Pentagon Levels Cyberspying Accusations At China

[Karloff]

Pentagon Levels Cyberspying Accusations At China

Some cyberintrusions can be blamed directly on China's military, according to the Pentagon's report to Congress.

"China is using its computer network exploitation capability to support intelligence collection against the U.S. diplomatic, economic, and defense industrial base sectors that support U.S. national defense programs," claims the Pentagon, in a report prepared and delivered at Congress' behest. This latest accusation alleges that China's government and military are directly involved in cyberespionage, in an effort to acquire technology to fuel China's military modernization. Though China's no newcomer to the cyberspy business [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/122282-Private-Cybercrime-Outfit-Exposes-Chinese-Hackers], this Pentagon report is the first time accusations have been leveled against Beijing directly for targeting US defense networks.

China has denied the accusations, describing them as groundless and irresponsible. "This is not beneficial to US-China mutual trust and co-operation," says Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying. "We are firmly opposed to this and have already made representations to the US side." Hua went on to say that China's defense buildup was intended to protect its national independence and sovereignty. In addition to cyberespionage, the Pentagon report alleges that Chinese ships have been issued antiship cruise missiles, developing their threat capability against American warships. According to the Pentagon, this is the first time the antiship missiles have been deployed with any kind of operational capacity. The 930 mile range of the DF-21D means it can hit targets in the Western Pacific. Other recent Chinese military improvements include stealth aircraft tests and a new aircraft carrier.

The Pentagon report is issued on an annual basis, and has been since the year 2000. China's increasing military capacity and territorial claims - most notably in the Philippines and Japan - have caused Congress considerable concern in recent years. Chinese defense spending is thought to be growing at a rate of 10% annually, inflation-adjusted; there have been some suggestions that actual outlay per annum may be growing at more than 10%. China's most recent military budget announcement, in March 2013, put the total at $114 billion, as compared to US expenditure of more than $500 billion.

Source: Wall Street Journal [http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887323687604578467442670389684-lMyQjAxMTAzMDAwNjEwNDYyWj.html]


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[DTWolfwood]

Good job pentagon. China also has an interest in protecting their interests with military might. My mind is completely blown. <.<

 

[Weaver]

I feel a lot of things

1) The US is spying on every goddamn country in the world. In fact, most countries are spying on one and other.
Remember this? http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/11/04/norway.us.spying.probe/index.html The US was caught with spies in Norway, which is clearly the biggest threat to US securities. Seriously, if they're spying on Norway I don't see why any other country thinks they also aren't being spied on.

2) As an extension to this, why wouldn't they also be hacking and gathering info about whatever they could? There is not an ounce of doubt in my being that the US is also hacking China.

3) While this is probably likely given what we know of China, WHY should we believe the pentagon? They're a complete black box that could be feeding you a heaping shit of lies just to get citizens riled up for the inevitable cyberwar, and there's no way you can verify or validate a single goddamn thing they say.

They could tell you any fucking thing they want and you have to take it completely on faith. Screw that, I don't trust them.

 

[Dr.Awkward]

Given how the US Navy is mostly responsible of guarding international waters, couldn't a little "accident" happen that cuts one or two of the undersea lines that go to China?

Given how small their own navy is compared to ours, the Chinese government might actually stop if they end up with a populace that grows angrier and angrier at the lost online connections and increased lag from the remaining bottlenecked lines.

 

[Therumancer]

You could always hire the other team's hackers and pay them a lot more. Seems like a solid investment to me.

Well, the problem is of course that China is pretty much a police state. We'd need to not only offer them more money, but also use the special forces to extract them to the US, which would pretty much start an official cold war.

See, right now we've been keeping this whole "China is our friend" thing going way too long, despite their robber economy, military build up, and saber rattling about colonizing other countries. Not to mention them holding us back from taking out North Korea, they talk tough about doing something, but notice they never actually do anything, and the Kim Jongs are still in power down there even in light of the current incidents. China referring to them as "Mad Dogs" sounded good, but you'll notice nothing has really come of it.

