Bolen C (Page 47)

China has amended its State Secrets Law to expand the coverage to high technology industries and improve security in areas near military sites. 

The National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee on Tuesday revised its Law on Guarding State Secrets. The amendment, which will take effect on May 1, said the nation encourages and supports the research and application of new technologies that can help protect its secrecy science and technology. 

“Currently, a new round of scientific and technological revolution is rapidly evolving,” An unnamed spokesperson of the National Administration of State Secrets Protection told Xinhua on Wednesday. “New technologies and applications such as big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence are emerging, resulting in higher requirements on self-reliance and self-reliance in information security technologies.”

He said the amended State Secrets Law will provide a legal basis for the protection of the intellectual property of information security product makers.

He said the revision can also strengthen the connection between the State Secrets Law and the Data Security Law.

Established in June 2021, the Data Security Law prohibits foreign judicial authorities from requesting data on Chinese citizens without first seeking permission from Chinese authorities. 

Military facilities

Passed in 1988 and amended in 2010, the existing State Secrets Law forbids the unauthorized opening of military restricted and management areas, as well as other places with state secrets.

The amended law says government departments should strengthen their confidentiality management in areas surrounding classified military facilities and other important secret-related units.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s Central Military Commission will implement confidentiality work in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and People’s Armed Police (PAP) in accordance with the new law.

The spokesperson of the National Administration of State Secrets Protection said the latest amendment will send a message to the public that everyone in the country has the responsibility to protect state secrets. 

“The amended State Secrets Law clarified that all aspects of the production, copying, publishing, and dissemination of online information must comply with it,” he said.

“Secondly, internet and network operators are required to report to the authorities promptly if they identify suspected leakage of state secrets,” he said. “They should also remove the related content from the internet and cooperate with the investigators.”

The amendment was announced on the same day when former Foreign Minister Qin Gang “resigned” from his position in the NPC Standing Committee. 

Politico, which frequently publishes leaks from US intelligence services, said on December 6 that Qin had already died, either from suicide or torture, in a military hospital in Beijing in late July.

Citing two unnamed people with access to top Chinese officials, the report said Qin and relatives of top rocket force officers had helped pass Chinese nuclear secrets to Western intelligence agencies. The Chinese government has not yet commented on the report. 

Some commentators said Beijing tried to use Qin’s “resignation” from his position in the NPC Standing Committee to dismiss the Politico report that the former top diplomat had died. But they said the public will be convinced only if Qin can appear in public.

Declassification

According to the existing law, China’s state secrets are classified as top secret, highly secret and just plain secrets and should be automatically declassified after 30, 20 and 10 years, respectively, if they were created after January 1, 1991. 

But in real practice, the government has not yet declassified any of its classified political documents.

In June 2020, the National Administration of State Secrets Protection published a set of temporary rules about the declassification of state secrets to ensure the public right to know. It added that government units should consider the impact on national security and social stability when declassifying any state secrets.

In contrast, Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan last December amended its State Secrets Law to change the confidentiality period of 4,500 political documents from “indefinite” to 30 years. Due to this amendment, about half of these documents will be made public in 2024. 

According to the amended law in Taiwan, a government department needs to give reasons to extend the confidentiality period of a classified document by 10 years. If a document has been kept in secret for 60 years, a government unit needs to seek an approval from its superior in order to further extend its confidentiality period. 

‘Work secrets’

The latest amendment of China’s State Secrets Law also included a new section about the protection of unclassified information known as “work secrets,” a term that refers to the government’s internal documents and discussions related to policy formation. 

The amended law says precautions taken for state secrets should also apply to “work secrets,” which are not state secrets but can result in an adverse impact if leaked. 

Jens Eskelund, president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in Beijing, told Reuters on Wednesday that China’s increasing focus on national security has raised uncertainty for business.

He said the scope of “sensitive information” seems to be expanding, which makes it more difficult for foreign firms to access necessary information.

