I think it is a critical omission by this article of this woman's former homelessness. Not that we need to re-litigate that homelessness as a national security issue (though some more urgency may be nice), but this woman is not some unsympathetic traitor, most of what she was doing was over her head. If you watch a few of her tiktok videos, she doesn't seem to clued into what's happening and happy to be normal. It's a shame that it came to this, but I imagine this has happened in other cases that didn't involve state-actors.
> I think it is a critical omission by this article of this woman's former homelessness.
"Person with no prospects takes too-good-to-be-true job offer that turns out to be helping do crime."
The specific details (homeless vs living with parents in a trailer park vs barely affording something etc) aren't really relevant. Any of those are roughly the same: someone in a shitty situation isn't careful enough when trying to get out of that situation.
The general situation (no prospects) is aiui fairly typical. Which makes it not news[1], and therefore not much of an omission at all much less a critical one.
[1] "Dog bites man" is not news; "man bites dog" is news.
> The general situation (no prospects) is aiui fairly typical. Which makes it not news, and therefore not much of an omission at all much less a critical one.
Whether it is "news" or not affects whether you choose to report on the story. It is not relevant to the context you provide when you report on in the content of said story.
> "Dog bites man" is not news; "man bites dog" is news.
That's a headline, not the content. If a man ended up in jail because his hand was bloody, and you decide to report on it, it absolutely behooves you to mention that it was because a dog bit him, vs. letting readers wonder if he's some sort of criminal.
Really? I see the fact that she was homeless as a failure of the system that she ended up unwittingly becoming a bad actor in, perhaps due to desparation.
Read the first sentence for context, they aren't just being shooed away its to help them.
> President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order urging cities and states to clear homeless encampments and move people into treatment centers
> Read the first sentence for context, they aren't just being shooed away its to help them.
Well, no, it says it's to help them. Important difference.
Like saying you're restoring free speech but then personally calling up Rupert Murdoch to kill a news story. Or saying you're bringing in radical transparency to the HHS, but then cancelling all public notice and comment periods on new health policies. Or saying you're a fiscal hawk but consistently voting for bigger deficits. You get it.
They have zero intention of helping them. These things are literally being built before your eyes. It was brown people last month and it’s homeless people this month… it’s not going to stop unless they are physically stopped.
I will assume that you are genuine in your belief that Trump or city leaders have any intention of helping people experiencing homelessness. In practice, the only thing that matters to them is to remove homeless people from public spaces by any means necessary. Any rhetoric about doing so for their benefit will not be followed through with. Most people who are homeless are either addicted to drugs which precludes them from participating in programs which require immediate abstinence, or too mentally ill to be helped with the limited funding that will be supplied for their "treatment". It is much more likely that they will be imprisoned indefinitely in a for-profit prison owned by a Trump donor than "helped" in any meaningful capacity.
There are some homeless people, screaming all day, addicted to drugs, defecating in their pants and in the street. These people do not deserve to live in the street. Having the “freedom” to do this where children walk on the sidewalk is actually completely insane. We live in a society. They need to be forcibly removed, put into asylums, given 24/7 care, and if they recover they can re-enter society.
Alternatively I would be amenable to putting them in, say, national parks, where they are given a tent and free food so they can scream all day there. Maybe it would be far enough away from transport that drug dealers wouldn’t bother to drive out there. But not in a major metropolis where normal people need to live and work. It’s absurd
All the progressive solutions seem to only not work, but exacerbate the problem and expose the public to more risk. Not to mention all the sympathy and gentle parenting the problem under the masquerade of tolerance just keeps the homeless in their addictions and spirals while those that dictate policies can get away with doing nothing and live in their secure buildings and escorted by private cars and security so as to never look at the problem. The lack of authority on the matter leaves it to random citizens to deal with, sometimes with deadly or legal consequences when its mishandled instead of being handled appropriately by trained law enforcement or social workers. Sadly, the past solution was more humane than the current ones when you look purely at the end results.
Which solutions are you writing about that have been tried? Were those solutions properly funded? Were those solutions watered down into broken systems moments before signing the bill?
The past solution was not more humane. Tell me this, what part of the past solution was different from a prison? Why do you think they broke them up in the first place?
You want to round people up against their rights, then give everyone healthcare so you don’t burden them with debt by forcing them into care.
> Which solutions are you writing about that have been tried? Were those solutions properly funded? Were those solutions watered down into broken systems moments before signing the bill?
Last time I parked in that garage that's right across the street from Berkeley, I saw a middle aged woman screaming in some kind of mental anguish in a dirty sleeping bag covered in her own shit. From what I remember the students having a coffee at the cafe 20 feet away just sort of dealt with it, I think I was around Fulton and Oxford. If you can't propose a solution to this, I don't see what you are adding to conversation.
And yes, we should give everyone healthcare, that's a foregone conclusion here. The question is, _what_ is the solution to the above scenario. Is it a checkup, a clean needle (is that van still parked at the BART downtown idk), a pat on the back, a pile of job applications, a warm sandwich and a pamphlet that says vote democrat. Man we are so far beyond stupidity, I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, here's your prompt. The above situation is a microcosm of a broader issue, engineer your way out of it, or stay out of the conversation.
You’re not listening then, you have to incentivize the use of healthcare. That solves that situation. If using healthcare isn’t a stigma that leaves you with a horrendously expensive bill, then people would feel confident in getting the help.
I am sorry you had to listen to someone scream. At least that person wasn’t unjustly locked up and stripped of their rights because you got anxiety. Her screaming is a 10000% better than creating another “mental health” private prison system.
There are people who are literally insane. The issue isn’t “healthcare” it’s that they are literally insane. They don’t even know what is going on all day
You didn't answer the question. What past solution was tried and actually worked and wasn't cruel or abusive to those who were "helped"?
People adopt this attitude that "obviously we just need to fix the problem using tried and true methods" but they can't actually articulate what those methods are. It's all just hot air.
I would like to suggest that at least in the case of the US the problems are largely political and thus there can be no straightforward solution since the people who would enact any solution are themselves the root cause.
> engineer your way out of it, or stay out of the conversation.
Yet a solution is conspicuously missing from your own rant.
> engineer your way out of it, or stay out of the conversation
The civilian conservation core, as conceived and executed in the 33-42 era, while updated to more modern standards of participation and scope would work wonders.
You're welcome.
EDIT: We're haunted by the same ghost. It's either up and out or over and through. Buenas noches.
That would certainly reduce the issue but it fails to address the most severe cases. The people yelling at shrubs on the sidewalk probably aren't going to be compatible with such an effort.
The solution is to take the screaming mentally insane off the street and put them into 24/7 mental care at asylums! Why can you not understand this clear solution?
I mean I completely agree with you but you have to understand that historically that doesn't have a great record for the people removed. It hid them away from the rest of us but at least past implementations were notoriously cruel and abusive to the imprisoned patients.