I've been saying for over a decade now that we needed to pre-emptively strike China, at least in terms of crippling it's military production infrastructure. I do not think nuclear ICBMs are quite the concern for us that they were once upon a time (despite what others here might think) and at the end of the day we're going to have to risk that anyway since we can't just let any nuclear capable power do whatever the hell it wants, our own interests be damned. I also feel that despite what a lot of people might think, a lot of nations would join with the US in this, as the general lack of action against China has been largely prompted by the US's lack of assertiveness and unwillingness to take a lead in a stronger position regarding them. Basically if we play nice with them, so are most of our allies on their own.

As I've said, time favors The Chinese since they can out produce us, and our lack of retaliation to their spying (which is not recent, Clinton lost a ton of military tech to them) simply means that they are going to become a bigger and bigger threat and increasingly advanced as time goes on. Their Yuan class submarine, Aircraft Carrier (which is not a defensive weapon), increasing belligerance over Japanese islands which are of strategic value to the US, and similar things all point in a really bad direction.

Interestingly it should also be noted that China is fond of what amounts to technological slave labour. You might remember years ago that there was a ring "busted" where prison officials were using prisoners to farm gold and such in MMOs and then selling it and pocketing the money. The Chinese goverment shut it down allegedly, but there was apparently evidence that the Chinese goverment simply took over the operation and broadened it, as well as coming up with the idea of training Chinese prisoners in computers and then using them for other things while keeping the prisoners under close observation. Mostly conspiricy theory fodder, but it's interesting to note that cyber espionage is becoming an even bigger factor a couple years after I was hearing that garbage. I mostly think of it because of your comments about bribing the Chinese hackers, in reality I suspect the ones that are "Free" are already kind of on "our side" acting with groups like Anonymous or doing their own thing, where the ones we are having problems with are either going to be Chinese military, or otherwise under tight controls.

I also can't help but not the irony in terms of one of the first solutions being "Bribery" since that is exactly what Chinese propaganda says our first reaction to this kind of thing would be (a sign of Western, capitalist corruption to our thinking). It would counter with lots of stuff about state loyalty and honor, but in reality just tosses humanitarianism out the door and pretty much keeps a tight leash on people as much as it can to prevent it from becoming a problem.

 

[Yan007]

Given how the US Navy is mostly responsible of guarding international waters, couldn't a little "accident" happen that cuts one or two of the undersea lines that go to China?

Given how small their own navy is compared to ours, the Chinese government might actually stop if they end up with a populace that grows angrier and angrier at the lost online connections and increased lag from the remaining bottlenecked lines.

I live in China right now. If the lines were cut, most people would never notice because China developed a separate "cage" and most Chinese don't venture out of the pen. This would piss off foreigners living in China and foreign companies that's for sure.

 

[cidbahamut]

I feel a lot of things

1) The US is spying on every goddamn country in the world. In fact, most countries are spying on one and other.
Remember this? http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/11/04/norway.us.spying.probe/index.html The US was caught with spies in Norway, which is clearly the biggest threat to US securities. Seriously, if they're spying on Norway I don't see why any other country thinks they also aren't being spied on.

2) As an extension to this, why wouldn't they also be hacking and gathering info about whatever they could? There is not an ounce of doubt in my being that the US is also hacking China.

3) While this is probably likely given what we know of China, WHY should we believe the pentagon? They're a complete black box that could be feeding you a heaping shit of lies just to get citizens riled up for the inevitable cyberwar, and there's no way you can verify or validate a single goddamn thing they say.

They could tell you any fucking thing they want and you have to take it completely on faith. Screw that, I don't trust them.

Beat me to the punch.

Basically the US whining about how China is trying to hack into their systems doesn't hold much water when we're doing the exact same thing to any given country.

 

[Ironside]

I've been saying for over a decade now that we needed to pre-emptively strike China, at least in terms of crippling it's military production infrastructure.

You want to start a war with the PRC?

He wants to launch pre-emptive strikes against the Chinese military, so technically speaking if the first strike was successful enough there would be no war since the Chinese military would cease to exist. To be honest I am also of the opinion that something needs to be done about China before they overtake the US in military terms. Put it this way I wouldn't want to be living in countries like Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, India, South Korea or any other Pacific region country when China eventually reaches the stage where they feel that the US wouldn't be able to stop them anymore. I don't know if full blown military intervention is necessarily the answer though - perhaps if we could just take down the government and somehow introduce a completely free internet with no restrictions then we might see things improve over there and that would be much preferable to seeing China start World War 3.

