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Operation Fox Hunt

(Photo by Erik Mclean on Pexels.com)

ProPublica’s Sebastian Rotella and Kirsten Berg have an outstanding piece on the Chinese government’s efforts to compel individuals to return to China to face often trumped up charges. Efforts include secretly sending Chinese officials into the United States to surveil, harass, intimidate, and stalk residents of the United States, and also imprisoning or otherwise threatening residents’ family member who have remained in China.

Many of the details in the article are the result of court records, interviews, and assessments of Chinese media. It remains to be seen whether Chinese agents’ abilities to conduct ‘fox hunts’ will be impeded now that the US government is more aware of these operations. Given the attention and suspicion now cast towards citizens of China, however, there is also a risk that FBI agents may become overzealous in their investigations to the detriment of law-abiding Chinese-Americans or visitors from China.

In an ideal world there would be equivalent analyses or publications on the extent to which these operations are also undertaken in Canada. To date, however, there is no equivalent to ProPublica’s piece in the Canadian media landscape and given the Canadian media’s contraction we can’t realistically expect anything, anytime soon. However, even a short piece which assessed whether individuals from China who’ve run operations in the United States, and who are now barred from entering the US or would face charges upon crossing the US border, are similarly barred or under an extradition order in Canada would be a positive addition to what we know of how the Canadian government is responding to these kinds of Chinese operations.

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Alarmist Takes On Chinese Influence Operations Must Be Set Aside

Lotus Ruan and Gabrielle Lim have a terrific piece in Just Security ‌which strongly makes the case that, “fears of Chinese disinformation are often exaggerated by overblown assessments of the effects of China’s propaganda campaigns and casually drawn attributions.”

The two make clear that there are serious issues with how some Western policy analysts and politicians are suggesting that their governments respond to foreign influence operations that are associated with Chinese public and private parties. To begin, the very efficacy of influence operations remains mired in questions. While this is an area that is seeing more research of late, academics and policy analysts alike cannot assert with significant accuracy whether foreign influence operations have any real impact on domestic opinions or feelings. This should call for conservatism in the policies which are advanced but, instead, we often see calls for Western nations to adopt the internet ‘sovereignty’ positions championed by Russia and China themselves. These analysts and politicians are, in other words, asserting that they only way to be safe from China (and Russia) is to adopt those countries’ own policies.

Even were such (bad) policies adopted, it’s unclear that they would resolve the worst challenges facing countries such as the United States today. Anti-vaxxers, pro-coup supporters, and Big Lie advocates have all been affected by domestic influence operations that were (and are) championed by legitimately elected politicians, celebrities, and major media personalities. Building a sovereign internet ecosystem will do nothing to protect from the threats that are inside the continental United States and which are clearly having a deleterious effect on American society.

What I think I most appreciated in the piece by Ruan and Lim is that they frankly and directly called out many of the so-called solutions to disinformation and influence operations as racist. As just one example, there are those who call for ‘clean’ technologies that juxtapose Western against non-Western technologies. These kinds of arguments often directly perpetuate racist policies; they will not only do nothing to mitigate the spread of misinformation but will simultaneously cast suspicion and violence towards non-Caucasian members of society. Such proposals must be resisted and the authors are to be congratulated for directly and forcefully calling out the policies for what they are instead of carefully critiquing the proposals without actually calling them as racist as they are.

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Standards as the Contemporary Highway System

Jonathan Zittrain, in remarks prepared a few weeks ago, framed Internet protocol standards in a novel way. Specifically, he stated:

Second, it’s entirely fitting for a government to actively subsidize public goods like a common defense, a highway system, and, throughout the Internet’s evolution, the public interest development of standards and protocols to interlink otherwise-disparate systems. These subsidies for the development of Internet protocols, often expressed as grants to individual networking researchers at universities by such organizations as the National Science Foundation, were absolutely instrumental in the coalescence of Internet standards and the leasing of wholesale commercial networks on which to test them. (They also inspired some legislators to advertise their own foresight in having facilitated such strategic funding.) Alongside other basic science research support, this was perhaps some of the best bang for the buck that the American taxpayer has received in the history of the country. Government support in the tens of millions over a course of decades resulted in a flourishing of a networked economy measured in trillions.

Zittrain’s framing of this issue builds on some writing I’ve published around standards. In the executive summary of a report I wrote a few months ago, I stated that,

… the Government of Canada could more prominently engage with standards bodies to, at least in part, guarantee that such standards have security principles baked in and enabled by default; such efforts could include allocating tax relief to corporations, as well as funding to non-governmental organizations or charities, so that Canadians and Canadian interests are more deeply embedded in standards development processes.

