Category Archives: Government

Britain, Economic, Government, Internet, Technology

5G and why we need it

TELECOMMUNICATIONS

5G

5G is the “fifth generation” upgrade to mobile telecommunications. It does not consist of a single new operating system but a “systems of systems” that will dramatically increase data speeds to such an extent you’ll be able to download a movie in just three seconds. It will also increase internet capacity a thousand-fold when it’s fully operational.

There is a big difference between 4G and 5G capabilities. 4G, like all the ‘G’s before it, is principally designed for smartphone browsing. 5G, however, is far more ambitious, linking together all kinds of devices, from household appliances such as fridges and washing machines to cars and electricity meters.

It is supposed to create what has been termed the “internet of things”, where everything we use in our day-to-day lives can be controlled remotely. For example, you could use the 5G network to control your washing machine from the other side of the world. It could also speed up the development of driverless cars by allowing vehicles to interact with each other.

5G will become increasingly relevant with a pressing need for it. In its strategy document for 5G rollout, published in 2017, the UK Government predicted that global data traffic would grow from 3.7 exabytes (3.7 billion-billion bytes of information, where one byte is equivalent to a short email) in 2015 to 30.6 exabytes in 2020. That’s the same as if the number of passengers on London’s Tube network grew by 53 per cent every year. Without an upgrade, existing systems face being overloaded.

There are also government policies which are dependent on 5G. If we are to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 – the ambitious target which was unveiled by former Prime Minister Theresa May last summer – then we will need to make much smarter use of the electricity grid. The 5G network would allow household appliances like fridges and electric car charges to switch in and out of the grid when needed.

There are risks with 5G. An “internet of things”, where every appliance is interconnected, provides new opportunities for hackers to interfere with electronic systems. They could potentially seize control of vehicles and cause them to crash, or by hacking smart door locks to gain entry to households.

Hostile nations could exploit 5G to try to disrupt our utility supplies, nuclear plants or airports. There are also serious privacy issues as 5G will make it easier for governments and corporations to track our lives one click at a time. But there are also considerable advantages – 5G networks involve far more secure data encryption. So, while there will be more appliances for hackers to target, doing so won’t be easy.

 

WHOEVER builds the 5G grid, or supplies equipment for it, could potentially plant bugs to allow interference with the network or enable mass surveillance by accessing data.

Huawei has repeatedly denied that it is an arm of the Chinese state, but as a Chinese company it is vulnerable to the control of a dictatorship with an appalling human rights record.

We wouldn’t allow a Chinese company to supply fighter jets for the RAF, goes the argument, and therefore we shouldn’t allow one to supply vital communications infrastructure.

Former national security adviser Lord Ricketts has dismissed the fears, however, saying: “I personally think we can find a solution which does allow them to have some role.”

Another serious concern is what it would mean for Britain’s role within the “Five Eyes” network of security partners – the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Britain – who frequently exchange intelligence. Canada has yet to make a decision, while New Zealand initially stopped Huawei providing 5G equipment but has since said it has not imposed a complete ban.

The United States is worried. Donald Trump doesn’t trust Huawei to build even the smallest part of our 5G network and the US has warned that it might be reluctant to share intelligence with the UK if we utilise the services of the Chinese company – although MI5 chief Andrew Parker recently claimed that this is an unlikely consequence. Some analysts have argued that the US is only saying this as a protectionist ruse in its ongoing trade war with China.

Yet, that doesn’t explain why Australia, too, has banned Huawei from building its own 5G network. The chair of Australia’s intelligence and security committee, Andrew Hastie, claims it is a question of “digital sovereignty”, while his colleague James Paterson points out: “Successive Australian governments banned Huawei from our broadband and 5G networks with very little controversy.”

In any case, no US company currently makes 5G network equipment. Instead, the US is considering subsidising Swedish firm Ericsson and Finnish company Nokia in order to help develop its own 5G network. In the US, T-Mobile has already switched on a slower version of its 5G network, claiming it covers 200 million people.

