She Exposed Beijing's Secret Police. Now Its AI Porn Deepfakes Smear Her — as Ottawa Signs a…

Laura Harth, known for exposing Beijing’s clandestine "overseas police service centers," has become the target of an AI-generated smear campaign. This campaign, which includes sexualized deepfakes, is linked to the same Chinese Ministry of Public Security that Harth's work has exposed.

What happened

The smear campaign against Harth emerged as a New York prosecution related to her reporting moved toward a verdict. OpenAI identified Safeguard Defenders, where Harth is a campaign director, as a target of industrialized transnational repression from China using AI. Meta has also identified the same network, Spamouflage, as the largest covert influence operation in the world and traced it to Chinese law enforcement. The deepfake attack is similar to one previously launched against Canadian Yao Zhang. The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted officers of China’s Ministry of Public Security in connection with this network.