Author: old_wp_importer

When Naomi Klein explored the Chinese surveillance industry earlier this year, she touched on the idea that Chinese companies are now trying to sell their surveillance equipment to the outside world.

True enough, but as she was writing for Rolling Stone she concentrated on possible exports to America. That’s a sideline: the US, with its own massive surveillance industry, needs no foreign assistance to spy on its citizens. The more interesting story is China’s growing exports of surveillance know-how to the developing world.

Thanks to Chinese technology even the smallest, poorest and most politically isolated nations are gaining the ability to conduct sophisticated electronic monitoring and censorship. That means above all Africa, but also perhaps Asia, Latin America and the former Soviet bloc.

Some specific cases have already been identified: Chinese knowledge has helped with internet censorship in Belarus and radio-jamming in Zimbabwe. Like there is more that goes unreported, both because of the secrecy involved and because there is no obvious Western angle for the english-language media.

More broadly, look at Chinese government documents. The primary official statement of its Africa policy is this document from 2006:

China will cooperate closely with immigration departments of African countries in tackling the problem of illegal migration, improve exchange of immigration control information and set up an unimpeded and efficient channel for intelligence and information exchange.

…

In order to enhance the ability of both sides to address non-traditional security threats, it is necessary to increase intelligence exchange, explore more effective ways and means for closer cooperation in combating terrorism, small arms smuggling, drug trafficking, transnational economic crimes, etc.

I don’t think I’m being too conspiratorial if I read into that an ambition to supply the backbone for surveillance across Africa.

My phone is a decrepit hand-me-down from my sister. Deep in its addled brain are a few dozen appointments and reminders she inserted years ago, which it now regurgitates more or less at random.

It has just told me that today is my 21st birthday.

Yesterday was apparently the 25th anniversary of a Soviet officer breaking the rules by not starting a nuclear war. I hadn’t heard this before; the even closer shave on a nuclear submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis was frightening enough.

Both those incidents have only come to light in the last decade; I wonder how many others there have been.

palmer1984 just posted a meme that touches on flag-burning. I’ve always been bewildered by the (mainly American?) objection to burning flags. But if you accept that flag-burning is Bad and Wrong…

How do True Patriots care for their ageing flags? Are they stored indefinitely? Given heroic burial (cremation presumably isn’t an option)? Is there a patch of desert somewhere, where old flags fly until they disintegrate completely?

The military are big on flags and big on rules; they must have some baroque procedure for getting rid of the old ones.

Also: I’ve only come across the obsession with flag-burning in an American context. Are there equally small-minded patriots in the UK and elsewhere?

Where can I find (online or on paper) a dictionary of all the strange little symbols that cover electrical equipment and the like?

What is it with you people and fucking everything in the ear?