The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s The Sydney Dialogue is a world-first summit for emerging, critical and cyber technologies.
The inaugural dialogue will be hosted virtually from Australia and will begin on 17–19 November 2021.
The Sydney Dialogue will have an Indo-Pacific focus and will bring business, government and technology leaders together with the world’s best strategic thinkers, to debate, generate ideas and work towards common understandings of the challenges posed by new technologies.
The program will commence with an opening address from Australian Prime Minister the Hon Scott Morrison MP.
The Prime Minister of India – Narendra Modi – will also be giving a keynote address at the inaugural Sydney Dialogue.
Conversations about technology are currently taking place in silos – for example, on artificial intelligence, the use of surveillance technologies, quantum, space and biotechnology, disinformation and cyber-enabled interference, supply chain resilience and the future of cyberspace. The Sydney Dialogue provides a forum for the world to anticipate and respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by increasingly complex advances in technology.
The dialogue will span both public and private activities, including keynotes, panels, roundtables, podcasts, an annual publication and more. While the dialogue will start in November, the conversation will extend into early 2022 as we continue to launch new events.
Invitations will be issued to select delegates from around the world, with priority given to those in the Indo-Pacific region. This year, most plenary sessions will be broadcast live to the general public, others will be publicly available at a later stage and a small number will be closed-door.
Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the myGov website was overwhelmed by a demand surge from citizens seeking to rapidly access digital services. In 2016, the online Census (eCensus) suffered a series of relatively small distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. While they didn’t overwhelm the platform, the attacks ultimately resulted in the eCensus being taken offline.
What do these two examples have in common, and what lessons should we learn to ensure more robust digital government services?
To answer those questions, this paper will examine five points:
The nature of the DDoS attacks
The CIA (confidentiality, integrity and availability) triad model for digital security
How to predict demand
How to respond to unpredictable demand
The structure of reliable data systems
https://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/15145727/Digital-government-services_thumb.png842596nathanhttp://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/16232551/ASPI-CMYK_SVG.svgnathan2021-07-20 06:00:002024-12-15 14:59:54Digital government services. Building for peak demand.
Mapping China’s Technology Giants is a multi-year project by ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre that maps the overseas expansion of key Chinese technology companies. The project, first published in April 2019, is now being re-launched in June 2021 with new research reports, a new website and an enormous amount of new and updated content.
This data-driven online project – and the accompanying research products – fill a research and policy gap by building understanding about the global trajectory and impact of China’s largest companies working across the Internet, telecommunications, AI, surveillance, e-commerce, finance, biotechnology, big data, cloud computing, smart city and social media sectors.
Two new research reports accompany the re-launch
Mapping China’s Technology Giants: Supply Chains and the Global Data Ecosystem Most of the 27 companies tracked by our Mapping China’s Technology Giants project are heavily involved in the collection and processing of vast quantities of personal and organisational data. Their global business operations depend on the flow of vast amounts of data, often governed by the data privacy laws of multiple jurisdictions. The Chinese party-state is ensuring that it can derive strategic value and benefit from these companies’ global operations. We assess interactions between the People’s Republic of China’s political agenda-setting, efforts to shape international technical standards, technical capabilities, and use of data as a strategic resource. We argue this ‘Data Ecosystem’ will have major implications for the effectiveness of data protection laws and notions of digital supply-chain security.
Reining in China’s Technology Giants Since the launch of ASPI ICPC’s Mapping China’s Technology Giants project in April 2019, the Chinese technology companies we canvassed have gone through a tumultuous period. While most were buoyed by the global Covid-19 pandemic, which stimulated demand for technology services around the world, many were buffeted by an unprecedented onslaught of sanctions from abroad, before being engulfed in a regulatory storm at home. This report describes the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, the growing China–US strategic and technological competition, and a changing Chinese domestic regulatory environment on the 27 Chinese Technology Giants we cover on our map.
Our Map includes over 1,400 new entries, totalling over 3,900 global entries. These are populated with up to 15 categories of data, totalling 38,000+ data points. Existing entries were updated to reflect new changes.
Our map tracks more than 130 donations, 80 of these are Covid-19 monetary and medical donations from ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba.
Biotechnology company BGI saw profits surge in 2020 as Covid-19 spread around the world. Our map now contains 100 datapoints of presence for BGI including commercial partnerships, Covid-19 related donations, investments, joint ventures, MoU agreements, overseas offices, research partnerships and subsidiaries.
We have tracked the expansion of Hikvision, Dahua and Uniview as overseas demand for their temperature screening products increased during Covid-19. The map contains 65 data points of overseas presence relating to Covid-19 for these three companies, including donations, commercial partnerships, and surveillance equipment.
