Archives for September 2021

SHENZHEN, China (AP) — China’s government was eagerly anticipating the return of a top executive from global communications giant Huawei Technologies on Saturday following what amounted to a high-stakes prisoner swap with Canada and the U.S.

Meng Wanzhou, 49, Huawei’s chief financial officer and the daughter of the company’s founder, reached an agreement with U.S. federal prosecutors that called for fraud charges against her to be dismissed next year. As part of the deal, known as a deferred prosecution agreement, she accepted responsibility for misrepresenting the company’s business dealings in Iran.

The same day, two Canadian citizens held by Beijing were were freed and flown back to Canada.

Meng was expected to arrive late Saturday in the southern technology hub of Shenzhen, where Huawei is based.

Her pending return was a top item on the Chinese internet and on state broadcaster CCTV’s midday news broadcast, with anchor Tian Liang saying Meng was returning home by dint of the “unremitting efforts of the Chinese government.”

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian reposted on social media a report on Meng having left Canada, adding “Welcome home.”

In an emailed statement, Huawei said it was looking forward to Meng’s return and would “continue to defend itself against the allegations.”

The company also sent a statement from Meng’s lawyer, William W. Taylor III, saying Meng had “not pleaded guilty and we fully expect the indictment will be dismissed with prejudice after fourteen months.”

Former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor were arrested in China in December 2018, shortly after Canada arrested Meng on a U.S. extradition request. China charged them with endangering national security and sentenced Kovrig to 11 years in prison, although their arrests were widely viewed as an attempt by Beijing to gain leverage in the Meng case.

“These two men have been through an unbelievably difficult ordeal. For the past 1,000 days, they have shown strength, perseverance and grace and we are all inspired by that,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Friday.

The case had caused a huge rift in China-Canada relations, with Beijing launching regular broadsides against the Canadian justice system and banning some imports from the country. In addition, two Canadians convicted in separate drug cases in China were sentenced to death in 2019. A third, Robert Schellenberg, received a 15-year sentence that was abruptly increased to the death penalty after Meng’s arrest. It wasn’t immediately clear if those prisoners might receive any reprieve.

In Shenzhen, a 20-year old job seeker at the headquarters of Huawei repeated a government view that Meng’s arrest was driven by politics and rivalry with the U.S. over technology and global influence.

“I think (this) was to stop Huawei’s development in the world,” said the man, who gave only his surname, Wang, as is common with Chinese speaking to foreign media. “It’s a very important reason — nobody wants other countries to have better technology than itself.”

The frenetic chain of events involving the global powers brought an abrupt end to legal and geopolitical wrangling that for the past three years has roiled relations between Washington, Beijing and Ottawa.

Huawei is the biggest global supplier of network gear for phone and internet companies and a symbol of China’s progress in becoming a technological world power that has received massive government backing. It has also been a subject of U.S. security and law enforcement concerns, with officials and analysts saying it and other Chinese companies have flouted international rules and norms and stolen technology and vital personal information.

The case against Meng stemmed from a January 2019 indictment from the Justice Department of the administration of former President Donald Trump. It accused Huawei of stealing trade secrets and using a Hong Kong shell company called Skycom to sell equipment to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions. The indictment also charged Meng herself with committing fraud by misleading the HSBC bank about the company’s business dealings in Iran.

The indictment came amid a broader Trump administration crackdown against Huawei over U.S. government concerns that the company’s products could facilitate Chinese spying. The administration cut off Huawei’s access to U.S. components and technology, including Google’s music and other smartphone services, and later barred vendors worldwide from using U.S. technology to produce components for Huawei.

President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has kept up a hard line on Huawei and other Chinese corporations whose technology is thought to pose national security risks.

Huawei has repeatedly denied the U.S. government’s allegations and security concerns about its products.

As part of the deal with Meng, which was disclosed in federal court in Brooklyn, the Justice Department agreed to dismiss the fraud charges against her in December 2022 — exactly four years after her arrest — provided that she complies with certain conditions, including not contesting any of the government’s factual allegations. The Justice Department also agreed to drop its request that Meng be extradited to the U.S., which she had vigorously challenged, ending a process that prosecutors said could have persisted for months.

