Three Filipinos convicted of
espionage in Qatar have had their sentences reduced – one from death to life
imprisonment and the two others from life to 15 years in prison. The
charge sheets read that all three Filipinos allegedly spied for the Philippine
government while working either in the Qatar Petroleum company or the Qatari
Air Force.
In this day and age, spy novels no
longer sell like hotcakes unlike in the 70s, 80s and 90s when the likes of John
le Carré, Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy made a fortune out of their
cloak-and-dagger page-turners. The spy novel genre has gone stale, along with
its movie spinoffs like James Bond, for a good reason.
That reason is that the stealing of
military or industrial secrets is now done via hacking or cyber-espionage.
Operating continents away from their target countries, hackers make full use of
supercomputers that would make Alan Turing, the acknowledged father of
theoretical computer science, shed copious tears had he been alive today.
Disgraced for his sexual preference
but pardoned in 2013 by no less than the Queen of England, Turing was the man
who created the first general purpose computer which helped the British MI6 or
secret service crack the German military’s Enigma encryption algorithm. Turing
shortened World War II by two years, according to historians.
But enough digression. The simple
point we’d like to make is that the Philippines would be the last country to
employ spies abroad and for what? To steal Qatar’s secret oil processing
technique? Or steal the blueprint of Qatar’s fighter planes which that country
does not even manufacture but also buys from countries like the US?
The Philippines will never be an oil
power. Whatever prospect for oil we have at Scarborough Shoals has been dashed
by China’s reclamation and military build-up in the area. Likewise, why would
the Philippines steal data from the Qatari Air Force when we are more than
happy to salvage America’s military junks from their scrap yard.
That spy yarn is simply preposterous.
END
image by New York Times
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