A mighty fight to finance Japanâs military splurge
One of the key highlights of Japan’s three national security documents released on December 16, 2022 – the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy and the Defense Build-up Plan (DBP) – is the commitment to increase defense spending.
The 2022 DBP revealed that the Japanese government will spend approximately 43 trillion yen (US$310 billion) from 2023–27 to fund the defense capability build-up. Japan’s Ministry of Defence (JMOD) budget will increase annually to reach 8.9 trillion yen (US$64.1 billion) in 2027.
The 2023 defense budget demonstrates Tokyo’s determination to follow through on its five-year spending commitments under the DBP. The total budget of over 6.6 trillion yen (US$47.5 billion) is a 27.5% increase from 2022 and the biggest defense budget in Japan’s post-war history.
But the “roughly 2% of GDP” goal that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida discussed in his press conference on December 16, 2022 following the announcement of these three documents is slightly misleading. The 2% includes not only the JMOD budget but also other national security-related spending such as the Japan Coast Guard budget and national infrastructure investments.
Still, the JMOD’s 2023–27 budget plan is 60% higher than the 2018–22 spending plan. As a country that historically spent roughly 1% of its GDP on defense and resisted calls to spend more, Tokyo’s commitment to such a considerable increase marks a departure from the past.
Highlights from these new documents — such as Japan’s acquisition of counterstrike capabilities and a substantial defense spending increase — continue to grab news headlines. But funding remains a thorny issue. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)–Komeito ruling coalition has been working on fiscal measures that will enable Tokyo to follow through on its defense spending commitments.
In December 2022, based on the LDP–Komeito’s approved outline, the Ministry of Finance included ‘tax measures to secure financial resources for strengthening defense capabilities’ in its seven-point 2023 tax reform proposal. These are incremental increases in the corporate, income and tobacco taxes proposed to start after 2024.
The LDP-led ruling coalition introduced the Defence Fiscal Resource Bill to the National Diet in February 2023. The bill provides the fiscal framework through which the Japanese government will fund the defense spending increase — which is essentially a mixed package of the establishment of the Defense Enhancement Fund and the incremental phased increase of corporate, personal income and tobacco taxes.
The bill passed the House of Representatives on May 23, 2023, and following the approval by the House of Councillors on June 16, 2023 became a law.
The opposition parties, including the Constitutional Democratic Party, vowed to block the bill. But the large majority that the LDP–Komeito ruling coalition enjoys in both houses of the Diet, with the additional support from the conservative Japan Innovation Party, cleared the way for the passage of the bill.
Even though Kishida won the legislative battle, whether the public will support it remains highly questionable.
In fairness, the majority of the Japanese public supported a defense spending increase. Polls taken by media outlets across the ideological spectrum throughout 2022 consistently show that the public mostly supports a defense spending increase.
Three separate media polls taken in April, October and December 2022 show that over half of the respondents supported a defense spending increase. Even a May 2022 poll by the Mainichi Shimbun, known for its criticism of expansive defense policy, shows 76% public support for such an increase.
But the public resisted funding this defense spending increase through higher taxes. Public resistance against tax increases began showing in late 2022. Two polls in November and December 2022 showed that over 60% of the public disapproves of such a tax hike.
This public pushback against the defense tax increase continues in 2023. Polls in January and February 2023 showed 71% and 64% of the respondents were against increasing tax to fund defense budget increase.
A May 7, 2023 public opinion poll revealed that nearly 90% of the respondents are concerned about a military crisis in Taiwan and over 60% support Japan acquiring counterstrike capabilities. But 80% are opposed to financing defense spending through tax increases.
Plus, Kishida might have missed the chance to gain public support for the defense tax hike by bringing the case to the public. Two separate polls conducted in January 2023 indicated that 78% and 63% of the respondents thought that Kishida should dissolve the Lower House and call an election before implementing the defense tax hike.
But with his approval rating just recovering to 45% following a successful G7 summit in Hiroshima, Kishida decided not to dissolve the Lower House, at least in the near future.
The Japanese public seems already to be reacting negatively to Kishida’s choice. The June 17–18 poll conducted by the Kyodo News shows that Kishida’s approval rating has dropped by over 6 points to 40.8%.
While the defense-related tax hike was not the only reason for the decline in his approval rating, it indicates that Kishida’s tactics of steamrolling widespread public resistance with the power of majority might work in the short-term, but may undermine the sustainability of Japan’s increased defense spending over time.
Yuki Tatsumi is Senior Fellow, Co-Director of the East Asia Program and Director of the Japan Program at the Stimson Center, Washington, DC.
