*-Update [18/07-2016] From Facebook Anon "justice league" shared a link. (July 10) .- "Who operations notorious big durian network ??!" - '' A water '' all know, the big durian network, as well as its members, for example circle01.com, share001.org , Bei Facebook continue to create of webspam, and even a lot of to provide fifty cents content, lies of the Google Adsense money, totally ridiculous. But anyones always thought that the Department of Chinese in Malaysia to open. But, after Bei then check the whois data, simply open the Department of Khitan fifty cents garbage net.. "-Anon" Justice league "tell you all the true~ -Update[18/07-2016]from - thehackernews.com - ''Pokémon GO — 6 Important Things You Should Know Before Playing this Game!''-(Sunday, July 17, 2016 ),editor:Mohit Kumar .
-Update [17/07-2016] From Huge Anonymous "★ Polish Cyber Army ★" release...!- Next, lol..see "Russian Anonymous '' Marketplace [Guide for Russian Anonymous Marketplace (RAMP)], we have been found...many many .. !- next- from panamapapers.icij.org/] and swastika [nytimes.com] released - "Reporting Within the Lines in Putin's Russia." editor: [Masha Gessen] (JULY 15. , 2016) - & - "Panama Papers Tie More of China's Elite to Secret Accounts!" - next - from the Great Anon "Ghost Squad hackers"> "OpIcarus: Anonymous hackers shut down Bank of England, call for 'online revolution!'" lololol ... (the good news ^^) - next - from "bannedbook.org"> "Xi Jinping not Renxia insult? Xi JinPing signed exclusive newspaper Combat Order Photos '', and the foolish's '' fifty cents slaves '' do not know..!- References within the text "Guangzhou Military armored brigade all the officers to accept the assessment, five kilometers armed off-road performance suddenly" leap forward " it was found that less than five kilometers away from the actual off-road, while the Chengdu Military Region regiment obstacle assessment, do not hang on the wire but stretch the rubber band and let the soldiers pass easily .- the report also refers to the armed forces in military training have found falsifications in contest, held in the 'South Sea'
assessment, actually a submarine forces in the region undersea diving tricks to give directions in a large-scale military exercises, some army quietly increased "enemy" target reflection area, so radar search target "abnormal sensitivity ".- in addition, pre-recorded firing four kinds of high-tech fraud under the weather, when the exercise, the sky Teenage rain and snow are not afraid, the headquarters of the reviewing stand sitting heads looked accurate shooting the big screen, really I thought it was live ammunition .- veterans have claimed that the CCP boasted sea "Corps" "elite force" all play a small role, their "exercises" are actually "acting", the war will be lost! - CPC National Defense University political commissar of the Air Force Gen. Liu Yazhou in October last year issued a "Sino - Japanese relations from the Diaoyu Islands issue" that:.-lolololo (wakakaka..)"Japan four hours to wipe out the East China Sea fleet of non-joke" ...wahaha...(laughing...)We ask: Who is the world's most liar ?!- next - from facebook- "Anonymous Philippine Operations" and "Magdalo Cyber Army" and "Spy Squad Philippines" and "Nguyễn thiên tài" and "F3r0Ci0u5" and "BloodSecurity International" --- >> #OpChina < <- ". China hacked tons of gov't websites What are we waiting for they are starting a cyberwar?!" #OpChina [ #OpChina - Philippines | Vietnam Official Index ..] - and next by "# Tango Down by "p@r@dox17" , #Palestine_DZ ,, # AnonGhost ,, #OpChina "(Good Job ^^, Thankyou ~)" and Our Friendly Anon ,, "Hacked Exxxx"- For Our All Huge Anonymous ", Really Thanksgiving~-
A water all know, the big durian network, as well as its members, for
example circle01.com, share001.org, Bei Facebook continue to create
spam, and even a lot of fifty cents provide content, lies to the Google Adsense
money,totally ridiculous. But anyones always thought that the Department of Chinese in Malaysia to open. But, after Bei then check the whois data, simply open the Department of Khitan fifty cents garbage net.. "-
Anon" Justice league "tell you all the true~
Information
from the stack it, as we can Didao Ye, the so-called Big Durian
network, simply come out and walk a line from Henan rubbish Khitan
garbage fifty cents. Why Zhong Yao money to subsidize fifty cents? Silly it? That we should strongly resist the big durian Systems Web site, the Department of the Air really see both eyes injustice.
* anti-Communist China -, fifty cents* Thanks for Facebook Anon "justice league" the great share~
Do you know what mean in the picture?~ We knew , it's so wonderful~ We like that^^
===
*-Update
[18/07-2016] From Facebook Anon "justice league" shared a link. (July
10) .- "Who operations notorious big durian network ??!" - '' A water ''
all know, the big durian network, as well as its members, for example
circle01.com, share001.org , Bei Facebook continue to create of webspam,
and even a lot of to provide fifty cents content, lies of the Google
Adsense money, totally ridiculous. But anyones always thought that the
Department of Chinese in Malaysia to open. But, after Bei then check the
whois data, simply open the Department of Khitan fifty cents garbage
net.. "-Anon" Justice league "tell you all the true~ http://melodyanony-anti-global-authoritarian.blogspot.com/2016/07/update-1707-2016-from-huge-anonymous.html===Melody===FOLLOW===> ################################
Pokémon GO launched just two weeks ago, and people have been getting crazy to catch 'em all.
Users, on an average, are spending more time engaged with the new Pokémon GO app than any other apps like Snapchat.
But, before downloading and playing Nintendo's new location-based
augmented reality game, users are required to keep the following points
in their minds:
1. Unofficial Pokémon GO app might contain Malware
Since Pokémon GO is currently available in only a few countries, many
third-party gaming websites are offering tutorials due to huge interest
surrounding the app, recommending users to download the APK from a
non-Google Play link.
Users need to "side-load" the malicious app to install the APK by
modifying their Android core security settings, which allows their
device's OS to install apps from "untrusted sources."
However, researchers have discovered that many of these online tutorials are linked to malicious versions of the Pokémon GO app that install a backdoor, called DroidJack, on victim's phones, enabling hackers to compromise their device completely.
2. Protect Privacy While Using Pokémon GO
If you're playing Pokémon GO, then forget about your privacy.
Since this augmented reality game requires your GPS location and a data
connection (either WiFi or cellular data), you can not expect your
privacy to be secured while playing this game.
However, still, users can avoid playing in locations where they do not want to be tracked.
Also, don't use your personal Gmail account to log in, as this links
your personal information including your GPS location and Pokémon GO
activity. Either use a burner Google account.
For this, create an all new Google account, with nothing in it, and use
this account to sign into Pokémon GO as well as other apps that you may
find doubtful.
3. Beware of Pokémon GO-themed Malicious Apps on Google Play Store
Yes, malicious Pokémon Go apps have even made their ways into the official Google Play Store.
Researchers from popular antivirus firm ESET have spotted at least three fake Pokémon Go apps on the Google Play Store. Of them, the one titled "Pokemon Go Ultimate" posed the biggest threat to Android users.
Pokemon Go Ultimate renames itself "PI Network" and deliberately locks
the screen of the victims’ devices immediately after being installed,
rending the devices unusable.
The only ways to get the infected phone unlocked are to remove the
device's battery or reboot the device via the Android Device Manager.
Even after restarting the device, the app removes itself from the
device's app menu, but still continues to run in the background and
silently clicks on porn advertisements in an attempt to generate ad
revenue for its creators.
The worse: Researchers say that the malicious app is just one step away from being Ransomware.
Although Google has removed the fake Pokémon GO app, users who had
already downloaded the app would need to uninstall PI Network manually
through their device's application manager.
The rest of the two fraudulent Pokémon apps produced fake security
messages in an attempt to trick users into paying for an antivirus
service that actually does not exist.
Currently, all three apps seem to be removed from Google Play, but be on guard: more are likely to show up in the coming days.
So, before head out to catch 'em all, just make sure you are downloading the legitimate Pokémon Go app. Here're ESET's full advisory and security recommendations.
4. Go catch Pokémon, But Just Watch Out!
It's less than two weeks since the launch of Pokémon GO, and the
Nintendo’s game is fueling public safety fears after the first major car
crash in Auburn, New York.
Later it was revealed that a 28-year-old car driver was reportedly
playing "Pokémon GO" and got distracted, thereby ran his vehicle off the
road and crashed into a tree.
Another case reported
by the San Diego Union-Tribune involved two men apparently playing
Pokémon GO were rescued after falling off a 90-foot ocean bluff in
California Wednesday afternoon.
The victims are fine, but that's not the point.
The point here is that do not put your or others lives in danger. Don't play the game while walking, driving and biking.
The Auburn Police Department has also released an advisory to remind drivers to use "common sense" while catching Pokémons and keep their eyes on the road at all times.
Here're some important points that players must keep in their minds:
Do not use the Pokémon GO app when you are operating a motor vehicle or bicycle.
Do not trespass onto private property when trying to catch a Pokemon.
Be aware of your surroundings when searching for Pokémon and do not
just stare your phone without knowing hazards around you, like roadways,
drop-offs, and waterways.
Always use caution when sharing your locations — strangers can see your location data.
Travel in groups in public/well lit areas.
In simple words: don't be a dumb crap; grow up!
5. Pokémon GO: Crimes, Robberies, Deaths & Other Problems
The game craze has been blamed for several robberies of distracted smartphone players.
Pokémon GO sends players out to capture the virtual Pokémon characters
that are superimposed in parks, streets, stores as well as inappropriate
locations like the Holocaust Memorial Museum, 9/11 Memorial, and
Arlington National Cemetery, as reported by CNN.
Across the America, the gamers have been drawn down dark alleys and into
dangerous neighborhoods in search of the Pokémon characters, only to be
targeted by criminals.
So, Pokémon fans need to be a little more vigilant while playing the
game, because your life and your money are more important to an
imaginary character.
6. Pokémon GO Cheats, Hacks, Punishment and Bans
Since Pokémon GO has taken the world by storm with gamers of all ages
joining in with the Pokémon catching fun, players are making use of
Pokémon hack and cheats to catch Pokémons with fewer efforts.
This augmented reality game requires gamers to walk around homes, parks
and local surroundings to find new Pokémon, as well as achieve goals
like hatching incubating eggs.
One can find the most common Pokémon in the distance of 2km eggs, with
the rarest ones in the 10km eggs. This means you are required to walk a
lot if you want to advance in the game.
So, players are using tricks like placing their phones on a record
player or tieing their phones with a fan in order to increase their
walking distance in no time at all.
In fact, tech-savvy players are spoofing their GPS locations with rooted
and jailbroken devices, so that they can catch Pokémon without
physically going to locations where the imaginary characters are
actually located.
However, before using these cheats, players should be aware of the fact
that they can be banned for up to five hours from playing the game.
Even worse, cheaters are being punished by encountering wild Pokémon characters, which runs away from them.
Although the company, as of now, is not imposing harsher punishments or
bans, some rumors claim that Niantic could completely block players
after a certain number of temporary bans.
So, we advise users to walk and find their favorite Pokémon characters as guided by the map.
Ares is a Python Remote Access Tool. Warning: Only use this software according to your current
legislation. Misuse of this software can raise legal and ethical issues
which I don't support nor can be held responsible for.
Ares is made of two main programs:
A Command aNd Control server, which is a Web interface to administer the agents
An agent program, which is run on the compromised host, and ensures communication with the CNC
The Web interface can be run on any server running Python. You need to install the cherrypy package.
The client is a Python program meant to be compiled as a win32 executable using pyinstaller. It depends on the requests, pythoncom, pyhook python modules and on PIL (Python Imaging Library).
It currently supports:
remote cmd.exe shell
persistence
file upload/download
screenshot
key logging
Installation
Server
To install the server, first create the sqlite database: cd server/ python db_init.py
If not installed, install the cherrypy python package.
Then launch the server by issuing:
python server.py
By default, the server listens on http://localhost:8080
Agent
The agent can be launched as a python script, but it is ultimately meant to be compiled as a win32 executable using pyinstaller.
First, install all the dependencies:
requests
pythoncom
pyhook
PIL
Then, configure agent/settings.py according to your needs:
SERVER_URL = URL of the CNC http server
BOT_ID = the (unique) name of the bot, leave empty to use hostname
DEBUG = should debug messages be printed to stdout ?
IDLE_TIME = time of inactivity before going in idle mode (the agent checks the CNC for commands far less often when idle).
REQUEST_INTERVAL = interval between each query to the CNC when active
PAUSE_AT_START = delay before contacting the server when launched (in seconds)
AUTO_PERSIST = should the agent be persistent by default
Finally, use pyinstaller to compile the agent into a single exe file: cd agent/python pyinstaller --onefile --noconsole agent.py
That's it ! You've got a fully standalone agent.
I suffer from insomnia so that night, probably also will not sleep.
===
Drug Education Site “Erowid” Was Blocked But RAMP Is Thriving Fast
RAMP
In Russia, there are plenty of drugs; you’re just not allowed to talk
about them. Internet censorship runs rife – except on the dark web.
With RAMP, the Russian Anonymous Marketplace, still thriving, the
underground community embraces drug culture away from prying eyes. RAMP
is a forum-based dark web site. Internet Censorship by region Many
regions around the world put various blocks on their internet access so
that citizens can no longer access various domains. In Singapore,
trying to access a porn site will likely result on you landing on a
boring placeholder page saying the site you are trying to access is no
allowed. In Indonesia, you can’t even access Reddit.
This form of internet censorship varies from geo-blocking, whereby
the site locks you out based on where you live. For instance, you may
have noticed this geo-blocking when you’ve tried to browse to a video
site in the US if you live in Australia, for example.
Some countries are also a little more ruthless in their blocking of
information. China is notorious for their internet censorship, banning
citizens from accessing not only Google, but Facebook, YouTube, Twitter,
and even the New York Times – alongside many others. Other countries
have varying degrees of censorship, and often the rules can ramp up and
change swiftly, seemingly without rhyme or reason. Censorship and Russia Back
in November 2012, Russia, reputably one of the world’s biggest hotspots
for illegal trading, enacted their internet censorship bill that was
based around protecting children from harmful information. This includes
information related to child pornography, suicide, and drug use.
Additions to the law were added at a later date to include references to
extremism.
The law is enforced by the Roskomnadzor, or the Federal Service for
Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media.
The agency has been ruthless in their blocks, with everything ranging
from torrenting sites, to online gambling. The agency has even put
temporary blocks on sites such as Wikipedia and Github. They are
particularly judicious when it comes to things such as attempts to rally
protests and anti-government chatter.
The drug website blockings in Russia
Swiftly after the first set of blocking, which involved the vast
majority of .ru drug sites, they made moves to blocking other drug
related sites hosted in other areas of the world. One such site that
fell victim to the Roskomnadzor was Erowid, in February of 2013.
For those who aren’t familiar with Erowid, it is a not for profit
organization set up to educate people about illicit and non-illicit
drugs. The website contains a wealth of information from scientific
papers and journalistic articles, to large scale survey results, to user
experiences, and other sources. It is perhaps the most well-known and
well respected large scale source of information on drugs that exists
online.
The factual site provides a beacon of hope for people wanting to find
real information regarding drugs amidst a sea of misinformation that
exists outside it. As one Reddit user so cleverly put it “I use Erowid
as a harm reduction site.” The site is extremely useful for people who
do use drugs to use them more safely. In Russia, removing this site from
the web may have actually made drug use more risky.
And the real irony of the situation (and where RAMP fits in)?
While the Roskomnadzor are busying themselves to ramp up blocking
websites left, right, and center, the irony of the situation is that the
dark web is flourishing in Russia with sites such as RAMP. Many sites
developed in other nations around the world are choosing to obtain
hosting in the country, because in Russia they steadfastly refused to
release information to other countries or cooperate with worldwide
investigations, and hosts ask for no identifying information.
RAMP (Russian Anonymous Marketplace)
The oldest existing dark web marketplace, RAMP, is growing daily,
too. RAMP is a Russian language drug marketplace that allows for private
interactions between buyer and seller. RAMP operates as a forum where
people come to buy and sell drugs. And it’s getting bigger, too. Has
anyone benefitted more from the swift exits of other dark web
marketplaces more than RAMP? It’s a debatable topic. RAMP features many
thousands of users and the RAMP site is popular all over Russia,
particularly in the larger cities.
RAMP on the Dark Web
While the Roskomnadzor concentrate on the Clearnet, drug culture is
thriving in Russia on the dark web, particularly on RAMP. If you are
travelling to Russia at any point, there’s always the option to download
Tor and jump on the dark web to circumvent the censorship laws. Grab a
Russian speaking friend and have a browse on RAMP, too. You might be
surprised with what you find on RAMP!
Getting familiar with the deep web? Looking to explore the top .onion links around the world?
We’ve put together this list of the most popular deep web sites for
you to check out – and it’s not just all darknet markets and drugs –
although there are plenty of them, too! 1. The Hidden WikiThe
starting point of most people’s journey on the deep web is the Hidden
Wiki. The Hidden Wiki contains links to all of the most popular sites on
the deep web and is a great jump off point for those looking to
explore. They also have a site on the clear net
The list is regularly updated and has been a stalwart of the deep web for years and years.
The Hidden Wiki onion URL: http://zqktlwi4fecvo6ri.onion
We did find an even better resource if you are just after Deep Web
links, it has categories, descriptions and even screen shots of all
active links. https://darkwebnews.com/deep-web-links/ 2. AlphaBay
The number one darknet market at the moment is AlphaBay. Although
darknet markets come and go, AlphaBay has been reigning supreme for
around a year now. The site contains the most listings of any
marketplace on the deep web, with items ranging from hacked accounts,
electronics, fraudulent identity documents, and, of course, the ever
popular drugs category which contains items like methamphetamine, MDMA,
and various nootropics like Modafinil.
The marketplace operates with an escrow system, and transactions are
conducted using the default currency on the deep web – Bitcoin.
AlphaBay Onion URL: http://pwoah7foa6au2pul.onion/
Find out everything you about AlphaBay here: https://alphabaymarket.com/ 3. Grams Not
sure which marketplace you want to use but know that you want to score
some drugs? Know exactly what you want? Grams is your ideal search
engine. Grams crawls all of the darknet market listings so when you type
in what you want into the search field you obtain the most relevant
listings, from all marketplaces.
It is a clever tool to use if you aren’t already a member of a darknet
marketplace or if you’re looking for something highly specific.
