Blazed and confused: Turkey’s raging fires

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right.

Now Mint Mobile is offering you the.

Gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half the price.

Not half the service.

Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day.

Yeah, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront.

Payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow 135 gigabytes of network busy taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Combing through satellite images to gauge a state's defense capabilities is the stuff of old school spycraft. The new school is this. Those images are now free online and communities of sleuths are finding all manner of information that was once top secret. And the name Murder Hornet is certainly evocative. The threat that these invasive creatures present in America isn't to humans, but to the humble honeybee, that is still worrisome. And the way they take down their prey is nothing short of gruesome. First up, though, Across the Mediterranean, wildfires are consuming the landscape. Viewed from the air, the northern part of the Greek island of Evia, near Athens, is a uniform ruined brown. The smoke has forced Athenians indoors. Thousands of people on the island have fled.

Childhood memories are burned right now. I used to run in this forest. I used to recycle. We used to go for and collect fruits. Now everything is gone.

Other European states are sending in support on the ground and in the air. Where Greece's water bombing campaign has been lacking. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis apologized for his government's failure to contain the blazes debt to shield the country against the reality of climate change, he said. I'm not looking for excuses. The problem is bigger than Greece, a lot bigger. From Italy to Algeria, Morocco to Lebanon, the whole of the Mediterranean and beyond has become a wildfire hotspot. Turkey too, where the leadership is also feeling the heat.

Stretches of what have been Turkey's coastal paradise, which were once covered in pine forests and olive trees, are now in ashes.

Piotr Zelewski is our Turkey correspondent and is based in Istanbul.

We saw remarkable footage from those areas, including that residents rushed to the sea, filling up buckets with water to ward off the flames approaching their homes.

And what's been the cause of all of these fires?

The cause of the fires is the lasting legacy of climate change and near record temperatures and severe droughts in the region. Temperatures in some places reached over 45 degrees Celsius. That is about 110Fahrenheit. Wildfires do occur this time of year, but never at this scale. To date, over 170,000 hectares have burned in Turkey, and that is more than four times the average between 2008 and 2020.

And the response to fires in neighboring Greece has been less than ideal, let's say. How has it been on the Turkish side? How has the Turkish government handled things?

The Turkish government has also been caught badly, unprepared by this disaster, perhaps much more so than the Greek government. From the very outset, local officials, local mayors, have been asking for for help from the central government, especially support from the air. But government ministers had to concede that they had no working water bombers and had to resort to using helicopters instead. The government has not done itself any favors on the PR front either. The head of the agency responsible for the upkeep of the water bombers admitted that he had gone through a wedding at the height of the crisis. And locals really feel like they've been abandoned to their fate. Turkey eventually accepted offers of help from Russia, Azerbaijan and the eu, but that seems to have been too little, too late.

And how much of this falls at the feet of the leadership, do you think?

Well, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government have tried to downplay their responsibility for all of this and says that it has brought all but a few of the fires under control. But the reality remains that the beginning of the crisis was something of a failure, that the government was inadequately prepared to deal with fires of this scale. Ever since then, it has been playing damage control. And when damage control has not worked, the government has resorted to pressure. Turkey's media watchdog has accused some television stations of spreading fear and anxiety about the fires and has threatened them with the, quote, unquote, heaviest of sanctions. And just a few days ago, prosecutors in Turkey launched an investigation into a social media campaign that called for assistance from abroad. And this all adds to the impression that Mr. Erdogan is overwhelmed by the crises, political, economic, and now environmental, and that Turkey is starting to reap the effects of decades of environmental destruction compounded by climate change.

What do you mean by environmental destruction?

This is a matter of runaway construction, pollution, which have made the country less resilient, coping with the effects of climate change. This is the legacy not only of Mr. Erdogan's government, but of Decades of bad planning and environmental neglect. The bill for all this is starting to come due. Earlier this summer, thick sheets of marine mucilage, known affectionately as sea snot, spread over the Marmara Sea to just south of Istanbul. Scientists said this was the result of rising temperatures, but also of industrial and agricultural runoff and construction frenzy in Istanbul. Each year, the forests lining the country's coasts recede further inland, replaced by rows of vacation homes and hotels. And there's concern now that developers will finish what the raging fires have started. Mr. Erdogan's ministers have promised to keep developers away from the areas scorched by the fires. Whether they keep their word remains to be seen. But even if they stick to their word, the fires will have shown how much harder it is to keep climate change at bay.

