FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

China’s Ambassador to Canada Exposes the ‘Five Eyes’ Surveillance State

Jan. 12. 2019 (EIRNS)—In a Jan. 9, op-ed in Ottawa’s Hill Times, by China’s Ambassador to Canada Lu Shaye, the capital daily did what no other mainstream media outlet has been willing to do since the untimely arrest, at the U.S. behest, of Huawei’s CFO Meng Wanzhou occurred while she was boarding a plane in Vancouver on Dec. 1, 2018. Much dispute has arisen over that arrest and China’s subsequent arrest of two Canadians suspected of espionage in Beijing. In an article entitled, “Why the Double Standard on Justice for Canadians, Chinese?” Ambassador Lu cut through the noise being created by the media and Western political class by exposing the overbloated Western surveillance state known as the Five Eyes, which he properly identified as the outgrowth of the unconstitutional Patriot Act and the PRISM surveillance system, exposed by the Edward Snowden leaks, which have annihilated all semblance of privacy among trans-Atlantic nations.

After describing the double standard applied by Canadian elites who have constructed a narrative that always paints China as the villain of the world while portraying the West as “free and democratic,” Ambassador Lu stated:

“These same people have conveniently ignored the PRISM Program, Equation Group, and Echelon—global spying networks operated by some countries that have been engaging in large-scale and organized cyber stealing, and spying and surveillance activities on foreign governments, enterprises, and individuals. These people also took a laissez-faire attitude toward a country that infringes on its citizens’ privacy rights through the Patriot Act. They shouted for a ban by the Five Eyes alliance countries ... on the use of Huawei equipment by these countries’ own enterprises.”

The Chinese Ambassador went one step further, ending his op-ed with a claim which has earned him much criticism in the days since its publication. In his closing paragraph Ambassador Lu made the uncomfortable point that the double standards employed against China, and the West’s willingness to ignore the Five Eyes, “is due to Western egotism and white supremacy.”