After appearing via videoconference for her hearing with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Meng made a brief court appearance in Vancouver, where she’d been out on bail living in a multimillion-dollar mansion while the two Canadians were held in Chinese prison cells where the lights were kept on 24 hours a day.

Outside the courtroom, Meng thanked the Canadian government for upholding the rule of law, expressed gratitude to the Canadian people and apologized “for the inconvenience I caused.”

“Over the last three years my life has been turned upside down,” she said. “It was a disruptive time for me as a mother, a wife and as a company executive. But I believe every cloud has a silver lining. It really was an invaluable experience in my life. I will never forget all the good wishes I received.”

Video was also circulated online in China of Meng speaking at Vancouver International Airport, saying; “Thank you motherland, thank you to the people of the motherland. You have been my greatest pillar of support.”

Shortly afterward, Meng left on an Air China flight for Shenzhen.

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Associated Press writers Eric Tucker in Washington, Rob Gillies in Toronto, Jim Mustain in New York and Jim Morris in Vancouver, Canada, contributed to this report.

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BRUSSELS (AP) — It’s the premier martial arts group in Europe for right-wing extremists. German authorities have twice banned their signature tournament. But Kampf der Nibelungen, or Battle of the Nibelungs, still thrives on Facebook, where organizers maintain multiple pages, as well as on Instagram and YouTube, which they use to spread their ideology, draw in recruits and make money through ticket sales and branded merchandise.

The Battle of the Nibelungs — a reference to a classic heroic epic much loved by the Nazis — is one of dozens of far-right groups that continue to leverage mainstream social media for profit, despite Facebook’s and other platforms’ repeated pledges to purge themselves of extremism.

All told, there are at least 54 Facebook profiles belonging to 39 entities that the German government and civil society groups have flagged as extremist, according to research shared with The Associated Press by the Counter Extremism Project, a non-profit policy and advocacy group formed to combat extremism. The groups have nearly 268,000 subscribers and friends on Facebook alone.

CEP also found 39 related Instagram profiles, 16 Twitter profiles and 34 YouTube channels, which have gotten over 9.5 million views. Nearly 60% of the profiles were explicitly aimed at making money, displaying prominent links to online shops or photos promoting merchandise.

Click on the big blue “view shop” button on the Erik & Sons Facebook page and you can buy a T-shirt that says, “My favorite color is white,” for 20 euros ($23). Deutsches Warenhaus offers “Refugees not welcome” stickers for just 2.50 euros ($3) and Aryan Brotherhood tube scarves with skull faces for 5.88 euros ($7). The Facebook feed of OPOS Records promotes new music and merchandise, including “True Aggression,” “Pride & Dignity,” and “One Family” T-shirts. The brand, which stands for “One People One Struggle,” also links to its online shop from Twitter and Instagram.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of a collaboration between The Associated Press and the PBS series FRONTLINE that examines challenges to the ideas and institutions of traditional U.S. and European democracy.

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The people and organizations in CEP’s dataset are a who’s who of Germany’s far-right music and combat sports scenes. “They are the ones who build the infrastructure where people meet, make money, enjoy music and recruit,” said Alexander Ritzmann, the lead researcher on the project. “It’s most likely not the guys I’ve highlighted who will commit violent crimes. They’re too smart. They build the narratives and foster the activities of this milieu where violence then appears.”

CEP said it focused on groups that want to overthrow liberal democratic institutions and norms such as freedom of the press, protection of minorities and universal human dignity, and believe that the white race is under siege and needs to be preserved, with violence if necessary. None has been banned, but almost all have been described in German intelligence reports as extremist, CEP said.

On Facebook the groups seem harmless. They avoid blatant violations of platform rules, such as using hate speech or posting swastikas, which is generally illegal in Germany.

By carefully toeing the line of propriety, these key architects of Germany’s far-right use the power of mainstream social media to promote festivals, fashion brands, music labels and mixed martial arts tournaments that can generate millions in sales and connect like-minded thinkers from around the world.

But simply cutting off such groups could have unintended, damaging consequences.

“We don’t want to head down a path where we are telling sites they should remove people based on who they are but not what they do on the site,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.

Giving platforms wide latitude to sanction organizations deemed undesirable could give repressive governments leverage to eliminate their critics. “That can have really serious human rights concerns,” he said. “The history of content moderation has shown us that it’s almost always to the disadvantage of marginalized and powerless people.”