Thanks very much for joining us. Piotr.

Thank you for having me.

Foreign.

Months more than a hundred new nuclear missile silos have been spotted in China's Gansu and Xinjiang provinces. It's the biggest buildup of launching capability since the Cold War, and American officials are worried.

These reports and other developments suggest that the PRC's nuclear arsenal will grow more quickly and to a higher level than perhaps previously anticipated.

The findings didn't emerge from America's intelligence agencies, but from an undergraduate student at Reed College in Oregon who scoured freely available satellite images on Google Earth. A 26 year old working for an American NGO spotted even more launch sites. This democratization of what was once the most privileged information is spreading with implications for matters not just of nuclear security.

There is this flood of data out there. There are sensors in everyone's pocket in the form of a smartphone. There are dashboard cameras. There are satellites that are taking photographs of every spot on Earth every single day.

Shashank Joshi is the Economist's defense editor.

And all of this information, all of this data is being analyzed by communities of open source investigators who are using it to solve puzzles and unearth secrets.

And how does that community of sleuths work?

Well, often they know roughly what they're looking for, but they have to hunt it down. So to take the example of the recent missiles found in China, there were rumors circulating in Washington that China was building a whole bunch of silos for its missiles. Those problems are sometimes shared on collaboration tools like Slack or social media like Twitter. There's a community of people and they're scouring often freely available satellite images, perhaps other open source information like photographs posted to media data on ship tracking websites. And they're piecing all of that together almost like a jigsaw puzzle collaboratively, in real time to make these breakthroughs. And some of it is fancy data, but some of it is just basic tools. So if you have a video and you see an explosion of a plane in the air, well, you can work out the distance by looking at the gap between the boom and the flash. You can use Pythagoras theorem to work out how far it is over land. So it's stuff that's very advanced and it' stuff that's quite basic as well.

And it's stuff that is ultimately unearthing very important events.

Yes, some of it is about as important as it gets. So, for example, open source intelligence unearthed the Chinese persecution of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang by uncovering this network of camps that China was denying. We also saw bellingcat, which is an open source investigation collaborative, demonstrate Russia's role in the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014 in the face of vehement Russian denials. And Bellingcat went on to identify the Russian agents who had attempted to assassinate Sergei Skripal, the former Russian spy in England in 2018. So again and again we're seeing ordinary people, ordinary investigators who are not working for intelligence agencies who don't have multi million dollar budgets. Basically humbling the Kremlin, humbling powerful states like Russia and China. And that is, I think, a sea change in the way that we think about secrecy.

But those same data might threaten national security if the secrets are worth keeping.

If your job is to hide these secrets, then of course these techniques can be bad news. So look at the example from a few years ago when researchers found data from fitness tracking devices was revealing these remote CIA outposts or Special forces bases in Somalia or Yemen, things that America was trying to keep secret. Another example would be looking at the interference from radar satellites that was suddenly showing up the location of American missile defense systems that was previously unknown. If you're at China or Russia, you probably knew these things anyway. But these are secrets to ordinary people like you and me. And so that sort of thing is now much harder to keep under wraps than it was in the past.

And that preponderance of data and these communities of people must not only concern themselves with matters of national security.

No, some of the big impact ones are of course, unveiling Russian spies or finding Chinese missiles. But open source intelligence can be used to track anything, really. One of my favourite examples I came across was hedge funds using open source data on the movement of private jets of CEOs and they were using that to predict mergers and acquisitions. If you can do that, that's a big deal. That's market sensitive, market moving information. So it's worth a lot if you can predict mergers just by looking at where private jets are going to. And crowdsourced information, crowdsourced photographs can be used by conservationists to track endangered animals and of course by poachers as well, which can put the endangered animals at greater risk. This is very much a double edged sword.

So what's the value judgment here? On balance, is open source intelligence a force for good or otherwise?

I think we have to consider it a force for good on balance. You know, we're a newspaper that is dedicated to openness, to transparency, to liberal values. But even if you think it's not so good, I think it's unstoppable. Before the invasion of Afghanistan, for example, in 2001, America's government was able to basically buy up all the relevant commercial satellite imagery that existed at the time. So no one else could buy it. You wouldn't be able to do that today. There's just too much. You have American satellites, European satellites, Chinese ones, Russian ones. They're all selling imagery, some of it of extremely high resolution. The Pentagon, the federal government in America doesn't have the monopoly over this kind of surveillance that it once did. For those of us who value open societies, who value openness, that's a good thing. I think we should embrace that. It's not always going to stop abuses, but I think it does make the world a little bit less mysterious, maybe a little bit less dangerous.

