Ex-Zoom employee charged with intercepting Tiananmen Square stream
Zoom admitted that it had changed how it policed web conferences after the Chinese government shut it down last year
19 December 2020 • 3:06am
The US government has accused a former Zoom executive of spying on Chinese dissidents for the Chinese military through the video conferencing app.
Prosecutors from the US Department of Justice on Friday announced charges against a China-based employee, Xinjiang Jin, who they alleged had assisted China in blocking a virtual gathering to commemorate the Tiananmen Square uprising. They said that prosecutors have been investigating Zoom for months.
Zoom said in a blog post that it was cooperating with the investigation and that it had fired Jin and placed other employees suspected of assisting him on leave. Its own investigation had found that Jin had shared the data of fewer than 10 users outside of China with Chinese authorities, it said.
Zoom bajo la lupa por censura dirigida desde China a través de un ejecutivo panampost.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from panampost.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
US charges China-based Zoom executive with disrupting Tiananmen video commemorations Toggle share menu
Advertisement
A photo illustration showing the Zoom logo. (Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic)
19 Dec 2020 07:08AM (Updated:
21 Dec 2020 02:07PM) Share this content
Bookmark
NEW YORK: US prosecutors on Friday (Dec 18) charged a China-based executive at Zoom with involvement in a scheme to disrupt video meetings commemorating the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in China.
Xinjiang Jin, 39, faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of conspiring since January 2019 to use his company’s systems to censor speech, the US Department of Justice said.
Advertisement
Advertisement
In a complaint filed in Brooklyn federal court, prosecutors said the software engineer, Zoom’s main liaison with Chinese law enforcement and intelligence, helped terminate at least four video meetings in May and June, including some involving dissiden
ABC News
Turn on desktop notifications for breaking stories about interest?
OffOn
Xinjiang Jin also monitored calls about politics and religion, prosecutors said.
• 5 min read
June 4, 1989: Tiananmen Square massacre
The student-led demonstrations were violently suppressed after the Chinese government declared martial law.Bettmann Archive via Getty Images, FILE
A China-based executive of an American telecommunications company was charged Friday with disrupting video conferences meant to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Xinjiang Jin s alleged conduct is part of what federal prosecutors in Brooklyn called the Faustian bargain China demands of U.S. technology firms that operate in the People s Republic of China.
Zoom worker shut down Tiananmen Square massacre meetings nydailynews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nydailynews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.