Category Archives: National Security

Defence, Government, National Security, NATO, Politics, Society

Enlarging NATO will be problematic. But Poland wants new members…

NATO

At a conference in the Polish city of Wroclaw on 12 June, the Polish defence minister, Tomasz Siemoniak, said that Macedonia and Montenegro should be invited to join NATO at next year’s summit in Warsaw. The two former Yugoslav nations want to join the 28-country military alliance, but any move to do so could increase already high-tensions between the Western alliance and Russia.

Any invitation, however, is likely to draw scorn from Moscow. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has opposed any expansion of NATO that includes the former communist nations in eastern and southeast Europe, claiming that it is a purposefully provocative move. Russia’s foreign minister has repeatedly warned against NATO approaching Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro, saying that NATO allowing those countries to join would be solely aimed at undermining Russia.

This type of disagreement – asking countries to choose allegiance to either the West or East – was the ideological barrier that fuelled the Cold War for more than 40 years and lies at the heart of the current conflict in eastern Ukraine. Some believe that the war in the contested region of Donbas, Ukraine, is deliberately designed to stop the country from being eligible for NATO selection, as the alliance does not typically allow nations to join while a conflict remains unresolved. Experts say this tactic, known as a ‘frozen conflict’, was used in the 2008 war in Georgia.

In 1999, former communist countries began joining NATO en masse, including the former Soviet states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania who all joined in 2004. In the Balkan region, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Slovenia and Romania are members of the alliance.

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Climate Change, Government, National Security, Politics, Society

The societal, cultural and geopolitical impacts of climate change…

CLIMATE CHANGE

CLIMATE CHANGE has been synonymous with polar bears and deforestation, but these days climatologists are paying more attention to people.

For many years now, climate change studies have tended to focus and rely on numbers-heavy charts and complex models to report on phenomena such as shrinking polar caps, melting glaciers and permafrost, caribou, the declining populations of reindeer and seal, as well as rising sea levels from Nigeria to the Maldives to the South Pacific.

In recent times, however, ethnographers, think tanks and sociologists have begun looking more closely at the social and cultural impacts of climate change on indigenous communities. Studies have been published on subjects including the Wauja people in Brazil (who have been impacted by the shrinking Amazon rain forest and industrialisation), Sami reindeer-herding communities across a warmer northern Scandinavia, as well as how the Bantu- and Khoisan-speaking tribes in the Kalahari Basin of sub-Saharan Africa have been affected. Of particular interest are the subsistence communities in Bangladesh and Malaysia whose coastal settlements are at continued risk of flooding from typhoons, monsoons and higher sea levels. Such research reflects a growing realisation in academic and policy circles that cultures and societies tied to nature have multigenerational knowledge that gives them special insight into changes in nature and the environment.

In the last decade or so, it has suddenly become apparent that the impact on people is really important and should be more than just an afterthought. There is undoubtedly an increasing realisation that climate change is more than a scientific artefact.

In 2014, Earth had its hottest year since weather record-keeping began 135 years ago. The 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1998, with nine of the total in the 21st century, according to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Recent studies show changes happening more quickly than predicted. The highly credible journal Science reported in March that the southern Antarctic ice sheet suddenly began losing its mass in 2009 at a steady and fast rate.

There is also growing interest in the geopolitical effects of climate change. The Brookings Institute, for example, estimates that for every percentage point rise in average temperature and drop in average rainfall, violent conflict between neighbouring states rises 4 percent, while violent conflict between groups within states climbs 14 percent. Scholars foresee, too, new shipping routes opening up as the Arctic ice cap shrinks still further, potentially leading to military conflicts. Russia, for instance, planted a flag on the seabed below the North Pole in 2007 and has some 4,300 miles of Arctic coastline.

In violence-plagued northern Mali, a desiccated landscape of dust and mud huts where the average rainfall is a third less than it was nearly two decades ago, scholars recently blamed a climate-change induced drought for fuelling conflict between Tuareg separatist rebels (who need water and grass for their cattle herds), as well as government-backed forces. In March, the National Academy of Sciences published a peer-reviewed study stating that ‘there is evidence that the 2007-2010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria.’ This was a devastating drought that led to widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families towards urban centres. Some studies suggest climate change will produce permanent refugees.