There are no modern techniques that’s why we left the old ways. The fact that you have nothing to offer but vague “use modern techniques” proves there are no modern techniques. It also shows you have a shallow understanding about health.
Do you understand how slippery of a slope “round them up and lock away mentally ill people” is? How do you determine who is dangerous and who is not? How do you determine which illnesses are for locking people up? How do you reason that with stripping away due process? Being mentally ill is not a crime.
It was this job that did it. If you watch her tiktoks she's almost bewildered that she is employed. It was beyond her comprehension what she did.
>Christina Chapman: I'm classified as homeless in Minnesota. I live in a travel trailer. I don't have running water. I don't have a working bathroom, and now I don't have heat.
>Annie Minoff: But Chapman's situation was about to turn around. In fact, the answer to her financial troubles had arrived just a few months before she posted that video in the form of a social media message.
>Robert McMillan: The message comes via LinkedIn. And it says, we're a foreign company looking for a US representative. That's really all we know about the message.
Doesn't change the effects of the action. And should be more or less legally irrelevant. But it does impact, in my view, the moral judgement they deserve.
We try to have moral laws but it’s impossible because morality is slippery. This is why we have judges and juries. Also, laws are not moral merely because they exist. Plenty of unjust and immoral laws on the books just depends who you ask.
> Not that we need to re-litigate that homelessness as a national security issue
Without this it's easy to think that this was just a bad actor we could have caught, instead of just a symptom of a deeper issue not being addressed
I'd be more surprised if there isn't a causal link between homelessness and making bad choices - I don't think it's really disputed that there's a causal link between homelessness and crime in general.
Amusingly, a significant fraction of people will read what you wrote as a causal link in a particular direction and agree with it. And a different fraction of people will read it as the link going in the other direction and also agree.
They're saying that having large numbers of a vulnerable and often disabled population on the brink of day to day survival is a national security risk because they are easily targeted and exploitable.
You don't need to find a causal relation to treason specifically to understand. They may not even be aware of what they are involved in.
You’re making a very good point here. We’ve always known that malign forces of various varieties will exploit the vulnerable in society, and we’ve definitely experimented with trying to imprison every last one of the vulnerable sucked into criminality. The War of Drugs has pretty definitively demonstrated this strategy doesn’t work. Poverty has been a national security issue for some time.
Just wait until you realize that the reason we have “national security” is because they are protecting a system that impoverishes americans and the world. North Korea is targeted because it is a socialist counter example. That’s a crime and it must be slandered.
This is why this line of argumentation is at once true and will never be persuasive: the poverty is the point of our economic system. That’s what they’re protecting. If Americans were all relatively equal, the economic royalists would have no throne to sit on.
The US has attacked North Korea constantly economically and killed 20% of its population in the 1950s. It economically supported South Korea. You are complaining about the results of this attack. In the 1970s the DPRK was economically outpacing the south and the US stepped up support to prevent capitalism from looking like shit.
The USSR no longer exists and China has only recently become strong enough to offer similar kinds of supports (which doesn't mean that it does in fact do so). China was an agrarian society until basically the past 25-35 years.
> North Korea is targeted because it is a socialist
You've got to be kidding me.
America has a Gini coefficient of about .42 [1]. The last time North Korea's was estimated, it was around .82. To to put that in perspective, the inequality gap between America and North Korea is well more than double that between America and the Netherlands.
To learn that we went to war with North Korea because it's communist? No shit. We also did that with Russia, China, Vietnam and a good fraction of current NATO members, trade partners and allies.
> Did you really think anticommunism disappeared from American elites?
Elites? Most Americans have unfavourable views of communism [1].
But you didn't say communism. You said socialism. And it's a bit ridiculous to argue (a) North Korea is run as a socialist economy or (b) that we have a beef with Pyongyang, today, because of how it runs its economy.
I don't have a beef in this discussion but I just want to point out that if you want to quote a source, then quoting Victims of Communism may not be your best move. They label all WW2 Nazi casualties by the Soviets as "victims of communism" so not exactly an objective and truthful source.
it is kind of befuddling that they had a working system that gave people the marginal quantity to not rebel and even that was too much for them. Even then don't carry water for NK as some sort of utopia. America is (as clickbaity as I feel saying this) more communist at its worst than NK ever was.
> America is (as clickbaity as I feel saying this) more communist at its worst than NK ever was
America has its wealth more evenly divided than North Korea does. America has never been communist. (And North Korea doesn't organise its economy according to Marxist-Lenninist principles other than running a command economy.)
You’re right it’s not like we have a leader that unilaterally decides what companies live or die or what mergers get approved based on who pays him off.
Or the same leader doesn’t unilaterally raise tarrffs, exempt companies that bow to him and tell other companies not to pass cost increases on to customers.
Capitalism != free market. It means private ownership of the means of production. Capitalism naturally tends towards monopoly due to competition. Companies go out of business, competitors buy up their remains, and consolidate market share.
What is happening politically is a reflection of this concentration of power that naturally accumulated due to the dynamics of capitalism (and as they rose they influence the state to enable further concentration, also part of the natural life of actually existing capitalism).
In new markets, capitalism looks pretty good and the competition drives good deals for consumers and the barriers to entry are low. This devolves over time into a highly concentrated market with high barriers to entry. We've seen this story in our industry time and time again. Unfortunately, the new market state is transient, and the concentrated part is steady state. This is why people are always looking for new market opportunities.
None of these companies that Trump is pressuring not to raise prices in response to tariffs are in any shape form or fashion monopolies, duopoly’s are any other type of “opily”. They are the car manufacturers and grocery stores and retail stores which have not been a monopoly in our lifetime.
And by “our” industry I assume you mean tech.
Which one of the tech companies is a “monopoly”?
There is nothing I can use Google for that I can’t use another company for and with Google Search, it isn’t even the best.
Amazon? I can order most things from other places or go into a physical store.
Apple? I can buy one of hundreds of different phones or computers
America's homeless population is because of America's land use policy, which is pretty communist. Or rather, it runs on "economic democracy" - no matter how much money you have, you can't do what you want with your land unless all your neighbors agree with it enough to change the local zoning policy. Which means you can't build low-cost multi-family housing on it.
??? What country would let rich people do whatever they want with national territory? In any case, you are complaining about other landed people. The renter class and homeless are considered non-persons.
A charitable interpretation is that it is a form of democratic control of wealth (neighbours decide what you do with your land) rather than individual control of wealth (building however many stories you want on your own land), and democratic control of wealth is definitely closer to communism than individual control of wealth
Yes, I agree. extending that logic, democracy in general is closer to communism, than to oligarchy (extremes on either side, ignoring feudalism ), but its not communism. I simplify the "isms" with communism - socialism - democracy -capitalism - oligarchy , extremes at both ends generally not good to society at large.
exactly. It doesn't help that homeless individuals are usually disproportionately suffering from mental illness. In a more industrial economy they would fit the basic requirements for industrial production jobs, not saying that they are fulfilling, but now that the economy is centered around knowledge/service work, their disenfranchisement has increased greatly the bandwidth of the school to prison pipeline and schemes like this.
