Tag Archives: foreign policy

Bar Them

Posted on by
Reply

It turns out the hacks into various cloud-based services and cloud providers by the People’s Republic of China was far more extensive in depth and breadth than heretofore reported.

They came in through cloud service providers, where companies thought their data was safely stored. Once they got in, they could freely and anonymously hop from client to client, and defied investigators’ attempts to kick them out for years.
Cybersecurity investigators first identified aspects of the hack, called Cloud Hopper by the security researchers who first uncovered it, in 2016….
A Wall Street Journal investigation has found that the attack was much bigger than previously known. It goes far beyond the 14 unnamed companies listed in the indictment, stretching across at least a dozen cloud providers, including CGI Group Inc, one of Canada’s largest cloud companies; Tieto Oyj, a major Finnish IT services company; and International Business Machines Corp.

Disgustingly, the cloud providers spent their efforts trying to cover up the breaches rather than working effectively to contain them and eject the spies.

Investigators in and out of government said many of the major cloud companies tried to stonewall clients about what was happening inside their networks. “It was like trying to pin down quicksand,” one investigator said.

Those companies should see their customers walk away, and those companies should be boycotted—and not only of their cloud “services.” They’ve demonstrated that none of their products can be trusted because the companies themselves cannot be trusted.

The government’s response? One example:

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security grew so frustrated by resistance by the cloud companies that they are now working to revise federal contracts that would force them to comply with future probes….

This is the wrong answer. Those contracts should be canceled for cause (obstructing a criminal investigation comes to mind), and those cloud companies barred from doing business with the government. Answers to Requests for Proposals that include these companies as partners or subcontractors in the answers should be rejected, too. Some of the cloud providers became more cooperative after government—ours or overseas—pressure, but that’s not enough.

Cut them all off.

And develop offensive cyber weapons and use them against the PRC’s intelligence, military, and political establishments.

Countering Interference

Posted on by
Reply

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”

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Moves and Countermoves

Posted on by
Reply

The People’s Republic of China is inordinately proud of its only carrier, launched just a couple years ago, and Xi loves to sail it around, showing it off. This time, though, he sailed it.

through the Taiwan Strait. With presidential elections in Taiwan weeks away, officials there have criticized the maneuvers as an intimidation tactic.

Which, of course, it was.

The correct response to this would be for us to sail a carrier, together with a destroyer escort, through the strait. And maybe again, on election day.

For training purposes….

Xi, Lam, and Hong Kong

Posted on by
Reply

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam met in Beijing with People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang earlier this week.  Li said, in a press conference afterward,

The city’s government must continue to make efforts in stopping violence and ending chaos in accordance with the law, and restore order.

On this, I agree.  Lam must have her police stand down from provoking violence in the protests by Hong Kong’s citizens and then using that violence as pretext for shooting tear gas at the protesters, beating them, and shooting them with live ammunition.

Lam must also have her government address in a serious manner—accepting the bulk of them, if not all—the five demands of the protestors:

  • withdrawal the extradition bill [lately done; although nothing has been done to prevent its being reintroduced]
  • Lam to step down
  • inquiry into police brutality
  • release of those arrested
  • greater democratic freedom

To which I add a sixth, a responsibility of the PRC press as well as of Lam’s Hong Kong government and of Xi’s PRC government:

  • To stop characterizing the protesters’ movement as an independence movement

It’s nothing of the sort. The protestors have been at pains to emphasize that they explicitly do not desire independence from the PRC; they want only their rights restored under the one nation, two systems framework promised by the PRC government at the time of handover from Great Britain.

When Lam has her government act responsibly, there can be a just peace and prosperous economic activity in Hong Kong.

The initiative is entirely hers. And Xi’s.