Lieber Case: Crossed Wires and Parallel Lines
Nanoscientist's case is quarantined, despite Maxwell-Epstein links
See Part Two, Dec 24, 2021: Lieber Case: Filling In The Blanks — Double agent or compromised? Chemist finds himself in no-man's land
See Also, Dec 10, 2021: Maxwell Case: Surveilled And Silenced —Twitter censors trial coverage as FBI connections broached
For all the controversy around Jeffrey Epstein we have heard little about the scientists he sponsored: a name here, a grant there — from a supposed billionaire financier who hung out with the great philanthropist of the age, Bill Gates.
Very few know of the Covid connection — that many of these scientists proposed solutions that have been used, or considered, in the pandemic response, from health monitoring and sensors, nano-injectables to biosurveillance, behavioural psychology to artificial intelligence, and from cybernetics to new forms of governance.
[sound off stage: The treetops rustle. Branches snap, then: thud.]
[enters stage left: Surveillance artiste limps into view, a little wobbly in his first job since journalism school propelled him into the lofty heights of Fakt Cheka.]
— “I say, I say, I say: that just ain’t so.”
On the U.S. East Coast, two people are facing down federal prosecutors in courtrooms 200 miles apart. They share a web of money and artifice that lured people with offers of free flights and entertainment and even million-dollar research grants.
Their fortunes, if not their fates, are linked. For Ghislaine Maxwell’s partner Jeffrey Epstein was a major donor to Charles Lieber’s groundbreaking chemistry.
There the similarities begin — a shared interest in connecting brains to computers, using tiny wires coated in hydrogel, or LNPs, opening new vistas for social organization and control — but you won’t learn this from the court cases.
Both trials look like they’ll be abridged: that of Ghislaine Maxwell for sex trafficking and Charles Lieber’s for hiding his connections and income from China. Each trial goes on as if the other didn't exist, nor their links to cybernetic research that involves the same billionaires and scientists; technologies and patents; and the means, motive and opportunity for experimentation at scale.
Dec 17, 2021
The decision to prosecute the leading nanotechnologist Charles Lieber is controversial. Dozens of scientists signed a letter in his support, saying legislation to counter espionage is being misused to snare academics over ambiguous grant offers.
The chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University embodies the next wave of micro-computerization: if the transistor unleashed consumer electronics in the 1940s, nanowires could change the way we live — so gushed Forbes in a 2002 article.
Lieber pioneered transistors in lipid nanoparticles (LNP) to help attach tiny electronic devices, couched within fatty gels, to cells — what he calls "liquid computing." Thomson Reuters named him the world’s leading chemist for the decade 2000-2010 based on the impact of his scientific publications.
These include titles like, "Graphene and Nanowire Transistors for Cellular Interfaces and Electrical Recording" (PubMed 2010). The Fakt Cheka are quick to swing by and call out that there’s no graphene in the Covid vaccines. At least seven studies claim to have found it in certain batches. Regardless, manufacturers admit that LNP is used to deliver mRNA and the Food and Drug Administration has been granted 55 years to gradually reveal the Pfizer shot’s ingredients.
Lieber's work is a key field in the so-called “fourth industrial revolution,” which attracts investors with their eyes on nanotechnology and bio-electronics, social media and payments systems and medical and military surveillance. Those investors include the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.
Shortened as 4IR it is “a revolution characterized by technological development in areas like artificial intelligence (AI), big data, fifth-generation telecommunications networking (5G), nanotechnology and biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and quantum computing.” If implemented, it would create a web of total control.
New evidence
On the trial’s fourth day, Friday Dec 17, prosecutors showed video of an interview in which Lieber told the FBI in January 2020 that he hadn’t been “completely transparent” when quizzed in 2018 over unpaid taxes and a Chinese programme to attract foreign academics.
While cross examining an FBI agent with a name worthy of Hollywood, Kara D Spice, the chemist’s defence pointed out that participating in the Chinese exchange was legal. Agent Spice confirmed the trial contains no charges related to espionage.
When the FBI confronted Lieber with emails, contracts and bank account details, he admitted “that’s pretty damning.” He and his wife had decided against repatriating the money from his Chinese bank account – WUT paid him up to $50,000 a month. “We realized that this was not an appropriate thing,” Lieber told the FBI.
To the observer it’s moot whether disclosure of income was the reason for the case against Lieber or if it was prompted by a parallel investigation or tangential pretext.
Why Lieber, why now?
The top nanotechnologist has been put on administrative leave and prosecuted at a time when his field has never been more relevant, more public and more lucrative.
Money is pouring into surveillance. Countries like Britain have rebranded their intelligence networks as biosecurity centres. The Pentagon cavalierly dashed past the Fakt Cheka, unveiling in Apr 2021 an implanted sensor for Covid-19 in the blood — technology the state-corporatist media has at times denied and even ridiculed.
Some of the biggest private investors are directly lobbying the Pentagon for contracts on anything related to artificial intelligence and the Cloud.
While they seek to ally with U.S. state security, they cautiously align themselves with geopolitical rivals. Analysts try to separate those companies which directly collaborate with China from those who tread more cautiously. Yet the wealthiest investors stand above and outside national boundaries or interests.
