Red Pawn
We - the Western world’s businesses and governments - have been under attack for years by the Chinese communist regime. A decade ago, the code name “Titan Rain” was little known, but other code names such as “Byzantine Candor” and “Moonlight Maze” went back years before, for Chinese government attacks on the Pentagon dating to at least March of 1998. Russia was involved too, and only Russia was talked about in this 1998 Newsweek article - but the Chinese attacks dwarfed the Russian ones.
The Chinese were successful (in the Byzantine Candor campaign) in obtaining a complete list of user names and passwords from a federal agency, along with many other compromising traunches of data.
All of these were downplayed and hushed by the US government, evidently as an embarrassment. The article describing the Byzantine Candor campaign (surfacing through Wikileaks) came eight years after the fact. This approach favored the Chinese, buying them time and putting the US at greater risk.
For example: A computer security expert at the Sandia National Laboratories intercepted hackers that he traced back to mainland China. He’d seen them before, hitting Lockheed Martin. When he notified his boss, and then they contacted the FBI, he was warned off. Puzzled, he continued to track the red hackers, and tried to continue to work with a “friendly” FBI agent - and was fired and lost his security clearance. (As an aside, I wonder what happened to that lawsuit.)
Recently, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Apple have all admitted to being hacked by the Chinese, as have many other famous companies, including military- and aviation-hardware giants. (Google’s position here is odd, as they were famously complicit with the Chinese in helping them to jail “dissidents” who used Google.com (and Google.cn) to look up politically incorrect information. China later attacked Google publicly … and very privately led a successful campaign to hack them including compromising GMail accounts.
I do not know how many people Google actively helped China throw in prison, before their help became merely accidental. Google did not actively complain until they discovered that they had been actively hacked themselves, apparently as a result of a Chinese communist executive discovering something unflattering when he Googled himself.
How many were tortured, and/or killed, as a result of Google tipping off their Chinese “partners”? The “Do No Evil” company has much to answer for, in my estimation. I was struck by their sudden decision that censoring results in China was just wrong - right after China attacked Google. And then Google quietly turned the censoring back on. Now Google, of course, uses somewhat more subtle censoring of results in the US.
But China’s problem was not just with Google - a company that long shared China’s antipathy for the US military. China’s problem is with all of the West, and with the US in particular.
And they are still quite busy at it.
Of course, they are not limited to computer warfare. It is common to hear on our Leftist media that we have the “world’s most expensive military.” It is perhaps true in a sense, but that sense ignores that fact that China simply pays less - for their soldier count dwarfs ours.
And as we are shutting down our carriers, China’s building new ones. China no longer feels quite the need for subterfuge, as they employed when they bought a Soviet aircraft carrier under the guise of turning it into a casino. Of course, that was never the plan - and those bones of the Soviet Admiral Kuznetsov class Riga, launched just at the end of the Soviet Union’s regime, have just been commissioned into China’s navy as their first operational aircraft carrier Liaoning.The world’s second largest navy will not be second-place for long, as this article describes.
China’s next carriers will, of course, be nuclear. Like the new nuclear powerplants they are opening each year, despite concerns from other countries and harshly-suppressed protests from within. (An oddity: This brief article on their nuclear program notes that they are “slated to be become the largest carbon dioxide emitter”- but they have been for have a decade. Except for a couple of months each year when Brazil burns its sugar cane.)
It is foolish to ignore China’s doings - and unconscionable to have put John Kerry, the only Senator to have been censured for private deals with Communists, in charge of addressing this strategic threat.
There is a brighter side to this, sort of. China’s own internal social media structures aren’t completely under their control - and are having an effect.
The Chinese people have an inherent drive toward capitalism and freedom, despite their corrupt and communist government’s worst efforts. Surveys have shown that Chinese citizens value free enterprise more highly than Western countries, including the US. This force may eventually break the communist stranglehold - as the United States slides closer to statism each year. This is not good news for the US, whose Constitutional republican government fueled by free enterprise has largely made the modern world, including China’s portion of it, possible.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Originally published at DeHavelle.com. You can comment here or there.