They have no reason to respect the American social contract because so far it's gotten them nothing, and in many cases like this, they are entirely unfamiliar with the stakes of the game as they stand now, as they are more concerned with the basic realities of their next meal and warmth. Her great move from the midwest(well I guess that used to be the west right) to the southwest indicates that not only was she likely adrift as many people are now, but open to anything that would keep her normed to the people she saw on her screens.
> national security risk because they are easily targeted and exploitable.
same reason FBI agents generally paid paid alright, and why federal government clearances take a strongly negative view of bankruptcy and poor financial management.
now it's writ-large across the population. yet more improvements brought to you by technology.
Yup it's definitely an organized group(s). I've gotten so many automated resumes that try different styles, locations, and keywords that I suspect are largely the same group or two. We even had one candidate join a Zoom as the wrong name (who had also applied!), realize his mistake, leave, and rejoin as the correct name.
>
It's less individual NK hackers and more "an established, well funded interview cheating pipeline" that lands jobs.
Just a shower thought: isn't it a missed business opportunity for recruiters from in particular other countries (but also the USA) to set up a similar "well-funded interview (cheating?) pipeline"?
They are extremely talented. One of my Chinese friends told me that one of the interviewees he got knew enough about X11 to impress everyone, but then shocked them by showing on camera wearing NK uniform. Apparently he didn’t get the job.
I only know this occurrence. Maybe it is a pattern. From what I know, they operate from a hotel in a Chinese city semi-publicly (the locals know). Developers are not supposed to leave the hotel. The reason they are extremely talented can be partly explained by the training they received: years of system programming training with access to all kinds of source code.
Of course I have never seen this with my own eye, but this friend is the original CTO of Deepin Linux so I believe him. I don’t get the military uniform part though, as it scares away potential employers. Maybe this is one of the requirements of the Chinese government.
If they really are operating from within China it wouldn't surprise me that they are required to be in uniform while 'at work'. When countries have status of forces agreements, it usually revolves around the individual being uniformed or not. For an example a US soldier could cross while out of uniform into the GDR anytime they wanted. But when in uniform, they had to use specific locations that were agreed upon by both sides. Otherwise it would have been considered recognition of a foreign government.
Yeah I think the same. I think that’s China saying we are OK for the operation but you need to make yourself clear that you are a NK military person whenever you approach Chinese business.
But really, I wish I could get into such an education. I myself lacks discipline to do so.
Basically, just imagine someone whose _entire_ job was interview prep and acting. (The guy doing the interview is likely not the one doing the job.) And for anything where they have any gaps, they've got a team of people behind them listening in and feeding them answers.
Basically every single technical, behavioural, or other question got a 10/10 perfect answer. (To the point where "the answers were too perfect" was one of the many yellow flags.) Part of the reason I'm so sure I interviewed one of these guys is I invested a fair bit of time looking into their background and chasing things up. They'd nailed the interview so hard it was worth digging until I found a red flag on the off chance I _could_ hire them.
Honestly the only thing they didn't nail were some of the more "chit-chat" type questions. The guy I interviewed claimed to be in LA while the fires were raging there and... was very confused when discussing the weather and I mentioned smoke.
No doubt the NK comrades will take care of her and put extra cash in the prison commissary for chips and pretzels.
I wonder if she fully knew how much trouble she could get in and just thought she wouldn't get caught. Or, it was more of a "I am just helping out these nice fellers get jobs. No big deal, I am not bothering anyone" case.
Were I perpetrating the scam, no way you let on that the workers are North Korean. Think it is entirely plausible she did not know. If they had said South Korean, who would challenge it?
More accurately, how would a foreigner identify the difference between a resident of SK or NK? The only plausible way I could do it would be asking them to criticize the premiere of NK
From an infosec perspective here part of the problem is the many employers' corporation policy on work from home laptops. These laptops were either rigged with one of two things:
A) remote desktop software such as anydesk
Or
B) a kvm over IP device providing a virtual video, keyboard and mouse session to a remote user over html5/tls1.3
If it's option (b), unless this laptop farm operator had in their possession some special DPRK provided unit that identifies its USB manufacturer ID and device ID as something innocuous, this is a problem.
People are not using sufficiently tight endpoint security policies and logging to identify USB devices that identify themselves as kvm over IP bridges. Or just permit listing a certain set of allowed external USB keyboards and mice (company provided).
And it doesn't have to be some special fancy device. Lots of open source KVM platforms out there let you choose whatever device ID appears for your keyboard and mouse. Here's how to make your PiKVM show up as whatever monitor, keyboard, mouse, cdrom, flash drive, whatever you want.
Unless you're not allowing anyone to use any kind of external monitor and you're not letting anyone use pretty generic and common external keyboard and mice your endpoint software is going to be pretty useless. Even if you give them a mouse and keyboard, all they have to do is tell the remote attackers "its a Logitech MK200 keyboard and mouse" and they can make the PiKVM look like a MK200 keyboard and mouse. Same if you try to limit it to only some specific monitor. EDID data can be easily faked, there's no cryptographic validation of USB device IDs or monitor EDID data at all.
It's not that easy fronting a job. I can't imagine one person going through all the interviews and juggle all the communication. Might as well just start your own agency with contractors from India or Philippines.
Sounds pretty excessive. Not familiar with the whole story, but given how painful is to clear an interview process let alone receive an offer makes me think people at some of these companies had to be involved in the scam.
Not involved, but when a company is getting an engineer for 70k who passes the interview, that company is suddenly not that interested in their background.
Why would they need to be involved in the scam? A hiring manager or recruiter is already incentivized to hire. This is the danger in hiring people who are fully remote without meeting them in person, which some companies do.
Maybe an American wants to be over-employed, has felony convictions, wants to work in ITAR field but married to Russian immigrant, whatever. Some reason to launder the identity.
How much worse is the crime because of North Korea? Would it be markedly different for Russia/Iran vs a formerly close ally like Canada.
>Chapman pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments.
Probably exactly the same crimes. Germans without the legal status to work in the US would probably be able to get bank accounts so the money laundering would probably just not be necessary.
Thats why you have to look after your own people. If you weaken them and make them vulnerable to bad actors this sort of thing will happen. A good argument for a form of socialism no?
I would argue NK may be weak because of foreign interference not because socialism, its hard to tell without a proper control. Which is ironic considering the original article complains about foreign interference.
I'm sure there was some sympathy for her former homelessness (unmentioned in this article). She was very much an unknowing actor who thought she was a "tech worker" and having never been part of this or around it likely thought her life was perfectly normal.
For fraud, identity theft, and money laundering, sure. Especially because this really wasn't her plan, but I guess this is a case of somebody getting roped into something that there was pretty good evidence that the person should have known much better.