Grams: http://grams7enufi7jmdl.onion (only works in Tor Browser) 4. Silk Road 3.0
Yep, Silk Rod is back with a 3.0. It was down for a couple of month
where they did a big security overhaul and a slight re-design. It is
created and run by the same team that own and run CryptoMarket. They are
growing FAST and have a massive selection of goods for sale.
Silk Road 3.0 onion URL: http://reloadedudjtjvxr.onion/
Silk road 3.0 Guide: http://silkroaddrugs.org/guide-on-how-to-access-the-silk-road-3-0/ 4. Torch
Search engines aren’t as big on the deep web as they are on the
Clearnet, for obvious reasons – many sites wish to remain hidden,
available only to those who know the .onion address and credentials to
login successfully!
Torch is one of the biggest search engines available that provides
search results from the deep web. Type your query into the search field
and start your research journey.
Torch onion URL: http://www.xmh57jrzrnw6insl.onion/ 5. RAMP (Russian Anonymous Marketplace)
Another darknet market, RAMP is the oldest running marketplace on the
deep web. Oh, and it’s in Russian, too. The site is one of a handful of
forum-based marketplaces operating, and most users are in Russia, but
some also operate in other Eastern European countries.
The site allows buyers and sellers to organize drug deals one on one,
with no middle man involved in the transactions. A common method of
delivery is via “dead drops” where the buyer drops off cash in a certain
spot, and then picks up the package at another, so buyer and seller
don’t have to actually meet each other for transactions to take place
and no Bitcoin is required.
RAMP onion URL: http://ramp2bombkadwvgz.onion
Find the full guide to RAMP HERE 6. Dream Market
Dream Market is our third darknet market on the list. This site has
been around since 2013 and has gained in popularity only recently, upon
other marketplaces exiting the scene. It operates similar to AlphaBay,
and is a traditional escrow market.
The market is rated very well among users, and although it’s not
quite as popular yet as AlphaBay, it’s certainly on the rise. Expect to
see this market continue on its upward trajectory for a while to come
yet.
Dream Market onion URL: http://lchudifyeqm4ldjj.onion/?ai=1675
All the info on Dream Market: http://dreammarketdrugs.com/ 7. The Hub
Forums have been a mainstay among computer enthusiasts since the
inception of the internet, and in its early incarnation, newsgroups. The
Hub is one of the biggest forums available on the deep web and focuses
on deep web related topics such as security, cryptocurrencies, drug
safety, and various darknet markets.
If you’re interested in chatting to like minded folks all about the deep web, then The Hub may be a good place to start.’
The Hub: http://thehub7dnl5nmcz5.onion (only works on Tor) 8. DuckDuckGo
Just recently, Tor has switched searching services from Google to
privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo, which is a coup for the
burgeoning search engine. The search engine does not track users, unlike
competitors Google and Bing, which makes it an easy choice for users
concerned with privacy. This also means that searches are not served up
according to your customer profiling, making it quite refreshing for
users that are becoming increasingly annoyed with confounding search
results from the other major players.
Although DuckDuckGo only searches Clearnet sites, it is a useful addition to your arsenal of privacy keeping tools.
DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/ 9. Wikileaks
If you haven’t heard of Wikileaks by now, then you must have been
living under a rock for the past 10 years. Created by Julian Assange who
currently holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London as he has been
since 2012 – the organization reports on secrets supplied by
whistle-blowers, informants, and the general public that are deemed
important in the interests of freedom of information.
Wikileaks has published vast reams of content over the past 10 years,
including several high-profile government leaks. The .onion Wikileaks
site provides a place to upload content directly to the organization,
all anonymously if desired. The uploads are encrypted for added
security, and the submission form asks questions like “What is the
threat to the sources?” and “Necessary publication timeframe.”
WikiLeaks URL: https://wikileaks.org/ 10. TorShops
For those who are interested in setting up their very own deep web
shop, TorShops is the place to go. The site makes it simple to set up
your very own .onion web store, whether you’re a budding online drug
dealer or just interested in selling your homemade jewelry via the deep
web.
Each site comes with an integrated Bitcoin wallet so payments are
made easily, a secure a fast server for your site, inventory management
systems, and order tracking. You can even get the guys at TorShops to
set up your whole shop for you if coding isn’t your thing – a custom
shop design comes in at $500USD.
TorShop URL: http://ww.shopsat2dotfotbs.onion/
===
By Jake Bernstein, Petra Blum, Oliver Zihlmann, David Thompson, Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer
In this story
According to analysis, as much as $2 billion has been secretly
shuffled through banks and shadow companies linked to Putin’s associates
Bank Rossiya, identified by the U.S. as Putin’s personal cashbox,
has been instrumental in building a network of offshore companies
Dozens of loans, some worth hundreds of millions of dollars, sold between offshore companies for as little as $1 or less
Vladimir Putin and Sergey Roldugin forged a bond as young men. Fast
friends, almost like brothers, they cruised the streets of Leningrad,
singing and, in Putin’s case, occasionally getting into fistfights.
As Putin rose to power as Russia’s supreme leader and Roldugin made a
name for himself as a classical cellist and conductor, the two remained
close. Roldugin has performed for Putin and high-profile guests at the
president’s official residence and has given media interviews that softened Putin’s fearsome image.
Now a leak of secret documents reveals another, hidden side of their friendship.
The records show Roldugin is a behind-the-scenes player in a
clandestine network operated by Putin associates that has shuffled at
least $2 billion through banks and offshore companies, an investigation
by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, German
daily Süddeutsche Zeitung and other media partners has found.
In the documents, Roldugin is listed as the owner of offshore
companies that have obtained payments from other companies worth tens of
millions of dollars. A company linked to the cellist also grabbed
secret influence over Russia’s largest truck maker, another snagged a
big slice of Russia’s TV advertising industry.
It’s possible Roldugin, who has publicly claimed not to be a
businessman, is not the true beneficiary of these riches. Instead, the
evidence in the files suggests Roldugin is acting as a front man for a
network of Putin loyalists – and perhaps for Putin himself.
Roldugin did not respond to detailed questions. Reporters from the
Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an ICIJ partner, met
briefly with the musician after a concert in Moscow last week. Roldugin
told them he needed more time to review the questions and determine what
he could say.
About 100 financial deals related to the network are described in the
leaked documents. They are complex. Payments are disguised in various
ways. On paper, shares in companies are swapped back and forth in a day.
Documents are backdated. Questionable financial penalties are assessed.
The rights to multimillion-dollar loans are sold between offshore
companies for $1.
In almost every instance, the result is the same: money and power
moves in the direction of the network, to companies and people allied to
Putin. The network’s covert deals allowed it to receive money in a
variety of ways including hundreds of millions of dollars in sweetheart
loans from a bank controlled by the Russian government.
Exterior of Putin's Palace in Russia. Photo: Russian Wikileaks (CC BY 3.0)
The
leaked documents come from the files of Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based
law firm that registered some of the Roldugin companies and helped
administer the network’s holdings in the British Virgin Islands and
other offshore havens.
For years there have been reports – mainly from whistleblowers – about Putin’s secret wealth. A few offshore companies, a palace
and a mega yacht have all been said to belong to the Russian leader.
Various news organizations have also noted how the people around Putin
have become rich. Yet a detailed picture of the hidden financial affairs of Putin’s circle has remained elusive.
Vladimir
Putin has been accused of corruption on a breathtaking scale. His
critics say he's used his power to amass a secret fortune, so is the
Russian president really one of the richest people in the world?
Reporter Richard Bilton meets former Kremlin insiders who say they know
how Putin's riches are hidden.
The records reveal what until now has mostly been the stuff of rumor:
how Putin’s cronies secretly conduct their business. The law firm’s
internal files show how minions and proxies created structures to hide
and move the secret wealth. The records include email correspondence,
bank account forms, loan agreements, share transactions and passport
scans. Dates, cash amounts and contract terms are detailed.
Loyalty and long-held relationships help bind the network together.
It’s a fraternity of Putin confidants. Many of the men whose interests
are reflected in the leaked files are Putin comrades whose history with
him traces back decades to St. Petersburg, the city known, before the
fall of the Soviet Union, as Leningrad.
There is Roldugin, who is godfather to Putin’s eldest daughter. Then
there is Yury Kovalchuk, a banker who forged links with the future
president when Putin was a municipal official, and Arkady Rotenberg, a
childhood chum who has become a billionaire through state-sponsored
construction projects, oil pipelines and other ventures.
Many of the men linked to the network, including Putin, share
something else in common besides history. They are connected to the St.
Petersburg-based Bank Rossiya, which the U.S. government has identified
as Putin’s personal cashbox.
The files make clear that Bank Rossiya built the network. Its
employees tended to it, working to create the offshore companies,
assigning ownership to Roldugin and others and shepherding the
transactions through banks in Russia, Cyprus and Switzerland.
The economic model for how members of Putin’s circle have shared the
profits from this network was also established back in St. Petersburg.
In the 1990s, Putin and the Bank Rossiya owners created a cooperative
for a gated community where they all had houses. The cooperative kept a
bank account in common. Each could put money in, and anyone could take
it out.
Nowhere in the Mossack Fonseca files is the name of the Russian
president, a former KGB spymaster, actually mentioned. Audio recordings
and witness accounts show that even when Putin’s closest confidants
privately discuss his financial dealings, they use pseudonyms for him or
simply gesture to the heavens rather than utter his name.
It’s inconceivable, though, that the network could have existed
without the knowledge and support of Putin, said Karen Dawisha, a U.S.
political scientist who has written extensively about Putin and his regime.
“He takes what he wants,” said Dawisha. “When you are the president
of Russia you don’t need a written contract. You are the law.”
After receiving detailed questions from ICIJ and its media partners,
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denounced the forthcoming articles in a
press conference as “an attack” and “a series of fibs,” according to
Russian news services. Peskov reportedly said that the questions
concerned offshore companies and “a large number of businessmen Putin
had never seen in his life.”
“Denying something numerous times or commenting on something that has no relation to us is just silly,” Peskov told reporters.
Ties of friendship
There is a video on YouTube
of Arkady Rotenberg, a former judo instructor who became a billionaire
thanks to Putin. He is standing with a group of men. Putin walks past,
flanked by his security detail. Rotenberg doesn’t see him coming.
Without breaking stride, Putin rubs Rotenberg’s head, mussing his hair,
like one would a dog or a child.
Of all those in his inner circle, Arkady and his brother Boris
Rotenberg have known Putin the longest. Their friendship dates to the
1960s, when as boys they sparred together in a martial arts club. The
ties of friendship grew to encompass business as well.
The European Union and the U.S. government issued sanctions against Arkady Rotenberg in 2014, in retaliation for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. also sanctioned his brother Boris.
The U.S. Treasury noted the two had “amassed enormous amounts of
wealth during the years of Putin’s rule” from Russian government
contracts, including roughly $7 billion for the Sochi Olympic games. The
sanctions document coyly described the reason for the designation as
“acting for or on behalf of… a senior official” of the Russian
Federation.
In 2013, the year before the sanctions were issued, one of Arkady Rotenberg’s companies received potentially lucrative government contracts
to work on a proposed $40 billion natural gas pipeline between Russia
and Europe. Around the same time, three anonymous companies made huge
payments into the Putin network, records show. Two of the shadow
companies, and likely all three, were controlled by Arkady Rotenberg,
according to the Mossack Fonseca files.
Loans from these Rotenberg companies totaling more than $231 million
appear to have gone to a British Virgin Islands-based company called
Sunbarn Limited, created by a manager at Bank Rossiya. The loans had no
repayment schedule.
Arkady Rotenberg did not respond to a request for comment.
In the case of the Rotenbergs, the Mossack Fonseca documents suggest
hidden business dealings between Putin and his old friends. When it
comes to Sergey Roldugin, the documents in the files falsely state that
he is not politically connected, obscuring the musician’s role in the
scheme.
Christening of Valdimir Putin's daughter Masha. Sergey Roldugin (far right) was the godfather.
There’s
no question that Roldugin and Putin are close. Some publications have
called him Putin’s best friend. In the early 1980s, Roldugin arranged a
double date on which Putin met his future wife, Lyudmila.
Putin selected Roldugin to be the godfather of his first child,
Maria, a sacred role in Russian Orthodox tradition. A photo of Putin
cradling Maria, beside his wife and Roldugin can be readily found on the
Internet.
Mossack Fonseca and bankers in Switzerland appear to have ignored
easily obtainable evidence of Putin and Roldugin’s bonds. Banks are
required by law in Switzerland to determine if account holders are
connected to politicians to safeguard against improper use of the
account. The industry term for this is “politically exposed persons,” or
PEPs.
The Mossack Fonseca files contain an application by Gazprombank
Switzerland in 2014 to open a bank account for a company in Roldugin’s
name. The form explicitly asked whether the owner of the company had
“any relation to PEPs or VIPs.” The answer: “no.”
“The bank had a legal obligation to check these declarations,” said
Mark Pieth, former head of the organized crime section of the Swiss
justice ministry. “Roldugin is, by his proximity to a serving head of
state, clearly an exposed person.”
Gazprombank declined to comment.
In a letter to ICIJ, Mossack Fonseca said the firm has “duly
established policies and procedures” to identify and handle cases
involving politicians or people associated with them. It said the
company considered those cases to be “high risk” and conducts more
intense checks and periodic follow ups. “We conduct thorough due
diligence on all new and prospective clients that often exceeds in
stringency the existing rules and standards to which we and others are
bound.”
Roldugin’s friendship with Putin likely landed him in the exclusive
club of Bank Rossiya shareholders. In 2010, a Russian news service disclosed Roldugin owned more than 3 percent of the bank.
The cellist told the New York Times in 2014
that “years back” he had needed money and that arrangements were made
to get him a stake. What he had to do for those shares was not
specified.
The history of Bank Rossiya is all about its shareholders working together cooperatively.
Lake of money
Yury Kovalchuk and Putin turned their attention to Bank Rossiya in
1991, when its largest shareholder was still the Leningrad Communist
Party.
At that time, Putin was deputy mayor and the person responsible for
attracting foreign investors and forming public-private partnerships.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Putin signed the
documents bestowing ownership of the bank on a newly formed joint
venture created by Kovalchuk and others, according to Dawisha, author of
“Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?”
“Putin’s function was to make legal what would otherwise have been illegal,” Dawisha said.
Kovalchuk became majority shareholder and board chair of this new
version of Bank Rossiya. When the U.S. government sanctioned him in
2014, it described Kovalchuk as one of Putin’s “cashiers.”
In the mid-1990s, Kovalchuk and a few other shareholders of the bank
owned dachas a few hours outside of town on the eastern shore of the
Komsomolskoye Lake. Putin found the money to buy a property. The men
formed a co-operative society to benefit the eight residents of their
shared gated community, which was called called Ozero (the Lake).
The Mossack Fonseca files show that the communal principles that
defined Ozero continued with Bank Rossiya and its participants more than
a decade later.
Former
country house or 'dacha' of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the
Ozero housing cooperative by lake Komsomolsk, outside St. Petersburg.
Photo: REUTERS / Alexander Demianchuk
About an hour’s drive from the site of the Ozero cooperative is the
Igora ski resort. According to local media reports, the high-end resort
is Putin’s favorite place to ski. Bank Rossiya publicly helped finance
its construction. The wedding of Putin’s youngest daughter, Katerina
Tikhonova, took place amid great secrecy on the resort grounds in
February 2013, according to Reuters.
Tikhonova married Kirill Shamalov, the son of Nikolai Shamalov, an
Ozero cooperative member and original Rossiya shareholder. Within a year
and a half of the wedding, the younger Shamalov, barely out of his
twenties, managed to borrow about $1.3 billion from Gazprombank to
acquire 21 percent of Sibur, one of the biggest petrochemical companies
in Russia, a stake that was worth at least $2 billion a little more than
a year later, Reuters reported.
A Russian company called Ozon holds title to the ski resort. Bank
Rossiya’s Kovalchuk is a co-owner of Ozon. Beginning in late 2009, Ozon
received $11.3 million worth of loans from a key offshore company in the
Putin network, the Mossack Fonseca files show. The loans carried an
interest rate of 1 percent.
One $5 million loan was revised and extended multiple times and was
converted to Russian rubles; the exchange rate and new amendments
reduced its value and ultimately, the amount owed, the leaked documents
show.
A lawyer for Kovalchuk said information about Bank Rossiya was
available from pubic sources, adding: “We do not understand why your
decision was to address these questions to Mr. Yury Kovalchuk.”
Bank Rossiya did not respond to detailed questions about its role.
War and peace
In early August 2008, Russian troops rolled into Georgia for what would be a five-day war.
They traveled on Kamaz trucks. Putin had long been a champion of the
company, visiting its factories and even taking a Kamaz racing truck for
a spin for the benefit of news cameras.
Five months earlier, the leaked records show, the classical cellist
Sergey Roldugin made moves to secretly gain a degree of management
control over Kamaz, a company with revenue of $3.51 billion in 2007.
In March 2008, the Mossack Fonseca’s files show one of the Roldugin
companies was given a secret option to buy a minority stake in Kamaz
through a company called Avtoinvest.
Putin adviser Ruben Vardanyan was board chair and principal owner of
the bank that ran Avtoinvest, a big shareholder in Kamaz. In 2008,
Vardanyan wanted to consolidate a majority hold on Kamaz, according to
press reports, but he needed help. The government of the Russian
Republic of Tatarstan held a significant portion of the shares of the
company; it had to be persuaded to sell.
As part of the deal, Roldugin’s company obtained a potential say over
all aspects of the operation of Kamaz such as “approval of the business
plan and budget” and approval over which foreign corporations would be
able to invest in the company, if Avtoinvest got its majority.
Roldugin’s company paid $1.5 million for the option and potential rights.
Russian
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin addresses workers of KAMAZ truck plant in
2012. Photo: AP Photo / RIA Novosti, Yana Lapikova, Government Press
Service
In return, the agreement found in the Mossack Fonseca files spelled
out that Roldugin’s company was expected to lobby for the “project,”
which was described as getting Avtoinvest its majority.
By late April 2008, Tartarstan entered into an agreement to sell its
shares to Avtoinvest, at below market price, according to press reports.
Putin relinquished the Russian presidency the following month,
swapping positions with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, another
confidant who had been with him since the St. Petersburg days. Despite
the change in title, there was little doubt that Putin retained control.