This article was originally published by East Asia Forum and is republished under a Creative Commons license.
How a one-time food caterer became Putinâs biggest threat
Never during the 23 years of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule has he faced the kind of challenge posed by Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s insurrection over the weekend.
The gravity of the crisis was underlined by Putin’s televised address on Saturday. He likened the insurgent’s “criminal adventure” to the catastrophe of 1917, when “intrigues, squabbles and politicking” on the home front triggered a military collapse, revolution and civil war.
In an obvious reference to Prigozhin, Putin claimed that “excessive ambition and personal interests led to treason, to the betrayal of the motherland and the people and the cause” for which Wagner soldiers had fought and died.
From catering food to running a trolling factory
What Putin has ignored is his own role in the transformation of Prigozhin from a convicted criminal and catering entrepreneur into a formidable political force in his own right.
Prigozhin was not merely “Putin’s cook” and a pro-Kremlin oligarch. He was a product of the peculiar kind of authoritarian regime that Putin created during his two decades in power.
In at least three ways, Putin ushered Prigozhin to the center of Russia’s political stage.
First, Prigozhin was a beneficiary of the Kremlin’s strategy of using loyalist proxies to attack the regime’s domestic opponents and fabricate the illusion of popular support.
The prototype was Nashi (“Ours”), a youth organization that was created to insulate Russia from the contagion of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004. Funded by obedient oligarchs, “Nashi” organized massive anti-Western demonstrations and violent attacks on anti-Kremlin militants, but proved powerless to deter mass protests against election fraud in 2011–12.
As the Putin regime struggled to contain this unfolding revolution, it turned to Prigozhin. Then best known as a St Petersburg catering magnate, Prigozhin quickly proved his usefulness by infiltrating the protest movement and funding a notorious television documentary that smeared pro-democracy demonstrators as paid hirelings of the West.
This was merely a prelude to Prigozhin’s main contribution to the consolidation of Putin’s power.
Although the regime had regained control of the streets, the opposition continued to dominate online political discussion. To neutralize this threat, Prigozhin created the Internet Research Agency. This trolling factory employed hundreds of staff, working around the clock to create the illusion of a groundswell of support for the regime.
It also became a tool of Russian influence on the international stage. Its intervention in the 2016 US presidential election helped Donald Trump to win and earned Prigozhin a place on the US sanctions list.
The advantage of proxies like Prigozhin was that they offered a shield of plausible deniability to the Kremlin. The drawback: they were harder to control.
One notorious example was the neo-Nazi outfit “Russkii Obraz” (Russian Image). Its leader was simultaneously collaborating with the Kremlin and organizing a terrorist campaign against its own opponents, including police and federal judges.
The Wagner Group is born
Putin’s second contribution to Prigozhin’s ascent was the 2014 invasion of Ukraine when Russia annexed Crimea. Like the Kremlin’s domestic control strategies, the “hybrid warfare” that Russia unleashed on Ukraine involved proxies, or non-state actors, working in close collaboration with the Russian armed forces.
Numerous Kremlin-aligned formations participated in this effort to create the illusion of an authentic popular uprising in southeast Ukraine.
The most durable was the Wagner Group, which was created after a meeting in the Defense Ministry in the summer of 2014. Prigozhin requested the use of military facilities to train volunteers to fight in Ukraine and emphasized that “Papa” (Putin) had endorsed the project.
Wagner mercenaries played an important role in the defeat of Ukrainian forces in the battle of Debaltseve in early 2015. They also became an instrument of Russia’s intervention in Syria, where Prigozhin acquired concessions for natural resources in return for security services.
This pattern was repeated in Africa, where Prigozhin worked with Russian diplomats to amass mining and forestry concessions, while propping up some of the continent’s most brutal regimes.
In the process, Wagner mercenaries committed atrocities in the Central African Republic and Mali, which provoked international condemnation.
Prigozhin’s swift rise in power
Putin’s third gift to Prigozhin was the hollowing out of Russia’s state institutions.
As the Kremlin tightened its stranglehold over the electoral process, Russia’s parliament became accountable to the regime, not the people. Independent political parties were crushed. The media were progressively subjugated by the Kremlin and its allied oligarchs.
Civil society was devastated by the passage of new laws against “foreign agents” and “undesirable organizations.” Instead of upholding the law, the judiciary and security agencies became tools of repression.
In this scorched, lawless landscape, Prigozhin flourished.
