Category Archives: Economic

Britain, Economic, Government, National Security, Russia, Society, United States

Russia’s ‘tremendous weapon’

CYBER WARFARE

SECURITY CHIEFS have warned that tens of thousands of British families’ computers have been targeted by Russia – potentially paving the way for a devastating cyber-attack.

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They fear the Kremlin is trying to identify vulnerabilities allowing it to “lay a foundation for offensive future operations” that could cripple Britain.

The concern is that Russia could take control of these devices then use them to overload vital infrastructure systems such as banks, water supplies, energy networks, emergency services and even the Armed Forces.

A so-called “man-in-the-middle” attack could be carried out anonymously because the Government would not know who had hacked into these systems in UK homes.

Security chiefs said they feared Moscow-backed hackers were trying to create a “tremendous weapon” to unleash in “times of tension”. Britain’s eavesdropping agency GCHQ, the White House and the FBI have launched an unprecedented joint alert about “malicious cyber activity” carried out across the globe by the Kremlin.

They warned that Moscow was mounting a campaign to exploit vulnerable devices and threaten “our respective safety, security, and economic well-being”. It followed a recent warning that Vladimir Putin was ready to retaliate for the Western air strikes on Syria, where Bashar al-Assad’s regime is backed by Russia.

Britain has been tracking the online activity for more than a year, a spokesperson for the National Cyber-Security Centre (NCSC) said.

Kremlin-sponsored actors were said to be using “compromised routers” to conduct “spoofing” – when the attacker hides their identity – to “support espionage… and potentially lay a foundation for future offensive operations”.

In an unusual transatlantic briefing the NCSC said there are millions of machines being globally targeted, with the intent of trying to seize control over connectivity.

“In the case of targeting providers of internet services, it’s about gaining access to their customers to try to gain control over the devices.

“The purpose of these attacks could be espionage, it could be the theft of intellectual property, it could be positioning or use in times of tension. All of the attacks have directly affected the UK.”

The FBI says that US government experts had found themselves “unwittingly on the frontline of the battle” against Moscow’s cyber-attacks. The Bureau said that, if Russia were able to hack into a wireless router then “own it”, hackers could monitor all the traffic going through it. “It is a tremendous weapon”.

A White House cyber security co-ordinator warned the Kremlin that the US and Britain would respond to any attack. The UK has previously carried out a huge cyber offensive against Islamic State, and the US attacked the Iranian nuclear programme by launching the Stuxnet cyber- attack in 2010 which wholly deactivated the programme’s centrifuges.

The US and UK insist they are pushing back hard and say that cyber activity must be stopped and opposed at every turn. They are confident, however, that Russia has already carried out a co-ordinated campaign to gain access to enterprise, small office routers and residential routers – the kind of things that everyone has in their homes.

The NCSC, FBI and US department of homeland security warned that Russian state-sponsored actors were trying to spy on individuals, industries and the Government.

A joint UK-US statement said “multiple sources” – including private and public sector cyber security research organisations and allies – had reported such activity to governments. The communique said: “Russia is our most capable hostile adversary in cyberspace so dealing with their attacks is a major priority.”

A UK Government spokesperson said: “This is yet another example of Russia’s disregard for international norms and global order – this time through a campaign of cyber espionage and aggression, which attempts to disrupt governments and destabilise business. The attribution of this malicious activity sends a clear message to Russia – we know what you are doing, and you will not succeed.”

 

THE warning from intelligence agencies that Russia is launching a cyber offensive against our Government, infrastructure, companies and even families, with the intention of spreading chaos and panic, is hugely significant.

It is a chilling reminder for everyone – if one were needed – that for Vladimir Putin, bombs, missiles and poison gas aren’t the only weapons of war.

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Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Russia, Society

UK measures and sanctions on Russia still leaves us vulnerable

BRITAINopinion-1

IN measured but uncompromising language, Theresa May handled herself extremely well in the House of Commons this week as she outlined the Government’s response to Vladimir Putin’s use of a lethal nerve and chemical agent on British soil. The Prime Minister’s rhetoric was equal to the profound seriousness of the occasion.

