Fisker EVs Hired an IT Spy Who Funneled Millions to N. Korea's Missile Program
torquenews.com
torquenews.com
If I want to hire someone (local or remote) as an employer here, I better make sure the worker has a valid working permit. Fines for non-compliance towards the employer are huge, even for a single day of work. All paperwork has to be complete before any work is done. Even when hiring through intermediary companies who guarantee it's all legal, liability and fines remain in place for the ultimate employer if it turns out to be not so.
It's already the law.
This is why employers mandate I-9 forms as part of employment.
This is part of the larger indictment against Christine Chapman by the DoJ, who found she was falsifying employment verification documents and giving access to North Koreans in return for a portion of the embezzled sums.
Stories like this are also why there has been a major push for RTO.
Citation needed. I find this very unlikely as the root cause.
Are you in San Francisco? This is a conspiracy theory I hear a lot in San Francisco.
The userbases overlap significantly now.
There is practically zero enforcement. Criminalise hiring illegal workers while stepping up enforcement and you dramatically reduce the value of illegal migration while shutting down large sections of the economy, thereby prompting supply-side inflation.
We don’t do it because this is a politically convenient middle ground that keeps illegal labor in the system while segregating it from competing with most of us. (Put another way: we have a regulated and an unregulated labor market. We like the fruits from the latter.)
(If you propose this after being elected you might only last one term though; it's a bit of a rug pull. Better to pull the rug out from under your party rather than the voters.)
I'm not so sure..
It’s a playbook as old as time. “At least we’re not <the other guy>”
When slavery was a thing, white southern workers made a lot less than northern workers. Racial superiority pumped the suckers up. Johnny Reb volunteered to be slaughtered so some aristocrat could own people.
The US governance model segments immigration and work regulation - the former is a federal matter, the latter is almost exclusively regulated by the states (including enforced of federal rules).
In recent years as conservatives have veered into a more overtly racist and reactionary movement that’s shifted a bit.
I expect endless demagoguery about immigration and performative cruelty, but nothing that will challenge the bottom line.
Here's a recent bit of commentary on E-Verify: https://jabberwocking.com/the-long-sad-story-of-e-verify/
It's a weird case where one business undercuts another by hiring cheap labor, and then the other business has to do the same thing or else risk going out of business.
Better enforcement might help, but remember, people like cheap chicken; it doesn't matter which way you vote.
If it needs fixing in law, let's do that... not this weird system we have now of turning our head the other way and waving it off as necessary while ignoring any criticism of said crazy system.
That being said: I personally think it makes more sense to lower the cost of plant-based proteins. It's always going to be cheaper when we eat the plants directly instead of having an animal convert the plant to protein.
(This person still eats plenty of meat... Because it tastes good.)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1747-0080.12...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10305646/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-93100-3
There's also an issue of lower fat/connective tissue content in plant-based meats (again, necessary to support joint and muscle recovery). Also, IIRC, the fats and oils in meat hold up better to high-temperature cooking than the ones in meat analogues. Best I can do is go pescatarian (which has its own issues at-scale).
They are processed food. I'm under no illusion that they are healthy.
I won't say I've never had them, but I generally turn my nose up at them and stick with real animal flesh or traditional vegetarian food.
In industries that famously have many illegal employees, the companies have cover because the employees always have fraudulent documents. And since the company is required to accept those documents and not discriminate, the company can't be held liable for hiring them even though they are illegal.
Underlying this situation is that it is unconstitutional for the Federal government to issue mandatory ids to citizens that could be used to reliably determine employment eligibility.
Genuine question: source?
> mandatory ids to citizens that could be used to reliably determine employment eligibility
Yes, state-issued IDs, the infallible line keeping underage drinkers out of bars.
There are many people who are US citizens that due to history or circumstances have no reliable documentation of such with which to bootstrap an ID -- I have people with no foundational documents in my own family. The system is designed to enable these people to bootstrap their paperwork without a reliable root document, which is of course exploitable by people that are in the US illegally.
State-issued IDs do not contain sufficient information to ensure eligibility for employment under Federal law.
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/forms/i-9...
I'm an employer, and this is the form that needs to be filled out when we hire someone.
Notice the 2nd page of eligible documentation. A "School ID" and "birth certificate" are adequate documentation for employment. Both can be easily forged and difficult to verify.
Also notice the bottom of the 2nd page: it allows (for a temporary period) a "receipt" of the document to be considered acceptable if it is "stolen" - meaning you don't even need to have the physical document at all.