During his time out of the presidency, 2008 to 2012, Bank Rossiya’s balance sheet ballooned from under $4 billion to more than $8 billion. And the network of Putin associates kicked into high gear.
As Putin was stepping down, Kamaz was booming and making big plans.
It announced that it would spend $1.5 billion by 2012 to modernize and
double production. Kamaz also began exploring the sale of an ownership
stake of up to 42 percent to a foreign buyer, according to press reports
at the time.
Then the global financial meltdown hit Russia’s automotive sector
hard. Kamaz cut its workweek to four days and slashed production.
Roldugin’s company never exercised its option to buy its Kamaz shares.
In December 2008, German carmaker Daimler did buy a piece of the company
– but 10 percent of it, not 42 percent. To get its slice of Kamaz,
Daimler paid $250 million to the Vardanyan investment bank that owned
Avtoinvest.
Vardanyan declined to answer specific questions because it involves
“proprietary and confidential” information, which he is not authorized
to discuss.
“The project was arranged as commercial arm’s length transactions
with consultation among legal and business representatives to ensure
compliance with existing regulations,” said Vardanyan.
Kamaz did not respond to a request for comment.
Hidden deals
In September 2009, a Mossack Fonseca compliance officer flagged a
transaction for $103 million involving a company called Sandalwood
Continental Limited. The manager for Bank Rossiya that was arranging the
transaction wanted Sandalwood corporate directors - who were stand-ins
provided by the law firm - to approve the deal. But its size seemed
worrisome.
Sandalwood was the lynchpin of the entire Putin-linked network. One
of Sandalwood’s roles appeared to be to borrow money from the Russian
Commercial Bank (RCB) in Cyprus, which in turn was backed by
Moscow-based, state-controlled bank, VTB. The $103 million began as a
loan to Sandalwood from RCB Cyprus.
The owner on paper of Sandalwood was Oleg Gordin, a small businessman
with a background in “law enforcement agencies,” according to an RCB
bank account opening form found in the files. Gordin also had power of
attorney on some of Roldugin’s company bank accounts.
Gordin did not respond to a request for comment.
Between 2009 and 2012, Sandalwood had lines of credit with RCB for
about $800 million, according to the files. Sandalwood loaned out about
$600 million in 2009 and at least $350 million in 2010.
The loans RCB made to Sandalwood were highly unusual for a bank. They
went to a borrower who had no discernible business model that would
allow it to pay back the money. The loans carried no security. Most did
not require installment payments but instead relied on a promise that
the entire amount would be returned after a certain time span.
“The assumption that RCB Bank Ltd is a so-called ‘pocket’ for
highly-ranked Russian officials is utterly unfounded and certainly does
not correspond to the actual state of affairs,” wrote Michael
Maratheftis, head of media communications for RCB, in an email response
to detailed questions from ICIJ and its media partners.
Maratheftis said the bank was legally precluded from answering
questions about “third parties,” but it has always acted in “a
transparent manner.” He said the bank has forwarded ICIJ’s questions to
legal authorities in Cyprus for an “independent investigation.”
Russian commercial bank in capital Nicosia, Cyprus. Photo: AP Photo / Petros Karadjias
Sandalwood
also functioned as a link in a chain of loan-swapping shadow companies.
It assigned the rights to interest payments in the millions of dollars
to companies - including one of Roldugin’s, which paid $1 dollar to
receive $8 million a year in interest. Two banking experts who reviewed
the Sandalwood loan assignments and an RCB loan made to the company said
the documents raised multiple red flags and didn’t seem to make
economic sense.
“It would appear that tax evasion, fraud and or some other predicate
act is underlying these transactions for purposes of money laundering,”
said David Weber, academic director of fraud management programs at the
University of Maryland and former special counsel for enforcement for
the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
RCB’s Maratheftis said the bank “was always in full compliance with the Anti-Money Laundering Regulatory Framework.”
According to an analysis of the Mossack Fonseca data by ICIJ and its
reporting partners, about $2 billion passed through the network between
2008 and 2013, most of it through Sandalwood Continental.
Sandalwood also served as a credit card of sorts, lending to more
than two dozen associated companies. It lent money to everything from
the Igora ski resort’s owner to a hotel near the Finnish border. When
Sandalwood loaned to other offshore companies, the repayment terms were
sometimes as long as 20 years.
In the case of the $103 million loan, Sandalwood had borrowed it from
RCB and immediately flipped the money to a Cyprus company called
Horwich Trading.
The Bank Rossiya manager shepherding the transaction wanted Mossack
Fonseca’s Panamanian directors to sign the Horwich Trading loan
agreement on behalf of Sandalwood quickly. One of the Mossack Fonseca
partners suggested that they get a letter indemnifying the law firm
first, possibly to avoid being held responsible for the any looting of
RCB.
Then Jurgen Mossack, a co-founder of the law firm, chimed in:
“I believe this is delicate,” he wrote in Spanish in an email. He was
worried that “we could be witnessing payments of questionable origin
and purpose.”
The Bank Rossiya manager explained that the loan was structured to
take advantage of a tax treaty between Cyprus and Russia. To gain
approval, he provided a letter of indemnity and other materials and
created a regular repayment schedule for the loan. It’s the only loan
from RCB to Sandalwood in the files that had a schedule of regular
repayments. It is also the only time in the files that Mossack Fonseca
appears to have objected.
The modifications satisfied Mossack Fonseca. The Panamanians also
took comfort from the fact that a Swiss law firm, Dietrich Baumgartner
& Partners, helped process paperwork for the Bank Rossiya network.
“As we are working with this client from a reputable Russian bank for
some years now, and our legal client of reference is a well-known Swiss
law office, I think we can accept the explanations and go ahead,” a
lawyer from Mossack Fonseca’s Liechtenstein office wrote.
Deitrich Baumgartner & Partners declined to comment.
A later email detailed the fees Mossack Fonseca charged Sandalwood,
which were based on the amount of the loans. For helping to create the
paper trail for the $103 million, it earned $2,030.
Media secrets
Mikhail Lesin was intimately involved in the efforts of Putin and
Bank Rossiya to control Russian media. As Putin’s first media minister,
he oversaw the regime’s propaganda push. Lesin’s government tenure
paralleled the growth of the bank’s media empire.
While in government, Lesin played a key role in brokering deals that
put critics in the media under ownership that was more closely aligned
with the Kremlin. In the wake of these efforts, voices critical of the
Russian regime fell silent.
After Medvedev replaced Putin as president, Lesin left the government
and joined the nation’s biggest private media group, Gazprom-Media,
which Bank Rossiya managed.
Gazprom-Media was only part of the media conglomerate that Bank
Rossiya built. Its sprawl has earned the bank’s chairman, Yury
Kovalchuk, the nickname the Russian Rupert Murdoch.
In 2005, Bank Rossiya bought a stake in a small television network,
which Putin then designated as a national broadcaster, greatly expanding
its reach and profit. It also took over Ren-TV, muting critical voices
and investigations of the government.
Now, the Mossack Fonseca files reveal that there was a secret
component to both Lesin and Bank Rossiya’s media dealings. Lesin had a
company called Gloria Market Ltd. based in the British Virgin Islands.
He created it in 2011, to collect money from advertising, according to a
source of funds form found in the Mossack Fonseca files.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Mikhail Lesin. Photo: Presidential Press and Information Office (CC BY 3.0)
In
the late 1990s, Lesin had helped set up an advertising sales company
called Video International that at one point controlled as much as two-thirds of the nation’s television advertising.
While Bank Rossiya publicly owned 16 percent of Video International, a
Roldugin offshore company created by the bank secretly held an
additional 12.5 percent stake, the files show. According to its 2014
bank account forms, the company, International Media Overseas, had
annual income of about $10 million from its holdings.
A lawyer representing Video International declined to answer detailed
questions, stating the information was non-public in Russia.
Roldugin’s International Media Overseas did more than simply hold
media stakes. In 2011, the company entered into backdated share
agreements with an offshore firm based in the Cayman Islands. The
revenue went to Switzerland where backdating is legal. Identical share
amounts were swapped between the parties, offsetting each other, so no
actual shares needed to change hands. Instead, the companies agreed to
the exchange and then simply paid the profit as if it had actually taken
place. In 2011, International Media Overseas gained $463,800 from the
deals. Sandalwood Continental netted almost $4 million from these types
of transactions between 2008 and 2011, the files reveal.
Crisis management
Putin’s circle of friends and associates are driven by two
imperatives: confidentiality and control. They hate risk. Putin has
shown he is willing to take aggressive steps to maintain secrecy and
protect communal assets.
By December 2011, the financial system of Cyprus, where Sandalwood
Continental did most of its business, was in trouble. The country began
negotiations with Russia for an emergency loan. Toward the end of that
year, Sandalwood, which banked with RCB Cyprus, began to transfer its
loans to another British Virgin Islands-based company called Ove
Financial.
In 2012, Sandalwood assigned dozens of loans, sometimes in amounts of
hundreds of millions of dollars, to Ove Financial for $1 each,
sometimes for nothing at all.
Ove Financial also served as one of the shareholders of Mikhail Lesin’s Gloria Market.
Ove Financial banked in Luxembourg, which was safe from the kind of
turmoil that afflicted Cyprus. The company also used another
Panama-based offshore incorporator called Morgan & Morgan.
Complaints sprinkled through the email traffic indicate Bank Rossiya
managers were less than happy with Mossack Fonseca’s service because the
law firm took too long to move documents or did not prepare them
exactly as specified.
The network would continue but without Mossack Fonseca or Sandalwood Continental. As a result, in 2013, Sandalwood shut down.
Putin’s associates made other changes to shore up the network. A new
proxy took Roldugin’s place as owner of the company that had been
involved in Kamaz. Roldugin hadn’t always been the most conscientious
front man. At one point, a Bank Rossiya manager had complained to
Mossack Fonseca in an email that it was a challenge to arrange for
Roldugin to sign documents. This would no longer be a problem.
Around the same time, the members of the Ozero Cooperative began to
transfer some of the massive wealth they had accumulated to their
children. And Arkady Rotenberg made his son Igor the owner of some of
his secret Mossack Fonseca companies, the leaked records show.
These generational transfers are signs of the rise of a new Russian aristocracy.
The Rotenbergs and other billionaires who have flourished under Putin’s protection are having an impact on the Russian economy.
The top 10 percent of wealth holders in Russia own 85 percent of all
household wealth in the country, according to a 2014 Credit Suisse
report. Meanwhile, 83 percent of the population has less than $10,000 in
personal wealth. Inequality in Russia is so bad it deserves its own
separate category, the report stated.
In 2014, Lesin resigned from Gazprom-Media. Russian press reports
blamed a conflict between him and Bank Rossiya’s Kovalchuk. Lesin
relocated to America, where he allegedly owned millions of dollars in
property, holdings that had raised the suspicions of U.S. authorities.
In November 2015, Russian media reported that Lesin died
of a heart attack in a hotel in Washington, D.C. Four months later,
Washington’s chief medical examiner announced a cause of death that
seemed anything but natural. The medical examiner said Lesin died of
blunt force trauma to the head and had bruises on his neck, torso and
limbs. Police are investigating the death.
How many secrets of the Putin-linked network Mikhail Lesin took to the grave may never be known. Contributors to this story: Olesya Shmagun and Roman Anin
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during a visit to a German Embassy school in Moscow in June.Credit
Pool photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko.
When a perfect metaphor is born, the world comes into focus.
It
happened in Moscow last week during a meeting between the staff of the
news organization RBK, also sometimes called RBC, and its newly
appointed bosses, Igor Trosnikov and Elizaveta Golikova. Within days, transcripts of the conversation
in both Russian and English — presumably obtained through a leak by a
staffer — were published by Meduza, a Russian online publication with
editorial offices in Latvia, out of the Kremlin’s reach.
Ms. Golikova: “Look, do you drive a car? Do you?”
Staff journalist: “Yes.”
Ms. Golikova: “Have you got a license?”
Journalist: “I’ve got a license.”
Ms. Golikova: “Do you ever break the traffic laws? Ever gotten a ticket? Do you pay up?”
Journalist: “Yes, of course.”
Ms. Golikova: “Well, if you drive over the solid double line, they take away your license.”
The
old RBK leaders had been fired. In the previous couple of years, they
had turned RBK, once an obscure service that focused on market indexes,
into a formidable enterprise that included a newspaper, a magazine and a
television channel. Under the leadership of the editor-in-chief,
Elizaveta Osetinskaya, RBK started publishing investigative articles
that made other Russian journalists gasp in awe: It did great reporting
and was brave enough to publish the stories.
RBK published a piece on a major redevelopment project in Moscow, apparently operated as a state concession by one of President Vladimir V. Putin’s
daughters, Katerina Tikhonova. It ran a report on Kirill Shamalov, who
is believed to be Ms. Tikhonova’s husband and had become a billionaire by his early 30s. RBK journalists wrote about Sergei Roldugin, a cellist who is one of Mr. Putin’s oldest friends and a very wealthy man.
Soon
after that report was published this spring, Ms. Osetinskaya and
several of her top editors were forced to leave RBK. The billionaire
Mikhail Prokhorov, who owns the company, has also come under pressure
from the Kremlin because of its derring-do.
Ms.
Osetinskaya and her team had been cautious, too. When they published
the piece on Ms. Tikhonova’s redevelopment project, for example, they
did not identify her as Mr. Putin’s daughter but let a friendly blogger
tie up the loose ends. So you could say that even with the old editors,
there was a bit of wink-wink going on, or a cat-and-mouse game. But
those metaphors are much less accurate than the traffic one.
“Where’s the solid double line?” asked a journalist at the meeting last week.
“Unfortunately, no one knows where the solid double line is,” responded one of the new bosses.
In Russia,
traffic rules exist largely to enable the police to collect bribes.
Enforcement is inconsistent: One might be stopped and shaken down or let
off if uncooperative. Traffic police have been known to plant temporary
stop signs or no-entry signs in unexpected places just to be able to
collect cash.
The RBK journalists pressed their new bosses.
“For
example,” one of them asked, “the reports about Shamalov and about
Putin’s daughter. Do you think these reports crossed the double line?
Because for us, as far as I understand it, they didn’t cross the double
line. These were good, professional reports. According to your
understanding, did they cross it or didn’t they?
“I’ll
be honest with you,” said Mr. Trosnikov. “I’m not going to answer a
question like that. You want too much.” Later, he added, “Don’t give us
this crap about Putin’s daughters. Let’s talk seriously, like adults.”
What
Mr. Trosnikov likely meant was that he could not set down anything like
hard-and-fast rules. It’s as if traffic rules were not actually written
but had to be intuited.
“I already told you,” said Mr. Trosnikov. “No one knows where the continuous double white line is.”
“No,” said a journalist. “It keeps moving.”
“Yes,” agreed Mr. Trosnikov. “Unfortunately, under the current circumstances it keeps moving.”
This
is how self-censorship works: It requires of journalists a kind of
hypersensitivity to signals that cannot be articulated as rules.
You’re
driving. It’s dark, perhaps raining. You can barely see the road. The
continuous double white line only comes into focus once in a while —
when someone else crosses it and police cruisers and helicopters swoop
in to remove the offender from the road.
You
drive very straight, thinking that this will guarantee your future: An
overabundance of caution means slow but steady progress. But after
seeing yet another driver being picked off the road, you realize it’s
the line that’s moving. And then the rims on the passenger side of your
car start to scrape the curb.
Masha Gessen is the author, most recently, of “The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy.”
The Panama Papers: Here’s What We Know
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Panama City, home to the law firm Mossack Fonseca, from which the confidential documents known as the Panama Papers were taken.Credit
Joe Raedle/Getty Images.
The Panama Papers have exposed how some of the world’s most powerful people may have used offshore bank accounts and shell companies to conceal their wealth or avoid taxes.
The papers — millions of leaked confidential documents from the Mossack Fonseca
law firm in Panama — identify international politicians, business
leaders and celebrities involved in webs of suspicious financial
transactions. The revelations have raised questions about secrecy and
corruption in the global financial system.
Who was named in the leaked documents?
Among
others, the documents named close associates of President Vladimir V.
Putin of Russia, the father of Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain
and relatives of President Xi Jinping of China and members of the
Chinese Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee. Articles published
by news organizations in cooperation with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists also named King Salman of Saudi Arabia; Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, who resigned as prime minister of Iceland
after the revelations; President Mauricio Macri of Argentina; and the
soccer star Lionel Messi, one of the world’s wealthiest athletes.
Other soccer players; officials from FIFA, the sport’s world governing body; and UEFA, the governing body of European soccer, were also tied to firms incorporated offshore through the Panamanian firm.
What do the documents suggest that they have done?
Those
prominent names were among the hundreds of people that the papers tie
to thousands of offshore shell companies. Such companies can be used to
shield vast wealth from tax collectors, regulators and creditors.
Many of the people named in the papers have denied in the strongest terms that they have broken any laws.
Mr.
Cameron, whose father was a client of the Panamanian law firm,
initially said he had not benefited from any “offshore funds,” only to
confirm later that he and his wife had profited when they sold shares in an offshore trust for 30,000 pounds ($42,160) in 2010, the year he became prime minister. (The dividends they earned were declared and taxed, Mr. Cameron said.)
Were any Americans implicated?
It is not clear how many United States citizens may have been involved. So far, the documents cited in news reports have not connected any prominent American politicians or other influential Americans to Mossack Fonseca.
One
reason may be that it is fairly easy to form opaque shell companies in
the United States. Americans “really don’t need to go to Panama,” James
Henry, an economist and senior adviser to the Tax Justice Network, told Fusion. “Basically, we have an onshore haven industry in the U.S. that is as secretive as anywhere.”
Is any of this illegal?
It
is not clear whether the papers document any lawbreaking. The holding
of money in an offshore company is generally not illegal by itself, but
it may be done to hide criminality from prying eyes, for example, by
facilitating tax evasion or money laundering.
Are there legitimate uses for foreign shell companies?
There
are many valid reasons for multinational corporations, joint ventures
or wealthy individuals to set up and use such companies.
For
example, many countries allow land to be owned only by citizens or
locally registered companies. So a foreigner seeking a retirement or
vacation home would set up a local shell company to purchase the
property.
A
corporation establishing a joint venture in a country with a weak or
corrupt legal system may want to do so through an offshore company based
in a place like the British Virgin Islands or the Cayman Islands, so
the venture can gain access to stronger courts and operate under more
sophisticated financial laws.