To date I haven’t heard of this position being adopted by the Government of Canada, or even debated in public. However, framing this as a new kind of roadway could be the kind of rhetorical framing that would help it gain traction.

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Links Writing

Repurposing Apple Time Capsule as a Network Drive

(Photo by MockupEditor.com on Pexels.com)

For the past several years I’ve happily used an Apple Time Capsule as my router and one of many backup drives, but it’s been getting a big long in the tooth as the number of items on my network has grown. I recently upgraded to a new router but wanted to continue using my Time Capsule, and it’s very large drive, for LAN backups.

A post in Apple’s discussion forums helpfully kicked off how to reset the wireless settings for the Time Capsule and prepare it to just live on the network as a drive. After following those instructions, all I needed to do was:

  1. Open Time Machine Preferences on my device;
  2. Select ‘Add or Remove Backup Disk…’;
  3. Select the freshly networked disk;
  4. Choose to use the pre-existing backup image, and input the encryption password for the backup.

Voila! And now my disk–with all its data–is available on the network and capable of continuing my Time Machine backups!

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Links Writing

Does Canada, Really, Need A Foreign Intelligence Service?

A group of former senior Canadian government officials who have been heavily involved in the intelligence community recently penned an op-ed that raised the question of “does Canada need a foreign intelligence service?” It’s a curious piece, insofar as it argues that Canada does need such a service while simultaneously discounting some of the past debates about whether this kind of a service should be established, as well as giving short shrift to Canada’s existing collection capacities that are little spoken about. They also fundamentally fail to take up what is probably the most serious issue currently plaguing Canada’s intelligence community, which is the inability to identify, hire, and retain qualified staff in existing agencies that have intelligence collection and analysis responsibilities.

The Argument

The authors’ argument proceeds in a few pieces. First, it argues that Canadian decision makers don’t really possess an intelligence mindset insofar as they’re not primed to want or feel the need to use foreign intelligence collected from human sources. Second, they argue that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) really does already possess a limited foreign intelligence mandate (and, thus, that the Government of Canada would only be enhancing pre-existing powers instead of create new powers from nothing). Third, and the meat of the article, they suggest that Canada probably does want an agency that collects foreign intelligence using human sources to support other members of the intelligence community (e.g., the Communications Security Establishment) and likely that such powers could just be injected into CSIS itself. The article concludes with the position that Canada’s allies “have quietly grumbled from time to time that Canada is not pulling its weight” and that we can’t prioritize our own collection needs when we’re being given intelligence from our close allies per agreements we’ve established with them. This last part of the argument has a nationalistic bent to it: implicitly they’re asking whether we can really trust even our allies and closest friends? Don’t we need to create a capacity and determine where such an agency and its tasking should focus on, perhaps starting small but with the intent of it getting larger?

Past Debates and Existing Authorities

The argument as positioned fails to clearly make the case for why these expanded authorities are required and simultaneously does not account for the existing powers associated with the CSE, the Canadian military, and Global Affairs Canada.

With regards to the former, the authors state, “the arguments for and against the establishment of a new agency have never really been examined; they have only been cursorily debated from time to time within the government by different agencies, usually arguing on the basis of their own interests.” In making this argument they depend on people not remembering their history. The creation of CSIS saw a significant debate about whether to include foreign human intelligence elements and the decision by Parliamentarians–not just the executive–was to not include these elements. The question of whether to enable CSIS or another agency to collect foreign human intelligence cropped up, again, in the late 1990s and early 2000, and again around 2006-2008 or so when the Harper government proposed setting up this kind of an agency and then declined to do so. To some extent, the authors’ op-ed is keeping with the tradition of this question arising every decade or so before being quietly set to the side.

In terms of agencies’ existing authorities and capacities, the CSE is responsible for conducting signals intelligence for the Canadian government and is tasked to focus on particular kinds of information per priorities that are established by the government. Per its authorizing legislation, the CSE can also undertake certain kinds of covert operations, the details of which have been kept firmly under wraps. The Canadian military has been aggressively building up its intelligence capacities with few details leaking out, and its ability to undertake foreign intelligence using human sources as unclear as the breadth of its mandate more generally.1 Finally, GAC has long collected information abroad. While their activities are divergent from the CIA or MI6–officials at GAC aren’t planning assassinations, as an example–they do collect foreign intelligence and share it back with the rest of the Government of Canada. Further, in their increasingly distant past they stepped in for the CIA in environments the Agency was prevented from operating within, such as in Cuba.

