Somewhere in this forum I wrote that pride was the greatest weapon China's adversaries feared in its arsenal and I pointed to the video below as being more alarming than the J-20 itself. Thank you David Axe for confessing it. China's blogger's are accidental America's spies? Translation: David Axe is trying reverse psychology because he don't like Chinese pride being expressed. What a pointless article! Should I turn the tables and say how it shows American ineptness in gathering intelligence. Which one is more the scandal? Chinese are more technologically advanced than thought or the US is not as...? That's what's he's admitting. The airfield is located in a public accessed neighborhood. Some American spy can't setup in a building or hotel nearby and gather intelligence on what's needed instead of relying on an accidental Chinese citizen spy with a cell phone? Let's not forget that footage happened when Robert Gates was in China and it was called a intentional slap on his face. So the Chinese accidental spy that took this footage means nothing in the end of it. Shouldn't he be taunting the Chinese military but then the Gates "slap" tells it was an intentional unveiling. Sounds pretty desperately insecure to me to try to spin a non-event into a story. Let's do the simple math right back. It says David Axe doesn't like seeing all these videos of the J-20 appearing on the internet. Just don't watch them, David Axe. But that's really not enough. Is stopping videos of the J-20 on the internet going to stop the J-20 program? No. He just doesn't like seeing the average Chinese being exuberant over it. That's what it means. You see in Key Aviation they completely killed the J-20 thread that was getting more views than anything else in that forum. They didn't lock it up. They got rid of it. So David Axe is not alone.
Are Chinese Bloggers America’s Accidental Spies?
By David Axe
Email Author
April 24, 2012 |
2:30 pm |
Categories: China
[video=youtube;DzL8r3j9dF8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzL8r3j9dF8&feature=player_embedded[/video]
On Dec. 22, 2010, someone apparently pointed a cellphone out of the window of a car driving along a public road outside the perimeter of a military airfield in Chengdu, an industrial city in central China. The person holding the phone, whose name has never been revealed, snapped a photo of a black-painted jet fighter taxiing through fog blanketing the airfield.
“Accidental spies” like the Chengdu photo are the subject of my feature in the new Pacific Standard magazine. (Danger Room’s own Spencer Ackerman is also a contributor.)
With his simple act, the photographer appeared to outperform the $80-billion-a-year U.S. spy community, which has the advantage of a plethora of drones, satellites, hackers and old-fashioned human spies. The snapshot was the first hard evidence of China’s very first “fifth-generation” stealth fighter, the J-20 — and it seemed to come as a surprise to some Pentagon analysts. “We have been pretty consistent in underestimating the delivery and initial operational capability of Chinese technology weapons systems,” Vice Adm. David Dorsett said.
In 2009, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had predicted that China would “have no fifth-generation aircraft by 2020.” Granted, Gates might have meant operational fifth-generation aircraft. All the same, the J-20′s appearance years ahead of schedule was a dramatic demonstration of China’s rapidly expanding aerospace prowess. And discovering it was also a signature achievement by a relatively unknown group of Chinese internet users whose military-technology fandom is having a profound effect on the most important strategic rivalry of the early 21st century.
The Chinese fanboys, who post rumors, photos and snippets of technical data to a wide range of blogs and forums, are America’s de-facto spies in China, hoovering up information on Beijing’s latest planes, ships, missiles and ground vehicles and making it widely available to U.S. analysts, journalists, military planners and policymakers.
The Chengdu snapshot’s roundabout journey from the photographer’s cellphone to computer screens in the United States is typical of the postings from these Chinese forum members. The photog uploaded the J-20 shot to an obscure military forum apparently hosted inside the firewalled Chinese internet. That’s where one prominent, U.S.-based Chinese forum member found the photo. This person, whose name I agreed not to mention, uploaded it to Top81, a popular forum that includes an English-language extension that is easily accessible by foreigners.
On Christmas Day 2010, Bill Sweetman, one of the world’s leading aviation journalists, noticed the photo at Top81 and, appreciating its significance, linked to it at Ares, the website of Defense Technology International magazine. Sweetman’s link spawned countless other links. There were skeptics, at first. But within a few days the J-20 was featured in newspaper headlines all over the Western world. Shortly thereafter Dorsett admitted the Pentagon was behind the curve.
It’s not actually certain that the fanboys are better spies than the Pentagon’s, CIA’s and NSA’s professional spooks. It’s possible that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army controls the trickle of information to the forums, and by extension to Western audiences — perhaps making the fanboys more propagandists than spooks. Read the article in Pacific Standard, and decide for yourself.
). The fact that some of what is written on these forums could very well translate to knowledge on the part of western intelligence, or at least filter down to media (not that we didn't know before --but this effectively confirms it), is something we should consider. Is it a good thing, that we could be playing a few cards into the opposing side? Would it be better if developing PLA capabilities (even if we're only aware of a fraction of them), were kept from the public eye so as to not prompt the other side to fund their own militaries more (or at least allocate declining funding in more relevant areas)