German authorities banned the Battle of the Nibelungs event in 2019, on the grounds that it was not actually about sports, but instead was grooming fighters with combat skills for political struggle.

In 2020, as the coronavirus raged, organizers planned to stream the event online — using Instagram, among other places, to promote the webcast. A few weeks before the planned event, however, over a hundred black-clad police in balaclavas broke up a gathering at a motorcycle club in Magdeburg, where fights were being filmed for the broadcast, and hauled off the boxing ring, according to local media reports.

The Battle of the Nibelungs is a “central point of contact” for right-wing extremists, according to German government intelligence reports. The organization has been explicit about its political goals — namely to fight against the “rotting” liberal democratic order — and has drawn adherents from across Europe as well as the United States.

Members of a California white supremacist street fighting club called the Rise Above Movement, and its founder, Robert Rundo, have attended the Nibelungs tournament. In 2018 at least four Rise Above members were arrested on rioting charges for taking their combat training to the streets at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. A number of Battle of Nibelungs alums have landed in prison, including for manslaughter, assault and attacks on migrants.

National Socialism Today, which describes itself as a “magazine by nationalists for nationalists” has praised Battle of the Nibelungs and other groups for fostering a will to fight and motivating “activists to improve their readiness for combat.”

But there are no references to professionalized, anti-government violence on the group’s social media feeds. Instead, it’s positioned as a health-conscious lifestyle brand, which sells branded tea mugs and shoulder bags.

“Exploring nature. Enjoying home!” gushes one Facebook post above a photo of a musclebound guy on a mountaintop wearing Resistend-branded sportswear, one of the Nibelung tournament’s sponsors. All the men in the photos are pumped and white, and they are portrayed enjoying wholesome activities such as long runs and alpine treks.

Elsewhere on Facebook, Thorsten Heise – who has been convicted of incitement to hatred and called “one of the most prominent German neo-Nazis” by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in the German state of Thuringia — also maintains multiple pages.

Frank Kraemer, who the German government has described as a “right-wing extremist musician,” uses his Facebook page to direct people to his blog and his Sonnenkreuz online store, which sells white nationalist and coronavirus conspiracy books as well as sports nutrition products and “vaccine rebel” T-shirts for girls.

Battle of the Nibelungs declined to comment. Resistend, Heise and Kraemer didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Facebook told AP it employs 350 people whose primary job is to counter terrorism and organized hate, and that it is investigating the pages and accounts flagged in this reporting.

“We ban organizations and individuals that proclaim a violent mission, or are engaged in violence,” said a company spokesperson, who added that Facebook had banned more than 250 white supremacist organizations, including groups and individuals in Germany. The spokesperson said the company had removed over 6 million pieces of content tied to organized hate globally between April and June and is working to move even faster.

Google said it has no interest in giving visibility to hateful content on YouTube and was looking into the accounts identified in this reporting. The company said it worked with dozens of experts to update its policies on supremacist content in 2019, resulting in a five-fold spike in the number of channels and videos removed.

Twitter says it’s committed to ensuring that public conversation is “safe and healthy” on its platform and that it doesn’t tolerate violent extremist groups. “Threatening or promoting violent extremism is against our rules,” a spokesperson told AP, but did not comment on the specific accounts flagged in this reporting.

Robert Claus, who wrote a book on the extreme right martial arts scene, said that the sports brands in CEP’s data set are “all rooted in the militant far-right neo-Nazi scene in Germany and Europe.” One of the founders of the Battle of the Nibelungs, for example, is part of the violent Hammerskin network and another early supporter, the Russian neo-Nazi Denis Kapustin, also known as Denis Nikitin, has been barred from entering the European Union for ten years, he said.

Banning such groups from Facebook and other major platforms would potentially limit their access to new audiences, but it could also drive them deeper underground, making it more difficult to monitor their activities, he said.

“It’s dangerous because they can recruit people,” he said. “Prohibiting those accounts would interrupt their contact with their audience, but the key figures and their ideology won’t be gone.”

Thorsten Hindrichs, an expert in Germany’s far-right music scene who teaches at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, said there’s a danger that the apparently harmless appearance of Germany’s right-wing music heavyweights on Facebook and Twitter, which they mostly use to promote their brands, could help normalize the image of extremists.