They
may be set up for other aboveboard financial planning purposes as well,
with no intent to deceive the authorities. But experts say the secrecy
provided by shell companies makes it all too easy and tempting to stray
into tax evasion.
Liam Stack, Steven Erlanger, Bryant Rousseau, Michael Forsythe, Neil MacFarquhar and Stephen Castle contributed reporting.
===
Panama Papers Continue to Shake Leaders, Including Cameron and Putin
During an appearance on Russian TV,
President Vladimir V. Putin deflected accusations that some of his close
associates had shoveled billions through offshore accounts,
characterizing them as attempts to destabilize Russia.
By REUTERS on Publish Date April 8, 2016.
Photo by Pool photo by Dmitri Lovetsky.
Watch in Times Video »
MOSCOW
— The reverberations from a leaked trove of Panamanian documents
rippled through several nations on Thursday, with President Vladimir V.
Putin of Russia calling the exposure of a proliferation of shell companies and tax havens an American plot, while Iceland picked a new prime minister and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain admitted that he had profited from an offshore trust.
After
days of contention, Mr. Cameron admitted that he had earned money
through an offshore trust established by his late father, who was named
as a client of Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the center of the documents known as the Panama Papers.
Mr.
Cameron told ITV News that he and his wife, Samantha, owned shares in
Blairmore investment trust, before selling them for about £30,000, or
$42,160, in 2010, the year he became prime minister.
The
dividends were taxed, Mr. Cameron said, adding that he had never tried
to hide the fact that his parents were wealthy. He had, however, been on
the defensive over the issue since Monday, when his office initially
described the question of his investments as a “private matter.”
Photo
From left, the cellist Sergei
P. Roldugin, Vladimir V. Putin and Dmitry Medvedev at the House of
Music in St. Petersburg in 2009.Credit
Pool photo by Dmitry Astakhov/Sputnik / Kremlin
The
Panama Papers were also embarrassing for Mr. Cameron because they
identified the British Virgin Islands, an overseas territory of Britain,
as a major center of offshore activity. That prompted critics to call
into question Mr. Cameron’s claims to be leading the international fight
against tax evasion.
“David
Cameron, who described the use of complex tax avoidance schemes as
‘morally wrong,’ has been forced to admit that he held shares in a fund
now linked to tax avoidance,” said Tom Watson, the deputy leader of
Britain’s opposition Labour Party.
In Moscow, Mr. Putin dismissed reports based on the legal documents,
which showed that some of his close associates had moved about $2
billion through offshore accounts, calling the accusations an American
plot to try to destabilize Russia.
Mr.
Putin, in his first public remarks on the subject, noted that none of
the accusations were aimed at him directly, because he was not named in
the papers, even if the international coverage has focused on him.
“Your
humble servant is not there; there is nothing to talk about,” he said
at a public forum for regional journalists in St. Petersburg that was
broadcast live by state-run television.
David Cameron Admits to Offshore Account
Prime Minister David Cameron of
Britain admitted to having offshore trust holdings until just a few
months before he ran for office.
By REUTERS on Publish Date April 8, 2016.
Photo by Dan Kitwood - Reuters.
Watch in Times Video »
Mr.
Putin also defended the cellist Sergei P. Roldugin, an old, close
friend who was named in the leaked papers. Mr. Roldugin was at the
center of a scheme to hide money from Russian state banks, the reports
said.
Mr.
Putin said that Mr. Roldugin had tried his hand at business to support
his love of music. “He is a minority shareholder in one of our companies
and makes some money out of it, but not billions of dollars, of
course,” Mr. Putin said. “That is nonsense.”
Mr.
Roldugin used the money to import musical instruments, Mr. Putin said.
“Almost all the money he earned he spent on musical instruments that he
bought abroad,” he said, adding that Mr. Roldugin recently began
donating the instruments to government institutions.
On paper, Mr. Roldugin’s shares in enterprises linked to friends of Mr. Putin, especially Bank Rossiya,
give him a net worth of hundreds of millions of dollars. “I am proud to
have friends like him,” Mr. Putin said, calling Mr. Roldugin a
“brilliant musician.”
There
was an immediate reaction on social media, with many people questioning
the president’s version of events. Sergei Parkhomenko, a journalist,
wrote on Facebook that at $6 million each, the $2 billion reported to
have been stashed offshore was enough to buy more than 300 of the rare
violins, cellos and other stringed instruments made in the 17th and 18th
centuries by Antonio Stradivari.
Putin’s Way
Articles in this series are examining how
President Vladimir V. Putin’s system of personalized state-sponsored
capitalism allows him to wield power at home and abroad.
Mr. Putin also rolled out a standard Kremlin excuse for any bad news regarding Russia from abroad. Russia, he said, deprives the West of its monopoly on economic and military power, which irks the West.
“In
this connection, attempts are made to weaken us from within, make us
more acquiescent and make us toe their line,” he said. “What is the
easiest way of doing this? It is to spread distrust for the ruling
authorities and the bodies of power within society and to set people
against each other.”
Mr.
Putin noted that WikiLeaks had described the leaked Panamanian
documents as an American-funded plot. “We now know from WikiLeaks that
officials and state agencies in the United States are behind all this,”
said Mr. Putin.
The WikiLeaks organization posted several somewhat contradictory messages on Twitter about the subject.
“US govt funded #PanamaPapers attack story on Putin via USAID,” said one on Tuesday, for example. “Some good journalists but no model for integrity.”
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But after the Russian state news media began citing WikiLeaks as proof that the Panama revelations had been an American plot, the WikiLeaks Twitter account said, “Claims that #PanamaPapers themselves are a ‘plot’ against Russia are nonsense.”
In
Argentina, a federal prosecutor sought to open a criminal investigation
into the business activities of President Mauricio Macri that were made
public by the leaked papers. The prosecutor, Federico José Delgado,
said in a document that Mr. Macri’s involvement in offshore companies
warranted a judicial investigation, chiefly because he did not disclose
the activity in required declarations of his assets.
The
leaked papers showed that Mr. Macri was a director of an offshore
company, Fleg Trading Ltd., which was owned by his father. It was
incorporated in the Bahamas in 1998 and dissolved in 2009. Mr. Macri was
separately found to have been a director at a second offshore company, Kagemusha S.A., that also involved his father.
Mr.
Macri’s office said he had never been a shareholder at Fleg Trading and
so was not required to disclose his involvement. “Everything’s in
order,” Mr. Macri told the local news media this week.
There
has been no official comment on the second company. On Thursday, Mr.
Macri, who campaigned on fighting corruption, reiterated that he was
innocent. “I have nothing to hide,” he said during a short speech to
announce a freedom of information bill.
And
in Iceland, Sigurdur Ingi Johannsson, the country’s agriculture and
fisheries minister, said that he had secured President Olafur Ragnar
Grimsson’s backing to become prime minister.
The
announcement came after Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson stepped down as
prime minister when the leaks showed that he had owned an offshore firm
with his wife.
Neil MacFarquhar reported from Moscow, and Stephen Castle from London. Jonathan Gilbert contributed reporting from Buenos Aires.
HONG KONG — At least three of the seven people on the Chinese Communist Party’s most powerful committee, including President Xi Jinping,
have relatives who have controlled secretive offshore companies, the
organization that has publicized a trove of leaked documents about
hidden wealth reported on Wednesday.
Liu Yunshan, China’s
propaganda chief, in Beijing in March. His daughter-in-law was once a
shareholder and director of a company registered in the British Virgin
Islands.Credit
Wu Hong/European Pressphoto Agency.
The documents, which came from Mossack Fonseca, a boutique Panamanian law firm
that specializes in creating tax shelters and secretive corporations
for wealthy clients, have jolted political leaders and other powerful
figures around the world. But they are considered especially sensitive
in China, where the Communist Party, under Mr. Xi, has pledged to
eradicate corruption within its ranks and seeks to portray itself as a
champion of equality, despite some of the world’s most glaring income
disparities.
The
information made public by the consortium on Wednesday included
material on the Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee, the
seven-member group, all men, that wields ultimate power in the country.
The
daughter-in-law of Liu Yunshan, China’s propaganda chief, was once a
shareholder and director of a company registered in the British Virgin
Islands, and the son-in-law of Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli was a
shareholder in three companies domiciled in the British tax haven, the
consortium reported.
President
Xi is the third member of the Politburo committee cited in the report
as having a relative who controlled offshore companies. The ties of Mr.
Xi’s brother-in-law, Deng Jiagui, to offshore companies have been known
since 2012, when a Bloomberg News article about Mr. Xi’s family wealth
detailed the business empire of Mr. Deng and his wife, Qi Qiaoqiao, the
president’s sister.
Photo
Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli in
Beijing last month. His son-in-law was a shareholder in three companies
domiciled in the British Virgin Islands.Credit
How Hwee Young/European Pressphoto Agency.
The
consortium’s review of the leaked documents found that Mr. Deng had
acquired three additional offshore companies, well before Mr. Xi became
China’s top leader and made a crackdown on corruption one of the
centerpieces of his leadership.
The
disclosures provide further insight into how China’s political elite
has tapped into the global network of lawyers and wealth managers who,
for a fee, can set up complex corporate structures that often have the
effect of cloaking vast personal wealth.
It
is not illegal for Chinese citizens to own companies offshore, and
there are legitimate reasons for having one. Thousands of Chinese
nationals have set up companies in offshore havens such as the British
Virgin Islands and the Seychelles. Mossack Fonseca has more offices in
China than in any other country, according to the company’s website.
Many
of China’s most powerful families set up offshore companies during the
administration of Hu Jintao, who preceded Mr. Xi as president and as
leader of the Communist Party. Family members or close business
associates of at least five of the nine men who served on the Politburo
Standing Committee from 2007 through 2012 had links to offshore
accounts, according to records reviewed by The New York Times.
Photo= I add >
evil & beast rubbish Xi Jin Ping #OpChina #OpHongKong #OpXiJinPing #OpLeungChunYing #OpHongKongDAB< I add , hate the-authoritarian !
President Xi Jinping in
Beijing in 2012. The ties of Mr. Xi’s brother-in-law to offshore
companies have been known for several years.Credit
Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
It
was during that period that Jia Liqing, the wife of Mr. Liu’s son, Liu
Lefei, appears to have become the director and a shareholder of Ultra
Time Investments, a company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands
in 2009, according to the consortium's report. It is not clear what
Ultra Time was used for, if anything. A Google search for the company’s
name on Wednesday turned up only one result, a list of offshore “shelf
companies” stating that Ultra Time had been incorporated on April 20,
2009.
Ms.
Jia and her husband represent two of the most potent arms of the
Chinese Communist Party. She is the daughter of China’s former minister
of public security and chief prosecutor, Jia Chunwang, according to two
people who have met the couple and who spoke on the condition of
anonymity in order to preserve those relationships. Liu Lefei’s father
oversees the country’s propaganda apparatus.
Liu Lefei heads one of China’s leading private equity firms and was until recently a vice chairman
of Citic Securities, the brokerage arm of the country’s biggest
financial conglomerate. Ms. Jia was a banker at Merrill Lynch until
2014, according to online records from the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong.
A
woman who answered a Chinese cellphone number listed for Ms. Jia on the
alumni website of Yale University, where she obtained an M.B.A., hung
up after the caller identified himself as a New York Times reporter.
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The
consortium of journalists also reported that Lee Shing Put, a
son-in-law of Mr. Zhang, the seventh-ranking person on the Politburo
Standing Committee, was a shareholder in Zennon Capital Management,
registered in the British Virgin Islands, and two other companies, Sino
Reliance Networks and Glory Top Investments.
Zennon
Capital Management is the owner of a Hong Kong company that has the
same name as an entity of which Mr. Lee is a director, according to Hong
Kong’s company registry. No information could be found on Sino Reliance
Networks and Glory Top Investments, although a Hong Kong-registered
company also is named Glory Top Investments.
The
website of the Washington-based Brookings Institution, which tracks
China’s top leaders, says Mr. Lee is a son of the founding chairman of
Xinyi Glass Holdings, which is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Lee Shing Put did not respond to an email request for an interview made through Xinyi’s public relations company.
Mr.
Deng, Mr. Xi’s brother-in-law, did not reply to faxed questions about
his offshore holdings sent to the family’s office in Shenzhen, in
southern China.
Correction: May 7, 2016
An article on April 7 about revelations that at least three of
the seven people on the Chinese Communist Party’s most powerful
committee have relatives who have controlled secretive offshore
companies gave an outdated title for Liu Lefei, whose wife was once a
shareholder and director of a company registered in the British Virgin
Islands, and whose father, Liu Yunshan, is a member of the committee.
Although the younger Mr. Liu heads one of China’s leading private equity
firms, he is no longer a vice chairman of Citic Securities.
A version of this article appears in print on April 7, 2016, on page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: Panama Papers Identify Kin of Chinese Leaders. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
===
Donald Trump’s Deals Rely on Being Creative With the Truth
Donald J. Trump at a campaign
event this month in Virginia. A survey of his four decades of wheeling
and dealing reveals an operatic record of dissembling and deception.Credit
Damon Winter/The New York Times
There was the time Donald J. Trump told Larry King that he had been paid more than $1 million to give a speech about his business acumen when in fact he was paid $400,000. Or the time he sought a bank loan
claiming a net worth of $3.5 billion in 2004, four times as much as
what the bank found when it checked his math. Or the time he boasted
that membership
to Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, N.Y., cost $300,000
when the actual initiation fee was $200,000. Or the time he bragged on
CNBC about his new Trump International Hotel and Tower in Las Vegas,
claiming, “We have 1,282 units, and they sold out in less than a week.”
As Mr. Trump knew, more than 300 units had not been sold.
Confronted
in a court case about this last untruth, Mr. Trump was anything but
chagrined. “I’m talking to a television station,” he said. “We do want
to put the best spin on the property.”
As
Mr. Trump prepares to claim the Republican nomination for president
this week, he and his supporters are sure to laud his main calling card —
his long, operatic record as a swaggering business tycoon. And without
question, there will be successes aplenty to highlight, from his
gleaming golden high-rises to his well-regarded golf resorts, hit TV
shows and best-selling books.
But
a survey of Mr. Trump’s four decades of wheeling and dealing also
reveals an equally operatic record of dissembling and deception, some of
it unabashedly confirmed by Mr. Trump himself, who nearly 30 years ago
first extolled the business advantages of “truthful hyperbole.” Indeed,
based on the mountain of court records churned out over the span of Mr.
Trump’s career, it is hard to find a project he touched that did not
produce allegations of broken promises, blatant lies or outright fraud.
Under
the intense scrutiny of a presidential election, many of those
allegations have already become familiar campaign fodder: the Trump University students and Trump condo buyers
who say they were fleeced; the public servants from New Jersey to
Scotland who now say they rue the zoning approvals, licenses or tax
breaks they gave based on Mr. Trump’s promises; the small-time
contractors who say Mr. Trump concocted complaints about their work to
avoid paying them; the infuriated business partners who say Mr. Trump
concealed profits or ignored contractual obligations; the business
journalists and stock analysts who say Mr. Trump smeared them for
critical coverage.
Taken
as a whole, though, an examination of Mr. Trump’s business career
reveals persistent patterns in the way Mr. Trump bends or breaks the
truth — patterns that may already feel familiar to those watching his
campaign.
First
and foremost is Mr. Trump’s tendency toward the self-aggrandizing fib —
as if it were not impressive enough to be paid $400,000 for a speech.
What also emerges is a nearly reflexive habit of telling his target
audience precisely what he thinks it wants to hear — such as promising
Trump University students they will learn all his real estate secrets
from his “handpicked” instructors. And finally, there is the pattern
already deeply familiar to his political opponents — making spurious
claims against adversaries under Mr. Trump’s oft-stated theory that the
best defense is a scorched-earth offense.
Equally
striking is his Houdiniesque ability to wiggle away from all but the
most skilled and determined efforts to corner him in an apparent lie. In
interviews, lawyers who have tangled with Mr. Trump in court cases are
sometimes reduced to sputtering, astonished rage, calling him
“borderline pathological” and “the Michelangelo of deception” as they
attempt to describe the ease with which Mr. Trump weaves his own
versions of reality.
“He’s
a bully, and bullies aren’t known for their veracity,” said Richard C.
Seltzer, a retired senior partner at the law firm Kaye Scholer who
confronted Mr. Trump in three real estate lawsuits.
In
a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Trump defended his integrity as a
businessman — “I shoot very straight” — and argued that those who accuse
him of acting in bad faith are often the same people he has
outmaneuvered in deals.
“What,
you’re going to quote people that I’ve beat? Are you going to quote
people that I out-dealt?” he asked, adding, “I’ll give you hundreds of
names of people that have dealt with me that say I’m very honest.”
Hillary
Clinton, meanwhile, is already hard at work making the case that Mr.
Trump’s truth-challenged business record is a harbinger of how he would
mislead from the Oval Office. Her campaign has even put up a
none-too-subtle website: www.artofthesteal.biz.
Mr.
Trump’s business record may help explain why various fact-checkers have
barely been able to keep pace with his false claims on the campaign
trail. PolitiFact has labeled 34 of Mr. Trump’s assertions “Pants on Fire” lies. As of July 1, The Washington Post
had fact-checked 46 statements by Mr. Trump. It gave 70 percent of them
its worst rating, four Pinocchios — a record so abysmal that the
newspaper recently compiled a video of what it called “Donald Trump’s
most outrageous four-Pinocchio claims.”
The
taxonomy of Mr. Trump’s business deceptions has been the subject of
legal and journalistic scrutiny for decades. A Fortune magazine article
from 2000 memorably described Mr. Trump’s “astonishing ability to
prevaricate” this way: “But when Trump says he owns 10 percent of the
Plaza Hotel, understand that what he actually means is that he has the
right to 10 percent of the profit if it’s ever sold. When he says he’s
building a ‘90-story building’ next to the U.N., he means a 72-story
building that has extra-high ceilings. And when he says his casino
company is the ‘largest employer in the state of New Jersey,’ he
actually means to say it is the eighth largest.”
The
casino magnate Steve Wynn, a sometimes friend and sometimes foe of Mr.
Trump’s, took up the subject of Mr. Trump’s honesty in an interview with
New York magazine. “His statements to people like you, whether they
concern us and our projects or our motivations or his own reality or his
own future or his own present you have seen over the years have no
relation to truth or fact,” Mr. Wynn said.
