Daily Archives: 26 September 2017

A Clear Statement of Intent

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Ri Yong Ho, northern Korea’s Foreign Minister and spokesman for Baby Kim, appears to have let the cat out of the bag.  Responding to President Donald Trump’s series of remarks about northern Korea and Baby Kim during the week, Ri said

He [Trump] committed an irreversible mistake of making our rockets’ visit to the entire US mainland inevitable all the more[.]

Notice that.  Ri isn’t only responding to Trump’s current position.  All the more is the key phrase here.  Northern Korea’s intent all along, its motivation for developing nuclear weapons and delivery systems, has been to attack us; otherwise, there is nothing than which to be all the more.

Just like Iran vis-à-vis Israel.

Hacking

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Germany has been struck by a wave of hackers from the People’s Republic of China as the PRC moves to steal from cutting-edge manufacturers.

The German government

is now moving to shield companies from state-backed hackers and criminal gangs, offering to pay to harden the defenses of Germany’s most vulnerable firms.

This is a start, but it’s insufficient.

Hacks like this, originating as they do from a fundamentally autocratic nation, can only be taken as state-sanctioned, if not outright -directed, as such they are overt acts of aggression, and so they require commensurately serious responses.

Germany—and the US where we’re hacked against—need to engage in sterner, more concrete responses to the PRC’s hacks.  Such responses should include sanctions against PRC companies in the same or similar industries as the hacked companies that range from punitive tariffs to barring those companies from doing business in Germany or the US to blocking their access to deutschmarks and dollars.  Further responses should include cyber attacks against PRC companies in the same or similar industries as the hacked companies with goals ranging from temporarily blocking their operations to permanently damaging them.