 

[Zombie_Moogle]

I've been saying for over a decade now that we needed to pre-emptively strike China, at least in terms of crippling it's military production infrastructure.

You want to start a war with the PRC?

China is a hostile enemy of the U.S., after all; doing 500 billion dollars worth of business with us annually, loaning our government 1.2 trillion dollars... they're clearly trying to take us down!

 

[Therumancer]

I've been saying for over a decade now that we needed to pre-emptively strike China, at least in terms of crippling it's military production infrastructure.

You want to start a war with the PRC?

Uh, yeah... I kind of just said that.

The way I see it is that China is a threat and in the middle of a huge military build up, and we're not talking defensive hardware either. The biggest limitation of China and why they have not been a threat is because despite a massive standing army they have not had the abillity to project those forces into other countries due to the lack of an effective navy. Recently they have been working on a modern navy including surface ships, aircraft carriers, and submarines to defend them with. This being combined with their increasing attempts towards missle and satellite defense and the stated intent to be able to force "conventional warfare" which would favor them. If you do a search for "China, Satellite, and Lasers" together you'll find articles going back to 2006 about China having ground based laser systems capable of blinding US military satellites. Digging further you'll find notes on efforts being made to expand these technologies into other directions to pretty much end the WMD stalemate. When you look at their internal propaganda behind "The Bamboo Curtain" they are justifying keeping running the sweatshops, factories, slave farms, and other things and feeding their wealth into the military due to promises of avenging themselves on the western world and taking over the rest of the globe as is their due right, and colonizing our lands once the cowardly shield of WMD fueled MAD is
off the table.

See, the thing is that while this isn't possible it's easy to sit back, laugh about it, and pretend it's not a problem. But if they keep banging away at it like "The Little Engine That Could" eventually they are going to get there, and we've already seen a lot of progress. Once they already have this technology and this military, we are pretty much utterly F@Cked, even if we stop them we're talking global decimation of not only their people but everyone else that gets involved as well. Hence my comments about a pre-emptive strike on their military infrastructure, I'd rather start a war on our terms while it still favors us, than I would play a purely reactive game and only fight when they have all their ducks in a row. The US barely pulled off two last minute global saves against Germany, I don't want to sit around with our head in the sand and wait until the last second and hope for a skin of our teeth victory against China. We see the build up, we see the saber rattling, we see the frightening development of technology, we see them robbing our economy via copyright and trademark violations, knockoffs of our products, and similar things, we see the horrendous human rights violations, we see them involved in cyber espionage attacks against us... They have pretty much given the US dozens if not hundreds of justifications to go to war, but we've been too nice to do it, due to our own purely reactive morality.

You might not like the point, but I see a lot of similarities between China's current behavior, especially in terms of offensive military build up, and what we've seen from Germany in the past. I'd much rather gut China's infrastructure now and take the losses that would entail, than wait a couple of decades until they start invading, try and rebuild our own military infrastructure when they have countered a lot of our big tech advantages (or caught up to them), and see even more people die as a result.

Also understand I have no real intention of occupying China, or "winning the peace" or any of that crap. We don't have the manpower for that kind of a land war. Rather I'd pretty much suggest just surrounding it with as many of our anti-missle ships and subs to shoot down their limited nuclear stockpile, bomb the crap out of it's fledgeling navy and naval production facilities, obtain air superiority (one of the advantages we still have) and then just bomb the crap out of them until they agree to follow copyright and trademark laws, reform human rights policy, and agree to strict limitations on military build up and technological development in the future. Then we leave. We'd need to put few, if any, US boots on Chinese soil. Sure millions of civilians will die, but even more will die if they start the war they are angling for and start trying to colonize other nations. Besides thinning their population might actually help in the long run.

I don't expect many here to agree with me, but that's pretty much my thoughts. I mention going to war with China largely because hey... we've just caught China spying on us and stealing from us again. How many times are we going to be stupid enough to just let it go? We keep ignoring this stuff and it just leads to more of it. After our resounding retaliation for the theft of military secrets during Clinton's presidency it's not any big surprise that China sees the US military infrastructure as an all you can eat Cyber-Buffet.