As an oligarch known for his private army and friends in the Kremlin, he operated with impunity. Investigative journalists who tried to shed light on the Wagner Group were harassed and sometimes died in unclear circumstances. His media empire, consolidated in 2019 as the Patriot Media Group, gave him a national platform.
It took Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine to transform Prigozhin from a dangerous regime proxy into a contender for power.
The first months of the war coincided with a draconian crackdown on the last remnants of political opposition, civil society and independent media in Russia. At the same time, the repeated defeats of Russian forces on the battlefield magnified the importance of Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenaries.
The simmering conflict between the Defense Ministry and Prigozhin revealed the erosion of Putin’s capacity to mediate between state institutions and non-state proxies.
In May, when Prigozhin warned of revolution and lambasted the “public, fat, carefree lives” of the children of the elite, he was striking at the foundations of the regime.
A month later, when Prigozhin mounted his armed rebellion and marched virtually unchallenged toward Moscow, he demonstrated that almost no one was prepared to defend the aging dictator in his hour of need.
Having sown the wind, Putin has now reaped the whirlwind.
Robert Horvath is Senior lecturer, La Trobe University and Isabella Currie is PhD candidate, La Trobe University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The poppycock of Myanmar drug suppression
There will likely be few public celebrations of World Drug Day today in northern Shan state, home to one of the world’s most rampant and lucrative narcotics production zones. But there may be some smug satisfaction expressed among the region’s assorted gangsters and others cashing in on the post-coup disorder in Myanmar.
This year’s theme for the United Nations International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking is “People first: stop stigma and discrimination, strengthen prevention.”
Myanmar’s coup-installed military regime, the State Administration Council (SAC), and the Myanmar Police Force (MFP) revel in these opportunities to promote their domestic drug suppression efforts and exaggerate their commitment to international cooperation.
In a post-truth Myanmar, the promotion of fallacious seizure statistics has been the methodology for years to fool the world into believing central authorities are serious about drug eradication.
The Central Committee for Drug Abuse Control (CCDAC) of the Ministry of Home Affairs claims that since the February 2021 coup d’etat, seizures of narcotics including opium, heroin, stimulant tablets (ya ba), crystal methamphetamine, marijuana, kratom and kratom powder have all increased.
The regime claims it nabbed US$462 million worth of narcotics in 2021; $533 million in 2022; and $179.53 million up until end of May this year. These are exacting figures: in 2021, the security forces claimed to have seized 198,188,715.5 ya ba tablets, precise right down to the half of a pill.
But exactly what is the scale of drug production in Myanmar? The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that opium cultivation has increased 33% in its 2022 Opium Survey, with an alarming increase in potential yield of 88%, potentially producing 790 metric tonnes.
Whilst the obvious conclusion is post-coup uncertainty and insecurity driving expanded cultivation, these upward trends may have preceded the coup. UNODC regional director Jeremy Douglas claimed at the launch of the survey in January that “the Golden Triangle is back in the opium business.”
The borderlands of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand have never been out of the drug business. Crystal methamphetamine production has surged over the past decade to an estimated $50-60 billion.
From unreliable but indicative seizures data, East and Southeast Asia seizures in 2011 amounted to 20,000 kilograms, reached a record of 172,000 kgs in 2021 and fell to 151,000 in 2022. Yet the price for methamphetamines has reduced across the region despite the higher seizures.
The UNODC and many international states and actors are stuck on the manta that that is all mostly the fault of transnational criminal organizations partnering with armed groups opposed to central authority in Myanmar. This is accurate and has been for decades. But it omits key partners in the drug consortiums: the Myanmar military and police.
The 2023 UNODC survey did note that; “A small number of methamphetamine laboratories have been detected in drug-producing regions under the regime’s control. However, there is a sizable discrepancy between Myanmar’s seized methamphetamine laboratories and the total supply of methamphetamine, with the only laboratories seized by Myanmar authorities between 2022 and early 2023 being smaller tableting operations in South Shan, near the Thai border, which does not reflect the reality of the market.”
The drug trade in Myanmar thrives because of the complex network of security arrangements between the Myanmar military, its local militia allies, ethnic armed organizations (EAOs), the hosting of transnational criminal actors and an entrenched culture of corruption and entwined criminal industries.
The post-coup descent into internecine chaos and increased illegality is simply a contemporary chapter of decades-long dynamics that have made domestic production unproblematic. But exactly how much is being done to stem drug production and how much is the international community cooperating with this charade?
In Myanmar, access to drugs has surged since the coup, with police seemingly spending more time on extortion rackets than genuine drug suppression. Drugs are reportedly openly offered and consumed at karaoke joints (KTV) throughout major cities. The powerful drug ketamine is supposedly readily available, but to what extent is hard to measure.
