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View Full Version : China decides to play tit for tat



mazdavirgin
08-05-2014, 12:13 AM
China is investigating two Canadian nationals for suspected theft of state secrets involving military and national defence research, the official Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday.

Xinhua identified the two Canadians as Kevin Garratt and Julia Dawn Garratt, but did not say whether they had been detained. It said the State Security Bureau of Dandong City, in northeast China's Liaoning Province, was investigating the case.

Canadian newspaper The Globe & Mail said the Vancouver couple had been living in China since 1984 and opened a coffee shop called Peter's Coffee House in Dandong in 2008. The couple previously worked as teachers in southern China.

The western-style coffee shop had a view of traffic flowing across the China-North Korea border, said the newspaper, adding the couple had a side business helping holidaymakers plan tours to North Korea across the Yalu River.

It said the immediate whereabouts of the Garratts was unknown and calls to their coffee shop went unanswered.

The investigation comes a week after Canada took the unusual step of singling out Chinese hackers for attacking a key computer network and lodged a protest with Beijing. Edited by Steve Wilson


Now for one I can't imagine anything worthwhile stealing from China in terms of military or national defense since they are a good 20 years behind the pace.

Second I'm wondering if this is going to cause any other Canadians who moved over to the bastion of freedom and human rights communist utopia to second guess their decision?

ZenOps
08-05-2014, 04:55 AM
Canada is hardly a hotbed of military technology.

China has quite a bit of economic technology that far surpasses european technology. Paper money was afterall a chinese invention (arugably the single most important economic invention, ever.) Arguably, china also knew about the psychological power of cupronickel (even if they didn't know how to isolate the nickel metal itself) long before everyone else.

Bitcoin, probably Japanese (but could secretly be an IRS invention)

California is a hotbed of computer and mind-altering drug tech (Xanax, Vicodin, specific strains of marijuana)

It depends on what you are looking to find. Military tech is only a small part of the larger tech picture. China has always understood how money works. One could also say that the Jewish culture understands how money works.

Is economic technology more important than military technology? If you can buy a nation, you don't have to take it at gunpoint - and its the "right" way to do it.

http://www.compoundchem.com/2014/03/27/the-metals-in-uk-coins/

Sugarphreak
08-05-2014, 06:26 AM
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ZenOps
08-05-2014, 07:54 AM
Its also possible that these people are spies, but are doing it for their own benefit and not actually employed by Canada.

There are plenty of spies out there that freelance, and just happen to have a passport of some foreign nation. There are plenty of spies in the US that spy on the US for their own benefit too, and are not part of a larger organization.

Seriously, US companies spy on other US companies all the time. That it even comes to "nations" is almost strange nowadays. Homer Simpson would scapegoat "Tibor" if he ever got caught spying.

Sugarphreak
08-05-2014, 08:36 AM
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ZenOps
08-05-2014, 08:52 AM
Especially true of computer hackers.

Often when computer hackers are found by authorities they have "hacked the planet" meaning they have broken into several different countries at all sorts of levels.

Many times its just a matter of what is easy, and what they are capable of - and the actual stolen information is more or less irrelevant to them personally.

Its not that they specifically targetted say Canadas voting irregularties, Chinas metal warehouse numbers, Austrailias Shadow kangaroo banking system, or Californias water grid - Its just that those were they ones that they were capable of looking at.