Extreme right concerts in Germany were drawing around 2 million euros ($2.3 million) a year in revenue before the coronavirus pandemic, he estimated, not counting sales of CDs and branded merchandise. He said kicking extremist music groups off Facebook is unlikely to hit sales too hard, as there are other platforms they can turn to, like Telegram and Gab, to reach their followers. “Right-wing extremists aren’t stupid. They will always find ways to promote their stuff,” he said.

None of these groups’ activity on mainstream platforms is obviously illegal, though it may violate Facebook guidelines that bar “dangerous individuals and organizations” that advocate or engage in violence online or offline. Facebook says it doesn’t allow praise or support of Nazism, white supremacy, white nationalism or white separatism and bars people and groups that adhere to such “hate ideologies.”

Last week, Facebook  removed almost 150 accounts and pages linked to the German anti-lockdown Querdenken movement, under a new “social harm” policy, which targets groups that spread misinformation or incite violence but didn’t fit into the platform’s existing categories of bad actors.

But how these evolving rules will be applied remains murky and contested.

“If you do something wrong on the platform, it’s easier for a platform to justify an account suspension than to just throw someone out because of their ideology. That would be more difficult with respect to human rights,” said Daniel Holznagel, a Berlin judge who used to work for the German federal government on hate speech issues and also  contributed to CEP’s report. “It’s a foundation of our Western society and human rights that our legal regimes do not sanction an idea, an ideology, a thought.”

In the meantime, there’s news from the folks at the Battle of the Nibelungs. “Starting today you can also dress your smallest ones with us,” reads a June post on their Facebook feed. The new line of kids wear includes a shell-pink T-shirt for girls, priced at 13.90 euros ($16). A child pictured wearing the boy version, in black, already has boxing gloves on.

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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/

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CHICAGO (AP) — Austin Moody wanted to apply his cybersecurity skills in his home state of Michigan, teaming up with investigators for the State Police to analyze evidence and track down criminals.

But the recent graduate set the idea aside after learning an unpaid internship was his only way into the Michigan agency.

“I don’t know many people that can afford to take an unpaid internship, especially when it’s in such high demand in the private sector,” Moody said of fellow cybersecurity job seekers. “Unpaid internships in cyber aren’t really a thing beyond the public sector.”

Hiring and keeping staff capable of helping fend off a constant stream of cyberattacks and less severe online threats tops the list of concerns for state technology leaders. There’s a severe shortage of those professionals and not enough financial firepower to compete with federal counterparts, global brands and specialized cybersecurity firms.

“People who are still in school are being told, ‘There’s a really good opportunity in cybersecurity, really good opportunities for high pay,’” said Drew Schmitt, a principal threat intelligence analyst with the cybersecurity firm GuidePoint Security. “And ultimately these state and local governments just can’t keep up from a salary perspective with a lot of private organizations.”

State governments are regular targets for cybercriminals, drawn by the troves of personal data within agencies and computer networks that are essential to patrolling highways, maintaining election systems and other key state services. Notable hits since 2019 include the Washington state auditor, Illinois’ attorney general, Georgia’s Department of Public Safety and computer servers supporting much of Louisiana’s state agencies.

Cities, too, come under attack, and they have even fewer resources than states to stand up cyber defenses.

Aided by industry groups, the federal government and individual states have created training programs, competitions and scholarships in hopes of producing more cybersecurity pros nationwide. Those strategies could take years to pay off, however. States have turned to outside contractors, civilian volunteers and National Guard units for help when their systems are taken down by ransomware and other hacks.

States needed to fill nearly 9,000 cybersecurity jobs as of this summer, according to CyberSeek a joint project of the Computing Technology Industry Association and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The total is probably higher because the project doesn’t count job listings that states posted only to their own employment portal.

State leaders are reluctant to detail the number of vacancies, worrying that could further entice potential attackers. States’ top security officials have ranked inadequate cybersecurity staffing among their top concerns every year since the National Association of State Chief Information Officers and Deloitte began surveying the group in 2014.

The problem isn’t limited to state governments.

U.S. officials make no secret of their own struggles to hire cybersecurity pros or retain them. The Department of Homeland Security alone has 2,000 cybersecurity job vacancies, and the Biden administration promoted 300 new hires this summer.