Photo
Mr. Trump in 2005 at the
ribbon-cutting ceremony of Trump International Hotel and Tower in Las
Vegas. He exaggerated about the number of units that sold in a week.Credit
Ethan Miller/Getty Images
‘Truthful Hyperbole’
Some
of the earliest documented examples of Mr. Trump’s deceptive business
tactics come from none other than Mr. Trump, who in books and in
interviews sometimes seems to delight in describing the brazen bluffs
and well-timed trickery he used to claw his way to the upper echelons of
New York City’s cutthroat real estate world.
“You have to understand where I was coming from,” Mr. Trump wrote in his 1987 best-seller, “The Art of the Deal.”
“While there are certainly honorable people in the real estate
business, I was more accustomed to the sort of people with whom you
don’t want to waste the effort of a handshake because you know it’s
meaningless.”
Mr.
Trump was particularly proud of a stratagem he employed in 1982, when
he was trying to entice Holiday Inn to invest in a casino he was
building in Atlantic City. The board of directors decided to visit
Atlantic City, which worried Mr. Trump because he had precious little
actual construction to show off. So Mr. Trump ordered his construction
supervisor to cram every bulldozer and dump truck he could find into the
nearly vacant construction site.
The now-defunct Trump University has left a long trail of customers saying that they were defrauded.Credit
Thos Robinson/Getty Images
For example, in the now-infamous Trump University
litigation, Evil<I add> Trump was asked in a deposition about a script that had
been prepared for Trump University instructors. According to the
script, the instructors were supposed to tell their students the
following: “I remember one time Evil<I add> Trump said to us over dinner, he
said, ‘Real estate is the only market that, when there’s a sale going
on, people run from the store.’ You don’t want to run from the store.”
No
such dinners ever took place, Evil<I add>Trump acknowledged. In fact, Evil<I add>
Trump struggled to identify a single one of the instructors he claimed
to have handpicked, even after he was shown their photographs.
Nonetheless, Evil<I add>Trump was not bothered by the script’s false
insinuation of real estate secrets shared over chummy dinners. Asked if
this example constituted “innocent exaggeration,” Mr. Trump replied,
“Yes, I’d say that’s an innocent exaggeration.”
On
Friday, Evil<I add> Trump argued that the script might fall under the legal
concept of “puffery” — which many legal dictionaries define as an
exaggeration or statement that “no reasonable person” would take as
factual. And in any event, he continued, the true sinners in the Trump
University case are the students who sued him even after giving rave
reviews in their written evaluations of the seminars. “I think that’s
dishonest,” he said.
Evil<I add>Trump has been repeatedly accused of bringing false legal claims to
avoid paying debts and evade contractual obligations. As far back as
1983, a New York City housing court judge ruled that Evil<I add>Trump filed a
“spurious” lawsuit to harass a tenant into vacating a Trump building.
Then there was the case Evil<I add>Trump brought against Barbara Corcoran,
the real estate broker best known for her appearances on “Shark Tank.”
In the mid-1990s, Mr. Trump owed millions of dollars to Ms. Corcoran for
helping him secure financing for a development. But when New York
magazine published a cover story about the troubled project — “Trump’s Near-Death Experience”
— Evil<I add> Trump sued Ms. Corcoran, accusing her and her associates of
sharing damaging information with the magazine and thus violating a
confidentiality agreement. He refused to pay her the millions he owed,
claiming her breach had gravely damaged his business.
At
trial, Evil<I add>Trump was unable to produce a single document showing harm
to his business. But his certitude never wavered, even after Ms.
Corcoran’s lawyer, Mr. Seltzer, confronted him with article after
article in which Evil<I add>Trump himself had discussed with reporters much of
the same “confidential” information he accused Ms. Corcoran’s team of
divulging.
“There
is something very belligerent about the way he presents facts, as if he
thinks nobody will have the balls to stand up to him,” Mr. Seltzer said
in an interview. (In dismissing Evil<I add>Trump’s suit against Ms. Corcoran,
the judge said the only damages he could identify were to Mr. Trump’s
“bruised ego.”)
Photo
The Evil<I add>Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County. Mr. Trump embellished the cost of a membership.Credit
Mike Segar/Reuters
Well-Timed Memory Lapses
In
Friday’s interview, Evil<I add>Trump denied filing frivolous court cases,
insisting, “I’ve won a massive majority of the litigation I’ve been
involved in.” He pointed to the USA Today survey of his 3,500 legal
cases. Although the newspaper could not determine who had prevailed in
the vast majority of the cases, it did find Evil<I add>Trump the clear winner
in 450 suits and the clear loser in 38.
And,
indeed, for all of the litigation Evil<I add>Trump has attracted or spawned,
for all of the times he has been accused of ruinous dishonesty, the
legal and regulatory record is surprisingly bare of official findings by
judges, juries or regulators that Trump engaged in perjury or
improper deception or actual fraud.
A
rare exception came afterEvil<I add> Trump decided to demolish a department
store to make way for his Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan. Evil<I add> Trump’s
demolition contractor hired about 200 unauthorized Polish laborers,
paying them as little as $4 an hour to work 12 hours a day, seven days a
week. The case ended up in federal court after some workers were
shortchanged even these wages.
Evil<I add> Trump protested that he knew nothing about the use of unauthorized
workers — even though workers testified that they saw him visiting the
site and some witnesses said that Evil<I add> Trump and the executive he
assigned to oversee the demolition were well aware of what was going on.
In 1991, a federal judge, Charles E. Stewart Jr., ruled that despite
Evil<I add>Trump’s denials, there was “strong evidence” that he and his
subordinates and his contractor had conspired to hire the Polish workers
and deprive them of employment benefits. He awarded them $325,415 in
damages.
But
in case after case, Evil<I add>Trump has displayed a special talent for
turning what should be cold hard facts into semantic mush. Perhaps the
most famous example of this skill came when Evil<I add> Trump was asked under
oath a seemingly straightforward question: Had he ever lied about his
net worth? Evil<I add> Trump responded, “My net worth fluctuates and it goes up
and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own
feelings.”
So, he explained in a deposition, when he said membership costs $300,000
to his Westchester golf club, that included the $200,000 initiation fee
plus every cent he guessed that a member might spend on annual dues
over the next 20 or 30 years. In other words, “The way I say it is more
accurate.” And when he told Larry King he was paid more than $1 million
for a speech, it was not his fault if viewers failed to realize he was
including not just his $400,000 speaking fee but also the hundreds of
thousands of dollars he assumed must have been spent promoting his
appearance.
Part
of what makes Evil<I add>Trump such an elusive target is that his paper trail
is often minimal. Evil<I add>Trump has repeatedly testified that he does not
use computers. He says he also throws away his day planner each month,
and just last year he testified that he did not own a smartphone.
“Unlike Hillary Clinton, I’m not a big email fan,” he said, leaving open
the question of how he posts to Twitter.
Evil<I add> Trump is also adept at deflecting blame to his staff. In two of his
books, Evil<I add>Trump made the startling and, as it turned out, bogus claim
that he had once performed the remarkable feat of climbing out from
under more than $9 billion in debt. Evil<I add>Trump blamed his ghostwriter for
the mistake. Asked if he reads his books before publication, Trump
said, “I read it as quickly as I can because of time constraints.”
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Evil<I add> Trump is also the beneficiary of miraculously well-timed memory lapses.
In suit after suit, the man who claims to possess one of world’s best
memories suddenly seems to have chronic memory loss when asked about
critical facts or events.
Such
was the case when Evil<I add>Trump filed a libel lawsuit against Timothy L.
O’Brien, the author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.” Among
other things, Trump asserted that “TrumpNation” cost him a “deal
made in heaven” with a group of Italian investors, men he had met and
who were on the brink of signing a business partnership that would have
made him hundreds of millions of dollars. Their names? He could not
recall. Evil<I add>“TrumpNation” also cost him a hotel deal with Russian investors,
he said. He could not remember their names, either. He was certain the
book also ruined a deal with Turkish investors. Again, he could not
recall any names. Polish investors also got cold feet after they read
Mr. O’Brien’s book. Their names escaped him, too. The book also scared
off investors from Ukraine. Alas, he could not think of their names
either.
Xi Jinping not Renxia insult? Xi signed exclusive newspaper Combat Order Photos
2016 Nian 07 Yue.
Accused Jiang Department
of Boxun network of 11 exclusive news that learning has authorized the
military to go to war, the southern theater has entered an alert. But he went on to say, such as the US provocations that may arise patient, is learning the insult. Commentator "water side" indicates that this is Jiang's campaign, hoping to rally pressure learning war.
Prior Boxun on a military exclusive news, Hong Kong and Macao was
exposed that is made up of military experts, there are two flawed. "In the water side," he pointed out that a total of US Army and several years of gap, the war would lose. In January, the CCP army newspaper also expressed this meaning. Jiang Zemin army 10 years of corruption, no one cares to enhance combat capability, but the military corruption. Liu Yazhou CCP officials also said: "Japan's four hours to wipe out the East China Sea Fleet of non-joke."
Since at 8:00 on July 5 to at 8:00 on July 11, the Chinese military in the South asia Sea waters near the Paracel military exercises. (Network Graphics). Prior to July 1, Taiwan
event missile mistakenly shot event, exclusive news Boxun network, said
Xi eastern theater command indicates, if the missile cross the line
immediately shot down. But Hong Kong media military commentator analysis, the exclusive news has many flaws, from a military point of view is a joke. Xi Jinping, not war is the "insult"
Accusations of Jiang's background Boxun network of UBM Agency July 11
published an exclusive news, citing military sources, said Beijing, Xi
Jinping last week issued instructions to the army " to do everything ready."
Operational decisions to make: the army into the secondary alert, an
alert in southern war zone, South China Sea Fleet, Army and Air Force
rocket into the pre-war status; strategic nuclear forces into an alert. Network Screenshot
Exclusive Boxun said: In the current atmosphere of public opinion, the
military mood, if provoked again the United States may appear to take
patient attitude, or just stop at the diplomatic verbal protest,
secretly conniving people set off a domestic anti-American
demonstrations; and even warships fighter symbolic "drive", not only to
convince the people of public opinion, it is the new term of the Central
Military Commission, headed by Xi Jinping insult. According to the instruction, the southern theater of front-line troops in fact been authorized to "go to war."
To this end, the southern king Norinari theater commander, and Navy
Commander Wu Shengli has commissar Miao Hua, deputy chief of staff as
well as the CPC Central Military Commission, the Joint Staff crown four
will be together, use the "command exercise" in the name arrived in the
South China Sea, deployment of combat ready.
The CMC Chairman Xi Jinping signed a combat order in advance and did
not consult the Chairman of the Central Military Commission and former
member of the Politburo, the party elders' opinions. "Now the party decided to study the parties will not stop, but it must be someone behind you want to see a joke."
The US media people, the Apollo Network Commentator "In the water side," said that this is "insult" in forcing Xi Jinping war. Xi Jinping and did not go to war motives and intentions.
The Hague arbitration result will be announced on the 12th, this is not
a sudden event, the ruling also observed or predicted will benefit the
Philippines. Therefore, the Department of Jiang Xi Jinping to take this opportunity to put pressure on. The reality is that without the Communist army military combat power, especially if against the US military would lose.
Apple Daily reported Wednesday quoted a professor at Beijing Foreign
Affairs College Zhou Yongsheng, he said the United States supports the
Philippines to engage in international arbitration, sent two aircraft
carrier fleet to China's doorstep demonstrations are to maintain its
world power. Chinese military exercises that it will not bow to US power politics. The two sides are demonstrated strength, not really happen to armed conflict.
CPC National Defense University Strategic Research Department Professor
Zhu is also analyzed the situation in the South China Sea will not be
calm in the short term.
Although the South China Sea area of conflict crisis has increased,
but the war does not meet the interests of all parties, and
extra-regional countries in the region do not have the ability to carry
out large-scale military conflict.
General Zhu said, "I do not think in the short term or long, the South
China Sea will affect traffic security outbreaks of war."
Exclusive Boxun said: Party elders who did not come forward to "jump
discussion" military orders, but no one to stop the military, all the
participating army head said he "agreed" to support President Xi do
battle order, insiders refer to "The military is anxious war, artillery
sounds, tons of gold, has always been so. "
"In the water side," pointed out that the so-called "military is
anxious to go to war, cannon sounds, tons of gold, always been the
case." In today's China is not established. If the war is a stalemate, beneficial to the Chinese military. But the total of US troops to the war undoubtedly breaks against the Chinese military paper tiger face immediately exposed.
US war on Iraq when the officers told me that a friend of my troops,
the US military saw a sentinel missile can explode several times,
destroying the enemy, including multilayer including underground
headquarters. Colleagues pale, military senior deeply shocked, fear. Exclusive Boxun also said that in recent days, Xinhua News Agency, CCTV, People's Daily and other central media also recently ordered the South China Sea issue show that China's attitude, ready to rally to fight the Central Military Commission.
CCTV broadcast the three-ship fleet of over a hundred and dozens of
warplanes firing in Xisha waters of video, but clearly shows that the
military "is ready to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity
of preparation." "In the water side," analyzed dog bite is not called.
Over the past few years a lot of back trouble, party media said the US
aircraft carrier to the Yellow Sea sea, there is no return. US aircraft carrier to come true, no sound. Would you really want to go to war, the media would not be party to jump so high. Mao left the army and is flicker powder. CCP army newspaper blew"losingbattle"
January 10, Chengdu Branch of the CCP army newspaper exposed the
original four army headquarters to convert all names, new armband
released.
The article said, "with particular emphasis on the past to abandon
greeting sent, please put a lot of energy wasted in work and leadership
on the higher authorities, from wherever it was that beg, around,
holding, patting the privileged status to wake up "to meet the
Commission for Discipline Inspection supervision and auditing
departments, political leaders beat freshman state.
The article also exposes the military "hidden rules": past practices
"going round in circles", "Me", "self-deception" is surprising,
especially those who work for the packaging of contention luck practice
in the New System ecological new requirements are outdated. To guard against wear new shoes to walk the old, old habits to avoid being kidnapped. CCF rottenfraud training Jiang corruption, state and army, military grip in the hands of Jiang's army rotten, no fighting. Xi Jinping took office calling for increased military combat power, the army trained to really fight the army. [Apollo Network has reported that the CCP army newspaper blew "losing battle" Xi Jinping no return] CPC training, sea and air military exercises throughout the cheating.
"Liberation Army Daily" had earlier reported that forty-seventh Army
tank aiming to improve the accuracy of dusty exercise site, quietly on
the runway shooting (Range) watering eliminate dust, as well as armored
infantry battalion exercises will shoot ahead position and distance from
the target position indicated entered into the computer, in order to
never miss.
Guangzhou Military armored brigade all the officers to accept the
assessment, five kilometers armed off-road performance suddenly "leap
forward", and found that less than five kilometers away from the actual
cross-country.
The obstacles to the Chengdu Military Region regiment assessment, but
do not hang wire stretched rubber band, let the soldiers pass easily.
The report also refers to the armed forces in military training have found falsifications.
In the assessment of the contest held in the South China Sea, a diving
submarine forces in the region actually seabed tricks to guide the
direction.
In a large-scale military exercises, some army quietly increased
"enemy" target reflection area, so radar search target "abnormal
sensitivity."
In addition, pre-recorded high-tech fraud under firing under four kinds
of weather, when the exercise, the sky Teenage rain and snow are not
afraid, the headquarters of the reviewing stand sitting heads looked
accurate shooting the big screen, really thought it is live.
Veterans have claimed that the CCP boasted sea "Corps" "elite force"
all play a small role, their "exercises" are actually "acting", the war
will be lost!
CPC National Defense University political commissar of the Air Force
Gen. Liu Yazhou in October last year issued a "Sino - Japanese Relations
from the Diaoyu Islands issue," he said: "Japan's four hours to wipe
out the East China Sea Fleet of non-joke." Experts refer to the Exclusive message is purely a joke Prior to July 1, with Taiwan missile mistakenly shot event.
Boxun network also published an exclusive news that the Chinese
Communist Party headquarters was moved to the eastern part of the
theater to the ground several times to report Xi Jinping, the study
indicates that if a missile shot down the line immediately. [Apollo has reported net exclusive newspaper Xi Jinping indicates brutally exposed the military experts]
July 8, Macau military commentator Huang in Hong Kong's Oriental Daily
review article, "Who in the hype rendering Yuzo mistakenly shot? "That the exclusive news agency said Wen Bo, military experts from the point of view, is purely a joke.
Huang said that the exclusive right message seems really vivid, but the
micro-novelist or screenwriter know not why, the lack of military
knowledge.
Huang inventory in the article, the two Mishap news: First, the missile
flew just a few minutes, Communist forces had no time to have so much
action; Second, the loss of radar target is normal, without a review.
"In the water side," this analysis, the Boxun mistakenly shot by Yuzo
incident leaked its purpose is to release "Taiwan Straits in enhancing
both preparing for" the wind, cross-strait relations spoiler, Xi Jinping
interference policy toward Taiwan.
Voice of America reported on the 11th, Taiwan's Mainland Affairs
Council officials said, after a recent incident missile mistakenly shot
event, cross-strait relations is not affected. Defense officials said that the Chinese military is no abnormal mobility appear. Boxun years "staggering" scoop these are often seen, was friends known as political gossip site. Hu Jintao from participation
Zeng Qinghong coup Xi Jinping, Li Keqiang to replace Xi Jinping,
another senior army coup against Xi Jinping Xi Jinping to be monitored,
and many, is nothing less than to Jiang faction campaign against Xi
Jinping camp. Apollo reported net Hakubaicho Source: Apollo reported net Hakubaicho reproduced, please indicate the author and source intact.
"Xi Chuan" On Secret: What is most afraid of juvenile Xi Jinping
, 2015 Nian 05 Yue.
Recently, with Xi and close its written biography of the CPC Shaanxi,
Shandong an event disclosure Party History Research Office Deputy
Inspector Gu Juchuan, in the 1990s, when once interviewed Jia Xi , Xi told him that his childhood best afraid to take a bath. Xi Jinping exposes hour afraid to take a bath. I add >
evil & beast rubbish Xi Jin Ping
#OpChina #OpHongKong #OpXiJinPing #OpLeungChunYing #OpHongKongDAB #OpNaziTrump #OpNaziDown < I add , hate the-authoritarian ! According
Wenhui Network May 12 reported that Gu Juchuan recently in Jinan
participated in the "Independent Commission Against cultural
construction launch ceremony first Confucius School stresses"
activities, and made the first report will be speaking at the event.