Some of our other allies are also refusing to denounce the Chinese firm. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is reluctant to ban Huawei, fearing retaliation against German companies exporting to China. France, too, has said it will allow Huawei to build parts of its 5G network.

Under Theresa May’s premiership, the government announced that Huawei would be allowed to provide equipment for the periphery of the 5G network, such as masts, but not the control systems at the core of the network. The security services – MI5, MI6 and GCHQ – claim that the risk to 5G from using a Chinese supplier is manageable.

But one complication that will need to be resolved is that our existing 3G and 4G telecoms networks already contain equipment manufactured by Huawei. In 2005, for example, BT signed a contract with Huawei that allowed it to connect customer lines to the main part of the network.

The UK Government announced this week that it is to stick to its existing policy, which is to allow Huawei to build communication towers and other peripheral equipment for the 5G network but ban it from the core parts of the network (such as military intelligence). Measures were also announced to reduce future reliance on China’s involvement by imposing a 35 per cent cap on Huawei’s share of the market.

Our Government claims that Huawei has such a technological head-start in creating 5G equipment that shunning it would delay the introduction and considerably increase costs. Alternative, though significantly more expensive, suppliers are ZTE, which is owned by the Chinese government, Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung (South Korean) and Viettel (owned by the Vietnamese military). The actual cost to the Government of Huawei’s input into 5G is unknown, as is the time frame. Restricting Huawei’s involvement would have delayed the launch of 5G by up to two years and cost the economy between £4.5billion and £6.6billion, according to a 2019 report by the telecoms industry body, Mobile UK.

We could have decided to upgrade the existing 4G network which would have given extra capacity for now. But, in the long run, that would have led to Britain lagging behind in telecommunications.

The pros and cons of using Huawei

Advantages –

. Banning the Chinese would reduce the number of companies supplying 5G, decreasing competition and leading to a rise in costs for consumers.

. Whitehall officials have also said it would cost the UK economy tens of billions of pounds in the coming years, from the lost opportunity of the productive gains of using 5G.

. There would also be a cost to companies who have started to roll it out across the country.

. Officials have warned that by barring Chinese involvement could slow down the rollout of 5G by up to three years.

. Huawei’s exclusion would likely damage relations with China, where Britain is also seeking to strike a post-Brexit trade deal.

The Risks –

. The U.S. says Huawei could be used as a back door for spying by the Chinese state.

. Critics have also warned China could use its access to Britain’s data network to shut down critical national infrastructure.

. There are fears the UK could lose its intelligence sharing relationship with countries such as the US and Australia, who have warned against allowing Huawei anywhere near their networks.

. Members of the US Congress have also threatened to block a future post-Brexit trade deal if the UK pushed ahead with using Huawei.

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Britain, Government, History, Israel, Society

Holocaust Commemoration: The horrors that still echo

75TH COMMEMORATION

SEVENTY-FIVE years on, the sheer evil and depravity against mankind defies comprehension.

Generations may have passed, but we still share the appalling horror felt by Red Army troops as they walked into Auschwitz.

Dispassionate history books describe the site as a “concentration camp”. It would be more accurately portrayed as hell on earth: a grotesque symbol of the horrifying consequences of man’s atrocious barbarism to his fellow man.

In total, more than six million people – overwhelmingly Jews – were exterminated in Nazi gas chambers and crematorium ovens. Victims, by accident of birth, of Hitler’s depraved ideology of Aryan supremacy.

As the last frail survivors pass into history, it is imperative the world never forgets the Holocaust. Never forget how, even in our professedly civilised modern world, far removed from the slaughter of those death camps, disagreement can mutate terrifyingly quickly into hostility and dehumanisation.

That was the premise of Prince Charles’s powerful warning in a speech at a solemn event in Israel marking 75 years since Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945.

Standing alongside world leaders, the heir to the throne said: “Hatred and intolerance still lurk in the human heart, still tell lies, adopt new disguises and still seek new victims.”

Seventy-five years on, he asked, is our strife-torn society in danger of losing sight of the lessons from the atrocity? “All too often,” he said, “words are used as badges of shame to mark others as enemies.”

