All You Need to Know About China Espionage
I’ve been writing a bit over the past few months about the never-ending procession of stories, mostly coming out of the U.S. Right-wing establishment, about Chinese government espionage. A lot of these focus on cyber-security, all of them owe their style and tone to cut-rate Cold War pulp fiction. Add some ominous music to the background, and we’re back in the 1950s.
Anyway, I just wanted to point you to a great post from Dave at Mutant Palm from last week that I finally got around to reading, which adroitly skewers a report from the uber-right Jamestown Foundation – these are people so far out there that they think the AEI staff are all wimps.
Not only is the post great, but Mutant Palm is now the only other blog I’ve seen recently that references the Cox Report, aside from China Hearsay of course. I just can’t let go of the go-go China bashing ’90s, I guess. Nice to see that the craziness of that time has not been completely forgotten. Thanks Dave.
P.S.: I verified the above AEI link by going to their site. I was rewarded for that effort with a photo and quote of chest thumper and IR nutjob John Bolton, who explains to us that if you think that the image and/or power of the U.S. in the world is less than it used to be, you will now be referred to as a "declinist". The quote comes from an interview Bolton gave in the Italian Liberal — rather ironic, that (and yes, I know where the term comes from – don’t write and explain it to me).
Hey Stan, thanks for the kudos. I think the Cox Report really doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves, since it seems to have served as the launching point for alot of approaches and attitudes towards China in U.S. policy today.
With stuff like the Jamestown article, I’m not saying its impossible for the PRC to have a massive espionage program, but that 1) most of the articles provide no evidence at all that there’s actually a central program, and 2) tend to make incredibly bogus arguments. For example, The Times of London just had a piece about a British official getting his blackberry stolen in a Chinese “honeytrap” operation. How this is a honeytrap and not an opportunistic lady who simply wanted to sell his phone is never demonstrated, and the real problem is not Chinese espionage in particular, but rather a failure on the British side to be adequately secure regardless of where the threat comes from. There’s precisely the same problem with hackers: whether there’s a Chinese government master plan to hack foreign governments is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that government officials should be opening email attachments without taking proper precautions (this was what the Merkel administration failed to do).
Of course there are some spies and hackers who are part of PRC govt programs. But there’s plenty that aren’t, and the same is true in the U.S. (think Hewlett Packard or credit card data thieves). Determining the relationship between the two in China is definitely a good thing to do, but making huge leaps by quoting random phrases that sound scary (Assassin’s Mace is another good example) is not the way to do it.