The radical rioters who stormed the Hong Kong Parliament in the past 12 hours (Youtube above) are reminiscent of the hopeful heroes who sat in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The world press are fooling themselves when they underestimate how Chinese military forces, responsible for Hong Kong, may react.
Map indicates the location of Legislative Council Complex/Hong Kong Parliament that radical protesters smashed July 1-2, 2019. (Map courtesy Agency France Press via CAPITALNEWS)
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Surveillance of the rioters likely includes: records on surveillance cameras; smartphone tracking and intelligence gathering; and, Chinese security (MSS) informers working undercover within the rioting group. There is also a possibility that Chinese government agent provocateurs operated to heighten the violence in the Parliamentary building.
In terms of smartphone intelligence gathering MSS would have improved its capabilities compared to its 2014
anti-protester measures. It is likely the student protester's smartphones continue to be tapped by MSS working with China’s "NSA" (Peoples Liberation Army (PLA)-IT)(with various other real and cover-names-to-confuse).
Reading INTELNEWS in 2014 MSS most probably exploited protesters reliance
on downloads of the FireChat smartphone app. Security intelligence gathering malware
was part of the app download. The malware gave MSS access to the address books,
communication logs and other private data stored on the protesters’ smartphones.
The malware also allowed MSS to take secret pre-protest planning group photos and at-protest individual and crowd photos using the cameras in the compromised smartphones. Quietly always-on smartphone microphone monitoring? So even if protesters were not actually arrested at the protest sufficient evidence was quietly collected to round them up days or weeks later.
Military Crackdown?
So damage to the Hong Kong Parliament may provide a pretext for a paramilitary police and then a military crackdown. Perhaps a broader circle of democracy activists in Hong Kong will also be arrested.
The Beijing Government can suspend the legal convention that the PLA cannot interfere in Hong Kong's internal affairs. This is because the PLA has always had an underlying or active role in internal security for all regions of China.
The 6,000 PLA troops based in Hong Kong can quickly be reinforced with several brigades of armoured vehicles from the mainland. The PLA's Hong Kong Garrison is under the direct leadership of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Military Commission and under administrative control of PLA's Southern Theater Command.
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See my earlier article
on the 2014 Hong Kong protests. The main difference now is radical smashing within Hong Kong’s Parliament will goad the Communist Party far
more than the
student-protestor 2014 sit-in (that stopped traffic on Hong Kong crossroads).
student-protestor 2014 sit-in (that stopped traffic on Hong Kong crossroads).
@Pete:
ReplyDeleteUnrelated to this story, but I wasn't sure how else to contact you:
The Russians had an accident in one of their deep diving titanium submersibles operated by GUGI. 14 reported dead and they are towing it back to base, which means they most likely scrammed the reactor. Losharik is roughly equivalent to the old US NR-1 boat that has been retired; it gets carried to work by converted Delta 3/4 boomers to do secret squirrel stuff on the bottom of the ocean - recovery, hydrophone emplacement, etc. The Russians are big on setting up hydrophones all over the Arctic ocean floor; they don't like US boomers or even attack boats being there. 14 dead represents about half or more of the total crew, though there may been a heavy crew for a training mission since this was is Russian waters on the continental shelf and its max depth is like 2500-3000 meters. Very odd that they are actually reporting on such an asset, given their history with such things and the nature of the asset. RIP to the sailors.
Cheers,
Josh