In 2020, the central government published a set of temporary regulations to protect “work secrets.” It urged local governments to implement them.

Read: China’s next top envoy promises new US approach

Follow Jeff Pao on Twitter at @jeffpao3

Continue Reading

This is part two of a series, ‘Lessons from the first cyberwar.’ Read part one.

As the internet connects more people, businesses, governments and military systems, it also becomes a gateway for cyberattacks. National infrastructures, government systems and financial institutions, all linked by networks, are at risk.

The growing number of potential cyberattack vectors means that ordinary citizens can also become involved in waging cyber warfare, like Ukraine’s volunteer IT Army, or they can become targets.

The 19th-century wartime strategist Carl von Clausewitz defined war as “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.” This perspective also views war as a state-directed effort to achieve political objectives.

Central to Clausewitz’s theory is the “warfare trinity”: the people, the military and the government. Historically, this trinity operated in the physical realm, predominantly through physical force – a characteristic of the industrial age. Clausewitz argued that, while the nature of war remains constant, its manifestation evolves over time with advancements in technology.

In the transition to the information age, the principles of Clausewitz’s warfare trinity remain relevant but the battlefield has transformed. Cyber warfare now represents a new domain where physical force is replaced by information and digital tools. This form of warfare simultaneously impacts all aspects of the trinity – people, military and government – almost instantaneously, and often with global scope.

The rise of cyber warfare illustrates Clausewitz’s belief that, while the nature of war is immutable, the methods and arenas of warfare continue to evolve. Today, cyber warfare aims to achieve political and strategic objectives through cyberspace, extending the battleground beyond physical spaces.

Cyber warfare blurs traditional lines between combatants and non-combatants, as civilians – either willingly or unwittingly – become part of cyber conflicts. Russia also uses organized crime for cyber operations against the West.

In the past, there was a clear difference between civilians and soldiers, often marked by uniforms. Civilians were usually away from the battlefield, which had defined boundaries.

However, in modern conflicts, this distinction has faded. Today’s enemies often include nonstate actors who blend in with civilians, making it hard to tell them apart, and the concept of a specific battlefield has vanished; military actions can now happen anywhere.

Cyber norms and international agreements

As the internet interconnects more facets of our lives it opens up new arenas for nation-states waging war, making the establishment of international cyber norms and agreements more relevant.

The shift from traditional battlefields to cyber warfare necessitates a re-evaluation of how international law and wartime strategies apply to the digital domain due to the increasing involvement of civilians in cyber conflicts and the blurring of lines between combatants and noncombatants.

Initiatives such as the Tallinn Manual and the Red Cross Cyber Norms have emerged as critical efforts to adapt existing legal frameworks to the realities of cyber warfare, aiming to mitigate the impact on civilians and ensure a degree of accountability and restraint in cyberspace.

The Tallinn Agreement stems from the work done in the Tallinn Manual, an influential guide on how international law applies to cyber warfare.

The Tallinn Manual, initiated by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence (CCDCOE) in Estonia, was developed by an international group of legal scholars and practitioners. It has become an influential resource for scholars and policymakers to use as a framework to deal with cyber warfare.

The Tallinn Agreement was created following Russia’s first large-scale cyberattack, against Estonia in 2007. The process began in 2009 when the NATO CCDCOE recognized the growing importance and unique challenges of cyber operations in international law and initiated a project to clarify the legal landscape.

The necessity for such a manual became clear due to the growing incidence of cyber operations that potentially crossed the line into armed conflict, or at least had significant international legal implications.

The manual addresses issues including sovereignty, state responsibility, the applicability of international humanitarian law in cyberspace and the conduct of hostilities.

The first version, known as Tallinn Manual 1.0, was published in 2013 and focused specifically on the most severe forms of cyber operations – those that would be considered equivalent to armed attacks under international law and the laws of armed conflict.

