Covid19 Vaccine Influence in Latin America
Followup: This note adds context to discussions of ways to meet challenges to U.S. policies reversing autocratic digital influence in Latin America. Reports: Andres Oppenheimer wrote in the Miami Herald that the Trump Administration, as recently as late July, was not planning to supply Latin America with U.S.-developed vaccines while Russia and China have entered agreements to…
The Covid-Digital Storm: Authoritarian Influence on Latin America’s Digital Demographic
Purpose: To explore the digital demographic connection to reversing Russian and Chinese subversion of democracy and liberty in Latin America. Background Before Covid19 spawned a pandemic, Russia and China had been plying influence operations and digital authoritarianism to pressure Latin America’s governments, elections, nationalists, businesses, security biases, attitudes toward democracy, and relations with the United States.…
On Labeling Adversarial Governments
The imprecise labeling of adversarial autocratic states in an information war can backfire on U.S., allies, and democracies in general. “ChiComm,” “Marxist,” “rogue state,” “communist” and “criminal” are broad labels that do not specify how autocracies like China, Russia, and North Korea actually behave, use, and abuse those concepts as distinguished from the nation state concept they…
Debilitating counter-espionage mindset regarding China
It is common for us to vent or joke about China’s “stealing.” While this has limited use against China’s public relations campaigns, the mental impression formed from the repeated theft conversation is a sense of moral triumph, disgust, and anger. Yet these emotions can shroud our minds from understanding our adversary. For the Chinese state,…
Threat Assessment & Initial Recommendations: Adversarial Military Use of Hacked Medical Records
At the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Porter and Brian Finch opined in “What Does Beijing Want With Your Medical Records?” that China’s 2015 Anthem hack accessed almost 80 million Americans’ private medical and insurance records as an ominous sign that it plans to expand and impose its massive surveillance state on Americans. Porter and Finch focus on…