Amerika

Liberal democracy is like anaesthesia. When applied to the victim, it makes them oblivious to obvious facts of their surroundings and therefore easy to manipulate. For years, America has sleep-walked through life, ignoring the fact that China is communist and wants to conquer us, and we keep hiring Chinese labor in our defense firms only to see them spy on us.

This should surprise no one because loyalty to blood is always greater than loyalty to ideological nation-state like the USA. However, our ideology of liberal democracy requires us to think that everyone is equal and motivated only by a desire to provide protection for that equality to their fellow citizens, so we are oblivious to the desire of other nations to conquer us.

Even worse, we have hamstrung ourselves with laws that demand we hire minority candidates in preference to white ones, which means that Chinese get to the head of the line in hiring for our most sensitive projects. Since they can sue for discrimination, they also have a powerful weapon against anything that even looks like suspicion of them for spying.

However, it seems like the defense industry is starting to catch on with new security restrictions that will make it easier to keep out those who are likely to leak secrets to their home countries:

The B-21 program is not just secret but “special access,” setting a much higher bar on who can get a clearance and how data are stored, among much else. An executive conference room at the plant is actually a high security windowless vault, where a massive conference table is surrounded by three dozen leather chairs and the walls are adorned with large photographs of the company’s long line of weapons. No cellphones are allowed in the room.

This allows the contractor and government to deny access to those who, despite having been hired and vetted with access to secret information, might be suspicious for any reason. This has zero impact on their job prospects but enables the employer to keep actual secrets safe instead of opening them up to a general pool.

We will probably never find out why they opted for these additional security precautions, officially, but given the large number of busts of Chinese-descended people working in the defense and internet industries over the last decade, supposing that they are the target of this action has grounding. Perhaps Americans are finally awakening from the stupor of liberal democracy.

Tags: china, defense industry, liberal democracy, spies, spying