re Chatter on Other Sites.- Are We a Security Risk?

[Kirkhill]

At risk of being considered a complete raving loony, possibly a majority opinion anyway, LeeYang's posts here have started me down a troublesome trail.

Has either of you, or anyone else for that matter, seen any rise in background chatter on progressive/anti-war/friendship sites pertaining to China recently?

LeeYang's sudden appearance on our boards is curious to me.   Particularly at this time.

There are articles in the US press about the US Navy trying out a new "surging" plan that conveniently puts 7 of the USN's 12 Carrier Groups off of Taiwan.

There are articles about the Canadian involvement in these US exercises in the National Post, including that one of the Surface Action Groups acting in support of the Carrier groups is a multi-national group led by a Canadian task group.

The US army is reorienting its division in Korea, reducing infantry, pulling back, offering fire support to the Koreans instead.

What really triggered my question is the comment in the article I posted in another thread (China Exchange? in Recruiting) about a great amount of internet chatter emanating from mainland China sites in support of Chinese intervention in Taiwan.

Just wondering who is paying LeeYang's salary.

Sorry if you find this offensive LeeYang but as you said yourself in the post on Michael Moore, who can you trust these days?

I will now go back to making myself a tin-foil beanie.   Is the propeller supposed to spin clockwise or counter-clockwise?

Cheers.

 

[winchable]

Perhaps I'm just kind of slow at catching meaning.
But you are thinking in terms of espionage, and if so, how does it pertain to us?
For us dumb kids at the back of the class..please

 

[nULL]

Please enlighten me, this is interesting.

 

[Kirkhill]

As I suggested I may be seeing more than is there. In which case I am an idiot and deserve to be called such.

But it is not so much espionage I am suggesting as information/disinformation.   Vladimir Putin's specialty when he worked for the KGB was German Soviet Friendship societies.   Encouraging westerners to follow their instincts and demonstrate against their governments.   In and of itself not a bad thing but when the other side is encouraging it a disingenuous activity at best.

LeeYang may have nothing to do with this type of activity at all, in which case I will apologize to him in advance but trust is hard to come by in international affairs and over the internet especially.

One thing that all sides in a dispute want is to get their message out and drum up support.   Traditionally this has been done with pamphlets, newspapers and magazines, radio and television.   These avenues require a great deal of infrastructure and have a great deal of internal inertia.   Thus they are extremely hard to influence (as any Conservative, or I suppose Marxist-Leninist, supporter will argue).

The internet is not subject to this inertia.   It is relatively easy to get your message out and has been used successfully in recent years to organize the anti-globalist movement as well as to get the message out from Iraq (the SalaamPax and Where is Raed blogs come immediately to mind).   And because it is not an "establishment" organ (probably dating myself with that) it tends to be more trusted by some.

What better place to try to make friends than the internet.

LeeYang's sudden burst of activity on this board is not unwelcome to me, just curious.   Especially as I said, in light of the high incidence of pro-assault chatter being reported by the Washington Times pertaining to Taiwan.

If I was an inordinately suspicious type, and I am, the conjunction of the Americans surging 7 carrier groups, with multi-national support in an exercise in waters near where the Chinese are planning to conduct a large scale "dress rehearsal" for an assault on Taiwan   would be curious to me.   Especially as one way armies have traditionally organized in plain sight was to schedule exercises near the target.   NATO, and Russia, for that matter would regularly go on alert when the other was on exercise.   No doubt the same thing applies now.

This board is a brilliant board, I thoroughly enjoy it and enjoy contributing to it but it is an interesting conundrum that in having these discussions we give away a lot about morale, organization, disposition of forces, capabilities etc well beyond the tactically restricted need to know pams.   If I was in the Peoples' Liberation Army and wanted to know the capabilities of our potential enemies, whether the forces are fit to fight, one of my activities would probably be monitoring this board along with equivalent boards in the US, Britain, India you name it.

And if I wanted to interact with my enemy's troops, outside the chain of command these boards would be a good place to start.