The $95,412 average salary of a local or state government cyber employee lagged by $25,000 or more in 2020 compared with the pay in the federal government, the financial services industry and IT services, according to a survey conducted by the International Information System Security Certification Consortium, a trade association.

Information security analysts earned a median salary of $103,590 in May 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Cyberseek puts starting salaries close to $90,000 across all employers.

Homeland Security officials in 2014 recognized that lower pay was keeping their agency at a disadvantage, but it took until this year to publish a rule allowing higher salaries for cybersecurity roles — capped at $255,800, the maximum salary allowed for the vice president.

“The Department desperately needs a more flexible hiring process with incentives to secure talent in today’s highly competitive cyber skills market,” a portion of the rule due to take effect later this fall reads.

Leaders in the field often bemoan the expensive and time-consuming certification requirements and background checks that employers insist on for cybersecurity roles, saying that keeps jobs vacant and discourages women and people of color from working in cybersecurity.

Nicole Beebe, chair of the department of information security and cyber security at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said states’ struggles are more fundamental. Private companies and the federal government aggressively recruit students during college, sending representatives to classes and career fairs.

State agencies are rarely there, said Beebe, who counsels students weighing multiple job offers long before graduation.

“When it’s a hypercompetitive field, you can’t just submit a job posting and think it will get the same traction,” Beebe said.

Lower pay at government jobs can be a turnoff, but many students prefer a position that lets them leave work at home, which is not always the case with private companies.

A state or local government role doesn’t compare to the “meat grinder” of constantly responding to new attacks or vulnerabilities on a cybersecurity team for Microsoft or Amazon, said Michael Hamilton, founder of the PISCES Project. The organization connects cybersecurity students to local governments that don’t have employees focused on that work.

“State agencies can be taking on interns, grooming them, showing them that state government is a promising place to work,” he said. “But what I see them doing is just getting into the fistfight with all the others that want to hire these people and losing.”

Sienna Jackson, a 2020 graduate from the University of Texas at San Antonio, accepted a job as an engineer at the defense company Northrop Grumman after interviewing with the company at a conference. She began college as an accounting major but discovered cybersecurity through a classmate.

After an internship with Dell during college, she hoped to find a similarly sized company with a strong training program and other benefits.

Salary and help with moving or housing also mattered for Jackson, who worked several jobs while earning her degree and has to pay back her student loans. She didn’t rule out state government jobs but didn’t see agencies at career fairs on campus or at conferences.

“Once I graduated and was interviewing, I realized I have a lot of options,” she said. “I get to choose where I go and my standards and not just accept whatever job comes my way.”

Moody, the Michigan native, got a scholarship from the Department of Defense that required working for the agency at least a year after graduating. Moody said he understands that state governments don’t have the kind of money that federal agencies or private companies spend on recruiting and generous salaries.

But sending cybersecurity staff to talk to students about their work and its importance to thousands of state residents can make a big impact without costing much, he said.

“A lot of people want to be in a public service role and are open to starting there,” Moody said.

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TORONTO (AP) — China, the U.S. and Canada completed a high-stakes prisoner swap with joyous homecomings for two Canadians held by China and for an executive of Chinese global communications giant Huawei Technologies charged with fraud, potentially bringing closure to a 3-year feud that embroiled the three countries.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hugged diplomat Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor on the tarmac after they landed in Calgary, Alberta early Saturday. The men were detained in China in Dec. 2018, shortly after Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies’ chief financial officer and the daughter of the company’s founder, on a U.S. extradition request.

Many countries labeled China’s action “hostage politics,” while China accused Ottawa of arbitrary detention. The two Canadians were jailed for more than 1,000 days.

“It’s fantastic to be back home in Canada and I am immensely grateful to everybody who worked hard to bring both of us back home,” a noticeably thinner Kovrig said after a Canadian government plane landed in Toronto and he was greeted by his wife and sister.

“I’m feeling fantastic,” Kovrig said.

Meng’s return to China later Saturday was carried live on state TV, underscoring the degree to which Beijing has linked her case with Chinese nationalism and its rise as a global economic and political power.

Wearing a red dress matching the color of China’s flag, Meng thanked the ruling Communist Party and its leader Xi Jinping for supporting her through more than 1,000 days in house arrest in Vancouver, where she owns two multimillion dollar mansions.