Tallinn Manual 2.0, published in 2017, expanded this scope to include a broader range of cyber operations, especially those occurring outside the context of armed conflict. This included considerations of sovereignty, state responsibility and human rights.

Red Cross Cyber Norms

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been advocating for the application of existing international humanitarian law to cyber warfare, especially emphasizing the need to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure.

One theme that has featured prominently in the Russo-Ukrainian war has been the rise of civilians engaging in digital warfare. Some of these civilians are minors, which may complicate the classification of them as enemy combatants in the cyber realm.

The Red Cross Cyber Norms seek to clarify how principles like distinction, proportionality and necessity apply in the digital sphere – particularly given the potential for significant civilian harm due to cyber operations targeting critical infrastructure such as hospitals, power grids and water systems.

Like the Tallinn Manual, the ICRC’s positions on cyber operations are interpretative. They are advisory and non-binding. They don’t create new legal obligations but aim to influence states and other actors to consider humanitarian principles when engaging in cyber warfare.

As countries such as Russia expanded their efforts to conduct cyber warfare against other countries, the need to create international norms and frameworks began to take shape.

However, even as these agreements and frameworks were being created, Russian attacks against the West and Ukraine became more brazen and destructive, with many of Russia’s attacks in recent years targeting critical infrastructure.

David Kirichenko is a Ukrainian-American security engineer and freelance journalist. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 he has taken a civilian activist role.

These articles are excerpted, with kind permission, from a report he presented at the UK Parliament on February 20 on behalf of the Henry Jackson Society.

Continue Reading

Should American allies be worried that if Donald Trump returns to the White House next year, he will tear apart treaties, recast decades-old international arrangements and adopt a go-it-alone approach to global affairs?

Recent comments from Trump disparaging NATO allies have put this question on the front burner in Washington and other world capitals.

Trump is, of course, in the middle of a presidential campaign and is seeking to show he would be a very different president from Joe Biden. Given Biden’s difficulties on foreign policy, it is easy to see why.

Biden’s mixed foreign policy record

Biden’s approval numbers are near historic lows – just under 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing. In particular, Biden’s foreign policy has been a problem. His plunge in popularity began around the time of the catastrophically mismanaged US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan two and a half years ago.

Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza – and the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and Iranian proxy attacks against American forces in Iraq and Syria that followed – have only made Biden look weaker. In fact, recent polls show only a third of American voters approve of his foreign policy.

A resurgent Iran reminds older Americans of the more than 50 Americans taken hostage in Tehran in 1979 and then-President Jimmy Carter’s failure to free them – one of the main reasons why Carter lost the 1980 presidential election to Ronald Reagan. The hostages were freed the day Reagan took office.

Today, Biden faces the same potential election-year problem with the Gaza war. Younger, progressive Americans, as well as Arab Americans, are more likely to be aghast at Biden’s support for Israel’s assault on Hamas in Gaza and the consequent civilian deaths.

Many Biden supporters are concerned this could affect his chances against Trump in November’s election, particularly in swing states like Michigan, which has a large number of Arab American voters.

Also working against Biden is the war fatigue felt by many Americans. After 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, many Americans are ready to take a break from global leadership responsibilities.

A long tradition of placing America first

Biden’s foreign policy weaknesses opens the door for Trump to show voters he will take a different approach.

Over the past four decades, starting with Reagan, successful presidential candidates have criticized foreign adventures, instead emphasizing domestic investment. Political scientists use the term “strategic retrenchment” to describe this, but politicians are more likely to use a phrase like “America First.”

In 1984, for instance, Reagan ran one of the most effective presidential campaign ads in history called “Morning in America”, which depicted a return to domestic tranquillity and prosperity.

[embedded content]

In 1992, Democratic strategist James Carville coined another famous phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid”, which then-candidate Bill Clinton’s campaign evoked successfully to focus on domestic economic issues in his race against President George H W Bush.