 

[CriticalMiss]

1) The US is spying on every goddamn country in the world. In fact, most countries are spying on one and other.
Remember this? http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/11/04/norway.us.spying.probe/index.html The US was caught with spies in Norway, which is clearly the biggest threat to US securities. Seriously, if they're spying on Norway I don't see why any other country thinks they also aren't being spied on.

You've got to keep an eye on those fjords, they could be jihadists.

If the US doesn't like people spying on them why don't they use some of those billions of dollars in military spending on making a decent firewall and ordering all military contractors and what have you to use it? They could even try not spying on other people too. But it is human nature to want to have a bigger/sharper/pointier stick than your neighbour so I doubt they will stop any time soon.

 

[Legion]

China's most recent military budget announcement, in March 2013, put the total at $114 billion, as compared to US expenditure of more than $500 billion.

It is always things such as this that make me roll my eyes at the West. America thinks it's cool for them to spend $500 billion on their military budget, but then have the audacity to complain when China spends around a fifth of that on their own military.

Not to mention that it is countries such as America and European nations such as Britain that are trying to police the world, not countries such as Russia and China that we are supposed to be worried about.

 

[Lazy Kitty]

China being a potential threat to the US military?

Good, I don't like the way the US pretty much has this globe in a stranglehold.

 

[King Kazma]

America spies on everyone, than they go and say you can't spy on us. Funny. Still, China is America's biggest threat. They're probably the best at cyber warfare. Actual military capabilities are improving all the time. They've the massive industrial base to support it all. Soon enough China will 'really' be threatening countries around it to bow to their will. Since, you know, threatening others with their nukes is kinda no option. They also have a no first strike policy.

 

[Moosejaw]

Yeah don't worry folks, since the US single-handedly won WWII and saved the world, we can totally just casually take out a nation of a billion people who we rely on tremendously economically and owns a sizable chunk of our debt with little trouble. All those nuclear weapons? No biggie, we'll just...surround China with submarines and shoot them all down! Problem solved. It'll go just as smooth as Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam & Korea - remember how those went? Absolutely goddamned great! Also with the evil Chinese commies vanquished, we can rest assured that taking out the government of the second largest economy in the world will have absolutely. No. Unintended. Consequences. None, none at all!

I'm sorry, I don't usually like these douchey sarcasm posts and because I went that route there's no way I'm convincing you of anything, but...Therumancer - seriously? Millions of dead people, all worth it because China was poking into our shit like we totally aren't poking into theirs and everybody else's shit - but we're allowed to, because America. The fact I think someone could seriously propose that, if you're not trolling, is a sign that we are truly deranged as a people. The fact that you can just idly wave off millions of people dead because China was threatening Uncle Sam's global domination e-peen is incredibly depressing but not too far off from the norm these days.

 

[Klonoa Prower]

Of course they're spying on us, because we're spying on them right back. The thing is, based on the situation we're in, we're basically conjoined twins at this point who hate each other, but we can't be separated or we'll both die. Our economies are inexorably linked to each other at this point and if one of us falls, the entire infrastructure of the other will collapse as well.

On the note of them increasing their military might. With the way America has been so gung-ho in the past 30 years or so, and the people in power over there smart enough to know that they're considered the "biggest threat to the western world", of course they're going to have weapons and materials in place. If America seems to have no qualms about conquering Iraq and Iran, it's rather hypocritical to complain about them taking other nations as well. The only difference is, they don't need to make excuses to the public about why they're attacking them like our politicians do.

And as for the whole protecting North Korea thing... they're the only active trading country with that nation, so wanting to keep that fairly free money is not wrong of them. Now if push came to shove, and Kim Jong Derp decided to do something stupid, like attack us, I'm certain China would be more concerned about keeping the debt with us in place than letting that hole in the ground nation survive. But the odds of that even happening are so astronomically low, since NK's leader is just stage performing anyway for his public. The world is the same no matter where you look, everyone may dance differently, but it's always to the same tune.

(Just for reference, I love my country with all my heart... it's the people in it I'm beginning to despise.)