The SAC Minister of Home Affairs who has the CCDAC in his portfolio, the army Lieutenant-General Soe Htut marked this year’s World Drug Day with a statement pledging to be more people-oriented.
“Reviewing the current drug problem, law enforcement and judiciary measures could not separately solve the problem. A balanced approach also requires a focus on public health care, improving living standards, promoting humanity, supporting development, and protecting basic human rights. Instead of punishing drug addicts as criminals, the government and civil society organizations have worked together to amend laws and regulations to promote drug addiction as a health issue rather than a crime.”
Yet that has been the main deficiency of Myanmar official approaches for many years, giving syndicates almost free rein to establish production zones while cracking down on small-scale producers and punishing drug users with long prison terms.
The 2018 National Drug Policy is actually an effective approach to the challenges of drug use, but has not been in line with repressive drug laws first drafted in the early 1990s under a previous military junta. Nevertheless, Soe Htut claimed the SAC is instructing regional and state authorities to “draft action plans consistent with their localities to implement drug control activities in a practical manner.”
Given the general breakdown in law and order across Myanmar, drug suppression will either be an extremely low priority or else officials will use it as an extra feature of control to combat armed and non-violent resistance.
World Drug Day also provides a platform for the military to signal its cooperation with the United Nations, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), regional law enforcement bodies such as the Australian Federal Police (AFP), the American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and the Thai Office of Narcotics Control Board (ONCB).
Much of this cooperation hums along in a depoliticized environment of professional niceties, never mentioning that some of the worst offenders in protecting the drug trade that floods the region with crystal methamphetamine are Myanmar security officers who have a long and sordid lineage of double standards. Nevertheless, regional partnerships are a necessary fiction.
ASEAN’s Narcotics Cooperation Center’s (with the delightful acronym of ASEAN-NARCO) “Golden Triangle 1511 Operation” involves China, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand and has been cooperating since 2019 on intelligence-sharing on drug precursor flows and drug shipments.
Yet taken over a longer time frame, it’s evident that Myanmar gains some measure of legitimacy for regional cooperation while not having to do much to crack down on production zones in Shan state. It’s one of the Myanmar regime’s diplomatic “bait and switch” tactics, in which it crows over joint drug suppression efforts while rebuffing ASEAN’s Five Point Consensus to address its political crisis.
The Australian Federal Police continues to liaise with the MPF on drug trade intelligence-sharing. In Senate Estimates hearings in November of 2022, AFP Deputy Commissioner Ian McCartney told the committee:
“There has been engagement with Myanmar police, not in relation to training and capacity-building, but in relation to matters of interest to the AFP, particularly in relation to drug trafficking. In terms of context, 70% of the methamphetamine that ends up in the streets of Australia comes from Myanmar. So there has been some engagement. It’s been restricted. It’s been under the auspices of an agreement that we’ve entered into with DFAT (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) to ensure that whatever engagement is strictly restricted to those issues.”
In the decade spanning 2012 to 2022, Australia seized 9.9 million tons of crystal methamphetamine, most of it sourced from Myanmar’s Shan state. Taking stock of the production timelines and the surge in output over the past decade, it’s obvious that the Myanmar drug trade grew during the decade of conditional civilian government, when the world was supporting a so-called “democratic transition.”
Given the current post-coup disorder, what hope is there that regional cooperation will have any positive effect? And how much is international assistance, even intelligence-sharing, assisting the SAC with domestic control while it maintains complex relations with multiple armed and illicit actors involved in the narcotics trade?
As Christopher Hitchens once remarked of the American “war on drugs,” “this isn’t a war, it’s a misuse of the word, it’s an apparatus of control.” Any credible or humanistic drug reform from the SAC is highly unlikely, condemning another generation of Myanmar people to cheap and easily available drugs with few harm reduction programs and continued punitive sentencing approaches.
David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarian and human rights issues on Myanmar
A new spin on an old medium: Community radio finds a new generation
Against the backdrop of a blurred train speeding past behind her, the DJ spinning live outside the Hanoi Railway Station kept her cool while the records turned, barely glancing at the busy tracks just a few feet away.
This kind of iconic, yet hyper-local aesthetic to backdrop the Hanoi Community Radio live stream is exactly what station founder Maggie Tra had in mind when she founded the station almost four years ago.
Tra, who grew up in Australia with mixed Vietnamese-Cambodian heritage, moved to Vietnam four years ago. Feeling that the scenes for music and art were a bit too separated in Hanoi, she wanted to find a way to bridge them while spotlighting Vietnamese creatives and giving them a platform to learn and grow in a field that was dominated by expats and foreigners.