All of this is to say that Canada periodically goes through these debates of whether it should stand up a foreign intelligence service akin to the CIA or MI6. But the benefits of such a service are often unclear, the costs prohibitive, and the actual debates about what Canada already does left by the wayside. Before anyone seriously thinks about establishing a new service, they’d be well advised to read through Carvin’s, Juneau’s, and Forcese’s book Top Secret Canada. After doing so, readers will appreciate that staffing is already a core problem facing the Canadian intelligence community and recognize that creating yet another agency will only worsen this problem. Indeed, before focusing on creating new agencies the authors of the Globe and Mail op-ed might turn their minds to how to overcome the existing staffing problems. Solving that problem might enable agencies to best use their existing authorizing legislation and mandates to get much of the human foreign intelligence that the authors are so concerned about collecting. Maybe that op-ed could be titled, “Does Canada’s Intelligence Community Really Have a Staffing Problem?”

  1. As an example of the questionable breadth of the Canadian military’s intelligence function, when the military was tasked with assisting long-term care home during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in Canada, they undertook surveillance of domestic activism organizations for unclear reasons and subsequently shared the end-products with the Ontario government. ↩︎
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2021.6.7

Not going to lie: the most useful feature for me, personally, that has been announced at WWDC this year (thus far…) is that the Photos app will now display full EXIF data. I really want Apple to enable advanced search in Photos so I can then sort based on EXIF information, to filter by camera/device and by lens.

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Links Writing

Which States Most Require ‘Democratic Support’?

Roland Paris and Jennifer Walsh have an excellent, and thought-provoking, column in the Globe and Mail where they argue that Western democracies need to adopt a ‘democratic support’ agenda. Such an agenda has multiple points comprising:

  1. States getting their own democratic houses in order;
  2. States defending themselves and other democracies against authoritarian states’ attempts to disrupt democracies or coerce residents of democracies;
  3. States assisting other democracies which are at risk of slipping toward authoritarianism.

In principle, each of these points make sense and can interoperate with one another. The vision is not to inject democracy into states but, instead, to protect existing systems and demonstrate their utility as a way of weaning nations towards adopting and establishing democratic institutions. The authors also assert that countries like Canada should learn from non-Western democracies, such as Korea or Taiwan, to appreciate how they have maintained their institutions in the face of the pandemic as a way to showcase how ‘peer nations’ also implement democratic norms and principles.

While I agree with the positions the authors suggest, far towards the end of the article they delicately slip in what is the biggest challenge to any such agenda. Namely, they write:

Time is short for Canada to articulate its vision for democracy support. The countdown to the 2024 U.S. presidential election is already under way, and no one can predict its outcome. Meanwhile, two of Canada’s closest democratic partners in Europe, Germany and France, may soon turn inward, preoccupied by pivotal national elections that will feature their own brands of populist politics.1

In warning that the United States may be an unreliable promoter of democracy (and, by extension, human rights and international rules and order which have backstopped Western-dominated world governance for the past 50 years) the authors reveal the real threat. What does it mean when the United States is regarded as likely to become more deeply mired in internecine ideological conflicts that absorbs its own attention, limits its productive global engagements, and is used by competitor and authoritarian nations to warn of the consequences of “American-style” democracy?

I raise these questions because if the authors’ concerns are fair (and I think they are) then any democracy support agenda may need to proceed with the presumption that the USA may be a wavering or episodic partner in associated activities. To some extent, assuming this position would speak more broadly to a recognition that the great power has significantly fallen. To even take this as possible–to the extent that contingency planning is needed to address potential episodic American commitment to the agenda of buttressing democracies–should make clear that the American wavering is the key issue: in a world where the USA is regarded as unreliable, what does this mean for other democracies and how they support fellow democratic states? Do countries, such as Canada and others with high rule-of-law democratic governments, focus first and foremost on ‘supporting’ US democracy? And, if so, what does this entail? How do you support a flailing and (arguably) failing global hegemon?

I don’t pretend to have the answers. But it seems that when we talk about supporting democracies, and can’t rely on the USA to show up in five years, then the metaphorical fire isn’t approaching our house but a chunk of the house is on fire. And that has to absolutely be our first concern: can we put out the fire and save the house, or do we need to retreat with our children and most precious objects and relocate? And, if we must retreat…to where do we retreat?