Yes, arguably this is much worse than someone leaking documents to the Russians (Alrdich Ames got a life sentence), because it enables many people to become spies.
Treason has a high bar in the us, though north Korea is one of the few countries you could get involved with that could land you a treason charge, I believe a state of war still exists between the us and noko.
"Treason consists... only of levying war against the United States or adhering to its enemies by providing them aid and comfort."
The history of actual treason, in the sense of federal criminal prosecutions for the concept defined in the Constitution and adopted almost immediately as a federal offense, is remarkably short. Since the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, there have been only 40 federal treason cases, and far fewer convictions. (John Adams secured the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in part because the constitutional definition of treason was too narrow.) Even the most famous "traitors" in American history were not technically guilty of treason. Benedict Arnold might plausibly have argued that it was those on the side he betrayed who were guilty of treason; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were actually convicted of conspiracy to engage in espionage.
Why is N. Korea in this respect treated as a boogeyman? Chinese literally do this all the time everywhere, and they’re a far greater threat given their government is malicious AND competent. But NK seems to be the punching bag even though they’re not that big of a deal.
Because Best Korea is politically/diplomatically permissible. No one gives a shit if the North Korean government is painted as the bad guy (maybe not even the North Korean government!).
However, this is 110% the opposite for China and the Chinese government. They are not permissible as the bad guy. So much so that it scuttled a Hollywood reboot of an action movie a decade ago (Red Dawn). Hollywood is on a short leash, but don't be fooled into thinking the capitulation ends there. Even our own politicians know better. If one were generous (I'm not inclined towards generosity) one might wonder if the politicians know that our economy is hostage to the CCP and do not wish to see us harmed, but the more likely explanation is that there's soft corruption that persuades them to sell us down the river.
The Chinese have worked hard, tirelessly even, for more than half a century, to make it very difficult to say anything bad about them without repercussions, even in countries far outside China's obvious sphere of influence. North Korea needs to invest in global propaganda efforts if it wishes to get off the jerkwar list...
>The Chinese have worked hard, tirelessly even, for more than half a century, to make it very difficult to say anything bad about them without repercussions, even in countries far outside China's obvious sphere of influence.
You don't matter. But if you did, you'd've just screwed yourself. I hope you're not an NBA basketball player hoping to sponge up some extra millions in the off-season, or any sort of athlete at all. Any type of celebrity either. And if you were talented enough that a Chinese company might want to hire you, then this comment would be found with certainty.
This is nonsense. China's peak of influence over America has passed, due in part to some of that past heavyhandedness.
If you're in a job that's exposed to China, sure, you should be careful. Same way if you're in a job that's exposed to a prominent individual, you probably shouldn't shit talk them in public.
There are very valid reasons to oppose the Chinese government, but it should NOT sink into jingoism or red scare style BS.
A globalized world like ours today makes it incredibly difficult to be heavy handed the same manner the USSR was back in the day.
(Doesn't mean organs like the UFWD aren't active, but their capabilities are vastly overstated for the sake of jingoism - and I'm saying this as someone who carries a burner and uses non-American ID at GITEX)
Huh? Chinese citizens are free to apply to jobs in the Western world, and most companies are happy to hire them. Also, while the Chinese intelligence apparatus undoubtedly has easier access to Chinese nationals, the vast majority of these workers are not a part of a state-run syndicate to circumvent sanctions (or worse).
The NK thing is a fundamentally different scenario: you have people you're not allowed to hire lying to you and stealing identities to get hired. That's an obvious problem in itself, and the fact that it's orchestrated by the NK government to benefit the regime is only making it worse.
There are other parties that probably do the same, but NK is the industry leader, so to speak.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Not to mention the tentacles some other more near Asian countries have into both industry and the state.
I'd be ok with going after traitors if it were actually traitors to the American people rather than the global status quo. But I guess that's part of living in a late stage empire.
I think it is a critical omission by this article of this woman's former homelessness. Not that we need to re-litigate that homelessness as a national security issue (though some more urgency may be nice), but this woman is not some unsympathetic traitor, most of what she was doing was over her head. If you watch a few of her tiktok videos, she doesn't seem to clued into what's happening and happy to be normal. It's a shame that it came to this, but I imagine this has happened in other cases that didn't involve state-actors.
https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/the-everyday-americ...
> I think it is a critical omission by this article of this woman's former homelessness.
"Person with no prospects takes too-good-to-be-true job offer that turns out to be helping do crime."
The specific details (homeless vs living with parents in a trailer park vs barely affording something etc) aren't really relevant. Any of those are roughly the same: someone in a shitty situation isn't careful enough when trying to get out of that situation.
The general situation (no prospects) is aiui fairly typical. Which makes it not news[1], and therefore not much of an omission at all much less a critical one.
[1] "Dog bites man" is not news; "man bites dog" is news.
> The general situation (no prospects) is aiui fairly typical. Which makes it not news, and therefore not much of an omission at all much less a critical one.
Whether it is "news" or not affects whether you choose to report on the story. It is not relevant to the context you provide when you report on in the content of said story.
> "Dog bites man" is not news; "man bites dog" is news.
That's a headline, not the content. If a man ended up in jail because his hand was bloody, and you decide to report on it, it absolutely behooves you to mention that it was because a dog bit him, vs. letting readers wonder if he's some sort of criminal.
Really? I see the fact that she was homeless as a failure of the system that she ended up unwittingly becoming a bad actor in, perhaps due to desparation.
Somewhat coincidentally, executive order today making homelessness a priority federal issue. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-orders-crackdown-home...
Executive order criminalizing homelessness. The order comes on the day I witnessed police disappear an unhoused person
you're gonna be seeing a lot more people disappearing in the next few year, mate.
they've given ICE more money than the FBI+DEA, or more than the entire Russian military.
I was thinking wealth inequality, mental health, etc.
> Trump orders crackdown on homeless encampments nationwide
He went another way, it’s almost comical if it weren’t so sad.
Read the first sentence for context, they aren't just being shooed away its to help them.
> President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order urging cities and states to clear homeless encampments and move people into treatment centers
> Read the first sentence for context, they aren't just being shooed away its to help them.
Well, no, it says it's to help them. Important difference.
Like saying you're restoring free speech but then personally calling up Rupert Murdoch to kill a news story. Or saying you're bringing in radical transparency to the HHS, but then cancelling all public notice and comment periods on new health policies. Or saying you're a fiscal hawk but consistently voting for bigger deficits. You get it.
By concentrating them into a camp like set up…
They have zero intention of helping them. These things are literally being built before your eyes. It was brown people last month and it’s homeless people this month… it’s not going to stop unless they are physically stopped.
I will assume that you are genuine in your belief that Trump or city leaders have any intention of helping people experiencing homelessness. In practice, the only thing that matters to them is to remove homeless people from public spaces by any means necessary. Any rhetoric about doing so for their benefit will not be followed through with. Most people who are homeless are either addicted to drugs which precludes them from participating in programs which require immediate abstinence, or too mentally ill to be helped with the limited funding that will be supplied for their "treatment". It is much more likely that they will be imprisoned indefinitely in a for-profit prison owned by a Trump donor than "helped" in any meaningful capacity.