Last October the Pentagon published a report which said: ‘Climate change poses immediate risks to national security.’ Chuck Hagel, then defence secretary, referred to climate change as being a “threat multiplier” that could exacerbate the spread of infectious diseases and armed insurgencies. And President Barack Obama picked up that thread in May, telling graduating cadets at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy that climate change ‘constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security’ as well as invoking how those threats will impact on how the U.S. military defends its country.

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Government, Intelligence, National Security, Society, Technology

Britain’s security and intelligence services: Responsibility not just power

SECURITY SERVICES

Intro: Given the extent of their reach and a recent parliamentary report into their activities an operational realignment is called for

Our security and intelligence agencies face greater challenges today than ever before. Advanced and sophisticated technology has become commonplace, and the world strains to keep up or nearly buckles under the weight of our digital communications. Monitoring the activities of terrorists, criminals and other malign forces have become difficult to spot because of the subversive methods they use in defying detection.

Bodies such as GCHQ, though, are hardly mere victims of the electronic advance. You may often hear security chiefs talking about their desperate searches for needles in haystacks, but the fact is they have an impressive operational capacity to cut through a lot of the chaff in order to find what they seek.

The Security and Intelligence Services (SIS) ability to obtain and examine vast swathes of raw data and processed information has been furiously debated ever since the revelations of Edward Snowden, the US fugitive, about how the British agency received data relating to UK citizens from America’s National Security Agency up to 2014 – a practice which was branded unlawful by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. Notwithstanding, there will always be a divergence of views between those who place primacy on GCHQ doing anything in its power to maintain public safety, and those who feel unease at the prospect of innocent people being subjected to continued intrusion.

Earlier this month a report on these matters by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee was a notable intervention. The committee members, like many of their peers across other government departments, believe that the bulk collection of data by GCHQ is legitimate and does not amount to unjustified, Orwellian surveillance. But they do appear to accept that the current legislation, which sets the parameters for such activities, is overly complex and lacks transparency. The legislation may have political oversight in regulating the activities of SIS, but its lack of public transparency and accountability was summed up well by the committee’s description of the existing legal framework. Intelligence agencies, they said, were being provided with a ‘blank cheque to carry out whatever activities they deem necessary’. In essence that is a damning indictment on the legislation that governs the work of our intelligence agencies. The committee has called for a new, single piece of legislation to replace and clarify current statutes as a matter of priority by the next government.

The discovery that a handful of intelligence officers have misused surveillance powers and have subsequently been disciplined by their superiors should also be of concern. The committee may speak reassuringly about the number of wrongdoers being in ‘very small single figures’ but the disclosure will hardly boost public confidence in the integrity of Britain’s security personnel. The recommendations of the committee are right, therefore, to suggest that the next government should consider criminalising such improper use of surveillance techniques.

Despite these positive proposals, there is nevertheless something troublingly simplistic about the committee’s top-line conclusion about GCHQ’s bulk interception capability. It says soothingly: ‘GCHQ are not reading the emails of everyone in the UK’. Whilst it is true that thousands of emails are read by security analysts every day, and that there remains a feeling that individual privacy of citizens comes a poor second to other considerations, few would have suggested otherwise against GCHQ’s simple assertion. That may be comforting for some, but surveillance does have the ability to antagonise as well as protect.

At a time when threats to this country are at a pitch not previously seen Britain’s security and intelligence agencies have a difficult job in tracking and monitoring those who wish to do us harm. But it must not be forgotten that the powers invested at their disposal are immense and more than proportionate for which they are needed. Simply asking that they be used responsibly is surely reason enough to help appease those who clamber to an argument of unnecessary state intrusion into many innocent people’s lives. Such a request stems from a belief that the glue which binds British society is primarily the combined force of its liberal values, not one that erodes it through a heavy-booted security capability.

 

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