Mideast Crisis and Russia, Cyberspace, Disinformation; China Fears Weather Station Snooping; Belt and Road Milestone
What We’re Reading, Hearing, and Watching – November 2, 2023
Mideast Conflict: a Poisoned Birthday Gift for Putin?
October 7, 2023 -- the day that Palestinian group Hamas launched a bloody incursion into Israel, sparking a new outbreak of war in the region -- happened to be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 71st birthday. Some commentators referred to the attack as, in effect, a birthday present to Putin. Politico called it a “welcome surprise.” Analysts have said Russia was probably not directly involved in the Hamas attack but nevertheless benefits from it in many ways. However, it may be a poisoned gift; it risks stirring up ethnic strife and political instability in Russia itself and complicates Russia's path through the treacherous shoals of Mideast politics. Natto Thoughts will explore this in more detail in a forthcoming report.
The Hamas-Israel War in Cyberspace
Cybersecurity researchers are keeping an eye on state-sponsored and hacktivist activity on both sides of the conflict. Hackers have been disrupting the websites of both Israeli and Palestinian humanitarian groups and harassing their employees. Groups associated with the Iranian government continue ongoing espionage. Hacktivist groups – sometimes fictitious fronts for state hackers – seek to “influence the global perception of the conflict,” as Tom Hegel of SentinelLabs told CyberScoop. Groups such as Anonymous Sudan have claimed to unleash distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on websites of government and critical infrastructure facilities in Israel and in allied countries. In late October a pro-Iran group offered to sell what it claimed was data on thousands of U.S. military, law enforcement and intelligence personnel. Many of these groups appear to have pro-Russian sympathies and to be seeking profits by advertising DDoS-for-hire services, according to Security Scorecard.
Most importantly in terms of connectivity, Israel cut off Internet access to Gaza residents for several days; only after pressure from US President Joe Biden’s administration did they partially restore it on October 29. The Washington Post reports on the effects of the blackout and cites broader global patterns of government-directed Internet shutdowns.
Mideast Conflict and Disinformation: The Liar’s Dividend
False and misleading information on the war abounds. Some examples:
Pro-Palestinian group AnonGhost claimed to have breached an unofficial Israeli app that warns of imminent rocket attacks; AnonGhost claimed to have sent false alerts to 20,000 people. (By contrast, residents of Gaza have no alert apps at all and were blinded for days by a total Internet outage, as Wired has pointed out).
Russian media amplified a video that falsely cited Bellingcat, a respected investigations group, as purportedly showing that corrupt Ukrainians had sold Western-supplied weapons to Hamas.
A “digitally manipulated” version of a White House memo circulated on the X platform (the successor to Twitter) and on a QAnon-related account. The memo purportedly showed that the US sent $8 billion in military aid to Israel; in reality, on October 11 the White House proposed a much more modest $2 billion, Time reported on October 13.
The @WarMonitors and @sentdefender (OSINTDefender) accounts on X have been actively posting material on the Israel-Hamas war. Their postings should be approached with skepticism; in the past, these accounts have actively amplified false reports, such as a synthetic image purporting to show a bomb attack on the US Pentagon in May (discussed here).
A series of identical messages on X, likely spread by bot networks, cited a supposed dearth of video evidence from Russia’s war on Ukraine, compared with abundant footage on the Mideast conflict, to claim that that the Ukraine war “has been ‘imagined’,” the Jamestown Foundation reports.
Widespread reporting has alerted the public to the risk that artificial intelligence (A.I.) can be used to falsify visual and audio content. Ironically, this public awareness has had an unintended effect, The New York Times (NYT) reported on October 28. “Disinformation researchers have found relatively few A.I. fakes, and even fewer that are convincing. Yet the mere possibility that A.I. content could be circulating is leading people to dismiss genuine images, video and audio as inauthentic.” The NYT calls this the “liar’s dividend.” Furthermore, tools for detecting AI-generated images have “a spotty track record” and sometimes produce false positives or negatives. Other approaches, which rely on identifying “the source and history of media files,” may “help restore some confidence in the quality of content,” the NYT said.