Florida built a “treatment center” in seven days!
There are some homeless people, screaming all day, addicted to drugs, defecating in their pants and in the street. These people do not deserve to live in the street. Having the “freedom” to do this where children walk on the sidewalk is actually completely insane. We live in a society. They need to be forcibly removed, put into asylums, given 24/7 care, and if they recover they can re-enter society.
Alternatively I would be amenable to putting them in, say, national parks, where they are given a tent and free food so they can scream all day there. Maybe it would be far enough away from transport that drug dealers wouldn’t bother to drive out there. But not in a major metropolis where normal people need to live and work. It’s absurd
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All the progressive solutions seem to only not work, but exacerbate the problem and expose the public to more risk. Not to mention all the sympathy and gentle parenting the problem under the masquerade of tolerance just keeps the homeless in their addictions and spirals while those that dictate policies can get away with doing nothing and live in their secure buildings and escorted by private cars and security so as to never look at the problem. The lack of authority on the matter leaves it to random citizens to deal with, sometimes with deadly or legal consequences when its mishandled instead of being handled appropriately by trained law enforcement or social workers. Sadly, the past solution was more humane than the current ones when you look purely at the end results.
Which solutions are you writing about that have been tried? Were those solutions properly funded? Were those solutions watered down into broken systems moments before signing the bill?
The past solution was not more humane. Tell me this, what part of the past solution was different from a prison? Why do you think they broke them up in the first place?
You want to round people up against their rights, then give everyone healthcare so you don’t burden them with debt by forcing them into care.
> Which solutions are you writing about that have been tried? Were those solutions properly funded? Were those solutions watered down into broken systems moments before signing the bill?
Last time I parked in that garage that's right across the street from Berkeley, I saw a middle aged woman screaming in some kind of mental anguish in a dirty sleeping bag covered in her own shit. From what I remember the students having a coffee at the cafe 20 feet away just sort of dealt with it, I think I was around Fulton and Oxford. If you can't propose a solution to this, I don't see what you are adding to conversation.
And yes, we should give everyone healthcare, that's a foregone conclusion here. The question is, _what_ is the solution to the above scenario. Is it a checkup, a clean needle (is that van still parked at the BART downtown idk), a pat on the back, a pile of job applications, a warm sandwich and a pamphlet that says vote democrat. Man we are so far beyond stupidity, I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, here's your prompt. The above situation is a microcosm of a broader issue, engineer your way out of it, or stay out of the conversation.
You’re not listening then, you have to incentivize the use of healthcare. That solves that situation. If using healthcare isn’t a stigma that leaves you with a horrendously expensive bill, then people would feel confident in getting the help.
I am sorry you had to listen to someone scream. At least that person wasn’t unjustly locked up and stripped of their rights because you got anxiety. Her screaming is a 10000% better than creating another “mental health” private prison system.
There are people who are literally insane. The issue isn’t “healthcare” it’s that they are literally insane. They don’t even know what is going on all day
it sounds like you are describing "mental health" issues. the provider of mental health care is.... the health care system.
dang seems your only parrot argument is "health care!!!"
hmm have you seen stabby maniacs and drug addicts in "healthcare provided countries"?
does having healthcare make those people visit those "providers" and go:
"Hello! I'm a maniac with mental issues/drug problems, and I'm visiting you to be treated! good day!"
what is your proposal exactly?
They, um, might be able to become sane by using... healthcare?
They are not capable of getting treatment themselves as they are insane and homeless. They need to be forcibly moved into an asylum
No. Asylums are just prisons and forcibly removing someone is stripping them of their rights. Try again.
You didn't answer the question. What past solution was tried and actually worked and wasn't cruel or abusive to those who were "helped"?
People adopt this attitude that "obviously we just need to fix the problem using tried and true methods" but they can't actually articulate what those methods are. It's all just hot air.
I would like to suggest that at least in the case of the US the problems are largely political and thus there can be no straightforward solution since the people who would enact any solution are themselves the root cause.
> engineer your way out of it, or stay out of the conversation.
Yet a solution is conspicuously missing from your own rant.
> engineer your way out of it, or stay out of the conversation
The civilian conservation core, as conceived and executed in the 33-42 era, while updated to more modern standards of participation and scope would work wonders.
You're welcome.
EDIT: We're haunted by the same ghost. It's either up and out or over and through. Buenas noches.
That would certainly reduce the issue but it fails to address the most severe cases. The people yelling at shrubs on the sidewalk probably aren't going to be compatible with such an effort.
The solution is to take the screaming mentally insane off the street and put them into 24/7 mental care at asylums! Why can you not understand this clear solution?
I mean I completely agree with you but you have to understand that historically that doesn't have a great record for the people removed. It hid them away from the rest of us but at least past implementations were notoriously cruel and abusive to the imprisoned patients.
> historically that doesn't have a great record for the people removed
Is it better than what we're doing now? Having them live on the streets neglected, unsheltered, hungry, and sick?
Seems like what we're doing today has a worse record.
We should hide them away in asylums and have modern techniques to prevent abuse
There are no modern techniques that’s why we left the old ways. The fact that you have nothing to offer but vague “use modern techniques” proves there are no modern techniques. It also shows you have a shallow understanding about health.
Do you understand how slippery of a slope “round them up and lock away mentally ill people” is? How do you determine who is dangerous and who is not? How do you determine which illnesses are for locking people up? How do you reason that with stripping away due process? Being mentally ill is not a crime.
There's a really good overview at the combination of factors that caused what we are seeing now, with references:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/AUrfQETViO
Yes, we really tried so hard to help these people, didn't we?
> this woman's former homelessness
Did she lift herself out of homelessness with this job? Or was she just homeless at one point in the past?
It was this job that did it. If you watch her tiktoks she's almost bewildered that she is employed. It was beyond her comprehension what she did.
>Christina Chapman: I'm classified as homeless in Minnesota. I live in a travel trailer. I don't have running water. I don't have a working bathroom, and now I don't have heat.
>Annie Minoff: But Chapman's situation was about to turn around. In fact, the answer to her financial troubles had arrived just a few months before she posted that video in the form of a social media message.
>Robert McMillan: The message comes via LinkedIn. And it says, we're a foreign company looking for a US representative. That's really all we know about the message.
Why is it critical? Is there a causation link between homelessness and treason?
> Why is it critical?
The root cause was desperation, not greed.
Doesn't change the effects of the action. And should be more or less legally irrelevant. But it does impact, in my view, the moral judgement they deserve.
And should be more or less legally irrelevant. But it does impact, in my view, the moral judgement they deserve.
I suppose, if moral judgements and legality have no relation, sure. But what does that imply.
