When will they learn?

Photo by Dominic Kurniawan Suryaputra on Unsplash

Once upon a time, many countries had regions that were known for different things. Here in the United States, we knew West Virginia was for coal, Detroit was for cars, Pennsylvania gave us steel, Florida gave us oranges, and my home region was known for pecans.

Today, we’re a global economy, for better or worse, and a lot of that is gone. Sure, there are Japanese cars aplenty on the roads of America, but some of those are more American-made than some of the Fords and Chevys driving beside them.

Technology, however, seems to come from China. They can produce plenty, and they do it cheaply. As a result, many of the devices in your house came from there, even if the company responsible is based somewhere else.

For you and me, that’s not great, but it’s not the end of the world, either.

What happens when large corporations, particularly working on government projects, use Chinese components? In an ideal world, nothing.

But we don’t live in an ideal world, and apparently, no one is wondering why they should be using things from an enemy nation on top-secret projects.

Royal Navy surveillance drones used by Britain’s elite special forces were fitted with cameras containing Chinese-made components that were secretly sending data to an address in China.

The K3 Scout drones, operated by Royal Marines, were found to be transmitting so-called ‘heartbeat’ communications to an IP address in China.

The signals were designed to tell a remote device that the cameras were online and operating normally.

The discovery has triggered national security concerns and forced the Ministry of Defence to strip the cameras of their internet connectivity.

Officials insist there is no evidence that sensitive military information or Ministry of Defence systems were accessed or transmitted overseas.

But the revelation has raised fresh questions about the security of Britain’s military supply chains – and whether Chinese technology has found its way into highly sensitive areas used by special forces.

The £12million fleet has been in use since March and was supplied by British defence contractor Kraken Technology Group.

Kraken had sourced the cameras from a third-party supplier which had provided assurances over their security.

Last year, I wrote about a discovery here in the United States where communications equipment was found inside of Chinese-made power inverters used in so-called green energy projects. This followed after Huawei 5G devices were banned in the United States over security concerns.

See, anything made in China falls under that country’s national security laws. Basically, anyone from China and any device from there is a potential security issue. While most Chinese people are good, decent folks, the state expects them to carry out orders even while abroad.

Companies that make cameras that get thrown onto sensitive naval drones are going to have the means to communicate with China. Power inverters put into solar panels that are pushed as the solution to climate change are going to have the means for China to cut them off.

Anything and everything from China that can be a security risk, is a security risk.

While it seems that Kraken understood the risks, whoever they got the cameras from lied about how safe the cameras actually were. Did Kraken just take their word for it? Or was the lie more elaborate? I don’t know from this, but I expect they’ll have to answer questions from the Ministry of Defense.

The problem is, though, if you can’t make these kinds of things domestically anymore, you have to get them from somewhere. If it’s not a trusted ally nation, then you’re gambling. It’s just that simple, because even if it’s a company in Saudi Arabia or Turkey, they might just be using Chinese manufacturing and saying it’s all safe.

Guys, we need to understand something. China is not a friendly nation. The Daily Mail report notes that an espionage case fell apart because the prosecutors had difficulty establishing China as an enemy state. That shouldn’t require establishing. It should be an accepted fact.

And as they gain power on the global stage, it’s the West that is paying to make it happen. We buy so many of our goods from China, and there’s literally no way for you and me to avoid it unless we make everything in our lives ourselves or buy from individual craftsmen and women who make a given thing.

Unfortunately, it’s kind of hard to find an artisanal television or computer motherboard. It’s not exactly easy to pop onto Etsy and get a handcrafted smartphone made in Nebraska.

China has positioned itself as the manufacturing region of the world. You can get anything and everything you want made there and shipped to your country. We even encouraged this, giving them billions in investments and working to get them into the World Trade Organization. We sold our own manufacturing capability down the river, handed it to a communist nation with designs on world domination, and now we’re finding out just how they’re using what we helped them establish.

And it really feels like no one is learning a damn thing. It feels like I’m beating my head against a wall because no one in authority seems to take the threat posed by this nation seriously.

No, they might not have a prayer in a head-on engagement with the United States military, but they don’t have to. They just have to weaken us with a thousand paper cuts. They just need to get more of their components in sensitive places, all answering back to Beijing.

And we keep letting them.

What’s worse, I don’t see Americans willing to make the sacrifices needed to deal with the threat, even if they recognize it. They want the latest iPhone, not a secure infrastructure. They want TVs that are bigger and have more features, but cost less year after year.

They don’t think beyond their own noses, and that selfishness will ultimately be the death of America if we don’t deal with it.

We, as a nation, will never learn because learning requires us to think beyond our physical reach, and we’ve been too indoctrinated to care about any of that; instead, we’re arguing over whether Sophie Cunningham is a terrible person because she thinks women’s sports are for women.

And criticizing China? Well, that just makes me racist or something, doesn’t it?

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