This as a topic close to your heart, I understand you covered in some depth on Babbage, our sister show on science and tech.

That's right. So on this week's episode of Babbage, we spoke to lots of people, including the former boss of the CIA, John Brennan, and, and his view was fascinating. He told me that open source intelligence might have changed the course of some big crises of the past.

When I look back over the course of history, a number of events, whether it be the Cuban Missile crisis, whether it be the Iraq WMD debacle as well as some other historic events. The more publicly available information that is available to societies as well as to governments. Satellite imagery, for instance, it might have resulted in scenario evolving from the standpoint of being able to prevent unnecessary wars as well as to divulge the truth, despite what maybe some government officials or policymakers were telling their countries publicly.

So if you're interested in this, if you want to Know more, go check out Babbage.

Shashank, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks, Jason.

It came to America from Asia probably in late 2019. Authorities tried to contain it, but its spread was too tough to track. What's now clear is that it may never be entirely eradicated. Like it or not, Americans might have to learn to live with the Murder Hornet.

Murder Hornets, the giant orange and bluish.

Black insects that come from Asia and left unchecked, can potentially wipe out honeybees in North America.

A massacre in the honeycomb.

60,000 honeybees torn apart in a savage attack. My God.

No, seriously, God, why? Asian giant hornets, as they're officially known, are 2 inches long and packed with venom. And since their arrival in America, conservationists have entered the great battle between Asian hornets and American honeybees.

They were seen and reported in December of 2019.

Ellis Leaders writes for 1843, the economist's sister magazine.

But no one really paid attention to them Until May of 2020, when this viral New York Times article came out, and it became an instant sensation. These were the early days of the pandemic. And I think something about the quote unquote, Murder Hornets just gripped the nation.

Part of the way that that grabbed everyone must surely be to do with the name Murder Hornets. How do they come by that name?

Well, Murder Hornets is this title that the New York Times found in one interview with a Japanese entomologist. But the Murder Hornets title does seem fitting to the beekeepers I spoke to in Washington State because they are a mortal threat to honeybees. They target bees during what scientists call the slaughter phase of the hornet's life cycle, where they've basically been carbo loading all summer. And when fall hits, they need protein in order to propagate their hive. And so first, a hornet scout leaves the nest to find larva that's their target. The scout smears a pheromone over the hive to mark it and goes back to their own nest. And a killing squad comes back. The army is basically between 3 and 50 Hornets the size of hummingbirds, and each one has jaws that can decapitate a bee in a single bite. And so, as the bees emerge to defend their home, the hornets just systematically behead them until the larvae are unprotected and the hornets clear out, taking the larva with them and leaving decapitated bees at the doorstep of their hive. This can actually be a big problem for humans, too. Bees help pollinate one in every three mouthfuls of food that people eat in the States. If These hornets become more and more common. The concern is that could threaten industrial agriculture as we know it.

But can that getting more and more common be controlled? I mean, presumably this hasn't been the catastrophe you describe in Asia, where there are from.

In Asia, the honeybees evolved with the hornets and they have their own defenses against the hornet. But that adaptation happened over millennia. And American honeybees, which originated in Europe, are entirely defenseless. And so American honey beekeepers are the first line of defense and only line of defense for these honeybees.

So what is it that humans can do about it then?

Human hornet hunters are concentrated in Washington State, and From July to November 2020, more than 1,000 volunteers, many of them beekeepers, but also other citizen scientists. They helped create hornet traps across the state in cooperation with the Washington State Department of Agriculture. The biggest success so far was last autumn when the WSDA crew found and destroyed a nest of nearly 200 hornets. But it's unlikely that that was the only hive. And just because they built their nest in one place one year, there's absolutely no guarantee that they'll remain in that same space. And all the entomologists I spoke to know that even if they've eradicated this one nest, and that was the only nest that came over on this one shipment, the next invasive species or the next hornet nest could already be on its way to America because the systems of international trade are so deeply ingrained in our society.

Alice, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer the link is in the show Notes. See you back here tomorrow. Sat.