Jia recalled in the report said that in 1996 he had an interview at
that time serving in Fujian Xi Xi had told him his childhood fear bath.
At that time in order to save water at home, Xi always showered after
their own brothers and pressed into the water wash again, and finally
the clothes in the wash. In addition, Xi Xi sisters also wear shoes with flower finished black ink, let them continue to wear the brothers.
According to statistics, Gu Juchuan Heyang County in Shaanxi Province,
graduated from the Chinese Department of Weinan Teachers College. 1987 by demobilized troops to local history research department work , Weinan Party History Research Center of the CPC deputy editor, deputy director. 1996 was named the Shaanxi Provincial Committee Party History Research work, followed by a "Xi Chuan" authors.
It is reported that since the beginning of the 1990s, in order to
personally interview Xi Gu Juchuan on themselves and their relatives,
work colleagues and other means to collect information, learning and
family relationship is quite close. Xi Jinping left Beijing who fear losing your life In 1966, the Cultural Revolution began, Xi's father, Xi brutally purged, was Kang Sheng and other man-as "anti-party group" and "gang" was reviewed, imprisoned for 16 years before and after care. Xi Jinping, who was in high school as a "reactionary student", was thrown into the classes.
In order to temporarily revive, Xi Jinping offered to respond to "down
the mountain" requirements at the time, his father had worked in
northern Shaanxi Yanchuan County Liangjiahe jump the queue. His request was granted. 1969 winter, Xi Jinping and other more than twenty thousand educated youth of 16 years set foot on the train to the West. Xi Jinping recalled the train to Yan'an, everyone is crying, he only laughed. Off relatives surprised, and asked him why laugh.
Xi Jinping said: "I'm not going to cry I do not go away, then there is
life in Beijing desperately not know a good thing that I can not do what
you go crying about.??"
Xi Jinping said later that he was to go to northern Shaanxi and there
is no purpose, is to make it as a place to stay, even evade land. Email subscription Forbidden News Source: NTDTV.
===
French media: Communist Party suffered a major crisis Xi Jinping has no escape route
2016 Nian 07 Yue.
Author: Xia Yan.
Recently, the method widely cited in a review of the program overseas viewpoint Political sources believe that the CCP
is currently more terrible than the economic crisis of the people is
lost, it has been common to every opposing the international and
domestic level.
July 16, law widely published an article entitled "Chinese Communist
Party: bigger than the economic crisis, people are ruined," I add >
evil & beast rubbish Xi Jin Ping
#OpChina #OpHongKong #OpXiJinPing #OpLeungChunYing #OpHongKongDAB #OpNaziTrump #OpNaziDown < I add , hate the-authoritarian ! the article. The paper said that in early July, Xi Jinping in Beijing to engage in a "highest level" of the economy expert forum.
Analysis of media people Chen Xiaoping, Xi Jinping I always have a
steelyard, that have the confidence and ability to maintain China's
economic growth rate of around 7% this is actually so that the
objectives of this expert forum aimed. Simply put, it is to continue to enlarge the economic cake. However, Chen Xiaoping quoted " insider ," the editorial believes that this idea of the problem lies in two aspects.
First, economists say, the signs from the environment to the political
system, actual data show that China is slid into the "middle income
trap", not to mention 7%, 6% probability of no. Second, China will lock the economy issue, Beijing is the official Normal and simple thinking.
They have always believed that as long as people have food to eat, it
shows the success of their treatment, have the power legitimacy.
Articles For example, one of the most obvious example is the Shanghai
retired workers to a rare group of Zhongnanhai, the CPC Shanghai
authorities to protest against the merger of two-track pension reform in the name continues to widen the gap between large pension of civil servants and retired workers.
The editorial believed that this time they are not asking for bread,
but the dignity of persons not to be discriminated against. Another example is to accelerate the economic elite to escape the communist system more and more. 2015 This year, we are waiting for US investment immigration visas Chinese people jumped threefold.
Editorial that this is a signal: China Regal although not openly
criticize the Communist Party, but they are voting with their feet,
accelerate to flee the Chinese Communist Party.
The editorial also pointed out that China is more terrible than the
economic crisis of the people is lost, it has been common to every
opposing the international and domestic level.
Chen Xiaoping analysis, after Xi Jinping came to power through
corruption in the short term does get popular support, but also
refreshing too: Third Plenary Session of 18th CCP announced is
considered to have market-oriented economic reform blueprint for China;
Fourth Plenary Session stressed the need to legally Ruling.
But Chen Xiaoping believes that the current situation is that aspect of
the market-oriented reform has been to subvert Communist Party
dignitaries. Communist generals Luo Ruiqing Luo Yu's son had told " Look China " interview also pointed out that the CCP has ruined the people, the people will not give much time to Xi Jinping. In early August last year, the CPC executives
held Beidaihe meeting, held a special symposium during the high-level
retirement, retired executives stressed that "the party of corruption,
social discontent anger" and so, when it comes to the CCP is facing
"death party crisis", also appeared crying scene , the meeting was
interrupted several times.
CCDI CCDI Standing Committee secretary Wang Qishan also, for the first
time publicly acknowledged the collapse of the communist system has been
at the brink of the critical point. Source: See China
===
The business of censorship: Documents show how Weibo filters sensitive news in China
When journalists at the Guangdong-based Southern
Weekly found that their 2013 new year editorial had been changed,
without their knowledge, to exalt the virtues of the Communist Party,
they took their outrage to the Chinese microblogging site Weibo.
The
popular social media site often provides a platform for journalists and
Chinese citizens to discuss news and contentious issues that mainstream
press are barred from reporting on. A set of documents provided to CPJ
by a former employee in Weibo's censorship department however, sheds
light on how the site must tread a fine line between appeasing
government censors and encouraging users to keep posting to its site.
Included in the several hundred pages of censorship logs are orders
that show how Weibo reacted to the Southern Weekly story as a growing
number of citizens - from lawyers, academics and students to migrant
workers and celebrities - took to the site to voice support for the
journalists.
The documents account for most of the internal orders of Weibo
censorship departments between April 2011 and late 2014, according to
the former employee, who asked not to be identified for fear of
repercussions. Each document, usually a couple of pages long, contains
the censorship orders of a day shift (10 hours) or a night shift (14
hours). The former employee, who said he left Weibo because he felt his
job was "maleficent," told CPJ he collected the logs so "people can
study [them ]. "
When contacted by CPJ for verification of the authenticity of the
documents, a representative from Sina, Weibo's parent company, said, "We
do not verify any documents that are not official." When CPJ contacted
Sina's headquarters in Beijing for comment at the end of february a
spokeswoman said the company did not have anyone who could respond to
CPJ's questions. At The by Southern Weekly Incident LED to One of at The Biggest Standoffs
over Press Freedom in China in Recent years. Journalists AT at The
Newspaper Used Weibo to Demand at The Resignation of Tuo Zhen, at The
head of at The Guangdong Propaganda, Department WHO allegedly ordered at
The Editorial to BE changed. Wentworth and Australia Further staged for
A s Some Strike . Showed Their Support to Citizens at The Journalists Not only ON Weibo, But Also Offline - A couple of Hundred Gathered Outside at The by Southern Weekly at The Headquarters of the with placards condemning censorship and demanding Press Freedom.
With no public comment by the propaganda department, and little
reporting of it in China's press, Weibo became the main outlet where
details of the incident were reported and commented on. But the grip of
China's censors was still felt at the microblogging site.
Copies
of the altered 2013 edition of Southern Weekly. Weibo posts about
protests over the changed editorial were censored. (AP Photo / Alexander
F. Yuan)
On January 3, 2013 - the day the altered editorial was published - the
censorship logs record instructions given by managers of Weibo's
censorship department to its employees: "Please concentrate on checking
and clearing posts related to attacking the director of the Guangdong
Provincial Propaganda department. This is the focus of today's work ...
Posts instigating his resignation should also be censored. Ordinary
mentions and ordinary negative posts do not need to be censored. " A corresponded to the Purported the Order at The censorship Directive from Central Propaganda, at The Department, Also dated January 3, 2013 and Published in China Digital Times, Which ordered "All Reporters and Editors Not to Discuss New Year at The Editorial by Southern Weekly ON the any public Platforms." January. 7 ON, 2013 China Digital Times Published Another censorship the Order
, the Attributed AS Coming from Central Propaganda, at The Department,
in Which allegedly ordered at The Department of Ensure Journalists Media
Outlets to Voice Support for DID Not by Southern Weekly and to Reprint AN Editorial by at The Communist Party- owned newspaper Global Times toeing the official line
. An entry in the Weibo censorship logs on the same day read, "Maintain
the same level of censorship [as in previous days], mainly make posts
unable to be shared. to those extreme posts that attack the party,
leaders, and calling for protests, make them invisible. Do not overkill.
"
Making posts "invisible" is different from deleting posts. When a post
becomes invisible, it can be viewed only by the person who wrote it,
leaving the user unaware that his or her post has, in effect, been taken
down. A November 2014 by at The Study University of the Lab, Toronto apos Citizen
, Which Tested A Sample of over TWO sensitive Keywords Days to See How
Weibo Posts are censored, and at The logs Viewed by CPJ Show One of the
this IS MOST apos at The Site Frequently Applied Methods censorship. ON January. 9, at The Publisher of at The Beijing Shi News,
A similarly outspoken Publication based in at The Country apos Capital,
threatened to Resign the when pressured by Party Officials to Comply
the with at The January. 7 censorship the Order to Reprint at The, Ltd. Free Join Times Article This article was, ACCORDING toReports . An entry in the Weibo logs on the same day, referencing the news of his resignation, said, "This must be completely killed." In the week after the Southern Weekly news
broke, CPJ found several entries similar to the above-mentioned ones
instructing rank and file employees on the particulars of censorship.
While the logs are a record of the censorship department managers'
orders to the employees, the source of the orders came from a government
relations specialist at Sina who served as a middle man between the
government and Sina's censorship department, according to the former
employee. The specialist received censorship orders from various
government agencies via channels such as the messaging apps QQ and
WeChat and conveyed them to managers in the censorship department.
"Those orders are usually clear, direct and urgent, like whose accounts
need to removed and which posts need to be deleted, "the former employee
said." The Cyberspace Administration of China is the highest authority
to Internet companies, but even the Ministry of Agriculture has the
power to order us to remove posts "The former employee added:". The
specialist also frequently goes to government meetings to study the
'spirit of [other larger] meetings,' which are broad censorship
guidelines. He then gives us some very vague orders. The censorship
documents I sent you included both kinds of censorship orders. " The In MOST Cases, the before Members of at The censorship Department Work ON Posts Img_twitter apos Computer System
Scans the each POST a using AN algorithm the Designed to the Identify
Politically Unacceptable Content, ACCORDING to at The Former the
Employee. Posts are Flagged by at The algorithm and Forwarded to at The
Department apos the Employees, WHO Decide their fate based on the
instructions listed in the censorship logs. The logs also include
instructions on how employees should categorize censored Weibo accounts,
to help Sina analyze its data. For example, when censoring accounts
that had posts related to the Southern Weekly case, employees Told to
the Click at The tabs were "by Southern Weekly" and "Politics." Over A
24-hour period, the About 3 Million 101 - 500 Posts Would Processed BE,
ACCORDING to Reuters Which
Interviewed in 2013. Four Former Weibo censors the in 2011, around 100
Million 101 - 500 A Posts day were made on Weibo, the state-run news
agency Xinhua reported.
The censorship logs viewed by CPJ provide insight into the workings of
Weibo's then approximately 150-member censorship team. They show how
government directives were received, processed, and executed within
Weibo, and hint at Sina's struggle in balancing satisfying the
government's censorship demands with maintaining user activity level.
User activity is the lifeline of any social media company. Censorship
brings down the activity level and drives users away because they are
less able to engage. If a Chinese Internet company does not follow
government censorship orders closely, it runs the risk of being severely
punished . at The Case of Fanfou, Which WAS Highlighted in CPJ apos
2013 Report "Challenged in China," Underlines the this Risk. Fanfou, at
The Country apos Earliest microblogging Platform, WAS Closed Down
for 16 months in the 2009-10 the After the ITS the Users. Posted
Information the About Riots in Urumqi in the restive region of Xinjiang.
While orders from the Chinese authorities were mostly about stopping
the dissemination of certain news items, the censorship logs show the
department's managers weighed in on the specifics. For example, if
making a post unable to be shared was sufficient in limiting the spread
of news, then they did not issue orders to make it invisible. If
temporary suspension of an account was enough for cowing the user into
political obedience, then they did not issue orders to remove it. In the
Southern Weekly case, a January 4 entry informed employees to not be
stricter in their censorship than Tencent, Sina's then competitor in the
microblogging market in China. The entry suggests that Sina was aware
heavy censorship could drive users to competitors.
During clashes in Guangzhou in 2011, censors were told to push positive reports and suppress critical posts. (STR / AFP).
SUCH nuanced censorship of News CAN BE Seen Throughout at The logs. The For Example, the After A Clash
the BETWEEN Street vendors and Security Guards in of Guangzhou, A June
13, 2011 entry the Read, "Positive Content, Official Reporting, Stories
ON Police Bravery, Calls for Peace , posts asking for help in emergency
-. do not touch on any of these Using the chance to instigate chaos,
saying that the government first opened fire, rumor mongering that the
pregnant woman had already died -. censor [them] As to those posts that
have a large number of forwards and you are not sure what to do, ask
your supervisor. Those who post video clips, make them invisible. Those
only narrate the case or live blog about it, if forwards numbers are
low, make them unable to be shared first. "
Not All News Events Warrant SUCH Complex censorship. At The MOST
Politically sensitive AND DELINQUENCY the require at The MOST Stringent
censorship, SUCH AS News Related to Conflicts in Journal of. The A July
18, 2011 entry, Which the Refers to AN Armed Attack
in A Police Station in Hotan in Which several security force officers
and hostages died, said, "All the nonsense and posts pointing at ethnic
policies and the police, censor them resolutely! If they are just
reposts of [official] news, pass. This is today's big thing. The police
are watching. Everyone, be careful. "
GIVEN at The depth and breadth of Weibo censorship, IT IS LIKELY that
MANY of at The Site apos Monthly Active the Users, around 220 Million 101 - 500
, have have been affected by the ITS censors AT some Point. The For
Journalist Liu, Hu HOWEVER, Not only WAS of He at The at apparent victim
of Weibo censorship, he was also imprisoned over his posts on the site. The In August 2013, CPJ the Documented How Liu,, the then A Reporter for at The Guangdong-based Newspaper New Express, WAS Arrested
for "Fabricating and spreading Rumors" for accusing 'several'
Government Officials of Corruption in Weibo Posts. The In September,
2015, the After A year in Prison , Numerous interrogations, and Coming
under pressure to give Confessions
ON State Television, Police Dropped at The charges Against HIM Due to
"Insufficient Evidence." the In December, at The Same month The that
Liu, Applied for Compensation for wrongful imprisonment undergo a, at
The Beijing Shi Prosecutor apos Office rescinded
at The " Evidence Insufficient "Decision, and ruled that of He HAD
committed" Minor Crimes, "A Classification that Makes HIM illegible for
Compensation, ACCORDING to Radio as Free Asia .
Liu told CPJ that during the past two and half years he has been trying
to have his case heard by the public, but Weibo censorship had made
that difficult. "I have had at least five Weibo accounts removed. Some
just disappeared for no reason. I can be muzzled at any time, "Liu said.
CPJ showed Liu two entries in the Weibo censorship logs that appear to
order posts about news related to his arrest, including negative
references about the police and government to be censored. When asked to
comment on Sina's apparent censorship of his case, Liu paused for a
moment before saying, "I do not want to talk about it. It's stifling." Attempts by CPJ to contact Sina for comment on Liu's case were not successful. Online censorship tightens AS, at The IDEA of being Weibo A Transformative Force for Freedom of Information has been Repeatedlychallenged by WHO Experts Study Chinese social Media. Perhaps Nothing IS More emblematic of at The Current State of Press Freedom in China Within last at The epilogue, to at The by Southern Weekly
Protest: the In July, 2015, Tuo, Guangdong apos Propaganda, Chief WHO
allegedly Orchestrated at The Changes to at The Editorial, WAS Promoted
to Deputy head of at The Central Propaganda, Department and in November
2015, Guo Feixiong, Liu Yuandong, and Sun Desheng -. who joined the
protest outside the newspaper's headquarters - were sentenced to six,
three, and two and a half years in prison respectively for "assembling a
crowd to public the Order Disrupt, " Amnesty International's Reported. https://cpj.org/blog/2016/03/the-business-of-censorship-documents-show-how-weib.php
Part 1
: Weibo has removed Their Conventional censorship Notice from Searches
ON at The Site This May BE A Bellwether for Enhanced censorship ON at
The Site Due to A as particularly sensitive period in Chinese Politics
or IT May Mark A Shift toward are More obscured censorship Or's IT May..
simply be Weibo testing out new tactics.
Part 2
:.. The Automatic Review of Content the Refers to Moderating messages
the before They GET circulated Widely the A Number of 's have have
Described THESE mechanisms, Which the include Keywords Which Trigger
your POST to Become hidden or your - Lightman to POST in at The First
Place We Sought to Outline with more clarity the pathways a Weibo post
might take-from submission to potential censorship.
Part 3
: We accomplished at The above by Posting sensitive Keywords and
Tracking How They were censored or Not based ON A Number of Factors This
IS only A Preliminary SET of Tests and Will hopefully serve AS A Basic
Methodology for Others WHO are interested to the Generate More. rigorous
testing.
Screenshots and the Data
: We've Github. Posted to the Test at The Data Used for the this, Lists
of Suspected Keywords Which Trigger Automatic Review, AS Well AS at The
Screenshots of censorship at The Various messages.
Part 1: Removal of Censorship Notice from Weibo Searches
Internet censorship watchers have long noted the ubiquity of the phrase
"in accordance with relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search
results are not displayed" on Chinese websites. That message (
"According to relevant laws, regulations, and policies, search results
can not be displayed") or one of its variants often accompanies search
results that have been filtered or censored by Chinese search engines
and content providers. While much of China's censorship system is by
design invisible or obfuscated, this notice has served both as a small
beacon of transparency as well as a chilling reminder that authorities
are in control of the information one sees on Chinese websites.