“I wanted to do an online radio station for a long time, and wanted to give back to Vietnam in some sort of way,” said Tra. “There’s not a lot of space or freedom of expression for local Vietnamese people.”
The UNESCO Community Radio Handbook defines community radio as “radio by the people and for the people”, with stations usually meant to serve groups bound by geography or common interests. Across Southeast Asia, where several states have complex administrative barriers for media organisations, the ‘do-it-yourself’ approach embraced by community radio can be attractive for locals looking for a platform to share their music or learn a new skill.
In the Philippines, Manila Community Radio has been operating since 2020. Thailand has Durian Radio and Bangkok Community Radio.
All these community radio stations operate mostly through a digital live-stream format. Some broadcast on Instagram, some on old-school radio waves – others via a combination of both, all carving out space for young creatives.
The idea of a fully democratised media platform is at the core of a community radio’s mission, according to Pijitra Suppasawatgul, associate professor in the Faculty of Communication Arts at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.
“The thinking of community radio is quite idealistic,” she said. “You cannot make money from it, or get advertising. It fails in terms of business model or making money.”
Historically, Pijitra said, Thai radio was used as a political tool during reforms and coups, with the government shutting down or co-opting community stations as it wished. But today, she sees promise in the medium’s more open nature.
“Radio can be something that opens people’s minds,” Pijitra said.
Bangkok Community Radio’s listeners are mostly in Thailand, with some in the U.S. and Europe. The heads of the station are trying to connect emerging artists in the region with one another, and give them a stage to work from.
“It’s about connecting with international artists, but also providing an adequate platform for a young, 18-year-old producer or jazz artist that wants to get into it,” said Frank Nankivell, one of the founders of Bangkok Radio.
Other radio organisers described a similar ethos. In Hanoi, Tra started by leading workshops to teach women and non-binary-gendered people how to DJ. Eventually, this grew into a community that became the foundation for Hanoi Community Radio.
Tuning in, listeners can both watch and listen to DJs bumping house and deep-house, experimental and electronic, disco and whatever lies between. When not playing music, the station features shows that are mostly in Vietnamese where hosts discuss topics ranging from philosophy to dating in the modern age.
The mix reflects Tra’s mission of creating a station where locals can play and say whatever they want – albeit within limits, given the political nature of Vietnam.
“We let anyone run a show. We just make sure to train them properly and let them know what they can and can’t talk about,” Tra said.
“Obviously, the focus is Vietnamese people,” she added. “[But] I want it to be as diverse as possible.”
To the south, in Ho Chi Minh City, Nguyễn Minh Tân noticed the same gap in the arts and music scene as Tra. After immigrating to Germany in 1991, Nguyễn moved back to Vietnam during the Covid-19 pandemic and had the same instinct as Tra.
He founded V2X magazine three years ago with the goal of building a platform to support young, upcoming Vietnamese creatives in the scene.
As DJs stream live from V2X’s booth, set in an apartment complex from the 1980’s in the middle of the city, Nguyễn reflects on the evolving art scene: “At the end of the day, they’re doing it for themselves, actually. We are just the platform.”
Since its founding, the project has expanded to include a community radio station, called V2X Radio, and music production workshops through V2X Academy.
Also known by the stage name, DJ Minoto, Nguyễn said V2X stands for “Vision to Express” and “Vision to Explore”. Much like Hanoi Community Radio, his station’s mission is to promote and support the creation of a new and unique Vietnamese youth identity.
“It can be different from Vietnamese traditions, but also, ideally, it should be different from anything else in the world,” he said.
His station’s slogan, “Đọc lập – Tự do – Hỗn loạn”, comes from the national motto of Vietnam, which is “Đọc lập – Tự do – Hạnh phúc”.
The first two words are the same – “independence” and “freedom” – but V2X changed the last from “happiness” to “chaos”.
“We picked ‘chaos’ to represent a rebellious spirit,” said Nguyễn. “It’s about breaking existing structures and redefining tradition and conservative ideology.
Contemplating the future of HCR, Tra echoes a similar sentiment:
“To be honest, I don’t even really want it to be my community radio. I want it to be [the local’s]. I would like them to take over it eventually and for them to just have that space.”
