China’s buildup of the surveillance state — “Intelligence Matters”
January 4, 2023 / 6:00 AM / CBS News
This week on “Intelligence Matters,” host Michael Morell speaks with Wall Street Journal reporters Liza Lin and Josh Chin about their new book “Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control.” Their new reporting examines how China’s data collection goes beyond that of other countries as China seeks to create a model to export as an alternative to democratic governance. Lin and Chin detail Silicon Valley’s involvement in the buildup of China’s surveillance state and how the technology is used to surveil Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
HIGHLIGHTS:
CHINA’S ALTERNATIVE TO DEMOCRACY: LIZA LIN: China is probably the only country out there that hopes to use surveillance to create this techno-utopian state. And as we mentioned in our research and in the book, China has this ambition to use the data collected to analyze any future threats to its governance and to identify these threats quickly and do something about it, to create an alternative model to what democracy could offer.
HOW CHINESE SURVEILLANCE DIFFERS FROM OTHER COUNTRIES: LIZA LIN: “And I think the difference between China and many other countries is that all these cameras are largely state owned. Unlike in the U.S., where you have a ton of Amazon ring cameras that are privately owned, a lot of the surveillance cameras that you see on the street in China are owned by government agencies and largely by the Chinese police. And beyond access to those 400 million cameras, the Chinese government still has access to about a billion smartphones that the Chinese citizens use. And that’s because there are a series of national security and intelligence laws that were put in place in China over the last decade that actually allow the Chinese government to have access to a lot of the information that Chinese tech companies collect.”
SILICON VALLEY’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE CREATION OF CHINA’S SURVEILLANCE STATE: JOSH CHIN: If you think about Silicon Valley involvement, it’s huge. And not just in components. If you think about the financial aspect of things, a lot of U.S. private equity companies and venture capital companies were the first companies to give Chinese surveillance startups a leg up in the game by funding them. So there are a lot of ways that the West and in particular the U.S. has contribute
Another lawsuit challenging Canada’s COVID-19 vaccination mandates has been tossed out of court for being “bad beyond argument.”
The claim was filed last May by Rocco Galati of the Constitutional Rights Centre, on behalf of about 600 people who are current or former employees of the Government of Canada, federal Crown corporations, and federally-regulated businesses or organizations.
Plaintiffs included 91 RCMP officers, 35 employees of the Department of National Defence, 18 Canada Border Services Agency employees, 31 Canada Revenue agency employees along with many more employees of various federal agencies and federally-regulated corporations.
Locally, Kelowna Airport firefighter Dustin Blair is one of the hundreds of plaintiffs in the case.
In a judgment delivered this week by Federal Court Judge Simon Fothergill, the claim was “struck in its entirety,” as the claim is “bad beyond argument” and can’t be properly answered by the defendants.
The claim names Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, Chief Medical Health Officer Teresa Tam, Minister of Transport Omar Alghabra and Deputy Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendicino.
In a 50-page statement of claim, the plaintiffs say they suffered harm as a result of the “Policy on COVID-19 Vaccination for the Core Public Administration Including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police” issued by the Treasury Board of Canada on October 6, 2021 and the “Interim Order Respecting Certain Requirements for Civil Aviation Due to COVID-19, No. 61” issued by Transport Canada on April 24, 2022.
Both orders required employees to be vaccinated for COVID-19 to maintain their employment in those sectors.
“There are allegations of constitutional invalidity and criminal culpability, broad assertions of scientific knowledge regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, and a claim that some of the public health measures instituted by the Government of Canada amounted to crimes against humanity,” Judge Fothergill said in his recent ruling.
“The Statement of Claim alleges that the Defendants have ‘knowingly engaged in the misfeasance of their public office, and abuse of authority, through their public office’ by ‘[e]xercising a coercive power to force unwanted ‘vaccination’ under the TB Policy and Interim Order. However, the pleading fails to engage with the substance of the [two orders], which do not force vaccination and also offer various exemptions and accommodations.”
But ultimately, Judge Fothergill noted that Canadian courts have consistently ruled that issues of vaccination as a requirement of employment are properly addressed by way of a grievance through the Federal Public Sector Labour Relations Act, in both unionized and non-unionized workplaces. He quoted a 2022 Ontario Court of Appeal ruling:
“The appellant’s members were not being forced to be vaccinated, denied bodily autonomy, or denied the right to give informed consent to vaccination. They could choose to be vaccinated or not. If they chose not to be vaccinated, they faced being placed on unpaid leave or having their employment terminated. This potential harm is fundamentally related to employment … There was no remedial gap in the labour relations regime that warranted the exercise of the Superior Court’s residual jurisdiction.” .
But Judge Fothergill left the door open for the plaintiffs who are not subject to that Act, to amend their claim to make it “intelligible.” These plaintiffs include employees of Canada Post, BC Ferries, Via Rail Canada, federally regulated airlines, and many others, along with the Kelowna Airport Fire Fighters.
“The claims must be framed in a manner that is intelligible and allows the Defendants to know the case they have to meet,” Judge Fothergill wrote.
The Artemis Accords is a non-binding multilateral arrangement between the United States government and other world governments participating in the Artemis program, an American-led effort to return humans to the Moon by 2025, with the ultimate goal of expanding space exploration to Mars and beyond.[9] As of December 2022, 23 countries and one territory have signed the accords, including eight in Europe, seven in Asia, three in North America, two in Oceania, two in Africa, and two in South America.