However, as of two weeks ago, Sina Weibo, a popular Chinese
microblogging website, stopped explicitly reporting when its search
results were censored, and instead, the site now returns a message
stating that no results are found when a user searches for sensitive
content. Search results for terms like Xi (Xi Jinping, at The President
is of China) have have Long been Filtered the without at The the User
apos Knowledge (returning only Sanitized Results) and the Users of at
The-Service oftentimes do Not the receive messages the when Their Posts
are The rendered Invisible (See Part 2 ). The removal of any acknowledgment of filtering during searches is another way of making censorship harder to easily detect. Timing
The this IS Not at The First Time Weibo has removed at The censorship
messages from Searches for sensitive Terms and Reported "NO Results"
INSTEAD. The From November 1 to November. 8 of 2012, Weibo Used at The Same Tactic to Obscure the ITS censorship
. HOWEVER, Operating since November 2012 up Last month The an until,
Weibo has displayed at The Conventional Message censorship, though the
with Various Increased Efforts to the filter Results During the ITS ESPECIALLY sensitive June 4 at The Events like TH Anniversary in 2013.
According to our monitoring logs, this most recent removal began at
roughly 9:05 pm EST on Oct 16 (10:05 am Beijing time on Oct 17). Since
then, searches for sensitive keywords have returned zero results as
opposed to a censorship message .
The timing of the first removal in 2012 occurred in the lead up to the
18 th Party Congress, a once-a-decade transition of power in the
Communist Party leadership and an especially sensitive event in China.
Reports at the time noted of the extreme Officials Took to of Ensure at
The Measures Event Would the Proceed smoothly- Including
at The cancellation of Theater Performances, Kitchen Knife Sales of
Banning, and at The locking of Taxi Windows in Beijing Shi .
Following these that Logic, at The Decision to Take Extra Measures to
Control at The Sharing and Dissemination of criticism in the online
sphere would make sense, and the removal of the censorship notice was
likely only the most obvious change taken to prevent disruptions.
This latest removal again took place in the lead up to an important
meeting of the Communist Party. The Fourth Plenum of the 18 th CCP
Central Committee occurred on October 20 to October 23, 2014. However,
unlike the 2012 instance, censorship notices did not . return to Weibo
just before the start of the event, and instead, lasted through the
duration of the meetings It's possible the latest iteration may in fact
be tied to another sensitive event: the APEC summit (Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation) in Beijing on november 10 - 11, which world
leaders like Barack Obama and Xi Jinping attended Protesters currently
occupying Hong Kong had initially suggested they might attend the
summit, potentially making it even more sensitive, however, they have
since postponed their visit to Beijing.. Analysis The To Confirm The at The Removal of at The censorship Message, We Re-Tested A Sample of 2,429 sensitive Keywords Compiled by China Digital Times
This Sample WAS Last Tested in the ITS entirety ON May 10 -. 12,, 2014,
and yielded 822 Keywords Which were Explicitly censored ( "According to
relevant laws, regulations, and policies, search results can not be
displayed"), 693 of whom had unique keywords which triggered their
censorship (sixty-four, literally the numbers "six" and "four" refer to
the crackdown on demonstrators in beijing on June 4, 1989;. sixty-four
student movement, "June 4 Student Movement," is similarly censored, but
is not considered a unique censored keyword) Sina Weibo indicated there
were zero results for only ten of the tested keywords ( "Sorry , unable
to find related results "). We submitted at The Same 2,429 Keywords through Weibo Search Engine ON November 3 - 4
.. Of As expected based ON Preliminary Testing, none of at The Keywords
returned at The censorship Message This Time, there WAS A VAST Increase
in Keywords returning at The "Sorry, Unable to the Find related results
"message (from 10 in our May test to 784). While a handful of those 784
keywords may genuinely have no results because they have not been used
in Weibo posts, 754 of those 784 were in fact previously censored, a
strong indication that searches for common terms yielding "no results"
are in fact being censored. For at The implications of at The AS Removal of censorship at The Explicit Notice, We wrote of Previously in Tea Leaf Nation that:
Whether full-scale or piecemeal, the reduction of blanket keyword
blocks is paradoxically a loss of transparency, since Chinese users no
longer explicitly know when certain results are being specifically
targeted for censorship... What is and is not off-limits has now become
slightly harder to determine-another step in making censorship invisible
and all-pervasive.
It will be worth following to see whether this change is permanent or
merely temporary as in November 2012 and June 2013. If the explicit
censorship notices return, we might surmise that tweaks to these
censorship notices serve as a bellwether for particularly sensitive
periods. More enhanced censorship may be occurring behind the scenes
during these periods, but that will require more monitoring to confirm.
Or it may simply be that Weibo is testing out new tactics.
Part 2: Pathways for Censoring a Weibo Post
The A Number of Significant Articles in Recent years have have DONE A
Great Deal to Illuminate How Weibo messages are censored the before and
the After They are. Posted Zhu, Phipps, Pridgen, Crandall, and Wallach
apos. "At The the Velocity of Censorship: High-Fidelity Detection of the Microblog Post is Deletions " ( Presentation
) Noted that" Weibo has Filtering mechanisms AS A Proactive, Automated
Defense "and Outlined THESE Measures: Explicit Filtering (Not Allowing A
the User to POST messages containing Certain Keywords), Implicit
Filtering (an Alerting at The the User that A" Data Synchronization
"issue would temporarily keep the message from being posted
immediately), and camouflaged posts (a user is able to successfully post
a message and it appears on their own timeline, but other users looking
at that same timeline will not see it). These are Not new new Measures;
Jason Ng, blogged the About "Vanishing Posts" Back in 2011 ( English Summary ). Bamman, O'Connor, and Smith ( "Censorship and Deletion Practices in Chinese social Media" ) along the with WA King-Fu and His-AT colleagues now at The University of Hong Kong ( "Assessing
Censorship ON microblogs in China: the Analysis and Keyword
Discriminatory at The Real the Policy the Registration -name " ) have have delved deeply Via Weibo apos INTO Identifying the API at The Deletion of Posts the After They've been submitted. King, Pan, and Roberts Recent Science Article This article was ( "the Reverse-Engineering's censorship in China: Randomized Experimentation and the Participant Observation"
) pays much needed the Attention to How the Employees Working AT the
Internet companies Actually Implement at The Systems for Performing
Online censorship at The Paper Offers Insight INTO. the various options
online content providers have for trying to ensure only acceptable
material is viewable on the website, including the various "automated
review" features.
As mentioned above, Weibo implements a number of automated review
features, including many of those listed in Table 1 of King. Weibo posts
also follow a similar lifespan to the pathways listed in Figure 1 of
King, with some variations. Based on testing we performed (See Part 3 ), We at The Typical Ways A Message IDENTIFIED CAN BE ON Weibo Filtered or deleted.
Fig 1. Possible pathways for a Weibo post
Some of the About explanation at The More Paths ( See "Screenshots" below for THESE Images of the NOTICES):
1) User submits a message with keywords on the explicit filtering
blacklist. They receive a message "Sorry, this content violates ...
regulated regulations and policies. Operation can not be specified." (
"Sorry, this content violates the" microblogging Community regulations
(trial) ", or related regulations and policies, can not be specified,
view the help:. http:. //t.cn/8sYl7QG") The user must remove the
blacklisted keyword before being able to post The submission is
censored..
2A) If the post contains certain keywords, it may be automatically and
instantaneously held for review by becoming invisible to all outside
users. From the moment it is posted until it is reviewed by a censor,
the post is invisible. From our two tests, it appears to take roughly 30
minutes before judgment is rendered on a post, but the amount of time
no doubt varies depending on day of week and time of day.
3) User submits a message with keywords on the implicit filtering
blacklist. They receive a message "Posted successfully. Please be
patient about 1-2 minutes delay due to server synchronization, thank
you." ( "Your microblogging successfully posted now server data
synchronization may be delayed, so the trouble to wait 1-2 minutes Oh,
thank you very much. ")
3A / B) As noted by Zhu, this can sometimes take hours, but in other
cases, can take about 30 minutes before the post-if approved (or not
disapproved) by the censors-actually appears on a user's timeline.
. 4A / B) Quite constructions rarely in Our Preliminary Tests IS A the
User Actually at Informed that They have have submitted Unacceptable
Content and that IT has been deleted ( See Screenshot below
). One of Our Accounts Which DID the receive Six of THESE the NOTICES
Received A warning Notice and A . 48 hour ban on posting ( ". Hello, you
are to report suspected irregularities based on other users' Weibo
community management (trial)", your account will be banned to post 48
hours View help: http: //t.cn / 8s9ROKhc "), but no others did. Much
more common is for posts to be rendered invisible (just as they were in
2A1) with no notice given to the user at all.
4C) Simply deleting a user's account was quite common in our
preliminary tests. It sometimes occurred hours after the account
finished posting any messages, and sometimes occurred within seconds.
The user was occasionally offered the opportunity to recover their
account by submitting an appeal. However , due to the types of accounts
used for the study and style of submitting content, we likely
experienced much higher than typical rates of account deletion (as
opposed to King who crafted genuine looking posts, thus likely evading
banning due to certain filters looking for spam and other non-standard
user behavior).
Part 3: Keywords which Trigger Automatic Review and Project Data
While both Zhu and King referred to these automated review mechanisms,
they did not explicitly identify what specific keywords were on the
blacklists that would trigger censorship via explicit filtering (box 1
in Figure 1), implicit filtering (box 3), and hiding of posts via
"camouflage" / invisibility (box 2A). Below, are links to a Github
repository with the data we have begun accumulating for tracking the
keywords which trigger these three types of automatic review.
We performed this initial probe for the keywords which trigger these
three methods of censorship by taking the 784 keywords which returned
zero results from searching in the CDT list (words assumed to cause
censored search results), and tried posting messages with them on Weibo.
Unlike King, we did not craft realistic-looking messages. As we were
just looking to identify words which would trigger automatic review, we
simply posted the keyword along with a unique ID number for our own
tracking purposes.
Because of rate limiting, we spread out the posting of these 784
keywords (which contained some duplicates) to 16 Weibo accounts
registered to users in locations around the world, including Canada, the
United States, France, England, Hong Kong, Macau, and . mainland China
Our first test took place on November 8, Saturday morning, Beijing time
and a follow-up test was run on November 10, Monday morning, Beijing
time (Each test was run using a computer in the United States;.
obviously, for future purposes, testing from different locations would
be ideal to confirm there is no variation based on location) We tracked
the following.:
Whether a message with the keyword was not allowed to be posted (explicit filtering)
Whether posting a keyword immediately returned a message stating that
due to synchronization errors, the message would be posted later
(implicit filtering)
Whether a message with the keyword was immediately viewable by another user (camouflaged post)
Whether a message with the keyword was viewable by another user one hour after being posted and 24 hours being posted
Whether or not a user received a message in their inbox from the administrators stating a post was being deleted
Whether or not a user's account was suspended
Caveat: the majority of the accounts we
used to test for automatic review censorship were basic accounts at
level 0. It's possible another user with different privileges might have
higher or lower degrees of censorship However, we were able to
consistently replicate the majority of the. below results when using new accounts, and hopefully others can as well. The In Our First the Test, 66 of at The Keywords Could Not BE. Posted
, Including Xi Mingze (Xi Mingze, the daughter of Xi Jinping), numerous
variants on Zhou Yongkang's name (a former government official under
investigation for corruption), and died eight (a derogatory play on the term for the 18 th
Communist Party Congress). In our second test, the number increased
slightly to 73. Though it was not identical across the two tests, there
was a large overlap, with 63 of the initial 66 also being unable to be
posted on the second test. Our First the Test the In, 14 of Keywords triggered at The Implicit Filtering
, Including the authorities in Beijing (Beijing authorities), Ding
(Ding Zilin, an activist), and China Spring (Chinese Spring, a play on
Arab Spring). In our second test , the number increased slightly to 15.
Again, though not identical, there was a large overlap, with all 14 also
triggering the implicit filtering during the second test. The In Our First the Test, 133 of at The Posts were Not Immediately is viewable by Another the User (camouflaged Posts) . THESE included Posts containing at The Keywords May 35 May (May 35, code for June 4 ), hairy bacon ( " Hairy Bacon ," AN insult for Mao Zedong), Boxun News ( Boxun News
), and tanks person (tank man). 202 were hidden / deleted within 1
hour, and 273 were hidden / deleted within 24 hours. Eighteen messages
regarding deletions were received and four of the sixteen accounts used
for the test ended up being suspended. The numbers were roughly the same
during the second test. We are less confident of the actual total
number of keywords which trigger posts being deleted / hidden after one
hour and 24 hours in the second test because twice as many accounts were
suspended during the test, including some before the first hour had
passed. Thus a greater proportion of deleted / hidden posts were
attributed to account suspension and unable to be confirmed as being due
to the sensitivity of the keyword itself . That said, there was still a
large overlap between the two tests with regards to camouflaged posts:.
only 19 of the 133 camouflaged posts from the first test were
subsequently viewable on the second test Further testing should be done
to identify more precisely which keywords are causing posts to be
automatically held for review in this manner.
AS A rudimentary Control, We Also. Posted 16 Keywords from at The the
CDT sensitive words List that returned Results (and THUS, were Not Fully
censored by Weibo Search) in at The November 3 RD the Test. We Also. Posted at The 33 Chapter the titles ( in Chinese ) of Quotations from Chairman Mao and the opening of
the Gettysburg Address (in English). Not one of these keywords
triggered censorship either via automatic review or were hidden /
deleted in the subsequent 24 hours in either test.
Message Filtering Explicit (Box 1 in Figure 1): Chinese | English
Message Filtering the Implicit (Box 3 in Figure 1): Chinese | English
Timeline of Missing messages in comparison Due to "camouflaged" / Invisible Posts (Box 2A1 in Figure 1): own Timeline VS the when Viewed by the User Another
The when the Visiting deleted weibo POST the Message (Box. 4A in Figure 1): Screenshot
Deletion Message in Inbox POST (Box. 4A in Figure 1): Screenshot
Warning the Account, 48 hour Ban (Box 4C in Figure 1): Screenshot
Abnormal Notice the Account (Box 4C in Figure 1): Screenshot
Acknowledgments h / t China Digital Times for noting the removal of the explicit censorship notice from searches, which spurred this brief report.
Q. Ng, IS A Research, jason Fellow at The Citizen AT the Lab on Twitter:. @jasonqng .
The Anonymous faction "Ghost Squad Hackers" dropped a bomb shell,…
thelastamericanvagabond.com
Ghost Squad Hackers Release Massive Data-Leak From The Israeli Defense Force
07 Apr 2016
Posted by Anthony Tyler.
The Anonymous faction calling themselves “Ghost Squad Hackers”
recently dropped a bomb shell, leaking a data “dox” on over 1,000
high-ranking individuals within the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). The
leak includes social media accounts, personal finance information, and
even information on a variety of the IDF-members’ families, including
over 10,000 emails, and 8,000 phone numbers and credit card numbers.
While The Last American Vagabond has
chosen not to display the personal information released, The official
statement by Ghost Squad can be viewed below with links in the video
description:
Having contacted the Vagabond nearly a
week ago, an open line of communication was maintained for what the
Ghost Squad claimed was going to be a “massive data leak,” on which they
clearly delivered. This data-leak with the moniker #OpIsrael is quite
massive and, despite one’s political or personal opinions on the matter,
is seen by the faction as not only the right thing to do, but a moral
imperative.
Recently, the Vagabond had gone on record questioning some of the actions and agendas of specific sects/factions of Anonymous, while remaining fond of names like Lauri Love and Jeremy Hammond, who are clearly receiving the wrath of the Surveillance State
for their hacktivism. While one can never be certain of a
group’s validity, as history has repeatedly demonstrated, it should be
stated that the Ghost Squad Hackers have yet to make any directly
ambiguous or questionable statements/actions on record, and they have
consistently stayed away from Mainstream Media outlets, which continues
to lend credibility to their cause in the eyes of alternative media.
Now, with this #OpIsrael leak, they certainly get another checkmark
towards authenticity, shedding light on the “USrael” (US/Israel)
stranglehold Zionist alliance, something that even many alternative news outlets still have thus far never cared to cover.
In a prior article written after correspondence with Ghost Squad Hackers, it was constructively suggested that the “Trump vs. Anonymous”
clash be left at the roadside, because the whole fight feels a bit
catty, as well as being counter productive to the bigger picture, and is
something that no one is really covering in the media other than Anons.
It doesn’t amount to anything, other than a show of computer skill on
the part of the hackers. This display of showmanship may have been the
Ghost Squad’s reasons for arbitrarily DDoSing a couple of Trump’s
websites–since the hackers have also led quite a string of additional
hack-campaigns, most notably against the Ethiopian government in January. Unlike operations called into question like Anonymous’ RedCult’s #OpISIS
for its recklessness and censorship, Ghost Squad has thus far kept a
focused message that is (dare we say) getting clearer and clearer.
When last discussing the Ghost Squad, the Vagabond ended with the
suggestion of setting aside this pissing contest with Trump, and looking
into some deeper leaks along the lines of (as an example) FBI
whistleblower, Sibel Edmonds of BoilingFrogsPost.com
and her discussion of NATO-funded Islamic terrorism through Operation:
GLADIO; openly, it was hoped that the hackers quoted “massive data-leak”
would be of this general gravity.
This is possibly one of the most substantial leaks that Anonymous has made since Stratfor and LULXMAS,
at least as far as the implications and the agendas that these hacks
cast light on. Instead of tiptoeing around heavily-corporate-funded
Color Revolutions like Operation: ARAB SPRING,
OCCUPY, and trash-talking with presidential candidates, Ghost Squad
Hackers may have just pumped some life into what could have been turning
into a lackluster, deflated, all-talk/minimal-walk Anonymous
collective.
No evidence has yet come to light that
would suggest the Ghost Squad Hackers are suspicious characters not to
be trusted, to the contrary, all arrows point towards authenticity thus
far. If in fact they are not authentic, this would be quite a detailed,
orchestrated psyop. The true test of this postulation will be in viewing
how the Mainstream Media addresses this #OpIsrael hack, if they do at
all. A media black-out of the situation, such as with Dr. Thompsonand theCDC’s Autism/Vaccine scandal, could very well further prove the authenticity of these hackers.
