In a new case, federal prosecutors filed criminal charges on Friday against an executive at Zoom, the video conferencing company, accusing him of plotting to disrupt and censor video meetings commemorating one of the most sensitive events. Chinese politics.
Prosecutors said the Chinese-based executive, Xinjiang Jin, invented reasons to suspend the accounts of New Yorkers hosting memorials on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and coordinated with Chinese officials to identify potentially problematic meetings .
He is accused of working with others to connect to video meetings under pseudonyms using profile pictures related to terrorism or child pornography. Subsequently, Mr. Jin will report the meetings for violation of terms of service, prosecutors said.
At least four meetings commemorating this year’s massacre – largely attended by US users – have been closed as a result of Mr Jin’s actions, according to prosecutors.
Mr. Jin, also known as Julien Jin, acted as the liaison between Zoom and Chinese government authorities, prosecutors said. He is identified in the criminal complaint only as an employee of a US telecommunications company. Zoom confirmed Friday that it was the company.
Mr. Jin has not been arrested and is at large in China, which does not have an extradition treaty with the United States.
The case was an unusually strong warning from law enforcement officials to US technology companies operating in China, which are often caught between the principles of freedom of expression and the demands of China’s censorship machine.
“Americans should understand that the Chinese government will not hesitate to exploit companies operating in China to pursue its international agenda, including repressing freedom of expression,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement.
A Zoom spokesman said on Friday that Mr Jin had violated his policies by trying to circumvent internal controls. Mr. Jin was fired, and other Zoom employees were placed on administrative leave pending the completion of an internal investigation.
In a lengthy statement, the company said it has since provided end-to-end encryption for all users and restricted access for Chinese employees to the global Zoom network.
The company is headquartered in San Jose, California and has hundreds of employees in China.
The accusation of a Chinese employee working for an American company is an aggressive reprimand against China, which requires technology companies operating there to monitor user activity to censor politically sensitive topics.
Seth DuCharme, the Brooklyn-based U.S. attorney whose office brought the case, said the allegations exposed the security vulnerabilities of U.S. technology companies engaged in the “Faustian business” of operating in China.
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The US prosecutor’s office in Brooklyn has been particularly active in bringing cases that have angered the Chinese government, including a criminal case against Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, and charges against eight people accused of conspiring on behalf of China to harass political dissidents in the United States. United to return home.
Mr. Jin was charged with conspiracy to commit interstate harassment and illegal conspiracy to transfer means of identification. A lawyer for Mr. Jin could not be identified.
The case is also a black eye for Zoom, raising new questions about the company’s security at a time when its software is strongly based on work, school, healthcare and more.
Mr Jin asked his colleagues for user data on US servers, to which he did not have direct access, prosecutors said. It was unclear how much Chinese government officials received from Zoom users’ account information in the United States.
A spokesman for Zoom said the company’s internal investigation revealed that Mr Jin shared users’ individual data with Chinese authorities. He shared the data with “less than 10 individual users” who were outside China, the company said.
The criminal complaint described a tireless effort by Mr. Jin and others to stop video meetings commemorating the anniversary of the June 4 massacre.
In the weeks leading up to the anniversary, Mr Jin warned a co-worker in the United States that Chinese officials were tracking Zoom users and stressed the need to keep the Chinese government’s demands for censorship a secret, according to the criminal complaint.
“He asks that we not be able to reveal it,” Mr. Jin wrote. “Otherwise it will have a significant impact on our country’s reputation.”
Mr. Jin told his colleague that if the Tiananmen market problem were mismanaged, China could block the company’s servers, according to prosecutors.
In another case, Chinese government officials notified Mr. Jin of a planned memorial to the American-based Tiananmen Market and provided him with the meeting number of the video call, which Mr. Jin was able to provide. “It’s over,” prosecutors said. It was not clear how the officials obtained the number of the meeting, because it was not published, according to prosecutors.
After customer demand for Zoom increased during the coronavirus pandemic, the Chinese government imposed additional controls on Zoom’s operations, even when they involved users outside of China.
In April, Mr. Jin told another Zoom employee that the Chinese government had ordered Zoom to develop the ability to close a meeting within a minute of the discovery of any violation of Chinese law.
In June, Zoom came under parliamentary scrutiny after blocking the accounts of Chinese human rights leaders who used the platform to organize commemorations of the 31st anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, in which military troops killed hundreds by student demonstrators, workers and ordinary citizens. These accounts were subsequently restored.
Zoom commemorations also led to consequences for people who were scheduled to speak to them.
A dissident in the United States, who was not identified by name, told the FBI that Chinese authorities had pressured several Chinese people not to speak at a Zoom event he organized.
On the morning of the event, it was shown in the criminal complaint, Chinese police officers detained one of the potential speakers for several days and arrived at someone else’s house to prevent the person from connecting to any electronic equipment.
Katie Benner contributed to the reporting.