On November 16, 2021, Matthew Ziburis sat in his car in a residential neighborhood in the Bay Area stalking an “enemy,” as he put it. A veteran of both the US Army and Marine Corps, Ziburis had previously served in Iraq. But on this mission, he was working at the behest of China’s government. The targets that autumn day were American citizens: Arthur Liu and his teenage daughter, Alysa.

Arthur’s personal story was an exemplar of the American Dream. As a university student, he took part in the 1989 pro-democracy movement in China. After the crackdown at Tiananmen Square that year, he fled to the United States, settling in California. Arthur poured a small fortune and an equal amount of energy into molding Alysa into a figure skating phenom. As a national champion at age 13, she bantered along with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, and was at the time on track to represent America at the Winter Olympics the following year in Beijing.

Ziburis was surveilling the Liu home when he called Arthur, falsely claiming that he was a member of the US Olympic Committee who needed to discuss upcoming travel to Beijing, Arthur says. Ziburis was adamant that Arthur fax him copies of his and his daughter’s passports as part of a travel “preparedness check,” Liu tells WIRED. This struck Arthur as odd. In his many years dealing with sports bodies, he had never fielded such a request. Alysa’s agent did not respond to a request for comment.

Ziburis’ surveillance of Arthur and Alysa Liu that November day five years ago was just one episode in a bizarre saga that spanned from California to Beijing, touched New York City mayors and members of the US Congress, and has seen two people plead guilty and two more awaiting trial.

Unbeknownst to Ziburis, as he sat outside Aurthur and Alysa’s Northern California home, he too was being watched.

Ziburis had allegedly been dispatched to Northern California by Frank Liu, a self-styled fixer in the Chinese community from Long Island, New York, who was in turn receiving orders from a person in China named Qiang Sun. According to US authorities, Sun was working at the behest of the Chinese government. A concerned private investigator who once worked for Frank Liu had alerted the FBI to Frank’s escapades and was assisting authorities. Law enforcement was already on to Ziburis by the time he arrived. Anthony Ricco, Ziburis’ lawyer, did not respond to requests for comment.

Officers watched as Ziburis surveyed Arthur’s home and visited his law office. The heavy-set man sulking around Arthur’s office also caught the attention of a neighbor, who approached Ziburis and asked him if he needed help, Arthur says. Apparently concerned, the FBI called Arthur to warn him that Ziburis was heading to his home. By then, in part because of the harassment, Arthur and Alysa were boarding a plane to fly out of California. “It was like a movie,” Arthur says.

Alysa’s showing in Beijing in 2022 was disappointing. Burned out, she retired from the sport. Then in February, after returning to the ice after a two year hiatus, Alysa became the first US women’s figure skater to win Olympic gold since 2002—intentionally without her father by her side.

Despite her much-publicized complicated relationship with Arthur, Alysa’s success—punctuated by her signature pierced smile, racoon-tail dye job, and palpable joy for her sport—has reignited interest in the long-running case of transnational repression against her and her father. Human rights advocates and researchers have documented in recent years the lengths Beijing has taken to suppress critical voices, even those residing abroad or whose perceived transgressions date back decades.

Neuroscientists know that there is a link between loneliness and cognitive decline in older adults, although it is still difficult to understand the exact magnitude of the link. A new longitudinal study provides evidence that a proportion of people who feel lonely end up having more memory impairment, though this doesn’t necessarily mean that their brains age faster.

The report, published in Aging & Mental Health, shows that older adults with higher levels of loneliness scored lower on tests of immediate and delayed recall. Even so, the rate at which their memory declined over six years was virtually identical to those who were not lonely.

“It suggests that loneliness may play a more prominent role in the initial state of memory than in its progressive decline,” said Luis Carlos Venegas-Sanabria of the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at Universidad del Rosario, who led the research. “The study underscores the importance of addressing loneliness as a significant factor in the context of cognitive performance in older adults.”

Six-Year Study of Thousands of Single People

The team analyzed data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), one of the most robust longitudinal databases for studying aging. For six years, the researchers followed 10,217 adults, aged 65 to 94, from 12 European countries. They assessed their level of loneliness and their performance on memory tests.

The results show that age was the most important determinant of memory level and speed of decline. From the age of 75 onwards, scores began to fall more rapidly. After 85 the decline became more pronounced. Depression and chronic diseases such as diabetes also reduced the initial score. Loneliness, while influencing the starting point, did not accelerate the slope of cognitive decline.

The study also found that physical activity was associated with better initial memory scores. People who engaged in moderate or vigorous physical activity at least once a month recalled more words on immediate and delayed recall tests. This effect did not change the speed of decline, but it did raise the baseline level, which functions as a kind of “cognitive buffer.”

Although the study does not explore the causes of the link between loneliness and cognition, previous research has proposed plausible mechanisms. Loneliness is often associated with less social interaction, a factor that influences cognitive performance. It is also associated with increased risk of depression, which does directly affect memory tests. In addition, lonely people tend to have more health problems, such as hypertension or diabetes, which also affect cognitive function.

By 2050, according to United Nations projections, one in six people in the world will be over the age of 65. Societies are entering a stage where old age will no longer be the exception but will become the norm. Dementia, as well as other neurodegenerative diseases that appear with age, will be a major challenge for health care institutions.

Privacy is not a modern invention; it is part of the human condition of trust, dissent, and intimacy. Every society has developed ways to communicate beyond the reach of power: whispered conversations, sealed letters, coded language.

The need to keep secrets is equally as important among the powerful – governments, more so than individuals, have jealously guarded their own secrets, even as they seek to uncover the secrets of others. What is new is neither the need nor desire for private communication but the current power of the observer.

We now live in what some have termed a “golden age of surveillance,” in which governments, corporations, and adversaries possess the technical capability to monitor human interaction at unprecedented scale. In this era of pervasive digital connectivity, most digital interactions leave a permanent, searchable trace, and the need to protect sensitive information has become critical.

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is therefore not a technical abstraction or ideological indulgence; it is the most effective defence against unauthorized access to private communications in a fully networked world. As digital communication continues to evolve, the risks of interception scale with it.