Prince Charles’ wise remarks as a chastisement to those who, even today, cultivate the wickedness of anti-Semitism and other disgraceful bigotry.

Listen to Jewish Labour ex-minister Dame Margaret Hodge. In the Commons she has lamented how hard-Left cranks in her party hurl execrable Jew-baiting bile.

Dozens of her family were murdered by the Nazis. Yet, on social media, she’s regularly taunted with photographs of the Auschwitz dead, swastikas and SS guards. Are these depraved morons, hiding behind their keyboards, proud of their nauseating provocations?

The internet drowns with Holocaust denial and repulsive anti-Israel propaganda. It is beyond belief the tech giants allow this foul content – a residue of the Nazi atrocities.

 

MEANWHILE, if the BBC had set out with deliberate cause to offend the Jewish community, they could hardly have achieved it more effectively. One of its senior correspondents has sparked fury by linking the Holocaust to the Palestinian crisis on prime-time TV.

This is why it is so important that influential public dignitaries such as Prince Charles counter such detestable and hate-driven disinformation.

His visit to Yad Vashem, site of the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, was also deeply personal – his grandmother is honoured there for taking immense risks to shelter and save Jewish lives in Nazi-occupied Greece.

Tomorrow, his wife Camilla will represent Britain at a World Holocaust Day ceremony at Auschwitz. Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge will join sombre commemorations here.

All this helps ensure the evil exposed 75 years ago never slips from our memories. A Royal Family serving dutifully as the nation’s moral lodestar.

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China, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Under China’s watchful eye

ORWELLIAN CHINA

Intro: The reality of modern China is no longer Orwellian science fiction. Every face and every move are being tracked. ‘Wrong’ political thoughts punished. All citizens’ lives are being controlled by the State. There are chilling implications for us all

TROUBLE in Hong Kong began earlier last month. Police ruthlessly beat protesters with batons and showered them with pepper spray in violent running battles. Rounds of rubber bullets and tear gas were fired into the crowds of angry but until then peaceful demonstrators.

The scenes in Hong Kong were as shocking as any seen there since the former British territory was handed over to China in 1997.

The handover was supposed to guarantee Hong Kong considerable autonomy and democratic rights under a “one country, two systems” agreement. But now its China-friendly parliament is debating plans to allow the extradition of Hong Kong citizens to mainland China, and a very different legal system. Which is why thousands have continued to besiege government buildings in the city, prompting the brutal crackdowns that have become more prevalent.

Hong Kong is the only spot on Chinese soil where any such protest is still imaginable. But for how much longer?

Be under no illusion, Hongkongers are protesting not in an act of hope but of desperation. With the new extradition law looming over them, they feel that this is their end game.

Beijing’s aim is clear: to turn Hong Kong into a Chinese city like any other. In the new China that means a place with harsher and vastly more efficient repression than we have seen in recent memory.

There are several reasons the Chinese Communist Party deeply distrusts Hong Kong and its way of life and is intent on destroying it.

One is the ability of Hong Kong to remember. In China remembering events the Chinese Communist Party chooses to erase from history is a subversive act and thus forbidden and punished.

Take Tiananmen Square. It was 30 years ago that a brave demonstrator carrying nothing more than a plastic grocery bag was photographed as he stood in front of a tank during protests in the Beijing square against China’s Communist government.

The starkest of images, it encapsulated in one potent frame the struggle for freedom against dictatorial oppression.

 

BUT the courage of this man, whose identity and fate has never been discovered, was to no avail. The regime of Deng Xiaoping cracked down on the revolt, beginning with a massacre of the Tiananmen protesters, followed by the widespread suppression of liberties.

The bloodshed, bullets and bayonets of Tiananmen Square in June 1989 only served to strengthen the Chinese Communist Party, cementing its grip on power and laying the foundations of the China we know today – a China which is now more determined than ever to eliminate all memories of Tiananmen.

In the two decades after the massacre, the Beijing Government pursued a twin-track policy of political authoritarianism combined with economic liberalism. Essentially, the nascent urban middle-classes were offered a deal: share in prosperity and keep your mouths shut.