Myanmar junta struggles to halt surge in drug trafficking
YANGON: Myanmar junta authorities said that they torched almost half a billion US dollars worth of illegal drugs on Monday (Jun 26) but warned that they were failing to stop a surge in the production and trafficking of narcotics. Head-high piles of heroin, cannabis, methamphetamine and opium were burned inContinue Reading
Move Foward’s Pita urged to reveal details of land sale
Political activist Ruangkrai Leekitwattana on Monday called on Move Forward Party (MFP) leader and prime ministerial candidate Pita Limjaroenrat to disclose details involving the sale of a 14-rai land plot he owned in Prachuap Khiri Khan’s Pran Buri district.
The move followed media reports by Isra News Agency that claimed Mr Pita recently sold the land for 6.5 million baht although the plot was listed to be worth 18 million baht in an asset and debt declaration he submitted to the anti-graft agency in 2019.
Mr Ruangkrai, who is also member of the Palang Pracharath Party (PPRP), said he sent a letter to the MFP leader to provide more information about the transaction to fulfil the constitutional requirements for a minister.
He said the MFP leader is seeking the prime minister’s post and so should prove he has the qualification listed in Section 160(4) of the charter, which says a minister must have a track record of honesty.
Among information Mr Ruangkrai asked from Mr Pita was the land sale contract, the receipt, the estimated price, payment of land transfer fees, personal income tax and a copy of the land ownership paper.
The PPRP member also wanted to know if Mr Pita had paid brokerage fees for the transaction and authorised anyone to carry out the transaction on his behalf. Mr Ruangkrai also asked if the land plot was sold at the stated price.
Early this month, Mr Ruangkrai petitioned the Election Commission (EC) to look into the land plot and asked the poll agency to seek information regarding Mr Pita’s assets and debts declaration from the National Anti-Corruption Commission for use in the probe.
The Senate committee on political development and public participation also said last week it has launched a further probe into Mr Pita’s qualifications and his eligibility to contest the May 14 election and was seeking information related to Mr Pita’s assets and debt, which it said are linked to his qualifications.
The Constitutional Court dissolved Move Forward’s predecessor party, Future Forward, after ruling that a loan from its leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit was a donation. Mr Thanathorn was banned from politics for 10 years.
Thousands of Myanmar nationals take refuge as fighting continues
Almost 4,800 Myanmar nationals are taking shelter in border districts in Mae Hong Son as fighting between the military and ethnic groups continues, according to local officials.
Clashes are reported along the Thai-Myanmar border opposite tambon Sao Hin of Mae Sariang district and tambon Mae Ngao of Khun Yuam district. The number of people taking refuge in four shelters in the two districts stands at 4,798.
Humanitarian assistance is being provided to the refugees through local officials and the Thai Red Cross Society with food, with water and other essential supplies being donated by residents of Mae Hong Son.
Authorities said the latest batch of donations arrived on Monday and the supplies will be distributed to the refugees at the four shelters, adding there are adequate supplies of food, water and clothing.
Local offices of the Thai Red Cross Society in the two districts are also calling for donations which can be dropped at the offices of Mae Sariang and Khun Yuam district everyday.
Chartchai Noisakul, founder of Saphan Boon Khru Nueng charity group, said the group plans to deliver essential supplies to the shelters every week until the situation is resolved.
Meanwhile, the Thai-Myanmar border administration centre has dispatched teams to build and manage sanitation systems at the four shelters and deployed security teams at the shelter areas.
Soldiers from the 36th mobile development under the Royal Thai Armed Forces Headquarters have been assigned to dig wells and build garbage dump sites while volunteers from the non-government sector work on the water system.
Security checkpoints have also been set up and teams assigned to hold daily meetings to monitor and assess the situation.
The tech flaw that lets hackers control surveillance cameras
Getty ImagesChinese-made surveillance cameras are in British offices, high streets and even government buildings – and Panorama has investigated security flaws involving the two top brands. How easy is it to hack them and what does it mean for our security?
In a darkened studio inside the BBC’s Broadcasting House in London, a man sits at his laptop and enters his password.
Thousands of miles away, a hacker is watching everything he types.
Next, the BBC employee picks up his iPhone and enters the passcode. The hacker now has that, too.
A security flaw in the surveillance camera on the ceiling – manufactured by the Chinese firm Hikvision – means it’s now vulnerable to attack.
“I own that device now – I can do whatever I want with that,” says the hacker. “I can disable it… or I can use it to watch what’s going on at the BBC.”
Thankfully for the man being watched, the hacker is working with the BBC. This is part of a series of experiments by Panorama to test the security of some Chinese-made surveillance cameras.
Hikvision and Dahua are two of the world’s leading manufacturers of surveillance cameras.
Nobody knows how many of their units line the UK’s streets.