Then, in 2000, then-Republican challenger George W Bush sharply criticized the Clinton administration’s focus on “nation building”, comparing it to “international social work.”

When it comes to Trump, bombast is a feature, not a bug. When he ran for the White House for the first time in 2016, he outlined his isolationist, “America first” approach, criticizing President Barack Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, for their “reckless, rudderless and aimless foreign policy.” He said, if elected,

I will return us to a timeless principle. Always put the interest of the American people and American security above all else.

He has returned to this rhetoric in the current campaign, even encouraging Russia to invade NATO countries that don’t spend the required 2% of their GDP on defense. While offensive at first blush, these comments serve the very useful purpose of showing a huge difference from Biden.

19th-century populist worldview

It is also important to understand a deeper truth about these comments. In his bones, Trump does not truly value any formal alliances formed before his ascent to power. Call it narcissism or isolationism if you must (and neither is entirely inaccurate), the former president sees formal alliances as a lower priority than fair play and power politics.

In this, Trump is a prime example of the Jacksonian tradition in American politics. Described best by the scholar and columnist Walter Russell Mead, the Jacksonian tradition is based on the political beliefs of former President Andrew Jackson, who was president from 1829 to 1837.

Jacksonians, like Trump and his most ardent supporters today, have a highly skeptical view of America’s involvement in global affairs. As Mead writes:

They prefer the rule of custom to the written law and that is as true in the international sphere as it is in personal relations at home. Jacksonians believe that there is an honour code in international life […] and those who live by the code will be treated under it. But those who violate the code – who commit terrorist acts in peacetime, for example – forfeit its protection and deserve no consideration.

For Jacksonians, when a country welches on its obligations (such as, in Trump’s view, the level of defense spending of many European NATO nations), it is morally right to punish them by calling into question treaty obligations.

Seen as a liar and fabulist by his opponents, Trump embodies this Jacksonian tradition of “customary honor” for his supporters, whose contempt for global elites and international institutions is deep and profound. (Trump was so enamored with Jackson, in fact, he had a portrait of the former president hanging in the Oval Office.)

This means, if Trump becomes president again, America’s allies, whether in NATO or the Indo-Pacific or elsewhere, will have to de-emphasize lawyerly arguments about international obligations and adapt quickly to the Trump-Jacksonian customary honor approach to diplomacy.

Superficially, this will mean global leaders offering praise for Trump’s various political performances. Going deeper, it also means finding a way to demonstrate that their relationship with the US is congruent with his sense of customary honor (and is also materially beneficial to the US and maybe even to Trump himself).

The model for this is the late prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe. Within days of Trump’s surprising election win over Hillary Clinton in 2016, Abe visited him at Trump Tower in New York and gave him a gold-plated golf club worth almost US$4,000. Trump immediately identified Abe as “friend.”

After then-Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had an unpleasant phone call with Trump in 2017, the Australian ambassador to the US, Joe Hockey, took to the links with Trump.

With good humor and some personal charm, Hockey helped restore the diplomatic relationship – not by emphasizing legalistic constraints but by developing a personal relationship that was grounded in common sense and customary honor.

Lester Munson is Non-resident fellow, United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue Reading

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has said sending Western troops to fight in Ukraine “could not be ruled out.”

After hosting a meeting of 25 European leaders in Paris on February 26, Macron said that there was “no consensus” on committing ground troops to the conflict in Ukraine but added: “Nothing should be excluded. We will do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia cannot win this war.”

Until now, NATO has confined itself to training Ukrainian military forces and supplying them with defensive weapons. Member states fear that directly confronting Russian forces in Ukraine would risk a massive escalation. And Vladimir Putin and his senior ministers have regularly issued threats that Russia could resort to using its nuclear arsenal in the case of a larger conflict.

At present, NATO is also conducting its largest military exercise since the Cold War. Steadfast Defender runs from January until May and involves all 31 member states. Aimed at enhancing the alliance’s collective defense capabilities and readiness, it is the largest exercise since Reforger in 1988, which involved 125,000 troops from the US, Germany, Canada, France and Denmark.