In recent history this dates from the Rockerfeller Trilateral Commission, the courting of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and “Nixon in China” that “opened” the country in the 1970s. A longer perspective dates from the 1830s and before, when the Opium Wars opened the country and made the fortunes of many Western families that control the financial markets to this day.
Longtime proponent of one world government Heinz Kissinger has called artificial intelligence a “change in human consciousness exceeding that of the Enlightenment” (to the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence conference in 2019).
Unlike the Enlightenment this will be a cartel — with investors looking to regulate at governmental level — and corporations “in wider inter-organizational structures” seeking to coordinate their control of society and share of the profits. One name they use is sustainable operations management (SOM).
Investors like Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone, seek to create “a global compact for the research, introduction and deployment of AI” which would define how the U.S. and China work together in, say, healthcare, education, and manufacturing. [1]
Yet events move fast. Just over a year ago Blackstone’s Schwarzman was being touted as the “inside man” who softened the impact of then President Donald Trump’s China rhetoric, someone with a personal relationship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
As the property developer Evergrande Group tottered, China’s leadership showed it would take a tough line with all foreign investors. Blackstone has since reasserted its commitment, completing the 100 per cent purchase of Guangzhou International Airport Logistics Park in Dec 2021.
Common prosperity
Four months after China’s communist party first mentioned “common prosperity” analysts are still divining the runes. Translated as “an overarching program that aims to promote socioeconomic equality while reinforcing party legitimacy and control” it shares some concepts with The Great Reset and the biosecurity state.
However President Xi Jinping’s talk of reducing poverty seems to collide with “you’ll own nothing and be happy,” while calls to promote the real economy are interpreted as a shift away from speculative investments to value-added consumer services and cleaner manufacturing.
For Western investors the key points include limits on Chinese companies raising money abroad, calls for fewer working hours, more face-to-face socializing and pulling Chinese children back from the brink of the digital game metaverse.
We seek to discern the Western camps on China: the “insiders” who see unlimited collaboration versus those determined to protect Intellectual Property and firewall national security. Yet it tells us more about the Chinese Communist Party’s determination not to cede control of digital surveillance and biosecurity to Western corporations.
While some investors like Blackstone plough ahead with investments in China, others are still smarting. George Soros wrote in the Wall Street Journal in Sep 2021 that asset managers like BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink had misled investors by encouraging them to triple their allocation to the country. Soros railed:
“The firm seems to have taken the statements of Mr. Xi’s regime at face value. It has drawn a distinction between state-owned enterprises and privately owned companies, but that is far from reality. The regime regards all Chinese companies as instruments of the one-party state.” [2]
The Open Society Foundation founder went on: “Today, the U.S. and China are engaged in a life and death conflict between two systems of governance: repressive and democratic.”
BlackRock’s spokesman responded that trade between the two countries exceeded $600 billion in 2020, and its decision to launch investment services in China would “contribute to the economic interconnectedness of the world’s two largest economies” (that six-syllable word is a Rockefeller marker).
Between the cracks
Has Lieber fallen into the crack between two camps — pro-China and less pro-China — or foul of the original intention of the U.S. Department of Justice China Initiative, launched in 2018 under former President Donald Trump to counter economic espionage? Lieber is not charged with espionage but mainly tax-related omissions.
Lieber’s lab at Harvard has received grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Defense for more than $15 million since 2008, according to the indictment filed on July 28, 2020.
This obliged him to disclose foreign ties and collaboration. As a strategic scientist for Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) since 2011, Lieber signed up to China’s Thousand Talents Program, a state effort to recruit scientists from other countries.
Lieber may have accepted a thousand talents but his value and connections were greater still. For within a few degrees of separation we reach a thousand points of light and Lieber works at the centre of a constellation.
His work is some of the most scintillating, at least that is publicly known, in the field of cellular bioelectronics and everything neuro: engineering, sensory, modulation and prosthetic. It inhabits the core of the Venn diagram where the possibilities include:
sensing disease, overcoming debility, self-repair
monitoring the brain, anticipating desires and satisfying neurochemical needs
implanting memories, overcoming fears, reshaping senses
uploading reality, downloading insights and processing information
Health is always sold to the public as the main aim of bio-electronic sensors: keeping you safe, quality of life and longevity. That is how the press is paid to portray it. Those who pay for these stories are same philanthropists who invest in and profit from the technologies which do not fall so neatly into the pursuit of liberty and happiness.
Such technology often reduces humans to resources, paid or unpaid and in marketing scenarios to slave or soldier. The biggest players are the military, financial and technology companies, along with big pharma.
For every heart stimulator or treatment for Parkinson's there is a patent for individual identification, exchanging data between individuals and sensors, data-mining, and most famously, the Microsoft patent from 2020 when Bill Gates was still on the board: “Cryptocurrency system using body activity data” (Patent WO2020/060606).
Lieber holds patents like WO2015/199784A3 for “electronic devices that can be injected or inserted into soft matter, such as biological tissue… the device may be passed through a syringe or a needle. In some cases, the device may comprise one or more nanoscale wires… connected to an external electrical circuit, e.g., to a computer.”
Battery power
One of the mysteries is why the Chinese university hired Lieber to do research on batteries.