Introducing STRATEGIC LANGUAGE

Strategic Language’s core mission is to recruit, vet and train native-language or equivalent East Asian speakers to assist US government efforts countering increasingly aggressive global activities against America and its allies.

These adversarial actions include domestic spying, corporate espionage, online disinformation campaigns and other historically Cold War-style antagonisms. 

It is common knowledge that the PRC has been successfully exploiting the west’s open source intelligence for many years. Now, Strategic Language will work to turn this around.

The founder of Strategic Language has spent over two decades in East Asia and knows from firsthand experience the decency and generosity of the vast majority of the Chinese people.

However, the Party and government of China have fixated the country’s ire on the US to distract from its own problems which has warped the population into believing the ascendant global power can do whatever it wants, when it wants, to anybody it wants. No one state should have that level of ability to act with impunity.

We hope neither the PRC or US governments want war. Unfortunately Xi Jinping seems to understand only force. This effort is about self-defense, and pushing back.

So we are committed to creating a virtual network of vetted native East Asian speakers from around the world who regularly read and monitor significant open source information originating from the PRC. 

This necessarily anonymous network will listen and watch and read specific topics and then post short abstracts, metadata and/or keywords into a searchable online English-language database.

These datasets will ultimately be available to relevant US government agencies and departments on a scheduled basis through standard government contracting protocols.

Being a private business, Strategic Language’s analytical end product will aim to clarify and streamline existing coverage (similarly to market intelligence) and ideally other approaches, but for dramatically less cost.

We must ultimately unite with partners and allies to disrupt and dissuade the PRC’s relentless expansionism until more harmonious leadership inevitably takes over in Beijing. Ideally, other language-centric open source information components could be added at an appropriate time later.


Strategic Language: Cost-effective intelligence solutions

To be clear, there are organizations that are already more or less doing what we’re outlining here, but not on any broad, scalable subject matter-specific level.

And definitely not on the cheap.

The following ‘watch list’ entertains presumed areas needing much greater overall transparency and understanding:

  • General political discourse, messaging by the CCP, Standing Committee, Ministry of State Security, Foreign Ministry, PLA, etc.;
  • ‘Diversity of thought within China’s bureaucracy, particularly as it relates to the Party’s engagement with provincial leadership.’ — Rep. Adam Schiff
  • Taiwan saber-rattling, provocative PLA activity and related disruption;
  • South China Sea militarization;
  • Hong Kong & Xinjiang suppression;
  • Belt & Road Initiative and other soft power expansionist programs;
  • North Korea buffer state status;
  • Technical authoritarianism, Safe City campaigns & exportation of digital surveillance tools;
  • Electronic backdoor surveillance and espionage;
  • Global intentions and government associations of Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Huawei, ByteDance, Netease, Lenovo, ZTE, etc.;
  • Semiconductor research and manufacturing competition between core tech industries in the PRC & Taiwan;
  • Rare earth metals conflicts and competitions;
  • The new Space Race;
  • Social media / video platforms & other media such as film and TV / Weibo / youth & dissident chatter;
  • General financial discourse, Party-tinged scandals, illustrative court cases, insider corporate activities, so-called anti-corruption efforts, and much more.

DIVISIONS OF LABOR — READERS:

  • Read, watch, listen approximately 2-3 hours of content per day relating to a given topic.
  • Write & loosely translate abstracts.
  • Upload to databases.
  • Track and suggest new topics.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERS:

  • Identify and manage latest OSINT tools and techniques to improve reach and quality of content and dataset development, including:
    • Maltego – Open source graphical link analysis tool for gathering and connecting OSINT.
    • Metagoofil – Extract metadata from popular file types.
    • Recon-ng – For lots of web based recon.
    • theHarvester – A better version of recon-ng.
    • cree.py – A geolocation OSINT tool for social media
  • Research and write opinions about technology advancement in China particularly machine learning and AI but also robotics, mobile, games, social media and general tech business.

BILINGUAL ASSISTANTS:

  • Translator-interpreters with current ‘non-sensitive’ security clearances or equivalent.
  • Assisting with online interviews, background checks, related research.
  • Tracking and investigating a potential recruit’s qualifications and trustworthiness.
  • Reading and reviewing Chinese-English translations for quality. 
  • Follow up with client requests.
  • Develop subject matter expertise.

FUTURE BUSINESS — Shortlist of the intelligence community’s current linguistic needs:

Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, Dari/Pashto, Korean, Persian/Farsi, Russian, Japanese, Vietnamese

LINKS

The New York Times: Eric Schmidt: I Used to Run Google. Silicon Valley Could Lose to China

TechCrunch: Is Washington prepared for a geopolitical ‘tech race’?

END

%d bloggers like this: