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Spying, the smart way

Forgive the lateness of today's column... for the first time in probably five years, the sun beat me up. It felt so weird waking up without having to turn on the lights to navigate through the house.

That aside... news of the day seems to be the suggestion that the Five-Eyes spy network may be dismantled under President Trump's reign.

As we all know, New Zealand is a member of the Five Eyes consortium and plays an important part in spying on countries including friends, allies and adversaries. However, the overheads and costs of such activities are not insignificant so it stands to reason that Trump may be considering slashing those costs by withdrawing.

Or, perhaps he's just figured out that old-school spying has been replaced in the 21st century by new ideas and new technologies.

Why would you bother buildinga complex array of systems to monitor radio, satellite and other forms of communications when it has become so much easier just to write an app for that?

What am I talking about?

Well there's TikTok for a start. The US government wants to ban this app because of its alleged role in collecting data for the CCP.

No massive arrays of antennas or hypersensitive snooping technology required -- just put the app on the appstore and wait for the majority of people in the Western world to install it on their phones -- voluntarily. Now you have billions of spies working for you at no charge and all you need to do is run your hyper-efficient AI (hello DeepSeek) on the datasets that are created to get almost any info you want.

I would say that when it comes to spying, China has trumped (excuse the pun) the USA and its partners hands-down.

But wait there's more...

Have you wondered why China is investing so much money in building super-affordable EVs and flogging them to the West at what some commentators believe are loss-leading prices?

Perhaps this explains it.

Yes, right now it is possible that China is setting up the largest spy network the world has ever seen and it's doing it right under our noses with our full cooperation.

Or at least that's what some would have you believe.

By comparison, Five Eyes is old, clunky, expensive and probably far less effective.

Who knows, somewhere within the halls of the CCP, there's probably someone typing a query into DeepSeekPlus and they will, within a few short seconds, have all the highly sensitive and secret information they need -- from the cameras or microphones of more than a hundred million willing but unaware accomplices going about their daily routines in the West, while using Chinese-made tech.

Paranoia?

Perhaps... but that's exactly the emotion that Five-Eyes was built on wasn't it?

Carpe Diem folks!

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