> if moral judgements and legality have no relation, sure. But what does that imply
Something akin to moral hazard [1].
I should also clarify that I meant legally irrelevant to conviction. It's absolutely relevant to sentencing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard
We try to have moral laws but it’s impossible because morality is slippery. This is why we have judges and juries. Also, laws are not moral merely because they exist. Plenty of unjust and immoral laws on the books just depends who you ask.
OP does address why it's critical:
> Not that we need to re-litigate that homelessness as a national security issue
Without this it's easy to think that this was just a bad actor we could have caught, instead of just a symptom of a deeper issue not being addressed
I'd be more surprised if there isn't a causal link between homelessness and making bad choices - I don't think it's really disputed that there's a causal link between homelessness and crime in general.
Amusingly, a significant fraction of people will read what you wrote as a causal link in a particular direction and agree with it. And a different fraction of people will read it as the link going in the other direction and also agree.
They're saying that having large numbers of a vulnerable and often disabled population on the brink of day to day survival is a national security risk because they are easily targeted and exploitable.
You don't need to find a causal relation to treason specifically to understand. They may not even be aware of what they are involved in.
You’re making a very good point here. We’ve always known that malign forces of various varieties will exploit the vulnerable in society, and we’ve definitely experimented with trying to imprison every last one of the vulnerable sucked into criminality. The War of Drugs has pretty definitively demonstrated this strategy doesn’t work. Poverty has been a national security issue for some time.
Just wait until you realize that the reason we have “national security” is because they are protecting a system that impoverishes americans and the world. North Korea is targeted because it is a socialist counter example. That’s a crime and it must be slandered.
This is why this line of argumentation is at once true and will never be persuasive: the poverty is the point of our economic system. That’s what they’re protecting. If Americans were all relatively equal, the economic royalists would have no throne to sit on.
I’d rather be poor in the US, than rich in North Korea. And I wouldn’t wish “poor in the US” on my enemies.
It's so sad that that the US is such a poor country and that its leaders refuse to learn from North Korea on how to become richer
The US has attacked North Korea constantly economically and killed 20% of its population in the 1950s. It economically supported South Korea. You are complaining about the results of this attack. In the 1970s the DPRK was economically outpacing the south and the US stepped up support to prevent capitalism from looking like shit.
The US did support SK, e.g., by giving it "most favorable nation" trading status, but NK had supporters, too, in the USSR and China.
>In the 1970s the DPRK was economically outpacing the south
-- according to statistics published by the DPRK.
The USSR no longer exists and China has only recently become strong enough to offer similar kinds of supports (which doesn't mean that it does in fact do so). China was an agrarian society until basically the past 25-35 years.
> North Korea is targeted because it is a socialist
You've got to be kidding me.
America has a Gini coefficient of about .42 [1]. The last time North Korea's was estimated, it was around .82. To to put that in perspective, the inequality gap between America and North Korea is well more than double that between America and the Netherlands.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_in... 2023
You should read up on the Korean War.
Here’s an accessible resource: https://blowback.show/
Did you really think anticommunism disappeared from American elites?
> You should read up on the Korean War
To learn that we went to war with North Korea because it's communist? No shit. We also did that with Russia, China, Vietnam and a good fraction of current NATO members, trade partners and allies.
> Did you really think anticommunism disappeared from American elites?
Elites? Most Americans have unfavourable views of communism [1].
But you didn't say communism. You said socialism. And it's a bit ridiculous to argue (a) North Korea is run as a socialist economy or (b) that we have a beef with Pyongyang, today, because of how it runs its economy.
[1] https://victimsofcommunism.org/annual-poll/2020-annual-poll/
I don't have a beef in this discussion but I just want to point out that if you want to quote a source, then quoting Victims of Communism may not be your best move. They label all WW2 Nazi casualties by the Soviets as "victims of communism" so not exactly an objective and truthful source.
> quoting Victims of Communism may not be your best move
I’m citing the YouGov poll they commissioned, but fair enough.
it is kind of befuddling that they had a working system that gave people the marginal quantity to not rebel and even that was too much for them. Even then don't carry water for NK as some sort of utopia. America is (as clickbaity as I feel saying this) more communist at its worst than NK ever was.
> America is (as clickbaity as I feel saying this) more communist at its worst than NK ever was
America has its wealth more evenly divided than North Korea does. America has never been communist. (And North Korea doesn't organise its economy according to Marxist-Lenninist principles other than running a command economy.)
We are capitalist. The fact that you doubt this means you are misinformed on basic facts.
You’re right it’s not like we have a leader that unilaterally decides what companies live or die or what mergers get approved based on who pays him off.
Or the same leader doesn’t unilaterally raise tarrffs, exempt companies that bow to him and tell other companies not to pass cost increases on to customers.
That doesn’t seem like the free market to me.
Capitalism != free market. It means private ownership of the means of production. Capitalism naturally tends towards monopoly due to competition. Companies go out of business, competitors buy up their remains, and consolidate market share.
What is happening politically is a reflection of this concentration of power that naturally accumulated due to the dynamics of capitalism (and as they rose they influence the state to enable further concentration, also part of the natural life of actually existing capitalism).
In new markets, capitalism looks pretty good and the competition drives good deals for consumers and the barriers to entry are low. This devolves over time into a highly concentrated market with high barriers to entry. We've seen this story in our industry time and time again. Unfortunately, the new market state is transient, and the concentrated part is steady state. This is why people are always looking for new market opportunities.
None of these companies that Trump is pressuring not to raise prices in response to tariffs are in any shape form or fashion monopolies, duopoly’s are any other type of “opily”. They are the car manufacturers and grocery stores and retail stores which have not been a monopoly in our lifetime.
And by “our” industry I assume you mean tech.
Which one of the tech companies is a “monopoly”?
There is nothing I can use Google for that I can’t use another company for and with Google Search, it isn’t even the best.
Amazon? I can order most things from other places or go into a physical store.
Apple? I can buy one of hundreds of different phones or computers
Microsoft? My life is completely Microsoft free.
America's homeless population is because of America's land use policy, which is pretty communist. Or rather, it runs on "economic democracy" - no matter how much money you have, you can't do what you want with your land unless all your neighbors agree with it enough to change the local zoning policy. Which means you can't build low-cost multi-family housing on it.
??? What country would let rich people do whatever they want with national territory? In any case, you are complaining about other landed people. The renter class and homeless are considered non-persons.
That's democracy and not communism?
A charitable interpretation is that it is a form of democratic control of wealth (neighbours decide what you do with your land) rather than individual control of wealth (building however many stories you want on your own land), and democratic control of wealth is definitely closer to communism than individual control of wealth
Yes, I agree. extending that logic, democracy in general is closer to communism, than to oligarchy (extremes on either side, ignoring feudalism ), but its not communism. I simplify the "isms" with communism - socialism - democracy -capitalism - oligarchy , extremes at both ends generally not good to society at large.