Our ‘Company Briefs’ include new ‘Privacy Policies’ and ‘Covid-19 Impact’ sections. We’ve also updated each existing overview, and of particular note are updates to the ‘Activities in Xinjiang’ and ‘Party-state Activities’ sections.
We’re introducing a new product: ‘Thematic Snapshots’. These combine company overview content across the four thematic areas named above. They are designed to serve as a user-friendly guide for the journalists, researchers, and policy makers who use our website.
Visitors can now explore our data in two ways, using either the Map or Data Listing pages. These display the same results in different formats depending on a users’ preference.
Click the ‘show Our Highlights Only’ to see the map entries ASPI staff have flagged as data points of particular interest. For these entries, we have undertaken additional analysis or recommend further investigation.
For more about this multi-year project visit the About page of the China Tech Map website.
The Team
The Mapping China’s Technology Giants research project is a huge team effort, comprising;
At the request of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs of Switzerland, ASPI translated the graphics and videos on the UN cyber norms into three new languages. We have now added materials in French, German and Italian to our repository of downloadable materials.
Read here about Switzerland’s endeavours supporting the UN’s normative framework to promote responsible state behaviour in the digital space and promotes multilateral cooperation in this area.
This report explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), fringe media and pro-CCP online actors seek—sometimes in unison—to shape and influence international perceptions of the Chinese Government’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, including through the amplification of disinformation. United States (US) based social media networks, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, along with Chinese-owned TikTok (owned by Chinese company ByteDance), are centre stage for this global effort.
The Chinese Government continues to deny human rights abuses in Xinjiang despite a proliferation of credible evidence, including media reporting, independent research, testimonies and open-source data, that has revealed abuses including forced labour, mass detention, surveillance, sterilisation, cultural erasure and alleged genocide in the region. To distract from such human rights abuses, covert and overt online information campaigns have been deployed to portray positive narratives about the CCP’s domestic policies in the region, while also injecting disinformation into the global public discourse regarding Xinjiang.
The report’s key findings:
Since early 2020, there’s been a stark increase in the Chinese Government and state media’s use of US social media networks to push alternative narratives and disinformation about the situation in Xinjiang. Chinese state media accounts have been most successful in using Facebook to engage and reach an international audience.
The CCP is using tactics including leveraging US social media platforms to criticise and smear Uyghur victims, journalists and researchers who work on this topic, as well as their organisations. We expect these efforts to escalate in 2021.
Chinese Government officials and state media are increasingly amplifying content, including disinformation, produced by fringe media and conspiracist websites that are often sympathetic to the narrative positioning of authoritarian regimes. This amplifies the reach and influence of these sites in the Western media ecosystem. Senior officials from multilateral organisations, including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations (UN), have also played a role in sharing such content.
The Xinjiang Audio-Video Publishing House, a publishing organisation owned by a regional government bureau and affiliated with the propaganda department, has funded a marketing company to create videos depicting Uyghurs as supportive of the Chinese Government’s policies in Xinjiang. Those videos were then amplified on Twitter and YouTube by a network of inauthentic accounts. The Twitter accounts also retweeted and liked non-Xinjiang-related tweets by Chinese diplomatic officials and Chinese state-affiliated media in 2020.
https://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/13215629/strange-bedfellows_banner.jpg4511350nathanhttp://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/16232551/ASPI-CMYK_SVG.svgnathan2021-03-30 06:00:002024-12-13 22:00:43Strange bedfellows on Xinjiang: The CCP, fringe media and US social media platforms
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) diplomatic accounts, Chinese state media, pro-CCP influencers and patriotic trolls are targeting the UK public broadcaster, the BBC, in a coordinated information operation. Recent BBC reports, including the allegations of systematic sexual assault in Xinjiang’s internment camps, were among a number of triggers provoking the CCP’s propaganda apparatus to discredit the BBC, distract international attention and recapture control of the narrative.
In ASPI ICPC’s new report, Albert Zhang and Dr Jacob Wallis provide a snapshot of the CCP’s ongoing coordinated response targeting the BBC, which leveraged YouTube, Twitter and Facebook and was broadly framed around three prominent narratives:
That the BBC spreads disinformation and is biased against China
That the BBC’s domestic audiences think that it’s biased and not to be trusted
That the BBC’s reporting on China is instigated by foreign actors and intelligence agencies.
In addition, the report analyses some of the secondary effects of this propaganda effort by exploring the mobilisation of a pro-CCP Twitter network that has previously amplified the Covid-19 disinformation content being pushed by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and whose negative online engagement with the BBC peaks on the same days as that of the party-state’s diplomats and state media.
