Daily Archives: 2 January 2020

Countering Interference

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The Republic of China has passed a law aimed at blocking the People’s Republic of China’s efforts at interfering with the RoC’s elections, which will occur 11 Jan.

Passage gained urgency after RoC opposition parties—especially the KMT—nominated candidates who openly and enthusiastically support “reunification” with the PRC and after the PRC’s influence over RoC media companies became overt.  The PRC has been

providing campaign funds and even mobilized support on social media for candidates from the main opposition Nationalist Party (KMT)….

These elections, with President Tsai Ing-wen expected to be reelected despite PRC interference, make this an especially fragile time for the nation.

It would be good if the rest of us openly supported the RoC’s efforts at maintaining its freedom: talking freely in support of the RoC, sailing navy flotillas through the Taiwan Strait with port calls along the way, increasing economic ties and restoring diplomatic ties, sailing close to and overflying PRC-occupied islands in the South China Sea, and on and on.

“New Strategic Weapon”

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Baby Kim, MFWIC of northern Korea has told us all that he’ll soon unveil one of these. Timothy Martin, writing in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, speculated that it’ll likely be something along traditional lines.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said the world will witness a “new strategic weapon” from the isolated regime in the near future as he sees little reason to stick with his country’s suspension of testing long-range missile technology.
But Mr Kim left vague whether the new weapon would be a nuclear test or an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Maybe it’s neither. Maybe it’s a cyber weapon, a broad suite of malware, perhaps, or a collection of mini-EMP devices. Either of those, or their combination, could paralyze us, leaving us not on our knees, but prostrate and helpless, given the lack of effort our government and our defense establishment have put into developing defenses in that milieu, and far more so and at far less cost to northern Korea than some bombs or missiles.