Jeremy Boss Delivers the Ground Truth

Jill Fields (0:06)

What the fork?

Philip Fields (0:07)

Okay, okay, let's try this again.

Jill Fields (0:10)

Welcome to Forking Off, the podcast by former feds who got the fork out. I'm Jill Fields.

Philip Fields (0:16)

And I'm Philip Fields.

Jill Fields (0:17)

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Philip Fields (0:20)

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Jill Fields (0:25)

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Hi everybody. Today's guest is former NGA Senior GeoAnt Analyst, Jeremy Boss. Now the government, of course, loves its acronyms and jargons. So in case you didn't know, NGA is the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. And a GeoAnt Analyst is a Geospatial-Intelligence Analyst. Now Jeremy will explain more about that when we talk with him in a little bit.

Philip Fields (0:53)

Yeah, and it's so cool because when I thought of the NGA before I started working for the government, I sort of thought about like in those movies like the Bourne trilogy and Enemy of the State where, you know, there's like some guy in a dark room and he's controlling the satellites and looking at the imagery and somebody's telling him to follow so and so turns out like that's just not how it works. So Jeremy gives us a better idea of how it actually works.

Jill Fields (1:21)

Yes. Yes, he does. In this interview, Jeremy also mentions some specific incidents that he worked and explains a little bit more about how NGA analysts actually do their jobs. So Philip, why don't you give us a little background about some of those incidents and why they're so important?

Philip Fields (1:37)

One of the first things that Jeremy talks about is how he worked on the Scarborough Reef crisis in 2012 and the later Senkaku Islands crisis. Both of those deal with Chinese territorial disputes.

The Scarborough Reef crisis being in the South China Sea and the Senkaku Islands being in the East China Sea. With the Scarborough Reef, I think it's good to just explain what that is because a lot of people aren't super familiar with everything that goes on there, but it's actually very important for geopolitical reasons. The South China Sea disputes go way back and I won't try and cover it all. The main thing to know is that after World War II, there was what was set up, the Nine People's Republic of China, that essentially claimed most of the South China Sea on behalf of the Chinese government. And so in 2012, the Scarborough Reef crisis was a two-month-long territorial dispute between China and the Philippines.

And it was denying Filipino fishermen access to their traditional fishing grounds and establishing Chinese control of the reef. After that, China started dredging and construction in the Spratly Islands, and they were building artificial reefs and using those to claim expansion of their exclusive economic zone, basically saying, we own all of this because that little rock over there is ours. In 2013, the Philippines initiated proceedings in the Permanent Court of Arbitration. And that court oversees disputes between governments over things like the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. So the Convention on the Law of the Sea is something that China actually has agreed to and ratified prior to this. And it's that international law that 200 miles from your coastal territory is your exclusive economic zone. The South China Sea, because there are so many countries right next to each other, it gets messy.

Oh, I bet. But this really made it pretty straightforward as far as who gets what. China just didn't like it because they claimed, well, we have all of these tiny little islands and that makes all of this ours. But even their control of those and whether or not those count as islands was something that was in dispute. So in 2016, when the Philippines took China to court, China said, we're not participating in that. But the court actually said, you don't have to show up for us to decide whether or not their claim is valid. China did submit a position paper and made a lot of public statements on it. And the tribunal declared that China's historical nine dash lying claim was junk. There was no actual lawful effect to it. A lot of the things that China had been claiming authority over, including the second Thomas Scholl, which is still a big deal today, this tribunal declared, no, this is the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines. And they found that China's 2012 activities, that dispute that Jeremy will talk about, that had all been unlawful. They also found that China had been harvesting endangered species and caused irreparable harm to coral reefs in the South China Sea and various other breaches of the convention.