“I have finally returned to the warm embrace of the motherland,” Meng said. “As an ordinary Chinese citizen going through this difficult time, I always felt the warmth and concern of the party, the nation and the people.”

The chain of events involving the global powers brought an abrupt end to legal and geopolitical wrangling that has roiled relations between Washington, Beijing and Ottawa. The three-way deal enabled China and Canada to each bring home their own detained citizens while the U.S. wrapped up a criminal case against Meng that for months had been mired in an extradition fight.

“These two men have been through an unbelievably difficult ordeal. For the past 1,000 days, they have shown strength, perseverance and grace and we are all inspired by that,” Trudeau said of the two Canadians.

The first activity came Friday afternoon when Meng, 49, reached an agreement with federal prosecutors that called for fraud charges against her to be dismissed next year and allowed for her to return to China immediately. As part of the deal, known as a deferred prosecution agreement, she accepted responsibility for misrepresenting the company’s business dealings in Iran.

The deal was reached as President Joe Biden and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping have sought to tamp down signs of public tension — even as the world’s two dominant economies are at odds on issues as diverse as cybersecurity, climate change, human rights and trade and tariffs. Biden said in an address before the U.N. General Assembly earlier this week that he had no intention of starting a “new Cold War,” while Xi told world leaders that disputes among countries “need to be handled through dialogue and cooperation.”

“The U.S. Government stands with the international community in welcoming the decision by People’s Republic of China authorities to release Canadian citizens Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig after more than two-and-a-half years of arbitrary detention. We are pleased that they are returning home to Canada,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.

As part of the deal with Meng, the Justice Department agreed to dismiss the fraud charges against her in December 2022 — exactly four years after her arrest — provided that she complies with certain conditions, including not contesting any of the government’s factual allegations. The Justice Department also agreed to drop its request that Meng be extradited to the U.S., which she had vigorously challenged.

After appearing via videoconference for her New York hearing, Meng made a brief court appearance in Vancouver, where she’d been out on bail living in a multimillion-dollar mansion while the two Canadians were held in Chinese prison cells where the lights were kept on 24 hours a day.

Outside the courtroom, Meng thanked the Canadian government for upholding the rule of law, expressed gratitude to the Canadian people and apologized “for the inconvenience I caused.”

“Over the last three years my life has been turned upside down,” she said. “It was a disruptive time for me as a mother, a wife and as a company executive. But I believe every cloud has a silver lining. It really was an invaluable experience in my life. I will never forget all the good wishes I received.”

Shortly afterward, Meng left on an Air China flight for Shenzhen, China, the location of Huawei’s headquarters.

Huawei is the biggest global supplier of network gear for phone and internet companies. It has been a symbol of China’s progress in becoming a technological world power — and a subject of U.S. security and law enforcement concerns. Some analysts say Chinese companies have flouted international rules and norms and stolen technology.

The case against Meng stems from a January 2019 indictment from the Trump administration Justice Department that accused Huawei of stealing trade secrets and using a Hong Kong shell company called Skycom to sell equipment to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions. The indictment also charged Meng herself with committing fraud by misleading the HSBC bank about the company’s business dealings in Iran.

The indictment came amid a broader Trump administration crackdown against Huawei over U.S. government concerns that the company’s products could facilitate Chinese spying. The administration cut off Huawei’s access to U.S. components and technology, including Google’s music and other smartphone services, and later barred vendors worldwide from using U.S. technology to produce components for Huawei.

The Biden White House, meanwhile, has kept up a hard line on Huawei and other Chinese corporations whose technology is thought to pose national security risks. Huawei has repeatedly denied the U.S. government’s allegations and security concerns about its products.

Former Canadian ambassador to China, Guy Saint-Jacques, Kovrig’s former boss, said he was elated the two Canadians are home.

“Clearly, the Chinese were so eager to get Meng back that they jettisoned all pretensions that the two Michaels had been arrested for good reasons. They must acknowledge that their reputation has been severely tarnished,” Saint-Jacques said. “There is grumbling in the Communist party of China, people saying, ‘In which direction are we going, Xi Jinping? We are creating too many enemies. Why are we enemies with countries like Canada and Australia?’”

Saint-Jacques said he thinks China will think twice before using “hostage diplomacy” again.

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Eric Tucker in Washington, Jim Mustian in New York and Jim Morris in Vancouver, Canada, contributed to this report.

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