Slashdot Mirror
Google.cn Attack Part of a Broad Spying Effort
CWmike writes "Google's decision Tuesday to risk walking away from China (Um, the world's largest Internet market) may have come as a shock, but security experts see it as the most public admission of a top IT problem for US companies: ongoing corporate espionage originating from China. It's a problem that the US lawmakers have complained about loudly. In the corporate world, online attacks that appear to come from China have been an ongoing problem for years, but big companies haven't said much about this, eager to remain in the good graces of the world's powerhouse economy. Google, by implying that Beijing had sponsored the attack, has placed itself in the center of an international controversy, exposing what appears to be a state-sponsored corporate espionage campaign that compromised more than 30 technology, financial and media companies, most of them global Fortune 500 enterprises. The US government is taking the attack seriously. Late Tuesday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton released a statement asking the Chinese government to explain itself, saying that Google's allegations 'raise very serious concerns and questions.' She continued: 'The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy.'"
"The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy." Well thanks to the likes of Google and Facebook I can hardly do that as is.
Q.E.D.
The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy.
But it's not so critical we're going to do give the citizens broad access to strong encryption and authentication, and force vendors to provide secure products with documented source code and APIs, because that would impede our ability to spy on them. The message to China is: We hate competition.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
So the US was hacking into human rights workers' information in order to find and imprison its own citizens that were speaking up against them? Right.
Well the US at one time actually did spy on human rights workers. As for the rest of your comment, No, but the US was (for example) training, equipping and directing death-squads in South America. The Echelon system would have been handy for things like target identification although the methods used to compile the victims lists seem to have been pretty random much of the time. The same is probably true of the "war on terror" which leaves one wondering, with all that technology, why they keep bombing weddings and funerals in places like Afghanistan? The answer is probably because in those places militants don't use much electronic equipment and when they do they have learned to use it in such a way as to make themselves hard to track. The whole mess makes one think the US is stabbing in the dark much of the time in their dealings with the Taleban.
"Dear US of A,
We're calling in all of your debts. Now.
-- China"
US economy goes bust. World economy goes fubar. Google dries up and blows away. China sits back and chortles.