Category Archives: National Security

Britain, China, Defence, Government, National Security, United States

The Chinese spy balloon: we cannot dismiss the storms

NATIONAL SECURITY: DEFENCE

Tobias Ellwood, Chairman of the Commons Defence Select Committee, has written on the need to thwart China and Russia’s mission to splinter our world into two. He was writing following the shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon by a US fighter jet off the coast of North Carolina.

Mr Elwood asks us to consider if it was the other way around had a US balloon gone into Chinese airspace. The Beijing regime would not have hesitated in shooting it down.

For too long, Ellwood says, America has dithered. With the West preoccupied with helping Ukraine, the diplomatic stand-off that has ensued between Washington and Beijing comes at a time when there is significantly more choreography occurring between the leaders of China and Russia.

Having enjoyed decades of relative peace, those two countries are fully aware that the West has become complacent and have lost its appetite to defend fledgling democracies such as in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya and Yemen.

It is no coincidence, either, that ahead of the invasion of Ukraine almost a year ago, Russia began its immediate military build-up not long after America and NATO retreated from Afghanistan.

Mr Ellwood asserts that together, China and Russia are not just openly pioneering a more authoritarian approach to governance, but are also encouraging other countries to follow suit, as they hope to see not just America but the entire West weakened.

China’s balloon over Montana should prompt another pivotal moment in history: a realisation that a China-Russia axis is looking ever more likely, and that we in the West are ill-prepared for the looming geo-strategic threats that the next decade will throw at us.

During his commentary, Ellwood says that the incident reminds him of what happened in October 1957, when millions of Americans looked to the skies in unprecedented panic after the Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite.

The feat was awesome. It lapped the world every 98 minutes, and was assumed to be peering down with sinister aims.

While Vladimir Putin poses the single largest threat to European security as he leverages Russia’s ability to endure hardship and drag out the Ukraine conflict, China’s President Xi poses a greater geopolitical challenge as he competes with America for global economic and technological dominance. Since gaining office in 2013, he has expanded the Chinese military to become the largest in the world and used Covid as an excuse to build the most advanced domestic surveillance system.

Xi is now starting to flex his muscles. China has taken clusters of rocks deep in international waters south of neighbouring Taiwan and turned them into military fortresses. All illegal under international maritime law – but unimpeded by the West.

Ellwood’s view that this is no time for strategic ambiguity is well stated. We need a clear plan, he says, to check both Russia and China’s destabilising agendas. We must accept that they are bent on a mission to see our world splinter into two spheres of dangerously competing influence. We urgently need to craft a strategy which influences Beijing’s behaviour, rather than one which prompts a reaction each time Xi pushes the envelope further.

Without a coherent approach, the risk of sudden escalation is increasingly likely.

TOUGH QUESTIONS

OF COURSE, all this raises some tough questions for the UK, too. We helped design the post-war security architecture, much of which still functions today.

Our efforts and actions earned us a permanent seat at the UN Security Council created in 1945. Nearly eight decades later, the world has changed. Do we still deserve this seat? And do we still want it?

If the answer is “Yes” – which our actions in Ukraine suggest – we must urgently upgrade our foreign policy, defence posture and international statecraft not only to justify our place at the table, but to anticipate what is coming over the horizon.

It may have been just a weather balloon – but the storms it forecasted are not so easily dismissed.

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Arts, Books, Government, National Security, Society

Book Review: Pegasus

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: The reporting of the world’s most powerful spyware program should teach us that no one is safe from such systems. But will it?

EDWARD SNOWDEN’S infamous leaks in 2013 from the US National Security Agency triggered a global debate around state surveillance – but even he couldn’t quite believe the scale of the story described to him in the summer of 2021.

Whistle-blowers had handed French investigative journalists Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud a list of 50,000 mobile phone numbers. These belonged to people flagged for attack by a cybersurveillance software package called Pegasus.

The investigation that followed is the subject of Pegasus: The story of the world’s most dangerous spyware, a non-fiction thriller and a must-read for all, not just those interested in cryptography and communications. As the authors warn: “Regular civilians being targeted with military-grade surveillance weapons – against their will, against their knowledge, and with no recourse – is a dystopian future we really are careening toward if we don’t understand this threat and move to stop it.”

Pegasus offers a fascinating insight into how journalism is coping with a hyper-connected world. Eyewitnesses and whistle-blowers have better access than ever to sympathetic campaigning journalists worldwide. But this advantage is shared with the very governments, corporations and organised crime networks that want to silence them.

To drag Pegasus into the light, Richard’s ‘Forbidden Stories’ consortium choreographed the activities of more than 80 investigative journalists from 17 media organisations working across four continents and in eight languages. The consortium’s mission is to continue and publish the work of other journalists facing threats, prison or murder.

Its Pegasus investigation commenced in March 2021, knowing full well that it had to conclude by June that year. By then, NSO – the Israeli company that created Pegasus in 2016 – was bound to twig that its brainchild was being hacked.

The bigger the names linked by the consortium to that list of phone numbers, the harder it would be to keep the investigation under wraps. Early on, the name of a journalist called Jorge Carrasco cropped up. He led one of the consortium’s cross-border collaborations, which aimed to finish the investigations of murdered Mexican journalist Regina Martinez. Then things got silly: the names of half the French cabinet appeared. Then president Emmanuel Macron.

The narrative of Pegasus is a pulse-accelerating account that is never afraid to delve into well-crafted technical detail. The authors explain how Pegasus gains free rein on a mobile device without ever tipping off the owner to its presence. It turns out to have evolved out of software designed to serve consumers waiting in queues on tech support call lines.

Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, two of the founders of NSO, cut their teeth developing programs that allowed support technicians to take charge of a caller’s phone.

Before long, a European intelligence service came calling. Eventually, Pegasus was sold to more than 60 clients in over 40 countries. It was the first software to give security services an edge over terrorists, criminal gangs and paedophiles – and over whistle-blowers, campaigners, political opponents, journalists and at least one Emirati princess struggling for custody of her children.

The book is detailed but it isn’t a diatribe against the necessary business of government surveillance and espionage. It is about how, in the contest between ordinary people and the powerful, software is tilting the field wildly in the latter’s favour.

The international journalistic collaboration that was the Pegasus Project sparked the biggest global surveillance scandal since Snowden. It led to a European Parliament inquiry into government spyware, legal action from major tech companies, government sanctions against NSO and countless individual legal complaints.

Yet, the authors spend little time sitting on their laurels. Demand for such systems is only growing. Certain governments are making offers to certain tech firms that add zeroes to the fees NSO once enjoyed. Nor do the authors expect much from the public debate sparked by their investigation: “The issues… might have been raised,” they concede, “but the solutions are not even in the works.”

– Pegasus by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud is published by Macmillan

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Britain, Government, Islamic State, National Security, Politics, Society, Syria, United States

Victory against ISIL can’t mask the incoherent approach in Syria

THE DEFEAT OF ISIL

Intro: The defeat of ISIL has become a cause for celebration, but there are hard security lessons to be learnt as well

FOR those who have participated in the challenging mission to destroy Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) deserve richly awarded plaudits. In the summer of 2014, when ISIL seized control of vast swathes of territory in northern Syria and Iraq to establish its so-called caliphate, removing the fanatical zealots from well-entrenched positions in places like Mosul and Raqqa looked to be a nigh impossible task. At its zenith, ISIL’s caliphate occupied an area approximately the same size as Portugal and controlled the fate of around 10 million people.

Thanks to the relentless efforts of the US-led coalition, ISIL’s empire now consists of little more than a square kilometre of desert scrub on the Syria-Iraq border. ISIL’s barbarous reign of terror is effectively over.

In strictly military terms, the coalition has achieved its stated objectives. With ISIL no longer able to terrorise those living under its control, nor in a position to spread the twisted propaganda that persuaded so many young impressionable Muslims (in Britain and elsewhere) to join the jihadi cause, there is genuine cause for celebration that this brutal death cult is on the verge of annihilation.

It can even be argued, as the former defence secretary Sir Michael Fallon has said, that in prosecuting the ISIL campaign the Western powers have finally found a workable paradigm for implementing military interventions in the Muslim world.

In this instance, the coalition has relied more on the judicious use of air power and special forces to achieve its goal, rather than resorting to the deployment of large-scale, and politically controversial, ground forces, as was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet, before becoming too carried away with the success of the anti-ISIL mission, it is worth remembering that our initial involvement in the Syrian conflict was aimed at destroying an entirely different foe.

Back in 2011, the primary aim of the US and Britain, the two Western powers that have been most heavily invested in the Syrian tragedy, was the overthrow of tyrant and dictator President Bashar al-Assad, whose minority Alawite clan has run the country since 1971.

It is hard to believe now, but former prime minister David Cameron even signed a joint declaration with the then US president Barack Obama in the summer of 2011 calling for Assad to step aside, arguing that he should “face the reality of the complete rejection of his regime by the Syrian people”.

Mr Cameron’s briefly held enthusiasm for securing regime change in Damascus ended when he lost the 2013 Commons vote to launch military action against Assad over accusations the regime has used chemical weapons on civilians.

And, pertinently, given the way the conflict subsequently developed, Cameron and his anti-Assad acolytes had a fortuitous and lucky escape. For, had they succeeded in overthrowing Assad, the fall of the Syrian government might well have resulted in ISIL taking control of the entire country, rather than confining their Islamo-fascist creed to the less populous northern districts.

It was, after all, the very real prospect of ISIL and its Islamist allies seizing control of Syria in the summer of 2014 that persuaded Iran and Russia to come to the aid of the Assad regime, thereby helping to turn the tide of the war decisively in the dictator’s favour.

So much so that these days the British and American governments accept Assad’s survival as a fait accompli, to the extent that neither country has shown the slightest interest in attending the talks aimed at deciding Syria’s post-conflict future.

Hence, the lesson of the West’s inchoate handling of the Syrian conflict is that, rather than celebrating the demise of ISIL’s caliphate, politicians would be better advised to reflect on their incoherent and muddled approach over the past decade, one that, had events taken a different course, could easily have resulted in the establishment of an uncompromising Islamist regime in Damascus.

That is certainly not the outcome Britain and its allies imagined at the start of the conflict, when they manged to convince themselves that the overthrow of Assad’s regime would result in its replacement by a secular-orientated, Western-style democracy.

Given that Islamist extremists have been Assad’s most committed opponents since the early 1980s, this was wishful thinking in the extreme, and the reason why, when considering any future military intervention in the Middle East (or anywhere else for that matter), it is vital that our parliamentarians properly examine the likely consequences of their actions.

All too often in the recent past we have got ourselves involved in conflicts without fully grasping the possible outcomes. A good benchmark would be to give priority to those threats that directly impinge on our own national security.

On that basis, destroying ISIL – a movement committed to carrying out terror attacks in Britain – always made much more sense than seeking to overthrow the Assad regime.

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