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A daily brief about the world's most dangerous places from international war correspondent Chuck Holton
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Thursday Dec 27, 2018
Thursday Dec 27, 2018
Is Nicaragua the "other" Venezuela? And is your teapot spying on you? All that and more coming up on the December 27th, 2018 episode of the Hot Zone.
I'm Chuck Holton. Rising allegations of espionage against China have people asking if spies are listening in on their phone calls...and they very well may be. But before we get to that, lets talk about Nicaragua. It hasn't been covered much in the US press, but this is one hot zone that has already claimed more than 500 lives this year.
Let me give you a little background, and I apologize ahead of time that I don't have a lot of background footage for these stories, so you'll just have to watch me talk today. Sorry about that. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega is on his second go around as the leader of that country. See, he was President from 1979 to 1990, then took a break, and came back to power in 2006 and has had a stranglehold on the government ever since, even installing his wife as vice president last year.
Ortega is a straight up marxist, and was the leader of the brutal Sandinista movement back in the 80's when my friend Oliver North was trying to help out the Contras during the Nicaraguan Civil War. The Sandinistas were known for such things as mass extrajudicial executions and other fun human rights abuses while in power.
Ortega won the election in 2006 by promising massive welfare programs to the nation's poor. When Ortega took office, he immediately started cozying up to Venezuela, and for a period of years received hundreds of millions in aid from that country, until Venezuela's corruption and socialism, (but I repeat myself) decimated that country's finances and it was no longer able to shovel cash at it's latin american neighbors.
and that's when the wheels started to fall off for Daniel Ortega. See, when you promise people lots of free stuff, it doesn't take long for them to come to believe they are entitled to all that free stuff. And when you run out of other people's money, the thin veneer of civility that covers a society wears out very quickly.
So for the last ten months or so, there have been massive violent riots in the streets across Nicaragua. Students, workers and business owners have banded together to call for Ortega to step down. And in true despotic dictator fashion, Ortega has dealt with the crisis by sending troops to quash the protests, jailing journalists and kicking NGO's out of the country. Ortega claims he will stay until the end of his eighth term in 2021, when rumor has it he plans to rig the election so his wife can become president after him.
During his reign, Nicaragua has mostly been a safe, peaceful place to visit. Totalitarian countries often seem clean, safe and tranquil on the outside. But it stays that way out of fear. If a despotic dictator will make your family disappear if you scare off some tourists, you're probably going to be as nice as you can. But when the government can no longer care for people from the cradle to the grave, watch out. That's what's happening in Nicaragua.
We've seen this in the United States with even localized disruptions in entitlements. Protests, sit-ins (remember the occupy movement?) and walmarts get pillaged - like they did in October 2014 when EBT cards in mississippi temporarily stopped working.
Many of the protests I've covered in the US over the last year contained some element of socialists -and they literally wear signs around their necks that say "socialism is the answer." Well if socialism is the answer, I think you are asking the wrong question.
Okay, let's move on to another fun socialist paradise - the people's republic of China. The Chinese government has been full court press on both spying and espionage around the world for many years. In Russia a few years ago, they found thousands of tea kettles (Tea is pretty popular there) that had wifi sniffers built into the plastic handles. So I guess you bring the teakettle home, it automatically hacks into your router and starts sending all your personal data back to Beijing. Isn't that lovely.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The Red Army has hundreds of thousands of hackers working for it, breaking into anything and everything they can around the world. Their targets don't even have to have any military or strategic importance - they'll hack into Taco Bell as eagerly as they will the Pentagon.
A few months ago a memo went out in the US defense department warning us service members NOT to own any phone made by ZTE or Huawei, among others. Because those phones come with a special feature - they send all your location, call and browsing data back to China to feed their insatiable appetite for information.
Those two brands are huge here in Panama...as a matter of fact I own a huawei phone. Oops. So you can imagine how excited I was to hear the Chinese President, Xi Jinping was coming to Panama to meet with the Panamanian President.
[Stand up in downtown Panama City] 1 min
Well I went to the embassy hoping for an interview and got stiffed. Such is the life of a journalist. But suffice it to say the Americans aren't exactly jubilant that the Panamanian government is cozying up to China. Especially when Panama has access to at least a little bit of US intelligence which helps them catch drug traffickers coming through the country. But the closer countries in Latin America get to China, the further away they are from US influence. And that has major implications for US national security.
And side note: NO, China does not own the canal. That's an urban legend that won't die. A Chinese company called hutchison wampoa has had the contract to manage the ports in Panama for more than a decade. But Panama runs the canal.
What's most concerning is that China is taking HUGE strides in the development of artificial intelligence, and AI runs on data. So much of what China is doing by scooping up information about your phone records and netflix purchases and uber rides has to do with helping china beat those companies at their own game, with the ultimate goal of making China the sole superpower on earth, and the United States merely an afterthought.
So to sum up, the FBI said earlier this month that Chinese spying doesn't just threaten the future of the Untied States. It threatens the future of the world. So there's that.
In a congressional hearing earlier this month, E.W. Priestap, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, testified to the severity of the threat. I'm going to read this to you because frankly, it's frightening.
“Make no mistake:" Priestap said. " The Chinese government is proposing itself as an alternative model for the world, one without a democratic system of government, and it is seeking to undermine the free and open rules-based order we helped establish following World War II,”
At an earlier meeting called the Aspen Forum, another FBI official named Michael Collins said this:
[quote from Michael Collins] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYmNS2TfK6M
So it's not so much that China sees us as their enemy...they see us more as prey. They are hunting our technology, our economy, and they will be absolutely ruthless in surpassing the United States every way they can.
Ask yourself this - how much of the electronic technology you use every day comes from China? If you're like me you probably have no idea, but can imagine that the majority of the electronics you interact with - from televisions to security cameras to electric toothbrushes - all come from that communist country. China is perfecting the art of using that technology to spy on it's own citizens and control their behavior through a social credit rating. Scary stuff. And they aren't keeping it in China. Many of these same technologies are seeping into American culture. From facial recognition scans at airports to creditors mining your facebook contacts...This great article in defense one yesterday asked the question this way: How far will societies pursue security along paths paved by dictators?
So basically, you should be very concerned about the Chinese surveillance state. Because it's not staying in China. It's already here. And frankly we have no idea how it will change our lives in the coming decade.
Well that's all for today folks. Thanks for being with us. Back again tomorrow - see you then. I'm Chuck Holton, and this has been the Hot Zone.
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