  1. Emphasis not in original. ↩︎
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Links Writing

Building a Strategic Vision to Combat Cybercrime

The Financial Times has a good piece examining the how insurance companies are beginning to recalculate how they assess insurance premiums that are used to cover ransomware payments. In addition to raising fees (and, in some cases, deciding whether to drop insuring against ransomware) some insurers like AIG are adopting stronger underwriting, including:

… an additional 25 detailed questions on clients’ security measures. “If [clients] have very, very low controls, then we may not write coverage at all,” Tracie Grella, AIG’s global head of cyber insurance, told the Financial Times.

To be sure, there is an ongoing, and chronic, challenge of getting companies to adopt baseline security postures, inclusive of running moderately up-to-date software, adopting multi-factor authorization, employing encryption at rest, and more. In the Canadian context this is made that much harder because the majority of Canadian businesses are small and mid-sized; they don’t have an IT team that can necessarily maintain or improve on their organization’s increasingly complicated security posture.

In the case of larger mid-sized, or just large, companies the activities of insurers like AIG could force them to modify their security practices for the better. Insurance is generally regarded as cheaper than security and so seeing the insurance companies demand better security to receive insurance is a way of incentivizing organizational change. Further change can be incentivized by government adopting policies such as requiring a particular security posture in order to bid on, or receive, government contracts. This governmental incentivization doesn’t necessarily encourage change for small organizations that already find it challenging to contract with government due to the level of bureaucracy involved. For other organizations, however, it will mean that to obtain/maintain government contracts they’ll need to focus on getting the basics right. Again, this is about aligning incentives such that organizations see value in changing their operational policies and postures to close off at least some security vulnerabilities. There may be trickle down effects to these measures, as well, insofar as even small-sized companies may adopt better security postures based on actionable guidance that is made available to the smaller companies responsible for supplying those middle and larger-sized organizations, which do have to abide by insurers’ or governments’ requirements.1

While the aforementioned incentives might improve the cybersecurity stance of some organizations the key driver of ransomware and other criminal activities online is its sheer profitability. The economics of cybercrime have been explored in some depth over the past 20 years or so, and there are a number of conclusions that have been reached that include focusing efforts on actually convicting cybercriminals (this is admittedly hard where countries like Russia and former-Soviet Republic states indemnify criminals that do not target CIS-region organizations or governments) to selectively targeting payment processors or other intermediaries that make it possible to derive revenues from the criminal activities.

Clearly it’s not possible to prevent all cybercrime, nor is it possible to do all things at once: we can’t simultaneously incentivize organizations to adopt better security practices, encourage changes to insurance schemas, and find and address weak links in cybercrime monetization systems with the snap of a finger. However, each of the aforementioned pieces can be done with a strategic vision of enhancing defenders’ postures while impeding the economic incentives that drive online criminal activities. Such a vision is ostensibly shared by a very large number of countries around the world. Consequently, in theory, this kind of strategic vision is one that states can cooperate on across borders and, in the process, build up or strengthen alliances focused on addressing challenging international issues pertaining to finance, crime, and cybersecurity. Surely that’s a vision worth supporting and actively working towards.

  1. To encourage small suppliers to adopt better security practices when they are working with larger organizations that have security requirements placed on them, governments might set aside funds to assist the mid-sized and large-sized vendors to secure down the supply chain and thus relieve small businesses of these costs. ↩︎
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2021.5.20

After many months of hope and anticipation, I’m looking forward to finally ditching the (cruddy and privacy intrusive) OS that is built into my TV and enjoying my new Apple TV 4K (Gen 2)! I admit to being disappointed Apple hasn’t transformed the Apple TV into a ‘true’ gaming device, but c’est la vie.

Now the wait begins for the a new Apple Watch…

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The Answer to Why Twitter Influences Canadian Politics

Elizabeth Dubois has a great episode of Wonks and War Rooms where she interviews Etienne Rainville of The Boys in Short Pants podcast, former Hill staffer, and government relations expert. They unpack how government staffers collect information, process it, and identify experts.

Broadly, the episode focuses on how the absence of significant policy expertise in government and political parties means that social media—and Twitter in particular—can play an outsized role in influencing government, and why that’s the case.

While the discussion isn’t necessarily revelatory to anyone who has dealt with some elements of government of Canada, and especially MPs and their younger staffers, it’s a good and tight conversation that could be useful for students of Canadian politics, and also helpfully distinguishes of of the differences between Canadian and American political cultures. I found the forthrightness of the conversation and the honesty of how government operates was particularly useful in clarifying why Twitter is, indeed, a place for experts in Canada to spend time if they want to be policy relevant.