Last year, the privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch attempted to find out. Between August 2021 and January 2022, it submitted 4,510 Freedom of Information requests to public bodies across the UK. Of 1,289 that responded, 806 confirmed they used Hikvision or Dahua cameras – 227 councils and 15 police forces use Hikvision, and 35 councils use Dahua.
Hikvision cameras are used to monitor many government buildings too – in a single afternoon in central London, Panorama found them outside the Department for International Trade, the Department of Health, the Health Security Agency, Defra and an Army reserve centre.
Security experts fear the cameras have the potential to be used as a Trojan horse to play havoc with computer networks, which in turn could spark civil disruption.
Prof Fraser Sampson, the UK’s surveillance camera commissioner, warns the country’s critical infrastructure – including power supplies, transport networks and access to fresh food and water – is vulnerable.
“All those things rely very heavily on remote surveillance – so if you have an ability to interfere with that, you can create mayhem, cheaply and remotely,” he says.
Charles Parton of the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), a former diplomat who worked in Beijing, agrees: “We’ve all seen the Italian Job in our youth, where you bring the whole of Turin to a halt through the traffic light system. Well, that might have been fiction then, it wouldn’t be now.”
Hikvision told Panorama it is an independent company and is not a threat to UK national security.
“Hikvision has never conducted, nor will it conduct, any espionage-related activities for any government in the world,” it said, adding that its “products are subject to strict security requirements and are compliant with the applicable laws and regulations in the UK, as well as any other country and region we operate in”.
Panorama worked with US-based IPVM, one of the world’s leading authorities on surveillance technology, to test whether it was possible to hack a Hikvision camera. IPVM supplied the one that was installed in a BBC studio.
Panorama could not run the camera on a BBC network for security reasons – so it was put on a test network where there is no firewall and little protection.
The camera Panorama tested contains a vulnerability discovered in 2017. IPVM’s director Conor Healy describes this as “a back door that Hikvision built into its own products.”
Hikvision says its devices were not deliberately programmed with this flaw and it points out that it released a firmware update to address it almost immediately after it was made aware of the issue. It adds that Panorama’s test is not representative of devices that are operating today. But Conor Healy says more than 100,000 cameras online worldwide are still vulnerable to this issue.
As Panorama’s hacking experiment begins, Conor and IPVM’s research engineer John Scanlan are sitting behind laptops in their Pennsylvania headquarters.
Hacking a computer system without permission is a criminal offence – so Panorama is not providing all of the details of how they do it.
Healy and Scanlan start by locating the camera inside Broadcasting House, then go to work attacking its security.
Then Healy times how long it takes to seize control of it. Just 11 seconds later, Scanlan announces: “We have access to that camera now.”
They can now see inside the studio – including the Panorama employee on his laptop.
“If we zoom in tight on the keyboard, we can see clearly the keys that he’s pressing to put his password in,” Scanlan says.
“This is akin to a locksmith giving you a key to your home and the secretly making a master key for all of the locks in that community… that’s effectively what Hikvision engineers did.”
From spy balloons to secret police stations and dissidents on the run, Panorama investigates China’s global surveillance operation. We reveal new details about Beijing’s fleet of spy balloons – and hack a Chinese-made security camera to show how similar devices that line our streets could be exploited.
Watch on BBC One at 20:00 (20:30 in Wales) on Monday 26 June – and afterwards on BBC iPlayer (UK only)
Hikvision says its “products do not have a ‘backdoor'” and were not deliberately programmed with this flaw. It adds it believes that nearly all of the local authorities using their devices would have updated their cameras long before now.
Next, the hackers begin their second test – accessing Dahua’s cameras by infiltrating the software that controls them.
Two test cameras have been set up in IPVM’s headquarters. If the hackers are successful, they could take charge of an entire network of surveillance cameras.
Soon they find the software vulnerability. “There we go, we’re in,” says Healy.
Now they are inside the system, they can use a camera to eavesdrop.
“What a lot of people don’t realise about these cameras is that a large majority of them have microphones,” Healy explains, and while users often switch these off, it’s easy for hackers to switch them back on again – in effect, “wiretapping” the room.
Dahua says when it was made aware of the vulnerability late last year it “immediately conducted a comprehensive investigation” and quickly fixed the problem through “firmware updates”.
The company also says it is not state-backed and that its equipment could not interfere with the UK’s critical infrastructure. It adds: “These allegations are untrue and paint a highly misleading picture of Dahua Technology and its products.”
But experts say the UK needs to do more to protect itself from what Prof Sampson, the surveillance camera commissioner, describes as “digital asbestos”.