It doesn't work, so it must not be communism.
exactly. It doesn't help that homeless individuals are usually disproportionately suffering from mental illness. In a more industrial economy they would fit the basic requirements for industrial production jobs, not saying that they are fulfilling, but now that the economy is centered around knowledge/service work, their disenfranchisement has increased greatly the bandwidth of the school to prison pipeline and schemes like this.
They have no reason to respect the American social contract because so far it's gotten them nothing, and in many cases like this, they are entirely unfamiliar with the stakes of the game as they stand now, as they are more concerned with the basic realities of their next meal and warmth. Her great move from the midwest(well I guess that used to be the west right) to the southwest indicates that not only was she likely adrift as many people are now, but open to anything that would keep her normed to the people she saw on her screens.
It's not even something that's unknown. There's a reason bad debts can get you denied a security clearance.
I thought that was more about blackmail potential.
Not in the slightest.
Its both about your decision making in getting to that point, and about what you might do to get out from under those debts.
Exactly the issue we see in this situation.
> national security risk because they are easily targeted and exploitable.
same reason FBI agents generally paid paid alright, and why federal government clearances take a strongly negative view of bankruptcy and poor financial management.
now it's writ-large across the population. yet more improvements brought to you by technology.
I cannot believe North Korean hackers are having better luck finding a job these days than I am.
It's less individual NK hackers and more "an established, well funded interview cheating pipeline" that lands jobs.
Yup it's definitely an organized group(s). I've gotten so many automated resumes that try different styles, locations, and keywords that I suspect are largely the same group or two. We even had one candidate join a Zoom as the wrong name (who had also applied!), realize his mistake, leave, and rejoin as the correct name.
I can't believe an actual engineer accepted this low of a salary!
Actual engineer:
> It's less individual NK hackers and more "an established, well funded interview cheating pipeline" that lands jobs.
Just a shower thought: isn't it a missed business opportunity for recruiters from in particular other countries (but also the USA) to set up a similar "well-funded interview (cheating?) pipeline"?
They are extremely talented. One of my Chinese friends told me that one of the interviewees he got knew enough about X11 to impress everyone, but then shocked them by showing on camera wearing NK uniform. Apparently he didn’t get the job.
Wow. Is this intelligence a one-off occurrence, or a pattern?
I only know this occurrence. Maybe it is a pattern. From what I know, they operate from a hotel in a Chinese city semi-publicly (the locals know). Developers are not supposed to leave the hotel. The reason they are extremely talented can be partly explained by the training they received: years of system programming training with access to all kinds of source code.
Of course I have never seen this with my own eye, but this friend is the original CTO of Deepin Linux so I believe him. I don’t get the military uniform part though, as it scares away potential employers. Maybe this is one of the requirements of the Chinese government.
If they really are operating from within China it wouldn't surprise me that they are required to be in uniform while 'at work'. When countries have status of forces agreements, it usually revolves around the individual being uniformed or not. For an example a US soldier could cross while out of uniform into the GDR anytime they wanted. But when in uniform, they had to use specific locations that were agreed upon by both sides. Otherwise it would have been considered recognition of a foreign government.
Yeah I think the same. I think that’s China saying we are OK for the operation but you need to make yourself clear that you are a NK military person whenever you approach Chinese business.
But really, I wish I could get into such an education. I myself lacks discipline to do so.
It would be interesting to see what these hackers are doing in interviews such that they’re landing so many jobs
There’s probably even recorded interviews out there with the candidates as data
Almost certain I interviewed one of these guys.
Basically, just imagine someone whose _entire_ job was interview prep and acting. (The guy doing the interview is likely not the one doing the job.) And for anything where they have any gaps, they've got a team of people behind them listening in and feeding them answers.
Basically every single technical, behavioural, or other question got a 10/10 perfect answer. (To the point where "the answers were too perfect" was one of the many yellow flags.) Part of the reason I'm so sure I interviewed one of these guys is I invested a fair bit of time looking into their background and chasing things up. They'd nailed the interview so hard it was worth digging until I found a red flag on the off chance I _could_ hire them.
Honestly the only thing they didn't nail were some of the more "chit-chat" type questions. The guy I interviewed claimed to be in LA while the fires were raging there and... was very confused when discussing the weather and I mentioned smoke.
The motivation might be to stay alive.
No doubt the NK comrades will take care of her and put extra cash in the prison commissary for chips and pretzels.
I wonder if she fully knew how much trouble she could get in and just thought she wouldn't get caught. Or, it was more of a "I am just helping out these nice fellers get jobs. No big deal, I am not bothering anyone" case.
Were I perpetrating the scam, no way you let on that the workers are North Korean. Think it is entirely plausible she did not know. If they had said South Korean, who would challenge it?
More accurately, how would a foreigner identify the difference between a resident of SK or NK? The only plausible way I could do it would be asking them to criticize the premiere of NK
When you hire a 10x developer who is literally 10x developers :-D
From an infosec perspective here part of the problem is the many employers' corporation policy on work from home laptops. These laptops were either rigged with one of two things:
A) remote desktop software such as anydesk
Or
B) a kvm over IP device providing a virtual video, keyboard and mouse session to a remote user over html5/tls1.3
If it's option (b), unless this laptop farm operator had in their possession some special DPRK provided unit that identifies its USB manufacturer ID and device ID as something innocuous, this is a problem.
People are not using sufficiently tight endpoint security policies and logging to identify USB devices that identify themselves as kvm over IP bridges. Or just permit listing a certain set of allowed external USB keyboards and mice (company provided).
Its probably B.
And it doesn't have to be some special fancy device. Lots of open source KVM platforms out there let you choose whatever device ID appears for your keyboard and mouse. Here's how to make your PiKVM show up as whatever monitor, keyboard, mouse, cdrom, flash drive, whatever you want.
https://docs.pikvm.org/id/
Unless you're not allowing anyone to use any kind of external monitor and you're not letting anyone use pretty generic and common external keyboard and mice your endpoint software is going to be pretty useless. Even if you give them a mouse and keyboard, all they have to do is tell the remote attackers "its a Logitech MK200 keyboard and mouse" and they can make the PiKVM look like a MK200 keyboard and mouse. Same if you try to limit it to only some specific monitor. EDID data can be easily faked, there's no cryptographic validation of USB device IDs or monitor EDID data at all.
You can bypass (b) pretty easily with a raspberry pi pico identifying as keyboard and mouse.
Change device id to the whitelisted ones.
Then use a hdmi to usb video capture and grab frames from that on the same pico.
That's something very easy to do.
quick cost is 14E, a pico (7E) plus usb to uvc (~7E)
It's not that easy fronting a job. I can't imagine one person going through all the interviews and juggle all the communication. Might as well just start your own agency with contractors from India or Philippines.
You're name is Bill Smith?
예 I mean yes.
Sounds pretty excessive. Not familiar with the whole story, but given how painful is to clear an interview process let alone receive an offer makes me think people at some of these companies had to be involved in the scam.