Matthew Gross is a senior editor and copy editor for the HIR. He is interested in the Arctic Circle and international diplomacy.
Visions of future space travel usually focus on the utopian facets associated with breaking through the final frontier and exploring the great beyond, but what might happen when the international dynamics on Earth extend beyond the stratosphere? That is the question that the Artemis Accords aims to answer: they are a series of bilateral agreements signed in 2020. The agreements attempt to establish cooperation on a US-led endeavor to bring humans back to the moon by 2025 with the eventual goal of interplanetary exploration. The Artemis Accords are based on several principles including peace, transparency, interoperability, emergency assistance, and minimizing resource conflict. The Artemis Accords currently have 21 party nations, including the United States, who initially drafted the agreements. The most notable nations “involved”, however, are actually two non-parties to the agreement: China and Russia. Although one would hope that the technological progressions associated with space exploration would automatically ameliorate fraught international relationships, the reality is that they might exacerbate existing tensions.isions of future space travel usually focus on the utopian facets associated with breaking through the final frontier and exploring the great beyond, but what might happen when the international dynamics on Earth extend beyond the stratosphere? That is the question that the Artemis Accords aims to answer: they are a series of bilateral agreements signed in 2020. The agreements attempt to establish cooperation on a US-led endeavor to bring humans back to the moon by 2025 with the eventual goal of interplanetary exploration. The Artemis Accords are based on several principles including peace, transparency, interoperability, emergency assistance, and minimizing resource conflict. The Artemis Accords currently have 21 party nations, including the United States, who initially drafted the agreements. The most notable nations “involved”, however, are actually two non-parties to the agreement: China and Russia. Although one would hope that the technological progressions associated with space exploration would automatically ameliorate fraught international relationships, the reality is that they might exacerbate existing tensions.
One potential area of conflict could be the international battle over resource extraction on the moon. The Artemis Accords establish that when nations engage in mining activities on the moon, they do not obtain property rights over the extracted materials. These Accords, however, are not legally binding and are merely a formalized understanding between the parties of the agreement.
While nearly two dozen countries have signed up for the Artemis Accords, a US-led plan to set the rules for activities in space including lunar stations, no country has joined China and Russia for the International Lunar Research Station. https://t.co/hrNrDO8XWZ
China-Russia Space Alliance Stumbles in Bid to Surpass US
Bloomberg News
Mon, February 27, 2023 at 1:43 PM GMT+8·7 min read
(Bloomberg) — China’s state-run media frequently touts the country’s major achievements and grand ambitions in outer space, including its space station and planned research outpost on the moon.
But there’s one thing it tends not to mention: Russia, its closest partner in space.
When Beijing and Moscow announced plans in 2021 for a joint lunar project, it looked like a powerful alliance, matching China’s technological prowess with deep Russian experience in space, dating back to the original moon race. Yet even before Russia’s war in Ukraine, there were doubts about what Moscow could offer Beijing.
“Russia is still one of the biggest players in space, but if you look at the trajectory of that program, it’s really been declining in terms of budget, personnel and capabilities,” said Mariel Borowitz, a space policy expert and associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine a year ago, China has downplayed talk of a Beijing-Moscow space axis, even while its diplomats say relations between the two nations are solid. Chinese representatives at September’s International Astronautical Congress in Paris didn’t talk about Russia when discussing the lunar project, and Russia is often left out of Chinese media reports about Beijing’s space program. .
In the competition to return people to the moon, NASA got a head start in November with the launch of an uncrewed capsule into lunar orbit. That was the first mission in a US program to land astronauts on the lunar surface by as early as 2025, a timeline that many see as ambitious.
China hasn’t disclosed a timetable for its plans to send people to the moon. “In the foreseeable future, we will send the Chinese to step on the moon,” Zhou Jianping, chief designer of the China Manned Space Program, said in a Feb. 25 interview with state media, without giving a more detailed timeline.
This Is the Space Station China is Building to Challenge the US
China also is trying to catch up in deploying satellites to orbit Earth.
For now, however, China has sought to use its space program as a soft-power tool to compete with the US, one reason Beijing and Moscow’s planned International Lunar Research Station — touted as promoting “humanity’s exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes” — was opened to other countries.
But while nearly two dozen countries have signed up for the Artemis Accords, a US-led plan to set the rules for activities in space — including lunar stations — no country has joined China and Russia for the ILRS.
The divide is widely seen by space experts as signaling a disagreement over who will set the rules and standards for future exploration. Among the nations joining the Artemis Accords in recent months are Nigeria and Rwanda — the first African countries to do so. Their move is a political blow to China’s efforts to sew up diplomatic support from African countries.
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Another setback came in January, when the head of the European Space Agency said the 22-member group has no plans for its astronauts to travel to China’s recently completed space station, backing away from an agreement signed in 2015. Cooperation continues, however, on a satellite to study solar winds.
“There’s this competing narrative between China and the US, and at the moment the US has a lot more willing partners than China has,” said Mark Hilborne, a lecturer in the Defence Studies department of King’s College London. .
China has had some success courting other would-be partners. During a trip to Saudi Arabia in December, President Xi Jinping welcomed having astronauts from the kingdom and other Gulf nations travel to China’s space station. The space agencies of China and the United Arab Emirates will work on joint projects, including a lunar rover, the two sides announced in September.
In addition, a company based in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen in January signed a preliminary agreement with Djibouti to build a spaceport in the East African country that will have seven satellite launch pads and three rocket testing pads. .