General Christopher Cavoli, NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe, said: “Steadfast Defender 2024 will be a clear demonstration of our unity, strength and determination to protect each other, our values and the rules-based international order.”

Importantly, one aspect of the exercises is the involvement of US and Canadian forces, which is designed to demonstrate the speed and size of NATO’s reinforcement capabilities.

It acts both as a reassurance to European NATO member states and as a demonstration to potential enemies of the ability NATO has to put large forces into the field. Exercises are part of the communication of deterrence.

The exercise is meant to simulate an, “emerging conflict scenario with a near-peer adversary.” This is a thinly disguised reference to Russia, which shows that NATO is beginning to take the threat of direct conflict with that country seriously.

During the Cold War, NATO undertook regular large-scale exercises. For example, Exercise Lionheart, led by the UK in 1984, involved nearly 58,000 British soldiers and airmen of a total force of 131,565, including troops from the US, the Netherlands and what was then West Germany.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, NATO has searched for a new identity. Its focus shifted in the 1990s from protecting common territory to protecting members’ common interests, as it did by intervening in the wars in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999 when it officially approved this new strategic concept.

Unity or disunity?

A demonstration of NATO unity and military capacity is important, coming after two years of disunity over how to respond to the war in Ukraine and amid wrangling over supplies of arms by Ukraine’s Western allies.

It has become more significant following recent remarks by former president Donald Trump that NATO members who did not meet the spending guidelines would no longer be protected by the US.

[embedded content]

Members are supposed to spend at least 2% of their annual GDP on defense – but it’s more complicated than that. Some nations’ defense spending is wholly allocated to NATO. Others, meanwhile, might set their defense spending at less than 2% but their spending per head is greater than that of those who meet the NATO guideline.

For example, Luxembourg falls short of the 2%, spending only 0.72%. But in per head terms, it spends US$921, which is more than Poland (3.9%) or France (1.9%).

The US may spend 3.5% of GDP on defense but not all of that is allocated to NATO. Much of the US’s strength is deployed in the Pacific and on its home territories. So it’s misleading to judge the value of NATO membership in these terms.

The key clause in the NATO treaty is Article 5, which governs collective security and compels members to respond if a fellow member is attacked by a hostile third party. The US is the only NATO member state to have invoked Article 5, following the 9/11 attacks.

It received assistance from other NATO members in Afghanistan and more widely in the “war on terror.”

Is Nato battle-ready?

A significant problem NATO faces, however, is not in deploying the troops it has, but in supplying them. As has been demonstrated by the efforts to provide equipment and ammunition to Ukraine, NATO has neither the stockpiles nor the manufacturing capacity to supply a lengthy modern war.

This is because NATO has long planned on what’s known as a “come as you are” war, which means it has the capacity to fight for only as long as the equipment and supplies last. For this reason, NATO’s strategy has always been, in the event of a conflict, to bring it to a conclusion as quickly as possible.

Admiral Rob Bauer of the Royal Netherlands Navy, NATO’s most senior military commander and military adviser to its North Atlantic Council, spoke at the Warsaw Security Forum in October 2023.

He said: “We need large volumes. The just-in-time, just-enough economy we built together in 30 years in our liberal economies is fine for a lot of things – but not the armed forces when there is a war ongoing.”

A number of European countries have already distanced themselves from Macron’s remarks, including Poland, the Czech Republic and Sweden, whose NATO membership has finally been approved by Hungary and which is set to become the alliance’s 32nd member.

But Russia has seized on Macron’s remarks, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov telling reporters that even discussing the idea of Western troops being sent to fight in Ukraine represents a “very important new element.” He added: “In that case, we would need to talk not about the probability, but about the inevitability (of a direct conflict).”

Kenton White is Lecturer in Strategic Studies and International Relations, University of Reading

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue Reading