Another good place to start, and probably a better place to trawl for potential sympathizers to my cause would be the other type of sites I described.   Progressive/Anti-War/Pacifist/Anti-American sites.

The reason I addressed this thread to null and goober is that they seemed amongst the better bets on this board for having access to people that post on those sites.   The chap from Trent University might also be plugged in.

I wanted to know if there had been similar "hands across the water" messages from China on other boards and has there been an increase in Chinese commentary recently.

At bottom what I am saying is that if I was going to invade Taiwan I might want to increase my disinformation activities, and LeeYang's actions could be seen in that light.  

And not to be alarmist, but even if Dongshan is the actual target and this really is an exercise I think I would probably want to try out an internet disinformation strategy anyway.

Course, I am prepared to be considered all wet on this one.   But maybe I am not.   I don't know.

I hope it is an exercise and stays that way -   like the many other exercises that have been held in those waters and the many exercises held in Germany and Poland.... where nothing happened at all.

OK you can measure me for my padded cell now.

Cheers.

 

[rcr]

As silly as all this sounds, I commend Kirkhill for seeing this in a different light.  Even if what he has stated is not at all true, he's got his instict working, and there's never anything wrong with that in friendly terms.  No harm done I say. :-X

 

[bossi]

Yup - our instincts have been honed over thousands of years ... a good thing to trust
(especially the survival instinct)

Never hurts to express a theory and ask for a reality check.
I'm digesting the info - will sleep on it and perhaps weigh in to this discussion ...

 

[SFontaine]

I know exactly what you mean man.

Over at www.militaryphotos.net so many PLA Soldiers, supporters etc have started posting up pictures and such of a bunch of high-speed Chinese soldiers, tanks, planes etc and it just seemed odd to me that I've seen so much PRC stuff in the last month or so just pop up everywhere... Also a week or so back a Chinese Navy ship was docked in Victoria and I saw a lot of Chinese Naval personnel wandering around downtown, which seemed really odd to me. Not that I'm saying there's some huge Chinese conspiracy going on or something but it just seemed really weird that in the last month or so China has sort of come front and center on various forums and such.

 

[Guardian]

This board is a brilliant board, I thoroughly enjoy it and enjoy contributing to it but it is an interesting conundrum that in having these discussions we give away a lot about morale, organization, disposition of forces, capabilities etc well beyond the tactically restricted need to know pams.   If I was in the Peoples' Liberation Army and wanted to know the capabilities of our potential enemies, whether the forces are fit to fight, one of my activities would probably be monitoring this board along with equivalent boards in the US, Britain, India you name it.

This is an excellent point...

A good reality check, Kirkhill. Even if your specific concern turns out to be no big deal, you've reminded us about the security implications of our discussions - always a good thing to keep in mind. Kudos...

 

[bossi]

(incredible feeling of deja vu ... having written this somewhere else ... must be the malaria medication ... oh, well ...)

A while back I actually had lunch with the Chinese military attache in Ottawa.
We were discussing exchange programs, and he explained that the Chinese Army didn't participate in any (and, he was envious of our ability to go on exchange with our NATO, Commonwealth and other allies).
He said they only ever went on courses with their few allies, but that was all.
Also, he said his family was forbidden from travelling outside of China while he was in Canada
(i.e. in order to prevent their defection).

Returning to the discussion of a certain foreigner's posting on this Forum ...
Does it make sense that the Chinese Army would employ somebody with a foreign education and "better than average language skills" and knowledge of foreign culture as a lowly clerk?
(okay - sure - we do it all the time in Canada ... but of course we recruit the cream of the crop!)

I guess we'd better be careful not to openly discuss JTF3 and their new laser sabres, or what a pain in the butt it is for every soldier in our Army to use up our individual/personal ammunition allocation of 48,000 rounds each (as well as all those anti-tank missiles every one of us has to fire until we get a perfect score).  And, we'd certainly better not mention our annual swim test where we have to swim underwater across Lake Ontario and simulate the invasion of a certain non-friendly power ...
(ooops - darn - did I say all that out loud?)