And here's the kicker: This form does not need to be submitted to any government agency. (You literally just fill it out and put it in a filing cabinet)
No, they're not. They're adequate to establish identity. (List B).
> form does not need to be submitted to any government agency. (You literally just fill it out and put it in a filing cabinet)
Correct. We're on the same page in respect of employers having no real requirement to verify work authorisation. This appears part of the policy choice that lets certain politicians rail against illegal immigration without threatening the economics they support.
"ANTI-DISCRIMINATION NOTICE: All employees can choose which acceptable documentation to present for Form I-9. Employers cannot ask employees for documentation to verify information in Section 1, or specify which acceptable documentation employees must present for Section 2 or Supplement B, Reverification and Rehire. Treating employees differently based on their citizenship, immigration status, or national origin may be illegal."[0]
[0] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/forms/i-9...
People not motivated to seek shall not find.
People are motivated by not becoming Federal criminals.
Enact a law to punish the employers and that would change overnight.
There are conflicting valid problems, different problems that are both valid, but the solution to one inhibits the solution to the other, and the law as it stands favors preventing discrimination as being the higher priority over preventing illegal employment.
I doubt either you or I knows if that is even a wrong priority, because I can't say which is the bigger problem. I'll say I don't begrudge any immigrants getting jobs, whether they are technically illegal or not. They are human and until they actually commit theft or violence I don't get off on making them suffer.
Regardless, the problem is not enforcing the law. The law says you must accept the documents. There is no "diverted blame". If you find the prospect of the wrong person getting a job so outrageous, the "blame" is on the government for making it easy to fabricate their documents. The various documents that the law says you must accept, should not be so easy to fake up, and there should probably be some office that accepts these documents and vets them instead of just telling employers to file them and never looking at them.
This reminds me of a Beavis and Butthead scene: "At the border. -Policeman: let them through. -Other policeman: Why ?. -Policeman: Mexicans know the capital of Texas, Americans don't"
This has been my proposed solution to the immigration problem in the US. Stop attempting to corral the people coming over, and shift 100% of your resources toward punishing those who employ them. How many people will attempt to sneak into the US when no one is willing to hire them?
I also view this as a "put your money where your mouth is" stance. It changes it from a political issue into one with a practical solution, and the people benefiting from cheap labor would have to be very creative to find fault with it.
The anti-immigrant politicians can't punish the employers because they would be punishing their own donors.
If that sounds like a contradiction, consider that undocumented/illegal immigrants are effectively pawns who have no political power in the system, and the contradiction disappears entirely.
The resolution to the contradiction is that few candidates to Federal office are opposed to illegal immigration, and those that have opposed illegal immigration have mostly gotten away with merely saying they are opposed while not doing very much to stop illegal immigration.
I don't know much about the topic, but conservative commentator Ann Coulter complained that although he certain got votes by talking about it, Trump didn't do much against illegal immigration and probably doesn't really want to do much about it.
The "interesting" (in Chinese proverbial terms) part is that we're living in times where a certain charlatan's actions have lead to the big red button actually being pushed on both matters. Whoever wins tonight, it certainly looks like we're about to test if each respective development has any bearing on polls, or if parties can just run on anti-immigration/pro-choice vibes ad nauseum, regardless of what's actually happened wrt each policy over the past (few) decade(s).
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/media/1352191/dl (pdf)
Some related coverage:
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/05/arizona-woman-accus... ("Arizona woman accused of helping North Koreans get remote IT jobs at 300 companies")
I really hope this doesn’t become ammunition for companies who force unjust and unnecessary return to office policies.
Unjust might be society not offering a sufficient safety net to ride out income volatility.
Saying "it's just business" is just a canned phrase for minimizing a general dismissive attitude toward the welfare of workers.
I don't think I am dismissive toward the welfare of workers. I strongly advocate for government helping workers by at least increasing/streamlining the process of receiving unemployment benefits and/or taxpayer funded efforts to re-train in the event of loss of income or even relocation assistance.
I find "it's just business" and "it's not personal" to be some of the most insulting and gaslighting phrases in the English language, by how they dehumanize the person at the receiving end of them.
People are affected by loss of income, and it is tragic. I don't think a buyer ceasing to buy from a seller is injustice, regardless if the relationship is employer/employee or customer/business.
It is society that should be providing the stability necessary for business to just be business. If a business makes a mistake, it is not unjust for the business to correct course which could involve changing its terms with its vendors (including employees).
