The UK Is GPS-Tagging Thousands of Migrants | Beijing’s Post-Election Plan for Taiwan | Campaign Against Hamas Could Backfire, and more
US & Japanese Aegis Missile Defense Warships to Form Protective “Shield” Around Taiwan (Kris Osborn, Warrior Maven)
A US-Japanese war preparation alliance is expanding an ability to track and counter Chinese ballistic missiles, anti-ship missiles and even nuclear missiles with combined warship patrols armed with advanced Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) technology.
In a joint exercise called Resilient Shield 2024, the Japanese Self-Defense Forces merged BMD tactics with US Navy warships to refine targeting, networking, fire control and intercept technologies, a US Navy essay stated. Although the exercise took place in a simulated computer-based environment, it was intended to assess US-Japanese threat detection, targeting and networking synergies with a mind to expanding a BMD envelope for both countries. With technological advances, computer based simulations are increasingly capable of closely replicate key performance parameters of weapons systems, along with actual simulated “live-fire” kinds of scenarios, data networking and advanced targeting.
The UK Is GPS-Tagging Thousands of Migrants (Morgan Meaker, Wired)
Mark Nelson took the call in an immigration detention center—a place that, to him, felt just like prison. It had the same prison windows, the same tiny box rooms. By the time the phone rang, he’d already spent 10 days detained there, and he was wracked with worry that he would be forced onto a plane without the chance to say goodbye to his kids. So when his lawyers relayed the two options available under UK law—either stay in detention indefinitely or go home wearing a tracking device—it didn’t exactly feel like a choice. “That’s being coerced,” says Nelson, who moved from Jamaica to the UK more than 20 years ago. He felt desperate to get out of there and go home to his family—even if a GPS tag had to come too.
It was May 2022 when the contractors arrived at Colnbrook Detention Center, on the edge of London’s Heathrow Airport, to fit the device. Nelson knew the men were with the government’s Electronic Monitoring Service, but he didn’t know their names or the company they worked for. Still, he followed them to a small room, where they measured his leg and locked the device around his ankle. Since then, for almost two years, Nelson has been accompanied by the tag wherever he goes. Whether he is watching TV, taking his kids to school, or in the shower, his tag is continuously logging his coordinates and sending them back to the company that operates the tag on behalf of the British government.
Nelson lifts up his trousers to reveal the tag, wrapped around his leg, like a giant gray leech. He chokes down tears as he describes the impact the device has had on his life. “It’s depressing,” he says, being under constant surveillance. “Right through this process, it’s like I’m not a human anymore.”