But this dual approach, while fuelling record growth, gradually began to undermine the authority of the communist regime, as its guiding ideology decayed, and corruption spread. All that changed in 2012 with the arrival in power of the new Party chief and President Xi Jinping, an apparatchik who has turned out to be a ruthless autocrat.

Now effectively President for life, Xi has overseen the return of a merciless Leninist dictatorship, complete with relentless state propaganda, the eradication of dissent and the domination of civic life by the Communist Party.

What makes this development even more forceful is that his Government is using today’s high-tech tools, such as mass video surveillance powered by artificial intelligence, to enforce its rule.

The internet and the cyber revolution have been often hailed as instruments of liberation, but in the hands of Xi Jinping’s state, they have become instruments of repression, mind control and political manipulation.

Communist dictatorship has been given a digital rebirth.

This is not the story we are usually told in the West. Politicians in Europe tend to focus on the threat of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. They all but ignore the reality of the far greater challenge from the evermore ambitious China.

Many Westerners have, indeed, long clung to the delusion that a more open economy and increasing growth will automatically bring political liberalisation to China.

The argument went that if we engaged and traded with China, the country would slowly start to resemble us. But that was nothing more than wishful thinking. Domestic repression is accelerating, while the regime seeks greater global influence.

The inability of officialdom to effectively face up to this threat is perfectly illustrated by the explosive controversy over the British Government’s plan to allow the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei to play a key role in the creation of the new generation 5G network here, despite the profound reservations of allies like the United States and Australia, who remain gravely concerned about the security implications.

Trying to downplay such anxieties, Huawei’s boss Ren Zhengfei has given assurances that his company “will never cause damage to a nation or an individual”. But this ignores the fact that an intelligence service law from 2017 obliges all “Chinese organisations and citizens” to “support, aid and co-operate with the work of the national secret service”.

There is breathtaking naivety and complacency about the true nature of Xi Jinping’s China. Far from being more pluralistic, China’s structure as a one-party state has been reinforced.

“The party rules everything,” says Xi, a chilling statement of fact that embraces every institution from the universities and the media to the civil service. Indeed, the party is now an organisation with no fewer than 89 million members, more than the entire population of Germany or, indeed, Britain.

In this climate, a new cult of Xi’s personality is accompanied by the punishment of any deviation from the ruling orthodoxy. The lives of China’s 1.4 billion citizens are saturated in Communist propaganda, including patriotic songs in nursery schools, banners on urban buildings, posters of Xi and output in the state-controlled media. Some taxis carry LED screens on their roofs showing party slogans.

Chairman Mao had his little Red Book. Xi has his Little Red App, launched in January this year, whereby citizens can collect reward points while reading socialist texts.

More aggressively, through show trials and arrests, the Communist regime aims to strike terror into anyone who still dares challenge the state.

This quest for ideological control has seen bloggers, journalists, campaigners and civil rights lawyers silenced; some have disappeared all together, others are forced to appear on TV, confessing to misdeeds. According to Xi, the Chinese legal system is “the handle in the knife of the party”.

 

A KEY element of Chinese propaganda is, as stated above, the rewriting of history. “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past,” wrote George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984 – a stance the Beijing regime has eagerly adopted.

A permanent state-run exercise in collective amnesia is under way, as shown by the way any reference to the Tiananmen Square atrocity has been gradually eradicated.

Over the years, the “counter-revolutionary riots” became known first as “the riots”, then “the political storm” and eventually just “the incident”. In the end even the “incident” dissolved into silence, as if an old photograph had faded until only a meaningless silhouette remained. Many of those under 30 years of age have no idea that it ever took place.

Chairman Mao once said that the Chinese Communist revolution “relies on guns and pens.” Guns and pens also go together in the case of Tiananmen Square. The state’s troops murdered the protesters; the state’s writers murder the truth.

By promoting freedom of expression, modern technology was meant to be an antidote to the poison of oppression. But it has not worked out like that in China.