In regards to when an employee or employer can terminate buying or selling labor, US law outside of Montana is “at-will”, meaning either party can stop buying or selling labor anytime they want, barring a contract that stipulates otherwise.
Sure, and the contract should be terminated.
Within the context of this article, learning you may be funding sanctioned activities is a valid reason to revisit your business assumptions.
So in your view all contracts should be meaningless if one party doesn't want it anymore? Do we even need contracts then?
What I have a "right" to is ultimately a matter of personal judgment. Isn't it?
My right to life[0] can still exist without you being obligated not to murder me. It means that I am always justified in self-defense, so if you try to kill me, I'm allowed to kill you back. Except not always. But basically always. Except for the exceptions we can frame a million different ways. In practice, neither of our rights to life are absolute...and so on, down the rabbit hole.
[0] But wait: My natural right? My legal right? In terms of enforcement? Or in some vague sense that I "have" a right and those are words I get to say, and, uh, if you don't like it then I'll say them again? In practice, no one cares. People just say "rights" to mean "I'm right."
Talking about rights is fraught and frustrating and mostly pointless, and my comment wasn't worth writing, but there's nothing I can do about it now.
He installed malware on his work computer. Was this then used by North Korea to hack Fisker's internal systems and syphon of money somehow? Maybe I missed the details in one of the articles linked below.
AFAICT, he merely worked for them. The only cash flows mentioned in the indictment [0] are simple wages.
The title is a bit misleading. "Millions" is the total haul of the North Korean remote workers over some 60-ish (??) companies. Fisker by itself paid no more than $214,596.00 (page 27, as "Company 6"). The article focuses on Fisker because it's an automotive news site.
Stu Sjouwerman: We were hiring a fairly specific, hard-to-find software engineer who had background in AI. We have a number of AI initiatives, and so we needed a software engineer to support all those initiatives.
Jessica Mendoza: The job was posted on online job forums, and pretty soon, resumes started to flow in from all over the country, and one candidate stood out. He said his name was Kyle.
Stu Sjouwerman: "Mr. Kyle" quote, unquote, air quotes, had experience with exactly everything that we needed. It was a very good interview. He was very open. He talked about his strengths and weaknesses, indicated where he felt he needed additional training and indicated a career path. And so, was the perfect interviewee, which made us move to the next step.
Jessica Mendoza: After conducting background checks, Stu's company decided to hire Kyle as a remote employee. They sent him a work laptop to an address in Washington State and started the onboarding process. But almost immediately, it became clear that Kyle was not who he said he was.
Stu Sjouwerman: At that point in time, our team started seeing very concerning traffic on that laptop.
Jessica Mendoza: What kind of concerning traffic?
Stu Sjouwerman: Well, Kyle immediately started downloading malware. We immediately saw that a whole bunch of things were happening that should not be. We tried to get in touch with him and asked if he needed any help. I think this was through Slack, and he said, "Yes, I am trying to debug my router and I'm following instructions from a list." And this is where it became very, very iffy, very fast.
Jessica Mendoza: The company shut down Kyle's laptop and quickly fired him. And then, they investigated. What exactly was Kyle doing? The answer took them completely by surprise.
Stu Sjouwerman: Yes, we have egg on our face because we hired a fake North Korean IT worker, but this is what happened. And if it can happen to us, it can happen to almost anybody.
Jessica Mendoza: It's kind of unbelievable that you hired a North Korean spy as one of your IT guys.
Stu Sjouwerman: Yes. That is pretty scary. And there are hundreds if not thousands that are actually, as we speak right now, in this same situation and delivering work for United States companies.
https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/your-new-hire-may-b...
It's so far worked out for Tesla, and at least of the major auto companies in the US they're still alive when they could have gone under previously.
Supporting new private industry is good policy, if done with balance. China has been employing this very successfully industry after industry.
> Tesla repaid its $465 million loan from the US Department of Energy (DoE) nine years early in 2013
The most "recent iteration" of Fisker was basically a company from scratch. It was only called Fisker because it's original founder (Henrik Fisker) retained the rights to the name and logo.
This time around there weren't any loans from the US govt.
Hiring in IT is a joke, there is an obsession with gamifying everything resulting in only people willing to play the game actually getting hired.
I wonder what the quality of work was like
first they hire telemarketing grunts. then HR gets complacent and normalize not doing any work. then they start using the same techniques for IT workers since for HR they're just more expensive telemarketing.