Japan’s Ocean Surveillance of Chinese Submarines

All 162 pages of the book "The Tools of Owatatsumi: Japan’s Ocean Surveillance and Coastal Defence Capabilities" (Desmond Ball and Richard Tanter, ANU Press, 2015), are available free on-line. The book details the undersea and electronic intelligence systems run by Japan and the USA to detect Chinese military activities, particularly submarines. The authors suggest that wile effective this network is vulnerable to attack, leading to possible military escalation and use of nuclear weapons.

However, what the authors do not discuss is ways in which surveillance networks can be made less vulnerable with technological developments. Japan's manned coastal surveillance stations are, by their nature, prominently located along the coast and so vulnerable to attack. However, electronic surveillance can now be undertaken by miniaturized equipment operated by remote control, making it far less visible and vulnerable.

Table of Contents for The Tools of Owatatsumi:

• Preliminary pages
• Frontispiece
• Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and Abbreviations

1. Introduction
2. Post-Cold War Intrusions into Japanese Waters
3. The JMSDF’s Ocean Surveillance Architecture
4. The Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force (JGSDF)
5. The Organisation of the JMSDF: The High Command, Fleet Bases and Regional Districts
6. Japanese Undersea Surveillance Systems, 1920–45
7. Technical Developments since 1945
8. US SOSUS Stations
9. JMSDF ELINT/Undersea Surveillance Stations
10. Airborne Ocean Surveillance
11. JMSDF SIGINT Collection and Ocean Surveillance Ships
12. The US Ocean Surveillance Information System (OSIS)
13. The Maritime Safety Agency (MSA)/ Japan Coast Guard (JCG)
14. Assessment of Japan’s Ocean Surveillance Capabilities

• Bibliography

From: Ball, Desmond & Tanter, Richard, (author.) (2015). The tools of Owatatsumi : Japan's ocean surveillance and coastal defence capabilities. Canberra ACT ANU Press. Retrieved from http://press.anu.edu.au/titles/the-tools-of-owatatsumi/

Metadata Retention for Law Enforcement

There seems to be some confusion within the Australian Government as to what data retention policy has been decided on by the Cabinet. It might be useful if the Prime Minister and the Attorney General were to ask for a briefing from their departmental staff as to what "metadata" is, or they could ask the Minister for Communications.

The Australian Minster, Mr. Tony Abbot, said on Tuesday:

We also need legislation which I have commissioned the Attorney to prepare, which the National Security Committee of the Cabinet has commissioned the Attorney to prepare to ensure that we are best able to monitor potential terrorist activity in this country. Obviously with the usual range of safeguards and warrants but that will include discussions with the telecommunications providers about the retention of metadata....

From Joint Press Conference - Prime Minister and Attorney General, Canberra,Tuesday, 5 August 2014)

The Attorney General said:

Finally, as the Prime Minister indicated, I have also been asked to develop – in consultation with relevant stakeholders, in particular, in the telecommunications sector – a system of mandatory data retention. That legislation has been approved in principle and is in development from today and will be introduced into Parliament later in the year.  ...

From Joint Press Conference - Prime Minister and Attorney General, Canberra,Tuesday, 5 August 2014)

Unfortunately I have been unable to find a copy of the legislative proposal for retention of metadata. In a later interview the Attorney General, Mr George Brandis, did not appear to know what metadata was, nor what it was proposed to require telecommunications companies to retain:

Brandis: "The web address, um, is part of the metadata."
Journalist: "The website?"
Brandis: "The well, the web address, the electronic address of the website. What the security agencies want to know, to be retained is the, is the electronic address of the website that the web user is ... "
Journalist: "So it does tell you the website?"
Brandis: "Well, it, it tells you the address of the website."

From: Attorney-General George Brandis struggles to explain Government's metadata proposal, ABC Radio, 7 August 2014

The Parliamentary Library produced a good overview of the issues "Surveillance in society—global communications monitoring and data retention" (Nigel Brew, Australian Parliamentary Library, 2013). The Wikipedia's "Telecommunications data retention" entry is also useful.

The UK House of Commons recently passed laws on data retention (Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014, UK Government). This authorises the UK Secretary of State to require telecommunications operator to retain specified communications data for up to one year. A warrant may not be required to obtain the data, under some circumstances. What data can be collected is not specified in the act, except to say that it does not include "data revealing the content of a communication". In the Australian context this data is being called "metadata". For an explanation of meta-data, see my ANU course lecture notes: "Metadata" (From Metadata and Electronic Data Management, by Tom Worthington, for ANU Course COMP3410, Information Technology in Electronic Commerce, 2009).

Internet metadata which would normally be stored would be the Internet protocol Address (IP Address) of the computer data was being sent from, the IP Address it was being sent to and the date and time. The issue which the Australian Attorney General appeared to be unclear about was if just the IP addresses were to be stored, or if the web address (URI) was also to be stored.

To use an analogy, the IP address would be the street address of a library someone was visiting, whereas the web address would be the number of the book they borrowed (event the chapter they opened it at). My interpretation of the UK law is that the web address would be part of the content of the communication and therefore not permitted.

What the Australian government proposes is unclear. A good first step would be for the Cabinet, and the Attorney General in particular, to be briefed on the basics of how the Internet works.

Australian Built Ship Deploys Surveillance Blimp for US Navy

During the Sydney 2000 Olympics, I was briefly in charge on the bridge of an Incat high speed ship (that is not as reckless as it sounds with the ship alongside a wharf in Sydney). While in Sydney, the ship was demonstrated to the US Defense Department who subsequently leased several and later ordered a new class of similar Australian designed high speed ships from Austral. These vessels are intended for transport of equipment and personnel (the Japanese military have also used one for military transport).  But these vessels have also be tried out for other military roles, the latest of which is to deploy a Tethered Aerostat (unmanned blimp) from the stern of HSV-2 Swift. The aerostat can be positioned 3,000 feet above the vessel for surveillance.

Real-time surveillance with wireless cameras

Professor Chun Tung Chou, University of New South Wales, will speak on "Enabling real-time tracking in embedded camera networks using compressive sensing" at the Australian National University, in Canberra, 11am 24 June 2013. Apart from the obvious application in building security, I expect this could also be applied to robot surveillance aircraft (UAVs).

Enabling real-time tracking in embedded camera networks using compressive sensing

Associate Professor Chun Tung Chou (School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney)

COMPUTER SCIENCE SEMINAR\

DATE: 2013-06-24 TIME: 11:00:00 - 12:00:00 LOCATION: CSIT Seminar Room, N101  ...

ABSTRACT:

An embedded camera network consists of distributed video sensors interconnected by wireless links. Due to the high data rate of video sensors, it is not feasible to stream the video data to a centralised location (sink) for processing. This means that a lot of the video processing must be performed on the embedded device. However, this presents a challenge because of limited computation power on embedded platforms. For example, conventional background subtraction methods can only process a few video frames per second on embedded platforms.

In this talk, we discuss how compressive sensing can be used to address this computational bottleneck. We present a compressive sensing based background subtraction method, whose accuracy is similar to conventional methods, but is five times faster. We show that this faster background subtraction method enables real-time tracking in an embedded camera network. If time allows, I will also discuss briefly on some of my other work on using compressive sensing in wireless sensor networks.

BIO:

Chun Tung Chou is an Associate Professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, UK. He has published over 100 articles on various topics, including, wireless mesh networks, wireless sensor networks and system identification. His current research interests are wireless sensor networks, compressive sensing and nano-communication.