China is rapidly gaining global influence through the application of ‘soft power’ — the ability to shape the world without the use of military force or coercion…
— from Medium.com, March 4, 2019
We’ll get around the subject of China in a moment. But first, a little bit of local coverage.
I attended a couple of the information sessions at the Pagosa Springs Tourism Conference yesterday, April 17. While walking home after one of the morning sessions, I noticed the three words that appear at the bottom of the Visitors Center sign on Hot Springs Boulevard. I’d driven and walked past this sign a thousand times, but I hadn’t ever taken a photo to document those three little words.
It stuck me that maybe this is what Americans want most, as we approach the first quarter of the 21st century.
Information.
Maps.
And a place where we can dispose of unwanted stuff.
At any rate, we’re going to be talking about information. And communications. And global influence.
The morning session at the Tourism Conference had attracted about 30 people, a mix of retailers, lodging owners, non-profits, restaurants, and other business people hoping to learn how to attract more tourists in the upcoming summer season, and into the future. Most of the Conference presenters had some connection to our local Pagosa Springs Area Tourism Board and its staff. The event was offered free of charge to the community, paid for via tax revenues.
For me, one of the more interesting facts, casually mentioned by Colorado Tourism Office Co-Vice Chair Courtney Frazier, concerned international tourism, which grew about 6 percent last year — with some regions, such as the Middle East, seeing growth in the 10 percent range.
The US, meanwhile, saw only 2 percent more international tourism during 2018.
Suggested reasons why the US — with all our amazing tourist destinations — is falling behind the rest of the world? From Forbes magazine, January 2019:
Adam Sacks, president of the Oxford Economics subsidiary Tourism Economics, says that “There appears to be a triad of factors affecting the [US tourism] market. The global economy is slowing; most currencies have weakened against the dollar; and US policy and rhetoric have damaged sentiment.”
And perhaps it’s not only the tourism market that has been damaged by “US policy and rhetoric.” Perhaps it’s the entire future of our nation as a global leader.
At the tail end of a rare open session of the Senate Intelligence Committee in March 2013, US Senator Ron Wyden asked the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, whether the National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting data on American citizens.
Clapper responded “No, sir,” and, “Not wittingly.”
In the following months, it became quite evident that James Clapper was lying, when The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and numerous other news outlets published information leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, revealing that the NSA was secretly collecting email, cell phone and Internet data on millions of Americans.
In 2013, Internet security expert Edward Snowden had been hired by NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, after leaving his employment with Dell and the CIA. Snowden — described by one co-worker as ‘a genius among geniuses’ — claims he gradually became disillusioned with the espionage programs with which he was involved, and that he tried to raise his ethical concerns, but was ignored.
On May 20, 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong after leaving his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii, and in early June he revealed thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill. Snowden became something of an international celebrity after news stories based on the documents appeared globally.
But the thousands of documents leaked by Mr. Snowdon revealed something perhaps even more important than the fact that the US government was spying on its own citizens — because they also detailed NSA espionage efforts in China, Japan, and Europe, including NSA programs targeting elected leaders in several countries.
Here in the US, we are regularly treated to news stories about cybersecurity issues, and the bad actors in these stories are often Russia and China, typically with the inference that the cyber threats from these countries are ‘government-sponsored.’ These stories may very well be true, but the story that we know to be true is that the US government has been secretly collecting data, via the Internet and cell phones, on people all around the globe.
The Chinese also know this to be true, and since 2013, their technology industry been working overtime to ensure that the US will never again be able to use the Internet and cell phones to spy on Chinese citizens and government officials. It appears the effort has paid off — and that Chinese communications technology has surpassed American technology, in terms of Internet security.
From a WIRED Magazine article by reporter Amit Katwala, November 2018:
In August 2016, China sent the world’s first quantum satellite into space from a launchpad in the Gobi Desert. Micius, which circles the earth at an altitude of 500km, is a powerful signal of intent – a starting gun for the technological race that could define the next century.
From what I can tell from some basic research, quantum computers are to normal digital computers, as present-day digital computers are to the mechanical adding machines of the 1960s. Instead of using binary bits – either 1s or 0s – quantum computers use qubits, which can exist in more than one state. They’re able to store and process vastly more information, using less energy, than traditional computers, and that makes them well suited to complex calculations. It also makes them very useful for encrypting communications.
But for various technological reasons, no one had been able to transmit qubit data more than about 65 miles. Enter the mastermind of quantum computing, the Chinese scientist Jian-Wei Pan.
From the MIT Technology Review, December 2018:
In September 2017, a Chinese satellite known as ‘Micius’ helped to facilitate a videoconference between Vienna and Beijing, two cities half a world apart. As it whisked across the night sky at 18,000 miles (29,000 kilometers) per hour, the satellite beamed down a small data packet to a ground station in Xinglong, a couple of hours’ drive to the northeast of Beijing. Less than an hour later, the satellite passed over Austria and dispatched another data packet to a station near the city of Graz.
The packets were encryption keys for securing the data in the video conference. What made this event so special was that the keys distributed by the satellite were encoded in photons in a delicate quantum state. Any attempt to intercept them would have collapsed that delicate state, destroying the information and signaling the presence of a hacker…
Thus, the encryption keys were far more secure than keys sent as classical bits — as a stream of pulses representing 1s and 0s… that can be intercepted… and copied.
Intercepted and copied by, for example, the NSA.