Last Thursday’s release of the Defence White Paper heralded more money and manpower for cyber security in Defence. Head of ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre, Tobias Feakin, analysed the cyber elements of the White Paper and its associated Investment Plan on The Strategist last week, covering the key developments for cyber policy in the DWP. The biggest takeaway is that cyber threats were included as one of the six key drivers that will shape Australia’s security environment over the next two decades. To counter this, Defence’s Integrated Investment Plan has allocated $300 million to be spent on cybersecurity from a total of $195 billion to be spent in the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, space, electronic warfare and cyber security capability stream, plus a further $5 billion to update Defence’s ICT systems, out to 2025.

An additional 1,700 positions—consisting of 900 ADF and 800 APS personnel—will be dedicated to intelligence, space and cyber positions, although it’s unclear how many are specifically committed to cybersecurity. While there’s a good amount of cyber threat-related language throughout the White Paper, both Feakin and Richard Chirgwin from the Register were critical of the comparatively small spend on cybersecurity, the vagueness of the language on cyber policy, threats and personnel numbers.

The US Department of Defense  released its budget request for cybersecurity in the 2017 budget last Friday. The Pentagon has asked for a 15% increase on the 2016 budget, bringing the total spend on defensive and offensive cyber capabilities to US$6.7 billion in 2017 and US $34.6 billion out to 2021. During his testimony at the House Appropriations defense subcommittee hearing, US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter discussed the future of US Cyber Command, saying the current arrangement—where Cyber Command is a sub-unified command of Strategic Command—was ‘not necessarily optimal’ and options to raise it as a full combatant command were still being examined.

Also from the Pentagon this week was the news of a new campaign targeting Daesh’s ability to use social media and conduct financial and logistical arrangements online.

Also across the Pacific, the dispute between the US government and Apple took another turn this week as a Federal judge in New York ruled in Apple’s favour in another case regarding access to encrypted data on an iPhone. Ellen Nakashima from the Washington Post notes that as the two cases involve different iPhone operating systems the technical assistance requested is also different to that requested to unlock the phone of one of the San Bernadino gunmen, but both cases rely on the application of 1789’s All Writs Act. The US Justice Department’s response was that they’ve asked for the decision to be reviewed, and further added that Apple had agreed to assist until the government’s request for assistance was made public through the court proceedings. Apple is now also reportedly considering full-disc encryption of iCloud data to further protect the privacy of its customers. This data, backed up from customers’ iOS devices, isn’t currently encrypted when stored by Apple. Such a change would make it impossible for Apple to access the data backups it keeps in iCloud—but would also mean that anyone who forgets their password can forget ever recovering their data as Apple would be unable to reset subscriber passwords.

In a report from  Swedish cybersecurity company Unleash Research Labs, the Myanmar Army has been named as the source of the cyber attacks that targeted pro-democracy news outlets before last November’s elections. Talking with The Diplomat, one of the report’s authors linked several hacktivist groups in Myanmar to the Myanmar Defence Service Computer Directorate’s network, which they used to target media outlets that opposed the military junta, and also targeted Thai police websites in retaliation for the death sentences imposed on two Myanmar men for killing two British tourists in southern Thailand. The Myanmar government denied the allegations.

And finally, the long-running transition of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority to a multi-stakeholder model is approaching its end, as the final plan for the transition comes up for agreement at a meeting in Morocco next week. The proposed plan, released in October 2015, will attempt to better balance the influence of governments and the broader internet community, and transfer the domain names and intellectual property currently held by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to an Internet Engineering Task Force-sponsored trust.

When Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi used the term ‘pull factor’ in a recent interview, she was reprising an expression coined four decades ago to describe how the promise of resettlement was the reason for the continuing exodus of Indochinese refugees.

Marsudi is well aware, however, that resettlement isn’t why an ever-growing wave of thousands of Rohingya Muslims are turning up on the shores of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. It’s simply to get out of Myanmar and find sanctuary—anywhere.

The dilemma isn’t the same, but in the early 1980s the Americans were arguing among themselves whether the later Vietnamese boat people were refugees, or what one controversial report called ‘economic migrants’: another catch-phrase now back in vogue.

While many may have been, refugee workers found it hard to make the distinction when the escaping families were braving storms and a brutal cordon of fishermen-turned-pirates in a desperate voyage across the Gulf of Thailand to find a new life abroad.

Little could be done to prevent that exodus at its source, but Myanmar’s membership of the Association of Southeast Asians Nations (ASEAN) should give Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia some political leverage to eliminate the ‘push factor’—even if that does look unlikely right now.

