Hidden Ledgers
“We're a Washington DC based nonprofit that uses publicly available information to investigate illicit networks as they pertain to global security and human rights abuses across the world,” explains Savanna Slaughter of the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS). “We work in various issue areas such as natural resource security, wildlife crimes, as well as national security derivative issues, such as China, Russia, Iran. So incorporating a bunch of publicly available information to help expose these networks and then take impactful actions working with government actors, on-the-ground authorities, civil society organizations, to stop these networks.”
The C4ADS team has been looking into two main areas regarding Myanmar: first, how the junta is able to stay in power through sustaining its military might; and second, examining the regime’s illicit finances and assets through, Slaughter says, “crony financing and conglomerates, as well as the industries and ways in which the Tatmadaw is able to continue financing their war efforts.” Myanmar is not a new area of focus for C4ADS—their 2016 report, “Sticks and Stones,” looked at online hate speech directed towards the Rohingya.
More recently, their investigations have mainly relied on hunting down and interpreting, publicly available trade data. In the US and other Western countries, such information is often a legal requirement, although it can still be challenging to sift through so many documents; however, countries like Myanmar and its neighbors present a much greater challenge, because just the process of gathering data alone is difficult. “Unfortunately, corporations can act totally in secret. We've no window into that, besides previous examples from when we were able to scrape the data,” she explains, adding that in such cases, leaked information has played a significant role.
Fortunately, C4ADS has its own data team, which has been able to digitize vast troves of documents, making them more accessible. Still, it takes much more work to make sense of them. Trying to untangle illicit financing is particularly challenging because the players intentionally hide their tracks, often setting up shell companies and deliberately obfuscating records. Slaughter’s team searches social media and the wider web to cross-check names and other details found in their document trove, in hopes of building a clearer picture. “The key takeaway is that you can't operate with a single data source, ever,” she explains. “Basically, you have to combine it with the other resources we have and try to maximize it. All of this data fits together to form a puzzle [while] working through the other types of publicly available information. And then, in certain cases, particularly with Myanmar, slotting this in for leaked information or defectors or human sources, as relevant.”
Because Myanmar doesn’t publish its own trade data, Slaughter and her colleagues must search the other end of the transaction where possible. Of course, records from places like North Korea and China are not accessible to her team, but there are public records available for many other countries. “A lot of these shipments have been spotted and identified, and have been a pretty good starting place for a lot of investigations,” she says, noting that all shipments are required to list the sender, recipients, dates, and contents. It can also be helpful to narrow down the search by looking at the HS code, a classification system which numerically indicates the item type being moved. But it gets tricky from there, as documents are sometimes forged, or the actual actors hire shipping agents to act on their behalf. To uncover these details, Slaughter admits that in addition to critical investigation and data analysis, it can also take a bit of luck, such as someone slipping up somewhere along the paper trail. Another possibility is piggybacking on criminal investigations, such as what happened recently in Singapore, when two men were arrested for falsifying documents that covered up a shipment of military grade sonar equipment to the Burmese regime. “It's really dangerous to have these whole illicit networks,” she says. “It's not just one bad actor, it's typically a whole series of them all working in concert, which makes it really dangerous, but we just try to do what we can and apply some critical analysis.”
Slaughter’s work touches on the subject of sanctions evasion, something covered extensively in past podcast episodes, such as the jet fuel coming in or the teak wood going out, the ongoing gas and oil operations, the profits in jade and rare earth, or prohibiting the use of US currency in any transaction. For example, some US teak importers claim to not know about the ethical challenges of the teak industry in Myanmar, or that the particular teak they import has been ethically sourced. However, they have had long-term relationships with teak mills in the country, know how the teak industry there operates, so Slaughter and her team believe it strains credulity that those companies are not turning a blind eye to the situation there, even if it cannot be proven. The issue of jet fuel is more complicated, since it is used both by civil aviation as well as the military. But their research has uncovered Navy-grade, high speed, diesel fuel coming from India delivered to “The Master,” a moniker which piqued their interest and prompted them to dig deeper, and which was written about in more detail in a recent Frontier article. At the same time, she describes the formation of so many shell companies that their work is like “Whack-A-Mole,” where they can barely identify one entity before others pop up. “Unfortunately, given that we only deal with publicly available data, unless they're publishing and bragging about this somewhere, which it never ceases to amaze me sometimes how self-incriminating people can be on their websites, we just don’t know for sure.”
While it is easy to get trade data from many countries, it is quite different for other nations, in particular Russia and China. C4ADS has established that Russia is one of the main suppliers of military parts to the regime, and does try to not hide it “because no one's going to hold you accountable for it,” she explains. On the other hand, she finds that “China is much more of a black hole.” Given the extensive border between China and Myanmar and their close ethnic bonds, there is certainly a great deal of trade taking place; however, because China stopped publishing trade data within the last few years, unless Slaughter gets lucky and sees a Chinese national’s name appears on a leaked document, or is able to review the annual minutes published from a Chinese board meeting, there is little she can do. Finally, while trade data coming out of India is fairly well-documented, it poses a different kind of challenge; even though there are accessible trade records, shipments of interest run the risk of being heavily obfuscated or being shipped to nondescript entities, making them very hard to unravel and trace in the context of military imports.
“Moving forward with this is going to require a lot more innovation,” she says in closing, “in terms of identifying companies of interest, perhaps working to develop some screening lists, or building out directors of interest and combining corporate data in a new way to form screening lists for shell companies and things like that.”