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seanmcdirmid | on: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's letter to staff about affair
Alleged Chinese spy unless I’m reading the article wrong? A Chinese intelligence asset could mean someone who just had CPC membership in college. Not that I’m saying Alice Huang isn’t a spy, I just would want more information before deciding.
skippyboxedhero | parent
She was being monitored by the CIA, who believed she was a spy.

Also, just to be clear here: the story is that Jensen was also going to Taiwan to meet with this person who was helping Alibaba evade sanctions, when Jensen met with this person Alibaba reps were always there, and in the US Jensen was making media appearances saying that sanctions on China had to be lifted.

Bear in mind that multiple people at Supermicro were charged for allegedly smuggling servers to China, and that the reason Megaspeed is being investigated is for effectively the same thing. Jensen denied he had anything to do with Supermicro, it is going to be much harder to say the same thing here.

I don't think the affair itself is necessarily related to the direction this will shortly take.

seanmcdirmid | root | parent | next
There is a huge difference between smugglers and spies though. Profit motive is all you need to be a smuggler, you don’t need espionage or anything else, you definitely don’t need a handler in zhongnanhai.
m10i | root | parent | next
> Profit motive is all you need to be a smuggler, you don’t need espionage or anything else

What you need to be a smuggler is to avoid prison.

When one side is fully aware that you are a smuggler that they can rat on to the other side whenever they want, even a child could blackmail you.

So that's one (fairly realistic imo) pathway from smuggler -> to espionage.

This is a hypothetical anyways.

seanmcdirmid | root | parent | next
She is a CEO in Singapore, she avoids going to jail by obeying Singaporean law. I don’t know how American law would even apply to her, they definitely apply to Jensen though.
jon128 | root | parent
American law, procedures and formalities or not, can potentially apply to anyone.

Nothing is beyond our reach.

NetMageSCW | root | parent
Iran appears to be.
newsclues | root | parent | next
The core competency of smugglers is getting the goods delivered. Some smugglers are motivated beyond profit or avoiding jail.
chmod775 | root | parent | next
The Chinese government definitely has better sticks to threaten Chinese nationals with than ratting them out to the US.
paimapi | root | parent
Certainly no government would ever encourage its own agents to engage in things like smuggling especially the smuggling of drugs to certain Global South nation states where the capital acquired from those operations end up funding pro-American paramilitaries who topple their local government. That would be totally bananas for any kind of republic.

Contra-ry to common conspiracy theories, I'm certain any government-led self-investigation into culpability in this vein was all very aboveboard and well-substantiated, and such incidents never ever happened.

mlmonkey | root | parent
> Certainly no government would ever encourage its own agents to engage in things like smuggling

North Korea has entered the chat ...

mejutoco | root | parent | next
They are talking about the USA
adrian_b | root | parent
USA, which is famous for engaging in several smuggling operations, like the Iran-Contra affair or the many cases when CIA was allegedly involved in drug trafficking.
paimapi | root | parent
I thought including 'bananas [...] republic' and 'Contra-ry' would be obvious enough of hints that I was being deeply sarcastic but alas
mlmonkey | root | parent
Sarcasm is a subtle art, my friend, and sometimes the audience misses the point. I did too, and re-read your comment and now see where you were going. <soft golf clap....>
| root | parent
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crossroadsguy | root | parent
And by dictionary definition once someone has been established as a smuggler, there’s technically no way they can also be labelled as spies, or engaging in espionage. Also, spies never smuggle, never. Spy’s honour! Yeah, that makes total sense.
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anonymous908213 | root | parent | next
> She was being monitored by the CIA, who believed she was a spy.

MLK Jr. was being monitored by the FBI and CIA, who believed he was a Communist.

UberFly | root | parent | next
That has nothing to do with the fact that she was being monitored by the CIA, who believed she was a spy. Stop it with the red herring bit.
NetMageSCW | root | parent
That appears to be an appeal to authority instead of establishing any facts, and the argument in the authority is not one rather than a red herring. Unless what matters isn’t whether she was actually a spy, only what CIA thought of her.
TychoCelchuuu | root | parent
But... he was a socialist.
jmtulloss | root | parent
Doesn’t sound like the Alibaba reps were at _every_ meeting
purpleidea | root | parent
They were watching through very secret hotel cameras ;)
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