Under Xi’s regime, this sophisticated technology has been harnessed as a weapon for the classic Communist Party tactics of intimidation, indoctrination and censorship. What we are witnessing is the return of totalitarianism in digital guise. When he was first installed in power, Xi gave the order to “win back the commanding heights of the internet”, a task that Westerners might have thought impossible given the web’s reputation for anarchic freedom.

But the Communists did it. They intimidated dissident bloggers, deleted accounts and demanded ideological compliance and censorship from providers.

Users of one of the most lively and popular social media tools, Weibo – China’s version of Twitter – were brought to heel in 2013 by the simple device of threatening jail sentences for “spreading rumours”. Political discussions were quickly dropped by Weibo, with the site confining itself to entertainment, commerce and propaganda.

Perhaps even more stunning is the Chinese state’s exploitation of monitoring techniques and facial recognition systems powered by artificial intelligence to impose strict conformity on its citizens.

Unlike much of the West, China is unencumbered by concerns about data protection and privacy, so it is using its cyber-expertise to forge ahead in this field.

The process is fuelled by the state placing a priority on cutting edge research and the population’s enthusiasm for mobile technology – no less than 60 per cent of all the world’s cashless transactions in 2017 took place in China, while the country is the world’s biggest market for e-commerce.

A new society is being born, one dominated by the all-seeing, all-powerful eye of the Government. By next year, China plans to have 600 million CCTV cameras, strengthening the apparatus of the surveillance infrastructure.

Already, the impact on individual life is phenomenal. At railway stations in cities like Guangzhou and Wuhan, for instance, entry is only allowed to people once their faces have been scanned and checked against a police database. And this is just the beginning.

The citizens of Hong Kong understand the extent of the state’s reach. During the initial protests there were long lines at the metro ticket machines because people didn’t want to use their rechargeable Octopus cards for fear of leaving a digital trail that could connect them to the protest.

A central component of the new China is the planned “Social Credit System”, which will gather data on the behaviour of each citizen to ensure, through rewards and penalties, adherence to the state’s rules on personal responsibility.

It is being trialled in places such as Rongcheng, where residents start with 1,000 “social credit” points, then earn bonuses or reductions according to their conduct, like obedience at traffic signals or remarks about the party on social media.

Digital technology even dictates the supply of lavatory paper in some of Beijing’s public facilities, with users given a restricted number of sheets in their allotted time once their faces have been recognised by the dispenser.

In China’s bold new vision, omnipresent algorithms create economically productive, socially harmonised and politically compliant subjects, who will ultimately censor and sanction themselves at every turn. In the old days, the party demanded fanatical belief; now mute complicity will suffice.

Of course, China’s plans are not just for domestic consumption. The country is exporting its surveillance and artificial intelligence technology all over the world.

And other autocracies are eager buyers, keen to ape China’s authoritarianism. Western democracies are also supplicants – as Britain proves with its courting of Huawei, hailed by Chinese police as being a “close partner” in “technological” and “digitalised” police work.

 

THE technological export drive is part of China’s concerted effort to expand its global influence. Until the recent past, the Beijing Government was deeply reluctant to play any role on the international stage, preferring to concentrate on domestic problems. But again, all that has changed under Xi Jinping, whose outlook combines socialist ideology with nationalistic pride.

The latter impulse is demonstrated in a host of initiatives: in the massive expansion of China’s military; in the funding of Chinese institutes in Western universities and think tanks; in the control of Chinese student associations overseas; in the creation of global propaganda machines like the television’s “Voice of China” whose European headquarters was recently set up in London; in the vast Chinese investments in Africa and South America; in the support for colossal infrastructure projects like Britain’s new nuclear power plant at Hinckley Point; any in the ferocity of response to any attacks on Xi’s regime.

The brave and proud Hongkongers out in the streets are a living rebuttal for the party’s claim that the Chinese aren’t cut out for democracy. And that is exactly why our governments should stand by them.

Xi’s regime has shown that it sees itself in ideological competition with us. Through its slide back to totalitarianism, it has rejected our values and tries to undermine them. For the sake of our own future, we must be willing to defend them.

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