The Last American Vagabond
would like to show gratitude to the Ghost Squad Hackers for their
correspondence, and their massive undertaking of what appears to be a
possible refocusing of the hacktivism movement, and a talking point for
one of the most essential connections when it comes to understanding
modern geopolitics: the US/Israeli Zionist Agenda to cleanse and maintain their perceived spiritual homeland, subsequently murdering thousands of Palestinians in the process, among their list of other war crimes.
In wake of the Soros Foundation/Ford Foundation/USAID funding of the selectively leaked Panama Papers,
the overall response to Ghost Squad Hackers’ #OpIsrael leak should
prove note-worthy and revealing, whatever those responses may be.
Hackers
affiliated with Anonymous also claimed to have shut down several
international banks over the past four days, including the National
Reserve Bank of Tonga, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the
central banks of Sweden, Myanmar and Laos.
A hacktivist who goes
by the name ‘S1ege’ claimed responsibility for the attacks, stating they
want to “start an online revolution” to retaliate against the “elite banking cartels putting the world in a perpetual state of chaos.”
We ask: Who is the world's most liar ?!- next - from facebook- "Anonymous Philippine Operations" and "Magdalo Cyber Army" and "Spy Squad Philippines" and "Nguyễn thiên tài" and "F3r0Ci0u5" and "BloodSecurity International" --- >> #OpChina < <- ". China hacked tons of gov't websites What are we waiting for they are starting a cyberwar?!" #OpChina [ #OpChina - Philippines | Vietnam Official Index ..]
Tuloy ka sa page namin!!! Maligayang araw!
Anong meron dito?
Andito ang mga #Op na idenedeklara para sa mga kababayang pilipinong hacker.
Para saan ito?
Ito po ay para makatulong at upang magkaisa na rin ang mga mamamayang pilipino lalong lalo na sa ating bansa. Bakit ito ginawa? Ginawa po ito upang hindi maghari dito sa cyber world, hindi po ito ginawa upang magyabang, ginawa po ito para makatulong. Para saan ang page na ito? Ang page na ito po ay ginawa upang mag-announce at mag-invite sa mga operasyon kagaya ng #OpFeedTheHomeless
na kung saan tayo po ay magbibigay ng pagkain na galing sa ating puso
at higit sa lahat ay hindi sapilitan. Isa pa po, dito din po
ina-announce ang mga totoong operayon dahil po mayroong mga pekeng
operasyon ang isinasagawa nang hindi naman dapat.
The
Philippines has turned down a Chinese proposal to start bilateral talks
because of Beijing's pre-condition of not discussing a court ruling
that nullified most of its South China Sea claims. cnn.ph/29UvB3N
We
ask: Who is the world's most liar ?!- next - from facebook- "Anonymous
Philippine Operations" and "Magdalo Cyber Army" and "Spy Squad
Philippines" and "Nguyễn thiên tài" and "F3r0Ci0u5" and "BloodSecurity
International" --- >> #OpChina < <- ". China hacked tons of
gov't websites What are we waiting for they are starting a cyberwar?!"
#OpChina [ #OpChina - Philippines | Vietnam Official Index ..]
#Tango Down by p@r@dox17
#Palestine_DZ
#AnonGhost
#OpChina
#site:
------
http://ecbjvqu.uacejh.cn/..
html
http://ecbuemc.uacejh.cn/..
html
http://ecbeotg.uacejh.cn/..
html
http://zc.wfu.edu.cn/..html
-------
#mirror:✔
Leung
Chun-ying was again besieged not unexpected question and answer session
in the Legislative Council, Mr unexpected individual establishment
faction hot pursuit, catching up with Chinese state-yong fifty cents
anti-Americanism in the South China Sea after the arbitration verdict
anti Philippines.
Mr Leung and pro-anti-China anti-American fifty cents worthy of
comparison, the same is a show, to avoid the same substantive issues,
the same can not change the will and decisions of the CPC, the
difference is that, for a pro-Mr Sedan Chair for his election, to more
or less responsible for their own words and deeds, and fifty cents or
anti-American anti-patriotic youth Philippines words and deeds are
curried.
Bishijiuxu do not ask do not ask the ICAC rebates
FTU, Mr Kwok Wai-keung yesterday in answer session, Leung Chun-ying not only
shelling labor policy "tight time-scale dumping, surrender speak tight,
tight MPF hedge ask, all lines have to mouth," Leung Chun-ying also political
platforms Ding in the ground, but also to leave in protest.
Mr Lam Tai-fai, although the industry has no intention to describe Mr
Leung said with a smile as box office poison, but made it clear that in
terms of governance and governance aspects of "very bad" This year the
government, if formed lawmakers say support Leung Chun-ying re-election, "the
minutes will lose a lot of votes." . Leung Chun-ying whether to become box office poison September Legislative Council elections? Pan Min Ye Hao, Ye Hao establishment, are well aware.
Even if the performance was dismissive Leung Chun-ying, also do not
want to tie themselves with government camp in the same boat, so as not
to be responsible for the wreck.
He therefore declared that establishment faction in the Legislative
Council election defeat, a view is detrimental to his re-election,
another view was that "on my re-election is a great help."
So far, the public may be able to understand, guild members, One
Country Two Systems Research Institute president Zhang Zhigang Why throw
"in September formed a hundred percent re-election defeat Chief
Executive" argument.
This not only shows that Mr. Leung to cut and formed faction moderate
stance, Mr Leung also provides for the so-called "another view", in
order to avoid pro-establishment camp in the Legislative Council
election defeat, even in Western Beijing no bending can be transferred.
Fai also more honest enough, if not support Leung Chun-ying establishment
faction candidate for re-election, "As a patriotic love for Hong Kong's
pro-establishment camp, is guilty of heaven."
But pro-people to keep their seats or seats to win the fight, you can
not not dare to commit to heaven gesture, in order to avoid the loss of
more votes. In the siege of the Legislative Council Leung Chun-ying, is their lowest cost Sao election.
From time to time recently when the people came out to support Leung
Chun-ying expressed regret, indeed because some of the core values of Hong Kong
by destroying repent, but some of it is again jumped on the bandwagon.
Members do not look at the pro-level movement questioned the ICAC
storm, do not question whether Mr Leung will be charged UGL5,000 ten
thousand yuan rebates or tax reporting to the Executive Council, try to
ask questions on how to implement the country, two systems, so evasive,
even though they knew of Mr Leung heart dissatisfaction, fear involved,
can only be self-inflicted, it is impossible contrary to instructions in
Western and Beijing. This election show, you really can fool the voters?
Is greater than the law of the land in the name of international law Patriotic Party
Look at the performance of the CCP and fifty cents on the anti-American
anti-Philippine problem, it is not difficult to understand, Leung Chun-ying
and Mr nothing but pro-Communist political logic according to the
interpretation of it.
The Hague International Court declared the South China Sea arbitration
result, China comprehensive defeat, then put the "four noes" (do not
accept, does not participate, does not recognize and does not perform)
the hard-line stance, accused of waste paper award, the judges' money
"service, command official media, the Philippine anti-anti-American
chorus fifty cents initiated in patriotism, nationalism under the banner
of cover do not actively participate in international litigation Manhan
transfer high-level power struggle, the focus of economic growth
stalling.
Leung Chun-ying and thick skinned, the second to none in Hong Kong
politics, in addition to the language used to pseudo-surgery, and now
not even for the sake of re-establishment camp electoral gains and
losses do not mind, it really is "rather teach me negative people of the
world, Hugh teach me negative people of the world ", as if the
alternative is the" four noes ": do not accept to give up seeking
re-election advice, do not participate in the Legislative Council
election debate, do not admit that he is box office poison, Hong Kong
people do not perform alternative referendum.
And no matter how pro- Leung Chun-ying siege, did not dare to offend
the CCP's heaven, not just Leung Chun-ying peeled Communist lackeys and puppets
veil, not criticize mistaken Port not only Leung Chun-ying is the CCP.
As fifty cents can be indiscriminate attacks on the United States, the
Philippines, the Philippine anti-siege not to join anti-American chorus
of celebrity stars, but the fact that the CCP dare to expose the harm
the country, dare to criticize the party is greater than the law of the
land has been developed to party more than international law?
Baggage
door ruin the reputation of Hong Kong's international aviation and
international city, and now the number of Hong Kong ICAC door to decades
of hard-won reputation as a city to establish the integrity destroyed. In the question and answer session yesterday, the chief executive, Wang Yang Yue Qiaoxi 689 do not "Gaosi Hong Kong." Yes, to be honest Gaosi, Hong Kong will be his opinion Gaosi too.
A job after graduating from school in 32 years, the ICAC dry detective
who won numerous awards, and was sent to the United States for FBI
training, ICAC Commissioner is actually a means of airborne her work is
not up to the heads of the Acting Executive Office "Mie Chai," which led
to her resigned. Then, a rising star known as the ICAC's 40-year-old Dillon High Principal Investigator also petition to resign.
According to Wen, Peh During the meeting with 20 chief senior
executives, explain the justification for Li Baolan acting executive
heads, was the presence of officers questioned violations, because even
if Li Baolan substandard work should also issue a warning so she was
given opportunities for improvement, instead of categorically "Mie
firewood."
It is reported that the ICAC and down low morale, staff scheduled
Annual Dinner held today, because more than 75% said they would not
attend, and the rare decision to postpone the dinner. 75% of people boycott is undoubtedly a collective protest action. This is not only morale of an organization, but rather involves a significant disintegration of Hong Kong values. ICAC since its inception in 1974, has been the pride of Hong Kong.
In the early days after police storm inexpensive, stable and
established the ICAC up over the years to carry out as long as possible
to report on the action taken by the Anti-Corruption Anti-bribery, Hong
Kong set a good clean atmosphere, some say even how Hong Kong bribery
methods are lost, invest in the mainland as well as Hong Kong people did
not even know how to open transfer benefits. Hong Kong's Chinese community, swept away thousands of years of traditional corruption, to show a new wind. For decades, the Hong Kong Independent Commission Against shoot a lot about movies and TV shows. Hong Kong is a clean atmosphere galore all Chinese society junction.
At one time, the Chinese Communist Party in power liberals have talked
to emulate the Hong Kong Independent Commission Against Corruption was
established.
Of course, as the internal power struggle, the CPC Hu Zhao has lost
power and the growing corruption, the proposal also inconclusive.
Since its inception in Hong Kong and around the world by the
recognition and respect, and the ICAC report, the filing mechanism
seriously investigated also difficult to shake, put in work of the ICAC
people have a sense of pride, of their responsibilities will feel
meaningful and valuable, ideals, other professions have relatively more
recognition and a sense of belonging. Have a good understanding Li Baolan friend said she simple, sincere, low-key, pragmatic.
32-year career in the ICAC, naturally it is clear how to act strictly
according to the mechanism, but also want to know "of" what is
"standard."
75% of people dissatisfied with the ICAC, the senior white face
questioning Yun six decisions in the description and Li Baolan they like
to guard the ICAC heritage and value systems.
So, Mr Leung appointed by the Peh, the implementation of the intention
of the beam, or to meet the intent of the beam, have no difference.
If Li Baolan perseverance press event mechanism to a beautiful woman,
and this investigation has caused big man trouble, and that is "up" less
than white brew six primary care is "standard." It is that clear, to "reach" the ICAC decades of "standard" can not "up to" abuse of power "standard." Ultimately, the overriding system is human, but also destroyed the system.
Someone said to me, Li Baolan cried several times, I believe that she
is not losing jobs for their own cry, but her life's work, and his
faith, and his stick dog was destroyed by a garbage hand and wept. Alas, the ICAC!
*-Update [18/07-2016] From Facebook Anon "justice league" shared a link. (July 10) .- "Who operations notorious big durian network ??!" - '' A water '' all know, the big durian network, as well as its members, for example circle01.com, share001.org , Bei Facebook continue to create of webspam, and even a lot of to provide fifty cents content, lies of the Google Adsense money, totally ridiculous. But anyones always thought that the Department of Chinese in Malaysia to open. But, after Bei then check the whois data, simply open the Department of Khitan fifty cents garbage net.. "-Anon" Justice league "tell you all the true~ http://melodyanony-anti-global-authoritarian.blogspot.com/2016/07/update-1707-2016-from-huge-anonymous.html -Update[18/07-2016]from - thehackernews.com - ''Pokémon GO — 6 Important Things You Should Know Before Playing this Game!''-(Sunday, July 17, 2016 ),editor:Mohit Kumar . http://melodyanony-anti-global-authoritarian.blogspot.com/2016/07/update-1707-2016-from-huge-anonymous.html -Update [17/07-2016] From Huge Anonymous "★ Polish Cyber Army ★" release...!- Next, lol..see "Russian Anonymous '' Marketplace [Guide for Russian Anonymous Marketplace (RAMP)], we have been found...many many .. !- next- from panamapapers.icij.org/] and swastika [nytimes.com] released - "Reporting Within the Lines in Putin's Russia." editor: [Masha Gessen] (JULY 15. , 2016) - & - "Panama Papers Tie More of China's Elite to Secret Accounts!" - next - from the Great Anon "Ghost Squad hackers"> "OpIcarus: Anonymous hackers shut down Bank of England, call for 'online revolution!'" lololol ... (the good news ^^) - next - from "bannedbook.org"> "Xi Jinping not Renxia insult? Xi JinPing signed exclusive newspaper Combat Order Photos '', and the foolish's '' fifty cents slaves '' do not know..!- References within the text "Guangzhou Military armored brigade all the officers to accept the assessment, five kilometers armed off-road performance suddenly" leap forward " it was found that less than five kilometers away from the actual off-road, while the Chengdu Military Region regiment obstacle assessment, do not hang on the wire but stretch the rubber band and let the soldiers pass easily .- the report also refers to the armed forces in military training have found falsifications in contest, held in the 'South Sea' assessment, actually a submarine forces in the region undersea diving tricks to give directions in a large-scale military exercises, some army quietly increased "enemy" target reflection area, so radar search target "abnormal sensitivity ".- in addition, pre-recorded firing four kinds of high-tech fraud under the weather, when the exercise, the sky Teenage rain and snow are not afraid, the headquarters of the reviewing stand sitting heads looked accurate shooting the big screen, really I thought it was live ammunition .- veterans have claimed that the CCP boasted sea "Corps" "elite force" all play a small role, their "exercises" are actually "acting", the war will be lost! - CPC National Defense University political commissar of the Air Force Gen. Liu Yazhou in October last year issued a "Sino - Japanese relations from the Diaoyu Islands issue" that:.-lolololo (wakakaka..)"Japan four hours to wipe out the East China Sea fleet of non-joke" ...wahaha...(laughing...)We ask: Who is the world's most liar ?!- next - from facebook- "Anonymous Philippine Operations" and "Magdalo Cyber Army" and "Spy Squad Philippines" and "Nguyễn thiên tài" and "F3r0Ci0u5" and "BloodSecurity International" --- >> #OpChina < <- ". China hacked tons of gov't websites What are we waiting for they are starting a cyberwar?!" #OpChina [ #OpChina - Philippines | Vietnam Official Index ..] - and next by "# Tango Down by "p@r@dox17" , #Palestine_DZ ,, # AnonGhost ,, #OpChina "(Good Job ^^, Thankyou ~)" and Our Friendly Anon, "Hacked Exxxx"- For Our All Huge Anonymous ", Really Thanksgiving~- http://melodyanony-anti-global-authoritarian.blogspot.com/2016/07/update-1707-2016-from-huge-anonymous.html ===Melody===FOLLOW FOLLOW===> !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
-Update [17/07-2016] From Huge Anonymous "★ Polish Cyber Army ★" release...!- Next, lol..see "Russian Anonymous '' Marketplace [Guide for Russian Anonymous Marketplace (RAMP)], we have been found...many many .. !- next- from panamapapers.icij.org/] and swastika [nytimes.com] released - "Reporting Within the Lines in Putin's Russia." editor: [Masha Gessen] (JULY 15. , 2016) - & - "Panama Papers Tie More of China's Elite to Secret Accounts!" - next - from the Great Anon "Ghost Squad hackers"> "OpIcarus: Anonymous hackers shut down Bank of England, call for 'online revolution!'" lololol ... (the good news ^^) - next - from "bannedbook.org"> "Xi Jinping not Renxia insult? Xi JinPing signed exclusive newspaper Combat Order Photos '', and the foolish's '' fifty cents slaves '' do not know..!- References within the 
text "Guangzhou Military armored brigade all the officers to accept the assessment, five kilometers armed off-road performance suddenly" leap forward " it was found that less than five kilometers away from the actual off-road, while the Chengdu Military Region regiment obstacle assessment, do not hang on the wire but stretch the rubber band and let the soldiers pass easily .- the report also refers to the armed forces in military training have found falsifications in contest, held in the 'South Sea' 
a guest
Many
regions around the world put various blocks on their internet access so
that citizens can no longer access various domains. In Singapore,
trying to access a porn site will likely result on you landing on a
boring placeholder page saying the site you are trying to access is no
allowed. In Indonesia, you can’t even access Reddit.
Back
in November 2012, Russia, reputably one of the world’s biggest hotspots
for illegal trading, enacted their internet censorship bill that was
based around protecting children from harmful information. This includes
information related to child pornography, suicide, and drug use.
Additions to the law were added at a later date to include references to
extremism.
The
starting point of most people’s journey on the deep web is the Hidden
Wiki. The Hidden Wiki contains links to all of the most popular sites on
the deep web and is a great jump off point for those looking to
explore. They also have a site on the clear net
Not
sure which marketplace you want to use but know that you want to score
some drugs? Know exactly what you want? Grams is your ideal search
engine. Grams crawls all of the darknet market listings so when you type
in what you want into the search field you obtain the most relevant
listings, from all marketplaces.
Exterior of Putin's Palace in Russia. Photo: Russian Wikileaks (CC BY 3.0)
Christening of Valdimir Putin's daughter Masha. Sergey Roldugin (far right) was the godfather.
Former
country house or 'dacha' of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the
Ozero housing cooperative by lake Komsomolsk, outside St. Petersburg.
Photo: REUTERS / Alexander Demianchuk
Russian
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin addresses workers of KAMAZ truck plant in
2012. Photo: AP Photo / RIA Novosti, Yana Lapikova, Government Press
Service
Russian commercial bank in capital Nicosia, Cyprus. Photo: AP Photo / Petros Karadjias
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Mikhail Lesin. Photo: Presidential Press and Information Office (CC BY 3.0)
07 Apr 2016
Posted by Anthony Tyler.
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