Whatever.
Maybe it's just a stupid prank, maybe it's actually a desperate attempt to initiate dialogue with potential enemies (i.e. in order to avoid the same fate that befell certain Axis powers in WWII - after the war, the two biggest Axis powers both embarked on a very ambitious language education program in order to ensure they became better connnected to the English-speaking Allies ...)
Food for thought, mes amis.

Having said all of the above, it's impossible for the moderators (alone) to ensure there are no OPSEC violations here - we need the assistance and cooperation of every single one of our members
(hmmm ... just like in real life ... hmmm ...)
Okay - I'd better get back to my nightly 300 pushups and 90 chinups before bedtime, just like the rest of you
(tomorrow we've got our weekly 26 mile rucksack march, and then we're stripping and assembling those new thermo-nuclear grenade launchers, blindfolded, underwater ... etc.)

 

[tabernac]

I guess we'd better be careful not to openly discuss JTF3 and their new laser sabres, or what a pain in the butt it is for every soldier in our Army to use up our individual/personal ammunition allocation of 48,000 rounds each (as well as all those anti-tank missiles every one of us has to fire until we get a perfect score).   And, we'd certainly better not mention our annual swim test where we have to swim underwater across Lake Ontario and simulate the invasion of a certain non-friendly power ...
(ooops - darn - did I say all that out loud?)

I think the malaria meds are getting to you bossi. ;D

 

[Kirkhill]

That ends our musical interlude.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

Tonight we have a double feature: The Many Lives of Walter Mitty and Get Smart starring Don Adams.

Signing off for now and its goodnight from me and its goodnight from him. :-*

 

[Cdn Blackshirt]

I've been tuned out for the last couple of days because I'm mvoving offices,
but that being said I don't think you're out of line to be paranoid.

For anyone who's read the Art of War or anything on how the Chinese
develop intelligence assets (often through business fronts), your comments
seem completely justified and I for one appreciate you sharing them.

Just as an aside, since the Chinese Authorities firewall the hell out of their
internet traffic in order to try to control information in/out, does it not
seem strange that certain individuals have access to foreign military sites?

Yahoo.com - blocked.
Retuers.com - blocked.
Army.ca - no problem???



Matthew.  ???

 

[SFontaine]

Yeah I don't understand that. They block CNN, Reuters, Yahoo and they edit Vice President Cheney's speeches because there are mentions of freedom in it but military sites of pro-Capitalist, pro-Freedom, pro-Democracy countries are accessible.

 

[Pugnacious]

Very strange...
Who ever is in charge of these boards (here and Military pics) might want to bump this strangeness up to the powers that be.

Cheers!
P.

 

[291er]

Where are some of this LeeYang's posts???  Chinese are notorious for their int-gathering techniques, and though I find it very unlikely that this is one of their sources of OSINT (open-source intelligence), stranger things have happened.....not sure if the "powers that be" would be interested in it....but who knows......

 

[Ex-Dragoon]

Here you go 291er if you find out anything can you let the admin know?

http://army.ca/forums/threads/17407.0.html

 

[Jarnhamar]

I guess we'd better be careful not to openly discuss JTF3 and their new laser sabres, or what a pain in the butt it is for every soldier in our Army to use up our individual/personal ammunition allocation of 48,000 rounds each

Thats funny but i guarentee someone is going to ask who the jtf3 are or call you a dummy because "We don't get 48'000 rounds!"

 

[casing]

Who are the JTF3?  :blotto:

 

[bossi]

Who are the JTF3?  :blotto:

Ooops ... we've said too much already ... now we're going to have to kill you.
(and, did I say only 48,000 rounds per soldier?  My mistake - a typographical error - of course I meant to say 48,000 plus 54 boxes of link for the machine gun annual test every soldier has to do, too)

 

[291er]

hurry break out the amnesia ray......