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China Taking on U.S. in Cyber Arms Race
Pabugs writes with a CNN story about an uncomfortable development in world politics and information technology. According to General Robert Elder, an Air Force military man setting up a 'cyber command' in Louisiana's Barksdale Air Force Base, the nation of China is already in the process of developing their own 'cyber warfare' techniques. While Elder described the bulk of China's operations as focusing on espionage, they and others around the world have more serious goals in mind. "The Defense Department said in its annual report on China's military power last month that China regarded computer network operations -- attacks, defense and exploitation -- as critical to achieving "electromagnetic dominance" early in a conflict. China's People's Liberation Army has established information warfare units to develop viruses to attack enemy computer systems and networks, the Pentagon said. China also was investing in electronic countermeasures and defenses against electronic attack, including infrared decoys, angle reflectors and false-target generators, it said."
China can be expected to increase strategic intelligence operations with respect to the United States and its other adversaries, especially as it continues its campaign for "multi-polarity". China employs a wide range of intelligence efforts with respect to the United States, many of which can be traced directly to intelligence capabilities within China's military and government establishment. Because China believes that the United States is a primary adversary, even as the US provides a good deal of the facilitation of China's growth, China can still be expected to continue and increase its strategic intelligence operations with respect to the US.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, China in some ways became the de facto ideological leader of the worldwide Communist movement. China found that it could use international Communist groups and networks, just as the Soviets did, to find persons sympathetic to the causes of Communism and socialism. Indeed, China has actively interacted with and supported international Communists, even persons or organizations known to be involved in criminal activities such a counterfeiting and money laundering. Chinese government officials have been known to meet with those in Communist organizations and student groups abroad, and there are indications such resources are leveraged in a similar fashion as with Russian intelligence.
As something of a flag bearer for world Communism, Beijing has become a "second Rome for Marxism-Leninism". China's Communists, much like the former Soviet Union's, believe world socialism is inevitable and that the Americans are a symbol of what is standing in their way. With the Soviets, the watchword was American "imperialism"; with the Chinese, American "hegemony". However, the Chinese also understand that many in the United States and the West in general view Communism negatively. As such, resources are also devoted to putting forth the images of Capitalism and quasi-democratic ideals, even as the vast populace of China enjoys no such benefit therefrom.
Part of China's strategic campaign is aided by its own system of government. As a system of government with control over much its own press, and even considerable influence over foreign press, China is executing an internal propaganda campaign against the United States with China's own people. At any opportunity, US intentions are painted as at best questionable and at worst aggressive and malicious. This environment, over time, will continue to enhance any support among the general populace for anti-US policy, or actions that must be taken against the United States, possibly with respect to quasi-autonomous disputed areas, such as Taiwan. Without access to multiple viewpoints on a situation, the Chinese people are fed a picture of the world as the Communist leadership wants it seen. Today, that includes mass censorship of the internet, and any sites associated with resistance movements, reformist groups, human rights organizations, and so on.
The propaganda does not stop at China's borders. The effort extends internationally, as China labors to appear clothed in the ideals of Capitalism and free markets - which it, in turn, knows will be seen by many experts as indicative of the decline of Communism. Some propaganda operations are not so subtle, with international news organizations living under the threat of losing their Beijing presence if information that is perceived too negative is published about China.
The continuing enhancement of these ideas lead to easing of trade restrictions, which in turn increases the transfer of high technology into China, and, especially, the finances so critically needed for the silent buildup of China's strength, military and otherwise. China is diligently working to continue to build its conventional army and navy, while also growing its strategic and high technology military capabilities. Chinese military theorists have envisioned new battlefields, where conflict does not happen in open warfare but also on the Internet, via the worl
I gotta say that it feels like that particular war's started already, and it's just that nobody actually told us.
Whether intentional or just a result of all those pirated copies of Winderz, the sheer number of bot-net/zombie attacks coming from China is staggering.
Too bad the "Great Firewall of China" is so concerned about information going IN to the country... I guess its perfectly fine if a citizen's computer sends thousands of emails for v1@gr@ or posts a zillion commercial messages into someone's threaded discussions... Just as long as it doesn't inform the user of how they've got very little freedom and a horrible standard of living, or say anything bad about the Chinese gub'ment!
