China loves collecting data —especially American data. Let’s not forget, last year, during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, former deputy national security advisor Matthew Pottinger warned the Senators that China has enough data to “influence and intimidate, reward and blackmail, flatter and humiliate, divide and conquer” nearly all American citizens.
So it’s no surprise that they’d poke around in our election information as well. Here’s the rundown from a local Fox affiliate:
The CEO of a company that provides software for managing Los Angeles County election poll workers was arrested Tuesday in Michigan for the alleged theft of workers’ personal information…Konnech Corp. CEO Eugene Yu was arrested on suspicion of theft of personal identifying information by investigators from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.”
Konnech Corp. was paid nearly $3 million dollars for a five-year contract to securely maintain the data of election poll workers and ensure only U.S. citizens could access that data —but that’s not exactly how it went down. They had data on servers in China, as well.
Before the arrest, there were reports —rumblings that Konnech Corp. was connected to China. But Yu and Konnech Corp. told The New York Times that “none of the accusations were true,” and that his employees “feared for their safety” against extremists. The Times ate this up, writing an article entitled How a Tiny Elections Company Became a Conspiracy Theory Target.
“The company has been accused by groups challenging the validity of the 2020 presidential election with storing information about poll workers on servers in China,” The Times wrote. “The company has repeatedly denied keeping data outside the United States…”
They lied.
Investigators who arrested Yu also seized hard drives and other digital evidence —proof that information collected by the company was stored on servers in the People’s Republic of China, the district attorney said.
According to The Washington Examiner’s Byron York, “Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon stressed that Konnech’s alleged crimes did not affect any election results. ‘The alleged conduct had no impact on the tabulation of votes and did not alter election results,’ Gascon said. ‘But security in all aspects of any election is essential so that we all have full faith in the integrity of the election process.’”
Correct. Two questions: why did Konnech Corp. need to store data on Chinese servers? And why did The New York Times dismiss it as conspiracy out of hand?