Not involved, but when a company is getting an engineer for 70k who passes the interview, that company is suddenly not that interested in their background.
Why would they need to be involved in the scam? A hiring manager or recruiter is already incentivized to hire. This is the danger in hiring people who are fully remote without meeting them in person, which some companies do.
Serious question, if she had been a front for Americans or say German nationals - what would be the charges and sentencing?
I don't know about Germans, but I do know Americans can legally work in America. There wouldn't be much of a "front" required.
Maybe an American wants to be over-employed, has felony convictions, wants to work in ITAR field but married to Russian immigrant, whatever. Some reason to launder the identity.
How much worse is the crime because of North Korea? Would it be markedly different for Russia/Iran vs a formerly close ally like Canada.
i expect its also a sanctions violation, not just fraud in this case.
Maybe similar to how they caught Al Capone: tax evasion. Clearly they wouldn't be paying taxes.
>Chapman pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments.
Probably exactly the same crimes. Germans without the legal status to work in the US would probably be able to get bank accounts so the money laundering would probably just not be necessary.
Thats why you have to look after your own people. If you weaken them and make them vulnerable to bad actors this sort of thing will happen. A good argument for a form of socialism no?
Yes! We should be socialists like the strong empowered people of North Korea.
I would argue NK may be weak because of foreign interference not because socialism, its hard to tell without a proper control. Which is ironic considering the original article complains about foreign interference.
Only 8 1/2 years? I guess this is what you'd call "light treason".
I'm sure there was some sympathy for her former homelessness (unmentioned in this article). She was very much an unknowing actor who thought she was a "tech worker" and having never been part of this or around it likely thought her life was perfectly normal.
https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/the-everyday-americ...
And if the gig doesn't work out, there's always money in the banana stand, Michael.
Shout out to the person that already registered bananastand.ai, may your valuation be high and your acquisition be swift.
For fraud, identity theft, and money laundering, sure. Especially because this really wasn't her plan, but I guess this is a case of somebody getting roped into something that there was pretty good evidence that the person should have known much better.
Yes, arguably this is much worse than someone leaking documents to the Russians (Alrdich Ames got a life sentence), because it enables many people to become spies.
slight digression, but i recently read "treason" only is defined during wartime. not sure how to disambiguate that assertion, though.
Non-paywalled article on this case: https://fortune.com/2025/07/24/north-korean-it-workers-chapm...
Thanks! Since https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/american-sentenced-to-8-year... appears hardwalled and no one has supplied an archive link, I've switched the top URL to this.
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paywall, but when I remember hearing about this I couldn't believe she wasn't being charged with treason.
She's literally helping North Korea's government siphon money from American companies.
Treason has a high bar in the us, though north Korea is one of the few countries you could get involved with that could land you a treason charge, I believe a state of war still exists between the us and noko.
"Treason consists... only of levying war against the United States or adhering to its enemies by providing them aid and comfort."
Treason is narrowly defined and convictions are very rare under US law:
https://theweek.com/articles/869173/brief-history-treason-un...
The history of actual treason, in the sense of federal criminal prosecutions for the concept defined in the Constitution and adopted almost immediately as a federal offense, is remarkably short. Since the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, there have been only 40 federal treason cases, and far fewer convictions. (John Adams secured the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in part because the constitutional definition of treason was too narrow.) Even the most famous "traitors" in American history were not technically guilty of treason. Benedict Arnold might plausibly have argued that it was those on the side he betrayed who were guilty of treason; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were actually convicted of conspiracy to engage in espionage.
Why is N. Korea in this respect treated as a boogeyman? Chinese literally do this all the time everywhere, and they’re a far greater threat given their government is malicious AND competent. But NK seems to be the punching bag even though they’re not that big of a deal.
Because Best Korea is politically/diplomatically permissible. No one gives a shit if the North Korean government is painted as the bad guy (maybe not even the North Korean government!).
However, this is 110% the opposite for China and the Chinese government. They are not permissible as the bad guy. So much so that it scuttled a Hollywood reboot of an action movie a decade ago (Red Dawn). Hollywood is on a short leash, but don't be fooled into thinking the capitulation ends there. Even our own politicians know better. If one were generous (I'm not inclined towards generosity) one might wonder if the politicians know that our economy is hostage to the CCP and do not wish to see us harmed, but the more likely explanation is that there's soft corruption that persuades them to sell us down the river.
The Chinese have worked hard, tirelessly even, for more than half a century, to make it very difficult to say anything bad about them without repercussions, even in countries far outside China's obvious sphere of influence. North Korea needs to invest in global propaganda efforts if it wishes to get off the jerkwar list...
>The Chinese have worked hard, tirelessly even, for more than half a century, to make it very difficult to say anything bad about them without repercussions, even in countries far outside China's obvious sphere of influence.
China's government fucking sucks.
There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
You don't matter. But if you did, you'd've just screwed yourself. I hope you're not an NBA basketball player hoping to sponge up some extra millions in the off-season, or any sort of athlete at all. Any type of celebrity either. And if you were talented enough that a Chinese company might want to hire you, then this comment would be found with certainty.
> if you did, you'd've just screwed yourself
This is nonsense. China's peak of influence over America has passed, due in part to some of that past heavyhandedness.
If you're in a job that's exposed to China, sure, you should be careful. Same way if you're in a job that's exposed to a prominent individual, you probably shouldn't shit talk them in public.
^^^ this.
There are very valid reasons to oppose the Chinese government, but it should NOT sink into jingoism or red scare style BS.
A globalized world like ours today makes it incredibly difficult to be heavy handed the same manner the USSR was back in the day.
(Doesn't mean organs like the UFWD aren't active, but their capabilities are vastly overstated for the sake of jingoism - and I'm saying this as someone who carries a burner and uses non-American ID at GITEX)
Huh? Chinese citizens are free to apply to jobs in the Western world, and most companies are happy to hire them. Also, while the Chinese intelligence apparatus undoubtedly has easier access to Chinese nationals, the vast majority of these workers are not a part of a state-run syndicate to circumvent sanctions (or worse).
The NK thing is a fundamentally different scenario: you have people you're not allowed to hire lying to you and stealing identities to get hired. That's an obvious problem in itself, and the fact that it's orchestrated by the NK government to benefit the regime is only making it worse.
There are other parties that probably do the same, but NK is the industry leader, so to speak.
I think you are greatly misinformed.
China has literally millions (tens of millions?) of hardworking engineers that do their job and get a paycheck
NK has zero of these people. They are basically a sovereign crime syndicate. They get hired and then extort or exfiltrate from their employers.
You might be exposed to some of the rampant anti-Chinese propaganda.
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Not to mention the tentacles some other more near Asian countries have into both industry and the state.
I'd be ok with going after traitors if it were actually traitors to the American people rather than the global status quo. But I guess that's part of living in a late stage empire.