Her resolute demeanour and command of her brief – no doubt learned from her long experience of security matters at the Home Office – put to shame Jeremy Corbyn’s efforts to defend the Russian state and his attempt to score petty political point scoring.

In a new low for British politics, the Labour leader parroted the Kremlin line, suggesting it was unfair to blame Putin without first sending him scientific samples of the toxin in the Salisbury attack.

To his discredit, too, Mr Corbyn even appeared to pin part of the blame on budget cuts to the British diplomatic service.

Corbyn’s response to this grotesque violation of international law and British sovereignty – in which scores of our citizens were put at risk of agonising death – was: “It is essential to maintain robust dialogue with Russia.”

Who would honestly believe dialogue would bring to heel a former KGB officer who exults in presenting himself at stopping at nothing to eradicate his country’s enemies?

Even the SNP in Scotland, never a party solid on defence – incoherent on NATO and divisive over Trident – have grasped the gravity of the situation.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said: “It is very clear that Russia cannot be permitted to unlawfully kill or attempt to kill people on the streets of the UK with impunity.”

The SNP’s party’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford assured the Commons that his party backed the Government and that “a robust response to the use of terror on our streets” was required.

However, we must be realistic. On their own, the measures outlined by the Prime Minister are high unlikely to shake Putin out of his contempt for the international order.

 

YES, Mrs May’s approach is a start. Her expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats identified as spies, the most radical such measure for more than 30 years, should seriously undermine Russia’s intelligence network. These expulsions were always going to be met with a tit-for-tat response.

Other sanctions – including the freezing of Russian state assets deemed a threat, the suspension of high-level contacts and increased security checks on private flights, customs and freight – also sends a signal that Britain will not let state-sponsored gangsterism flourish with impunity.

The truth, though, is that Mrs May held back from other measures that could have inflicted serious harm on the Russian economy.

The reasons for such caution are clear. One is that Britain depends on Russia for 20 per cent of our gas, leaving us desperately vulnerable to punitive Russian reprisals.

Another is that BP, our biggest company, has a vast holding in Russia’s biggest oil company, while the City launders billions in the country’s dirty cash.

And politicians have run down our Armed Forces, spending only £36billion a year on defence. Putin, with a defence budget of £44-50billion – and has an army ten times the size of ours – will feel safe to sneer.

Yet, Russia’s economy is only two-thirds the size of ours. We could be doing much more to match Putin’s military strength.

As for energy security, wasn’t it criminally irresponsible to allow last year’s closure of Britain’s biggest gas storage facility, leaving our reserves at today’s perilously low levels?

Given our vulnerability, the sanctions may have gone as far as Britain could go alone without the international effort needed by straining every sinew to secure.

There is one gesture that could signify abhorrence of the Salisbury atrocity. Whilst it is welcomed that no government minister or member of the Royal family will attend the World Cup in Russia this summer, wouldn’t a boycott by the England team and other countries who are equally infuriated ram home the message more powerfully?

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China, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Essay: The West can no longer be complacent with China

CHINA

WHEN Xi Jinping was a child, his father – then, a high-ranking government minister – fell out of favour with the founder of the People’s Republic, Chairman Mao.

As part of his family’s humiliation, Xi, as an eight-year-old, was paraded on a school stage in a metal dunce’s cap. The audience raised their arms and shouted, “Down with Xi Jinping!” Even Xi’s mother was forced to join in the chanting.

Later, Xi was sent to be “reformed” in an impoverished, rural commune.

Earlier this week, in an extraordinary reversal of fate, that humiliated schoolboy was affirmed as the most powerful man in China since Mao when the People’s Congress in Beijing rubber-stamped a constitutional amendment. In effect, it abolishes the legal limit of two terms on China’s presidency. Xi is now the country’s leader in perpetuity – or as some might have it, dictator.