The Digital Sorceress
I'm more concerned how much of the US debt china owns. Imagine china dumping all the debt and buying Euros. Pretty much most articles I have read said it would crush the dollar. That alone would probably be enough to start and end a war all at once.
access list 110 deny ip any any
Victory.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
It'll be interesting to see what China (and Asia in general) does in the next 50 years. On one hand, they publicly denounce the US and treat us like an enemy. On the other, we've pretty much lost all of our manufacturing capability to them. No US producer can ignore their vast quantities of cheap labor and hospitable business climate. Now that the Communists have no real power there, what's going to fill in the void?
What will be even more interesting is a conflict that forces us to begin manufacturing domestically again. I wonder how long it'll take to ramp up all the factories that closed up during the last 30 years or so?
Any country on Earth with enough technological resources to protect would be stupid not to start thinking about ways to defend it in a conflict. China's no exception.
.. there's always a way in ..
A lot of US companies are outsourcing software development to China. Hardware vendors are moving the bulk of their manufacturing to China. At the same time, the US military is relying more and more on off the shelf software and hardware. Seems to me that there's ample opportunity for mischief (hidden trojans, etc.). Curious, that no one seems to be concerned about this.
[Insert pithy quote here]
It's pretty simple. All missiles have an IR port for commands. If there are infrared decoys, the enemy won't know which is the missile to hack! And an angle reflector will reflect the enemy's hacking signals right back at him (think shiny shield against Medusa.)
I am an american studying in China, and can say that I have not seen a single legal copy of xp, music cds, dvds, software, or in fact, any electronic media. Even Chinese movies are nearly completely ripped off even though they cost about $1.5 USD. My friend bought a laptop here and it came with complimentary copies of photoshop, xp, office, and more. The environment here is nothing like you would picture communism to be. In fact, it isn't communism at all. Chinese communism means something entirely different than Soviet communism meant, just as democracy means something different to every country. The people here don't dislike the US. They are not brainwashed to do so. Most people simply do not care about big issues. There are definitely important international issues though. The Taiwan situation is a significant example. Taiwan is a hot issue here, but most people just want to make enough money to be able to buy more. True capitalists. Furthermore, the laws are completely different than the actual situation. Enforcement is selective, and many laws are not enforced at all. As to provide insight into the actual story: every major country has information security and warfare as a priority. Why would China not want to? Also, as far as China is concerned, Taiwan is a rogue state... why should security not be important in that context as well? China and the US are MAJOR trading partners. The US and the Soviet Union were not so much. The list goes on...
The article said that in addition of all of this, they also invested in ECMs and general defenses against electronic attacks.
I see your point, but you could also consider that the infrared targetting systems are electronic also
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
they don't represent an ideological threat they represent a power center threat. that's a big, fundamental difference, and a crucial one in how to view china
ideologically, the chinese are severely compromised: a communist system only in name. in actuality the chinese are more capitalist than the worst excesses of the gilded age under the robber barons. witness the latest scandals just today: disgusting child labor and fake and deadly products
this hypercapitalism is resulting in gated communities of ultrarich next to a countryside of desperate and teeming poor. communist my ass. china is orders of magnitude more capitalist than any society on this planet. and ruled by a "Communist Party". ha!
ideologically bankrupt, china is therefore just a power center. the only real threats to the united states and the west are ideological ones. centers of power without an ideological center cannot grow and spread, but merely sit there. in actually the reverse holds true: power centers without ideology fall under the sway of other foreign ideologies, and the chinese in that respect are ripe to fall under the influence of a new ideology. the only real model close to anything china coudl become being a western democratic one
i actually hold no illusions that democracy will cheerfully and without resistance spread across china any time soon. china is historically bureaucratic and authoritarian, and will in fact take generations to go truly democratic, if ever. but if china is on course anywhere, however slow, it is towards that kind of enlightenment. it's either that or the continuation of the longstanding chinese historical tradition of stifling authoritarianism and layers of indolent bureaucracy. which would be a shame, as it would doom china to the long term decay and inwardness and lack of progress that it faced centuries before. china in fact has a chance to democratize now, with difficulty, and with every passing decade the chance of that becomes less, and the certainty of its historical bureaucratic inertia reasserting itself becomes more
there is only one other real ideological threat in this world, something china is not in danger of coming under, and something that is a real threat to the usa: militant islamic fundamentalism. i fear and worry about a theocracy in tehran with an atomic bomb way way more than i worry about the chinese. the chinese are ideologically dead in the water. tehran meanwhile is ideologically muscular and virulent
the west did in fact defeat/ witness the collapse of communism. don't fool yourself into thinking communism is still a threat. the only real threat today to the west is militant islamic fundamentalism. the chinese meanwhile are ideologically toothless, and therefore no real threat. they just want to make money
i say to the chinese: remember and listen to the plan sun yat sen laid out a century before for china. sun yat sen, the hero to both the nationalists and the chinese:
1. expel foreigners. done
2. centralize power. done
3. democratize. not done. yet
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Forget the Chinese, we Canucks already have all your contractors pegged with our Supr-Dupr Spy Coins! All your base are belong to us!
