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US charges ex-Zoom staffer in China for sabotaging Tiananmen video meetings

蘋果日報 2020/12/20 13:13


A former China-based executive of Zoom Video Communications has been charged in the United States for allegedly helping Beijing to censor online commemorations of the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident.
Jin Xiangjin, also known as Julien Jin, is at large. He allegedly “coordinated with the People’s Republic of China to target dissidents” and disrupted at least four video meetings held in May and June to mark the 31st anniversary of Beijing’s Tiananmen massacre on June 4, 1989. Those meetings were hosted by individuals residing in the U.S., including some who lived in the eastern district of New York.
Jin is charged with conspiracy to commit interstate harassment and unlawful conspiracy to transfer a means of identification, according to documents unsealed on Friday in a New York federal court.
“The Chinese Communist Party will use those within its reach to sap the tree of liberty, stifling free speech in China, the United States and elsewhere about the party’s repression of the Chinese people,” assistant attorney general for national security John Demers said.
The California-based Zoom said that Jin was appointed in October last year as its contact person with the Chinese government.
New York prosecutors alleged that Jin and his co-conspirators fabricated evidence, such as fake email accounts and Zoom accounts using the names of Chinese dissidents, to justify to company management why they had to shut down the meetings and cancel or suspend certain accounts. The “evidence” presented by the Jin team also included screenshots of participants’ profile pictures that had a masked person holding a flag resembling Islamic State, to show the video meetings were supporting terrorist organizations, inciting violence or distributing child pornography, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
He conspired to “censor the political and religious speech of individuals located in the United States and around the world at the direction and under the control of officials of the PRC government,” the department added.
Jin is wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Zoom said on Friday that it had terminated his employment for violating company policies and for trying to circumvent internal access controls.
Zoom also said its own investigation did not indicate that any enterprise data had been shared with the Chinese government, but the company believed Jin or other employees might have provided the data of not more than 10 China-based Zoom users to Beijing.
Lee Cheuk-yan, the chairperson of the group that organized Hong Kong’s annual Tiananmen vigil, said the U.S. prosecution indicated the long arm of the Communist Party had infiltrated American technology companies and that such cases were “only the tip of the iceberg.”
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