The fog of war and widespread false social media reports have made it hard for even the most dedicated journalists to gain a clear picture of ongoing events. However, reputable media outlets still try to maintain journalistic integrity through diligent research and fact-checking. Professional journalists are still more likely to produce reliable reporting than are potentially biased amateur content creators on social media. Added January 15 2025: As one example, BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh, tracks misinformation and disinformation on the conflict.
China Tit for Tat: Illegal Foreign-Related Meteorological Detection Sites v. Spy Balloon
China claims to have discovered “hundreds of illegal foreign-related meteorological detection sites across more than 20 provinces nationwide, transmitting weather data in real-time to overseas locations, posing risks and hidden dangers to China’s national security.” Some of these sites are directly funded by foreign governments. The Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS)’s official WeXin account (discussed here) announced, “Meteorological data are an element of information security and resource security, and are closely related to military security, food security, ecological security, climate change and the public interest, so that the unlawful collection and cross-border transmission of meteorological data jeopardizes our country’s sovereignty, security and development interests.” Interestingly enough, the MSS seemed to forget the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson’s response to “the unintended entry of a Chinese unmanned airship into US airspace” in February 2023. At that time, the spokesperson stated, “the airship is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes,” and it entered US airspace “due to force majeure.” Chinese foreign and defense ministry officials expressed outrage after the US shot down the balloon; they said the country reserved the right to use "any necessary means" in response. As the Sinocism Substack pointed out, readers might ask: wouldn’t the MSS consider a foreign “civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes” floating over China to pose “risks and hidden dangers to China’s national security”?
The story of the February suspected Chinese spy balloon incident is not over. On September 17, US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley confirmed to CBS News that it was a spy balloon but “there was no intelligence collection by that balloon.”
China BRI Continues to its Second Decade
China released a white paper to mark the 10th anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s global infrastructure development strategy. The white paper, titled “the BRI: a Key Pillar of the Global Community of Shared Future”, listed the BRI’s achievements in the past 10 years, including that China had “signed more than 200 BRI cooperation agreements with more than 150 countries and 30 international organizations across five continents.” A commentary from People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, praised the BRI, saying it promotes not only hard connectivity — referring to physical infrastructure, — but also soft connectivity – referring to rules and standards – and heart-to-heart connectivity – referring to people-to-people communications. The commentary gave examples of those types of connectivity under the BRI, such as connecting people to people by establishing schools for young people in Tajikistan and other countries acquire vocational skills (hxxp://paper.people.com[.]cn/rmrb/html/2023-10/10/nw.D110000renmrb_20231010_2-03.htm).
Outside China, observers have seen not all rosy pictures of the BRI. A US Council on Foreign Relations article noted that the number of heads of state and government who attended this year’s BRI Forum was down to 23 compared with 29 in 2017 and 37 in 2019. The decrease in high-level attendance indicates that globally, “enthusiasm for BRI has waned, as major projects have run into trouble, countries have less capacity to take on additional debt, and China’s desire to lend has decreased.” However, the BRI, as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature policy project, is here to stay. As Natto Thoughts noted previously, China’s July 2023 Law on Foreign Relations explicitly called for continuing “high-quality development of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), so China could build a “global community of shared future” in the Chinese way.”
In Case You Missed It
Former Chinese premier Li Keqiang, who retired in March this year, died of a heart attack at 68 last week. Even though Li was a Chinese premier with little power, overshadowed by President Xi Jinping, under whom he served, citizens in China overwhelmingly mourned Li in various ways – posting in social media, visiting his childhood residence in Hefei, Anhui Province, and gathering in Zhengzhou, Henan Province where Li served as the governor. As the New York Times pointed out, “deaths of senior leaders are always sensitive occasions in Chinese politics.” Many speculated on whether a protest like the one in 1989, after the former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) head Hu Yaobang passed away, would happen again. It seems unlikely, because the authorities in China control the Internet tightly and the political situation is different.
On October 24th China officially announced the removal of former defense minister Li Shangfu from his position, without citing any reasons. He had already disappeared from public view two months ago. Natto Thoughts wrote about Li’s role in US – China military communication and whether Li’s disappearance might have opened a channel for future communication. Now that Li is formerly sacked, this could have our hopes up for the US-China military communication. Oh, wait, though, don’t forget that the nagging question of Taiwan’s status is the “core of the core” of China’s strategic priorities.