Category Archives: defense policy

But It’ll Help

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Jason Riley says banning TikTok won’t solve data security problems.

TikTok is hardly the only social-media platform that offers heaping platefuls of misinformation and political propaganda. It isn’t even the only app owned by a Chinese company that gathers extensive data on American users. WeChat, the messaging app developed by the Chinese tech firm Tencent, is another. ….
Another problem with banning TikTok might be that it will do little if anything to address data-security concerns. Foreign and domestic tech companies capture mountains of user information, which enable them to target advertising. TikTok is far from the worst offender. A 2022 Consumer Reports study noted that Google and Meta collect much more data than TikTok.

Congratulations to Riley: he’s successfully identified how widespread and hoary in age that failure is.

Riley also is too narrowly focused. No one move will, by itself, solve data security problems. That, though, does not at all mean that no one move should be made; it just puts a premium on taking additional steps, ideally in concert with each other, but at least take them.

In the end, too, our government wouldn’t be banning TikTok: the PRC government, through TikTok‘s owner ByteDance, would be the one banning TikTok in the US. The PRC’s choice is clear: allow TikTok to continue operating in the US by selling it to a non-PRC-domiciled business or, by refusing, ban the app.

Nor are there any real free-speech concerns with a ban of TikTok. There are a plethora of other messaging and marketing venues. No one’s speech would be limited in any way; only a single tool, well used by an enemy nation for espionage against us, would be limited.

Riley concluded with this:

The reality is that nothing TikTok does is unique to TikTok, and China doesn’t need the app to access our data. If Congress wants to do something about digital privacy, it will have to do better than this.

Absolutely. But doing better requires, of necessity, first starting to do something.

“Mistake”

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The Pentagon has finally got around to recognizing the dual nature of businesses domiciled in the People’s Republic of China, and it has listed a number of companies as being dual military and commercial companies. Among them are Cosco Shipping; CATL (Contemporary Amperex Technology), which is trying to ram a new CATL battery factory down the throats of a Michigan community whose residents adamantly don’t want it; and WeChat owner Tencent Holdings. I think WeChat ought to be on that list, too, but that’s for another time.

CATL and Tencent in particular are bellyaching about their listing.

Tencent said its inclusion “is clearly a mistake. We are not a military company or supplier. Unlike sanctions or export controls, this listing has no impact on our business. We will nonetheless work with the Department of Defense to address any misunderstanding.”

And

CATL has never engaged in any military-related business or activities….

CATL also says it’ll sue if they can’t have its way.

The claims are…silly…given the already dual nature of all businesses domiciled in the PRC as intelligence gathering and commercial operations under the PRC’s 2017 National Intelligence Law. The whole point of that law is to put PRC companies at the behest of the nation’s intelligence community for espionage and, by extension, at the behest of the nation’s People’s Liberation Army for use of their products and development of related products as guided by that espionage.

Why Indeed

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Elizabeth Braw, of the Atlantic Council, in her Friday Wall Street Journal op-ed, wondered why the People’s Republic of China would want to undermine global shipping.

Undermining the global maritime order seems an odd strategy for a country that owes its rapid economic rise to the oceans.

It’s not an odd strategy at all. The PRC has observed the economic, political, and military power that has accrued to the United States since WWII by our nation’s control of the seas and protection of global shipping. The aggressively acquisitive PRC (South China Sea; East China Sea; naval bases around the world, including Atlantic Ocean coastal Africa and Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean coastal South America) is now sailing a formidable combat navy and a very large dual use merchant marine fleet. The PRC also has publicly stated its goal of supplanting the US as the global hegemon.

The PRC, with that globally capable navy and merchant marine, now believes it can achieve that.

The straight and simply stated answer to Braw’s question is that the PRC doesn’t want to undermine global shipping at all. It wants to be the power that controls it, with all of that economic, political, and military power redounding to it and with the parallel result of a reduction of the US by the same magnitude.

Sometimes political science isn’t rocket science.

Since Mexico Won’t

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Supporters of Republican President-elect Donald Trump are making noises about military strikes against the drug cartels in Mexico. Newly elected Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is downplaying the matter while she makes noises about her government taking the cartels seriously.

Sheinbaum has rushed to show her administration isn’t soft on drugs and migrants. Her government has gone after fentanyl smugglers in Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel, seizing 1.3 tons of the drug in a record bust. She has sent her security minister to Sinaloa to oversee the efforts to take back control of a state where organized crime dominates the political establishment and two factions are in a turf war.
Mexico is in talks to set up a unit of elite security officers who would be vetted and trained by US law-enforcement officials for operations against criminals in Mexico, according to Mexican officials.

The fentanyl bust seems like a large number, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the total fentanyl output of Mexico’s drug cartels, an output that includes both their own production and their transshipment of fentanyl through Mexico to the US. The talks regarding the elite unit appear to be just chit-chat for show, given how progress in setting up the unit is close to nil.

There’s no reason to believe that Sheinbaum is any more serious about the fentanyl flows than was her predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who functionally aided the cartels with his hugs instead of jails policy.

The facts remain that the cartels are poisoning us, and so far the Mexican government is allowing that. The Mexican government has even allowed various of the cartels to take over and operate many of Mexico’s cities, and the cartels own and operate the state of Sinaloa. That’s the central government functionally abetting the cartels.

As noted above, Sheinbaum is making noises about returning Sinaloa to government control, but nothing is happening so far. Meanwhile, the fentanyl continues to flow. If all Sheinbaum has is noise, or if she really does try and does not succeed, it may be necessary for the US to take down the cartels ourselves. American lives depend on it.

Namby-Pamby

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It seems that Yemen is turning out hard to deter from its attacks on Israel. It shouldn’t be surprising that it seems so, given the Progressive-Democrat Biden administration’s lack of effort seriously to deter the Houthis in Yemen even from attacking commercial shipping in the nearby waters of the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.

Despite hundreds of American and allied strikes and the deployment of a US Navy flotilla to the Red Sea, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have kept up a steady drumbeat of attacks on commercial shipping passing through the vital waterway and lobbing missiles at Israel.

Those hundreds of strikes have never been a serious attempt to deter the terrorists. They’ve just been reactive pin-pricks and tit-for-tat hits against the launch site(s) responsible for particular shots taken at shipping or, lately, at Israel. Virtue-signaling doesn’t deter much of anything.

It’s certainly true that terrorists who view martyrdom as a thing to be sought will be harder to deter than many other entities. However, were serious efforts made—were the Biden administration with or without the meekly passive participation of European governments—to destroy all of the terrorists’ launch sites, weapons and missile caches, the terrorists resident in them or nearby, in parallel with cutting off their resupply by sinking Iranian shipping carrying the resupply, deterrence qua deterrence would be irrelevant. The Houthis can’t shoot what they don’t have.

This, too:

The Houthis have withstood a nearly decadelong campaign by Saudi Arabia aimed at unseating them.

In this regard, the Houthis have been actively aided and abetted by the Progressive-Democrat Biden administration, beginning with their cutoff of arms sales to Saudi Arabia over the latter’s attacks on Houthi installations and Houthis themselves. The Biden claque masqueraded that cutoff as recompense for a Saudi’s murder of a journalist. That they’d be aiding terrorists hasn’t mattered to them. Virtue-signaling again.