UK spy chief says West faces ‘moment of reckoning’ on tech

KELVIN CHANFri, April 23, 2021, 8:59 AM·2 min readJeremy Fleming

LONDON (AP) — Western countries risk losing control of technologies that are key to internet security and economic prosperity to nations like China and Russia if they don’t act to deal with the threat, one of the U.K.’s top spy chiefs warned Friday.

“Significant technology leadership is moving east” and causing a conflict of interests and values, Jeremy Fleming, director of government electronic surveillance agency GCHQ, said in a speech.

Singling out China as a particular threat, he said the country’s “size and technological weight means that it has the potential to control the global operating system.”

China is an early adopter of emerging technologies but it also has a “competing vision for the future of cyberspace,” and it’s playing an influential role in the debate around international rules and standards, he said.

He raised the possibility of countries with “illiberal values” like China building them into technical standards that the world ends up relying on, and using their state power to control and dominate technology markets, turning them into arenas of geopolitical competition.

Russian hacking and other nefarious online activity, meanwhile, poses the most acute threat to the U.K. but, like a smartphone app vulnerability, could be avoided.

China’s Foreign Ministry blasted the remarks, saying they were “totally groundless and unreasonable.”

“Western countries, such as the U.K. and U.S., are actually the true empires of hacking and tapping,” ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a briefing in Beijing.

Left unchecked, foreign adversaries could threaten the design and freedom of the internet, Fleming said. He citied as examples the security for emerging technologies like “smart city” sensors used to manage services more efficiently or digital currencies, saying they could be hardwired for data collection or other intrusive capabilities that go against open and democratic societies.

Britain and other Western countries face “a moment of reckoning,” Fleming said.

“The rules are changing in ways not always controlled by government,” Fleming said in his speech at Imperial College London. “And without action it is increasingly clear that the key technologies on which we will rely for our future prosperity and security won’t be shaped and controlled by the West.

Britain should not take its status as a cyber power for granted, and it should work on developing “sovereign technologies” such as high-speed quantum computing and cryptographic technology to protect sensitive information, Fleming said.

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Japan to host first joint military drill with US, France

 Fri, April 23, 2021, 2:44 AM·2 min read

Japan will hold a joint military drill with US and French troops in the country’s southwest next month, the defence minister said Friday, as China’s actions in regional waters raise concern.

The exercise, running from May 11 to 17, will be the first large-scale exercise in Japan involving ground troops from all three countries, the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force (JGSDF) said in a statement.

It comes as Tokyo seeks to deepen defence cooperation beyond its key US ally to counter Beijing’s growing assertiveness in the East and South China seas.

“France shares the vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific,” Defence Minister Nobuo Kishi told reporters.

“By strengthening cooperation between Japan, the United States and France, we’d like to further improve the tactics and skills of the Self-Defense Forces in defending remote island territories,” he said.

Paris has strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific where it has territories, including the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean and French Polynesia in the South Pacific.

The joint drills will be held at the JGSDF’s Kirishima training ground and Camp Ainoura in the Kyushu region and include amphibious operation exercises.

Last week, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and US President Joe Biden vowed to stand firm together against China and step up cooperation including on technology.

Japan has long said it feels threatened by China’s vast military resources and territorial disputes.

It is particularly concerned by Chinese activity after the Japanese-administered Senkaku islands, which Beijing claims and calls the Diaoyu.

Washington has reiterated in recent months that the US-Japan Security Treaty covers the disputed islands.

China claims the majority of the South China Sea, invoking its so-called nine-dash line to justify what it says are historic rights to the key trade waterway.

Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan all contest parts of China’s declared territory in the sea.

An international tribunal in The Hague in 2016 invalidated China’s claims in the South China Sea in a first-ever ruling, also saying Chinese reclamation activities in the Spratly Islands are illegal. Beijing rejected the decision.

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Philippines protests China’s ‘threatening’ South China Sea presence

 Fri, April 23, 2021, 3:50 AM·2 min read

MANILA (Reuters) – The Philippines has sent two new diplomatic protests to China over its failure to withdraw what it called on Friday “threatening” vessels that were massing in contested areas of the South China Sea.

The Philippines has ramped up its rhetoric in recent weeks over the lingering presence of hundreds of Chinese boats in its 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), testing relations between two countries that have sought to heal their historic rifts.

The Philippine foreign ministry said maritime officials had observed the “continued unauthorised presence and activities” of 160 Chinese fishing and militia vessels around the disputed Spratly islands and Scarborough shoal, as of April 20.

Five Chinese coastguard vessels were also spotted around the areas.

“The continued swarming and threatening presence of the Chinese vessels creates an atmosphere of instability and is a blatant disregard of the commitments by China to promote peace and stability in the region,” the foreign ministry said.

It comes as the Philippines announces a boosting of its presence of vessels in its EEZ. Under international law, foreign vessels are permitted to make “innocent passage” through a country’s EEZ.

Chinese diplomats have denied that militia were aboard the vessels.

China’s embassy in Manila did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday on the new protests.

China claims almost the entire South China Sea, where about $3 trillion worth of ship-borne trade passes each year. An international arbitral tribunal in 2016 invalidated China’s expansive claim, which is based on its own maps.

Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam also have competing claims to various islands and features.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said on Monday he was prepared to deploy navy ships to assert the country’s sovereign rights to oil and mineral resources in its EEZ, telling China that if it started drilling for oil, so will he.

(Reporting by Karen Lema; Editing by Martin Petty)