If they can stop squabbling among themselves and dispose of the mantra that member states should not interfere in each other’s internal affairs, they’d have every right to press Myanmar to repeal the 1982 law which rescinded Rohingya citizenship after centuries of residence in western Rakhine.

While the three governments have been rightfully criticized for keeping thousands of ‘migrants’ floating offshore in dire conditions, mounting a humanitarian operation shouldn’t obscure the fact that Naypyidaw is allowing the burden of an uncompromising policy to land squarely on its neighbours.

Thailand has good reason to worry. It was only the promise of resettlement that persuaded it to take in the Indochinese refugees in the 1970s and 1980s. But that hasn’t always applied to the Karen, 120,000 of whom are still living in nine camps along the Thailand-Myanmar border.

Overseen by the military, Myanmar’s civilian administration may have reluctantly agreed to attend Friday’s summit in Bangkok. But in refusing to even acknowledge the word ‘Rohingya,’ it seems to be saying that finding a permanent solution isn’t their problem.

If ASEAN officials expected moral support from Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Su Kyi, they have been sadly mistaken. As an ethnic Burman nationalist, she hasn’t shown herself to be sympathetic to the Rohingya or any other minority cause.

In a BBC interview in 2013, when 144,000 of the 735,000 Rohingya had already been displaced by ongoing violence, she denied they were targets of ethnic cleansing and claimed that fear among majority Buddhists had fuelled religious tensions.

Ethnic Burmans comprise two-thirds of Myanmar’s population of 50 million, with the rest made up of six main minority groups, including the Shan and Karen in the rebellious northeast who have fought against the central government since independence.

The Bengali-speaking Rohingya are already widely scattered. More than 200,000 live across the border in Bangladesh, as many as 500,000 in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and another 30,000 in Malaysia.

Malaysia is now the final destination for most of the Rohingya. But even if it does deny them official status, by allowing them to work in menial jobs over the years, Kuala Lumpur has inadvertently created a pull factor that is now also impacting on Thailand and Indonesia.

The United States says it’s ready to take the lead role in a multi-country effort, organized by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), to take in the ‘most vulnerable’ of the latest wave of refugees, to call them by their real name.

The US has already quietly resettled 1,000 Rohingya people, despite a UNHCR pronouncement three years ago that they weren’t eligible for resettlement, even if they do fit the definition of a refugee: people with a well-founded fear of persecution.

At the height of the violence in 2012, UNHCR chief Antonio Guterres claimed the UN’s resettlement programme—and its method of referrals—was only for those fleeing ‘one country to another under very specific circumstances. Obviously, it’s not related to this situation.’

Other refugee officials insist that religion and/or post 9/11 security concerns aren’t the issue. While no-one will publicly admit it, the stateless Rohingya are considered poor resettlement prospects in the Western countries because they lack any formal education and are prone to domestic violence.

Retired refugee workers recall the UNHCR having similar reservations about resettling Hmong hilltribe refugees from the war-torn mountains of northern Laos, who then proceeded to amaze everyone with their ability to adapt to a life they’d never prepared for.

Then there are the Karen on the opposite side of Myanmar; all of them better educated and, without putting too fine a point on it, either Buddhists or Christian Baptists. While many remain in limbo along the border, a surprising 80,000 have quietly been accepted for third-country resettlement over the past decade. That, of course, is not the aim of the hastily-called Bangkok meeting, which is expected to consider a regional action plan addressing the more immediate issue of people traffickers and the idea of an international development fund for Rakhine state.

At this early point, it’s the most that can be expected.

T.X. Hammes has a new article in The National Interest, ‘Sorry, AirSea Battle Is No Strategy’ in which he argues that war with China won’t be won by deep strikes. Distant, defensive deterrence and blockades suit us better.

Are the economic benefits of military primacy all they’re cracked up to be? Dan Drezner has a new journal article that challenges whether military preponderance has paid off for the US.

There was a foreign policy battle of minds between the Foreign Minister Bob Carr and his Opposition counterpart Julie Bishop, hosted by the Lowy Institute on Wednesday. For a summary of the main points and key features, check out related blog posts here or listen to the recording here.

There are some new Centre of Gravity papers, published by the ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, including one by C. Raja Mohan on recent China–India border disputes and their security implications for Australia, a second by Robert O’Neill on the ADF in a post-Afghanistan era, and a third by Admiral Dennis C. Blair on how Australia and the US should respond to China’s recent assertiveness (PDF). Read more