With cunning ruthlessness, he worked his way through the ranks of the party that treated his family so abhorrently, from local to national politics, and saw off rivals while establishing political and popular support with his war on corruption. And as a former peasant who toiled hard labour in the fields, his “man of the people” credentials have done him no harm.

He has already decreed that his own name and ideas are written into the nation’s constitution, as “Xi Jinping Thought” – an honour he shares only with Mao. We in the complacent West would do well to wake up to the vaulting ambition of the leader of the world’s most populous state. The lingering question now is whether power will go to his head.

We have become used to expansionist threats and sabre-rattling from countries such as Russia and North Korea, but we don’t really expect it from China, which is traditionally insular and inward-looking. It is, after all, the country that built a Great Wall around its borders to keep out foreign influences.

Xi is intent, however, on reversing that centuries-old trend. China has established itself as a global player in trade, is massively expanding its military and now wants global political influence to match. In some ways, this can benefit the West. For example, Xi has put pressure on North Korea’s unstable leader, Kim Jong-un, to halt his erratic missile tests and even to roll back Pyongyang’s nuclear programme. Donald Trump’s boastful remarks recently of a diplomatic breakthrough (with arms talks to come), would have been impossible without Xi’s influence.

If the world becomes a safer place in the short-term as a result of this new willingness on China’s part to play the role of a global power-broker, we should all sigh a sense of huge relief. But as this week’s declaration reveals, Xi isn’t interested in the short-term. His plans are for the much longer-term. He certainly has had several opportunities to get the measure of Trump: First at a meeting last April in Florida at the President’s Mar-a-Lago resort, later at the G20 talks in Hamburg, and then again when the two met in Beijing last November. Whilst they did seem to hit it off on strategic issues, the relationship between them is a strange one. Neither will feel comfortable in a partnership of equals.

President Trump has already asserted his independence by announcing serious trade restrictions on Chinese steel and other imports. Yet, China is not only a major trading partner of the US, but a colossal underwriter of American debt. The government in Washington could not function without borrowing hundreds of billions, financed largely by Chinese loans. If China withdraws that support, in direct retribution for Trump’s trade blockade, what will happen to the US economy?

And, if Xi stops applying pressure on North Korea, what happens to Trump’s much vaunted peace talks? The Chinese President has manoeuvred himself, not just into one commanding position, but into a whole array of them.

It is not only America that is suddenly uncomfortably aware of Chinese strength. India, too, is eyeing its immense neighbour with unease after Xi sent China’s new navy into the Indian Ocean. This none-too-subtle display was prompted by a dispute over international policies concerning the Maldives. China, which has committed huge investment into developing its naval fleet, knows the world will take notice of a fleet of modern battleships. Meanwhile, across Eurasia, Xi has been the driving force for a new Silk Road linking China’s factories to Western Europe via Putin’s Russia, making Moscow the willing junior partner of Beijing.

All this confirms Xi Jinping as the most powerful and ambitious man in Chinese politics since the death of Chairman Mao more than 40 years ago – with one significant difference. Mao wanted to break completely with China’s cultural past – the hallmark of the bourgeoise – Xi has a different strategy and wants to celebrate it.

XI is determined to restore the country’s links to its heritage and arts by fostering a new creed of nationalism in place of Communism. Chinese artworks and treasures, which were scattered to the winds during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, are being brought back from the West by Chinese multimillionaires who see themselves as nationalist champions. Xi’s own wife, Peng Liyuan, a singer who entertained the troops after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, is at the forefront of this movement.

From the arts to geopolitics, trade wars to nuclear peace talks, Xi seems to have thought of everything. His carefully constructed powerbase may have one weak point: If he is president for life, then the ambitions of the country’s rising stars below him could be thwarted. That would risk political stagnation and infighting.

But for now, the West cannot risk complacency, especially now that China is controlled by the Thoughts of President Xi. If Mao gave China independence, and former leader Deng Xiaoping rebuilt the economy, then Xi is dedicated to making it a force to be reckoned with once more.

 

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