Why does anyone believe anything that comes out of the Pentagon any more?
"Ok, could somebody please explain to me what classifies as a cyber-attack? It seems all these are applicable only to public Internet, not private networks. What's all the fuss?"
Day 1.) You, the lazy and over confident American, are preparing to release a new technology and enjoy all that profit that is bound to rain down for years, if not decades. You've been confirming patents, training vendors, stockpiling components and lining up sales channels. Some of that data has traveled public networks, but so far, most has circulated on your private network. And someone has been watching both.
Day 2.) All of the details of your plan have been harvested, mined and translated out of English into not one, but at least 1/2 dozen foreign languages.
Day 3.) Investments in all of the related technologies are planned and set to take place at the appropriate times to (a) profit (b) control the resources at their roots (c) position what appear to be innocuous bond traders so that when the time is right, the trigger is pulled and your firm is put in a less than favorable global market light.
Day 4.) Copies, clones and variants of your new technology are made available in vast markets where you have no reach.
Day 5.) You release your technology into the market place, like a new born calf, and wait for it to take those first precious steps all on its' own.
Day 100...) Instead of finding yourself the captain of industry all of those domestic pundits said you'd be, you have this feeling that maybe you've wasted your time, somehow.
Day 500.) The sadness you feel, seeing others profit from your firm's hard work and yankee ingenuity can hardly be put into words. Your staff put in the time - your investors put in the money - you put in years of your life. Is it possible there are others like you? Is it possible you and other domestic companies gifted the futures of concerns outside your country? How could something like this happen?
How could the good old USA be leap-frogged by developing nations dominated by dirt farmers and polluted countrysides? How?
& the U.S. doesn't do any of this?
No, it doesn't. It does a bit here and there but it has no effective overall strategy.
I swear, we as Americans are so freaking self-righteous!
You misspelled either 'complacent' or 'doomed' but I don't know which; either would make sense.
You speak of "the spread of propaganda" & the use of "deception, disinformation & influence" by the Chinese yet we, as Americans, have been doing it for MUCH longer!
No, you haven't. You want to think you have, but you haven't. There has never been an American propaganda initiative that was 5% as effective as the Chinese PR machine for their attack on India. You wish you could do it (and then you'd have fun feeling all guilty about it) but you can't. Do you think the Iraq strategy would be in such a mess if you could do what the Chinese did in 1962?
I know of what I speak. So can you, if you read Xinhua every day. Just read it. After a few months, you will start to believe. It is a whole other history, a whole other way of looking at the world. America has nothing like it. That is why America is losing; that is why America is cast as the bad guy when they invade one lousy country for oil or whatever, and China gets to flatten the whole of central Asia, northeast Asia, and half Africa as far as I can see by this point, and yet remain Teh Cool.
You lost already. Going "oh but we are so bad for employing these elite evil technologies and techniques, teehee, oh wicked wicked us for being so kickass" does not help. Watch Fox, watch CNN, watch Al-Jazeera, even watch the BBC if you have to, and you will see different spins, different biases, different points of view. Watch Xinhua even in English and you will see a different reality. "Tibetan People Bask In Glow Of Rosy Future". When you can come up with a headline like that and have 1/3 of the world take it as truth, THEN you will be making progess.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
...is to write it in the whitespace on $100 bills. They're quite happy to accept the free flow of our money, but not the free flow of information. I'll hereby dub this IP over TD, or "IP over Trade Deficit". Working on the RFC now.
How is the Chinese leadership Communist? Please describe specific ideologies, approaches and goals that show their communist tendencies. I'm just wondering how you're going to manage that without resorting to the American definition of Communism: "authoritarian government with populist crowd control methods that doesn't like the US".
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.