To contest and blunt criticism of the CCP’s systematic surveillance and control of minority ethnic groups, the party will continue to aggressively deploy its propaganda and disinformation apparatus. Domestic control remains fundamental to its political power and legitimacy, and internationally narrative control is fundamental to the pursuit of its foreign policy interests.
https://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/15193216/ICPC2021-TriggerWarning_banner.jpg4501350nathanhttp://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/16232551/ASPI-CMYK_SVG.svgnathan2021-03-04 06:00:002024-12-15 19:38:06Trigger warning. The CCP’s coordinated information effort to discredit the BBC
We are pleased to announce that ASPI will host The Sydney Dialogue – which we aim to make the world’s premier policy summit for emerging, critical and cyber technologies – in the second half of 2021.
Today, the Foreign Minister Senator the Hon. Marise Payne announced that the Australian Government will support, and partially fund, The Sydney Dialogue.
The Sydney Dialogue fills a critical gap globally in public discourse and policy making. ASPI will aim to bring together the world’s political leaders, heads of government, business and civil society leaders to focus on technology including artificial intelligence, quantum, biotechnology, space and the future of cyberspace.
Emerging, critical and cyber technologies have a material impact on our lives and work. They reshape our societies, economies and the future of our planet. There is a pressing need to join-up the conversations taking place within government, multilateral institutions, business and civil society to enable more informed and deliberate decision making.
ASPI has undertaken policy-relevant research on issues relating to cyberspace and technology for eight years. This work is agenda-setting, and pushes new, often unexplored areas. The Sydney Dialogue will adopt this characteristic and drive global policy debates on technology. Maria MacNamara, the former CEO of Advance.org, joins ASPI this month as a Senior Fellow to help us create and deliver the inaugural Sydney Dialogue in 2021.
This new initiative will take a natural focus on the Indo-Pacific, while highlighting developments from across the world. We look forward to working with governments, business and civil society to make The Sydney Dialogue the home of global strategic and policy debates. A place where the world can anticipate and respond to the complicated challenges and immense opportunities presented by the increasingly complex advances in technology.
https://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/17135358/v2Artboard-1-copy-scaled.jpg8532560markohttp://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/16232551/ASPI-CMYK_SVG.svgmarko2020-12-23 14:42:002024-11-10 14:43:56‘The Sydney Dialogue’ – ASPI’s new global technology initiative
Thailand’s political discourse throughout the past decade has increasingly been shaped and amplified by social media and digital activism. The most recent wave of political activism this year saw the emergence of a countrywide youth-led democracy movement against the military-dominated coalition, as well as a nationalist counter-protest movement in support of the establishment.
The steady evolution of tactics on the part of the government, the military and protesters reflects an increasingly sophisticated new battleground for democracy, both on the streets and the screens. Understanding these complex dynamics is crucial for any broader analysis of the Thai protest movement and its implications.
In this report, we analyse samples of Twitter data relating to the online manifestation of contemporary political protests in Thailand. We explore two key aspects in which the online manifestation of the protests differs from its offline counterpart. That includes (1) the power dynamics between institutional actors and protesters and (2) the participation and engagement of international actors surrounding the protests.
https://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/15221021/WhatsHappeningInThailand-banner.png4501350nathanhttp://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/16232551/ASPI-CMYK_SVG.svgnathan2020-12-14 06:00:002025-03-06 14:19:46#WhatsHappeningInThailand: The power dynamics of Thailand’s digital activism
For this volume of ASPI’s After Covid-19 series, we asked Australia’s federal parliamentarians to consider the world after the crisis and discuss policy and solutions that could drive Australian prosperity through one of the most difficult periods in living memory. The 49 contributions in this volume are the authentic voices of our elected representatives.
For policymakers, this volume offers a window into thinking from all sides of the House of Representatives and Senate, providing insights to inform their work in creating further policy in service of the Australian public. For the broader public, this is an opportunity to see policy fleshed out by politicians on their own terms and engage with policy thinking that isn’t often seen on the front pages of major news outlets.
https://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/13174052/afterCovid-v3_banner.jpg4501350nathanhttp://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/16232551/ASPI-CMYK_SVG.svgnathan2020-12-01 06:00:002024-12-13 17:44:50After Covid-19 Volume 3: Voices from federal parliament
ASPI’s Danielle Cave probes how data and technology have shaped espionage in a time of Covid-19 crisis and beyond in the July 2020 Australian Foreign Affairs issueSpy vs Spy: The New Age of Espionage:
Listen to the November 2020 Australian Foreign Affairs podcast: Spying in the age of Covid-19 featuring Danielle and ASPI’s Andrew Davies.