“We have a previous generation that has installed this equipment, largely on the basis that it was cheap and got the job done,” he says. “We’ve now realised that it has some serious and inherent risks – so what do we about it?”
Asked whether he trusts Hikvision and Dahua, he replies: “Not one bit.”
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New images show Chinese spy balloons over Asia
Synthetaic/Planet Labs PBCNew evidence of China’s spy balloon programme – including flights over Japan and Taiwan – has been uncovered by BBC Panorama.
Japan has confirmed balloons have flown over its territory and said it’s prepared to shoot them down in future.
China has not directly addressed the evidence presented by the BBC.
US-China relations were thrown into turmoil earlier this year, when an alleged Chinese spy balloon was shot down off the US coast.
China claimed the balloon seen over north-western US in late January was a civilian airship, used for scientific research such as meteorology – and that it was an unintended and isolated event.
John Culver – a former East Asia analyst for the CIA – told Panorama that this “had been not just a one-off, but a continuing effort dating back at least five years.” He said the Chinese balloons were “specially designed for these long-range missions” and some had “apparently circumnavigated the globe”.
Working with Synthetaic, an artificial intelligence company which sifted through huge amounts of data captured by satellites, the BBC has found multiple images of balloons crossing East Asia.
The company’s founder, Corey Jaskolski, found evidence of one balloon crossing northern Japan in early September 2021. These images have not been published before.
Mr Jaskolski also believes the evidence points to this balloon having been launched from deep inside China, south of Mongolia. The BBC has been unable to confirm this.
Japan is a close ally of the US and more American forces are stationed there than in any other foreign country.
Yuko Murakami, from the Japanese ministry of defence, told the BBC that the government was “taking all precautions to monitor the situation on a daily basis” and would even be willing to shoot down balloons to protect the “lives and property of people in the territory of Japan”.
The US State Department says it believes the Chinese balloons are equipped to gather signals intelligence. It says the aircraft it discovered over the US had “multiple antennas, likely capable of collecting and geo-locating communications”.
To investigate whether China had launched other balloons, the Panorama team first searched social media and press reports across the region for sightings of UFOs in the sky.
They found two photographs taken by Taiwan’s weather service, appearing to show a balloon over the capital, Taipei, in late September 2021.
Mr Jaskolski then cross-referenced them with satellite imagery. “Within 90 seconds, we found the balloon off the coast of Taiwan,” he says.
From spy balloons to secret police stations and dissidents on the run, Panorama investigates China’s global surveillance operation. We reveal new details about Beijing’s fleet of spy balloons – and hack a Chinese-made security camera to show how similar devices that line our streets could be exploited.
Watch on BBC One at 20:00 (20:30 in Wales) on Monday 26 June – and afterwards on BBC iPlayer (UK only)
The Taiwanese government told Panorama that it believed it was a weather balloon but Mr Jakolski disagrees.
“Just based on the diameter of the balloon and the fact that the operating altitudes look similar… that looks an awful lot like the balloon that flew over the United States, over Japan,” he says.
Democratically-governed Taiwan has long been in China’s sights.
Last year the Chinese military launched a rehearsal of a full-scale attack.
US President Joe Biden has previously said the US would defend Taiwan if China attacked.
How AI helped locate the balloons
Corey Jaskolski started with a sketch of what he thought the balloon would look like from space. He then fed this outline into his AI software, together with rough coordinates of where it was last seen.
He also analysed wind models to trace the balloon’s path and find its origin.
Working with satellite images provided by the company Planet Labs, Corey fed all the information into his software, known as RAIC (rapid automatic image categorization), to locate the balloons.
Surveillance balloons are huge – the size of several buses – and carry sophisticated equipment capable of collecting large amounts of data on targets below.
But photographed by a satellite from space, they appear to be just small white blobs.
Mr Jaskolski’s research shows that the balloon which flew over the US in February was at one point about 80 miles (130 km) from a nuclear air force base in the state of Montana.
He also plotted the flight path of the balloon back to its most likely launch site – Hainan Island in the South China Sea.
“It looks like on the… launch there was cloud cover,” he says. “And if I were going to launch a balloon, I would have chosen a cloudy day in order to minimise that chance of detection.”
In a statement, the Chinese Embassy in London accused the US of itself releasing a large number of high-altitude balloons, which have continuously circled the globe and illegally flown over China’s airspace.
It said that “China is a responsible country” which always acts “in strict compliance with international law and respects all countries’ sovereignty and territorial integrity”. It added that it rejects “unfounded allegations to denigrate and attack China”.
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