News you may have missed #0286
February 14, 2010 1 Comment
- More on CIA spies working for corporations. Author Eamon Javers provides more information about his new book, in which he examines the increasing phenomenon of CIA agents working for private corporations on the side.
- Rio Tinto spy controversy thickens. Anglo-Australian mining company Rio Tinto says it is “extremely worried” about four of its staff, who were arrested last July by Chinese authorities and have now been formally charged with espionage.
- Court keeps White House spy emails secret. Two weeks ago, US President Barack Obama declared in his State of the Union address that “it’s time to require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with my administration or Congress”. This does not appear to apply to telecommunication industry lobbyists, who campaigned in favor of facilitating warrantless communications interception through the National Security Agency’s STELLAR WIND program.












How many government informants are there in China?
February 15, 2010 by intelNews 1 Comment
Kailu County
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The interest of intelligence observers was stirred last week by a rare revelation made by a Chinese regional police official, who said that his bureau employs one in every 33 local residents as an informant. Speaking to Xinhua News Agency, Liu Xingchen, deputy public security bureau director for Inner Mongolia’s Kailu County, said his force employed 12,093 informants out of approximately 400,000 inhabitants. The informants’ task, he said, was to provide government with intelligence, to weed out “non-harmonious elements”, and to uncover “all sorts of information that might destabilize society”. Some reports note that, when applied nationwide, these statistics point to the possible existence of “at least 39 million informants”, a number that represents 3 per cent of China’s population and “lays bare the enormous scale of China’s surveillance network”. Such extrapolations, however, are risky for a number of reasons. Read more of this post
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with bureaucracy, China, informants, Inner Mongolia, Kailu County (China), Liu Xingchen, News, political policing, surveillance