Tag Archives: freedom

PRC Cyberwar

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Here’s an example of the People’s Republic of China’s war on us, here in cyberspace, described in BusinessWeek.

In 2011, [Dell SecureWorks Director of Malware Research, Joe] Stewart turned his sights on China. “I thought I’d have this figured out in two months,” he says.  Two years later, trying to identify Chinese malware and develop countermeasures is pretty much all he does.
…
Malware from China has inundated the Internet, targeting Fortune 500 companies, tech startups, government agencies, news organizations, embassies, universities, law firms, and anything else with intellectual property to protect.  A recently prepared secret intelligence assessment described this month in the Washington Post found that the US is the target of a massive and prolonged computer espionage campaign from China that threatens the US economy.  With the possible exceptions of the US Department of Defense and a handful of three-letter agencies, the victims are outmatched by an enemy with vast resources and a long head start.
…
Stewart tracks about 24,000 Internet domains, which he says Chinese spies have rented or hacked for the purpose of espionage. … He catalogs the malware he finds into categories, which usually correspond to particular hacking teams in China.  He says around 10 teams have deployed 300 malware groups, double the count of 10 months ago. “There is a tremendous amount of manpower being thrown at this from their side,” he says.

The intel assessment to which the BusinessWeek article referred was summarized here.

The National Intelligence Estimate identifies China as the country most aggressively seeking to penetrate the computer systems of American businesses and institutions to gain access to data that could be used for economic gain.

The report, which represents the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community, describes a wide range of sectors that have been the focus of hacking over the past five years, including energy, finance, information technology, aerospace and automotives, according to the individuals familiar with the report, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the classified document. The assessment does not quantify the financial impact of the espionage, but outside experts have estimated it in the tens of billions of dollars.

An example of the cascade effects of China’s war, from that intel summary:

In 2011, when Chinese hackers attacked network security company RSA Security, the technology stolen was used to penetrate military-industrial targets.  Shortly after, the networks of defense contracting giant Lockheed Martin, which used RSA security tokens, were penetrated by Chinese hackers.

There are a couple of questions remaining in this cynic’s mind.  One concerns the apparent ease with which Stewart and his Indian follow-on tracked down this Chinese hacker (an effort described in the BusinessWeek article).  I have to wonder whether the “hacker” was a honeypot and how well the two trackers covered their own tracks—or whether they left their employers exposed.

The other flows from that first question.  Assuming no honeypot, it seems apparent that the hacker was discovered because he was careless, and not because our guys were better at the cyber combat.  Is the US helplessly bringing a jackknife to a combined arms assault?  Is that why our government’s efforts to protect us—and to counter and retaliate—are so infantile?  And the latter so timid:

[T]he Obama administration is seeking ways to counter the online theft of trade secrets, according to officials.  Analysts have said that the administration’s options include formal protests, the expulsion of diplomatic personnel, the imposition of travel and visa restrictions, and complaints to the World Trade Organization.

Pleas and chit-chat, nothing serious.

How did we get so helplessly far behind?  Our government (not just the present administration) has had no understanding at all of the threat posed.  A former government official said,

The problem with foreign cyber-­espionage is not that it is an existential threat, but that it is invisible, and invisibility promotes inaction.

Understanding how our weapons work so they can be neutralized, knowing where and how to plant malware to shut down our financial, transportation, and energy infrastructure—and having the malware to plant—threatens our sovereignty.  That it’s “invisible” is simply an aspect of any war: camouflage and stealth.  The government has first to understand that we’re in a war with the Chinese for our independence; then the fact of invisibility for the Chinese combatants will be understood for what it is—just a technique for advancing their attacks.

Obama and our Constitution

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Michael Mukasy, President George Bush the Younger’s last Attorney General, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed described President Barack Obama’s leaked (should I say “surreptitiously released?”) white paper memo concerning presidential authority to conduct drone warfare, including against American citizens overseas.  Mukasey had this to say, in part, about the memo:

The memo mentions the president’s constitutional responsibility under Article II to defend the country, but it grounds the president’s authority to act not in the Constitution but in “the inherent right of the United States to national self-defense under international law…and the existence of an armed conflict with al-Qa’ida under international law.”

A moment’s reflection yields the insight that the US government’s powers are defined by the Constitution, not by international law, and that in any event international law is a highly elusive concept, there being no universally recognized source for it.  Yet here the Obama administration seems to prefer abandoning the Constitution altogether rather than relying on an inherent presidential power….

Because the Constitution is more than 100 years old, hard to understand, and not binding on anything, anyway.  And a law “professor” says we ought to just do away with it.  Plainly, our president buys that line, too.

Unions and Elections

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Who says unions don’t try to influence the outcomes of elections—at the ballot box itself, not via campaigning in a run-up to an election?

The image below, from a Wall Street Journal article about a Boeing engineers union contract election shows the degree to which a union will go to tell its members how to vote.                                                                                     

Poverty and Welfare

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The connection isn’t only moral.  It’s economic, also, as new research is showing.

Richard Vedder, an economics professor at Ohio University says that our exploding welfare state has led to an American poverty rate of 14%—these welfare programs actually are

creating a dependency on government, which is unhealthy both for the individuals involved and their children, and also for the broader society[.]

Specifically, Department of Labor statistics show four programs in particular contribute to  Americans’ increasing dependence on government.

  • Food stamps, or The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as it’s now known.  Nearly 30 million more Americans receive them than in the year 2000.
  • Social Security Disability: 3 million Americans  received payments in 1990—today it’s 8.6 million.
  • Pell grants: 3.9 million students were awarded them in 2000.  Today it’s 9.7 million, even though  nearly half of graduates work in jobs that require no degree.
  • And extended unemployment benefits: 26 weeks had been the standard—today it’s 52 weeks or more for many [and during the Panic of 2008 and ensuing Obama Recovery, it’s run as long as 99 weeks].

This isn’t just academic theorizing, though.  Doug McKelway, in his article at the above link, talked, among others, to a sandwich shop owner in Maryland:

Kyle Murphy…described how anecdotal evidence he sees as an employer jibes with Vedder’s assessment.  He often sees new hires quit to seek government benefits.

“The people who know how to use the system best get the most out of it.  It’s not necessarily the people who need the assistance the most,” he said.  Murphy has seen many of his employees quit jobs, then claim they were fired to obtain unemployment benefits.

Vedder concludes,

We have had nearly four decades with growing incomes, rising standard of living for the majority, yet the poor have grown in number even as a proportion of the population.  So some of these policies are not working.

I’m more cynical: since they create a captive collection of voters for the hander-outers in government, maybe they are working.  Never mind that the outcome puts our republic at risk.

China’s Economic Course

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In a nation that’s facing a demographic implosion (a birth rate of around 1.5 against a rate of roughly 2.1 required to maintain current population levels, and an aging population (expected by 2050 (the current generation plus their children) to have four workers in the age band 50-64 for every three aged 15-29, and for every 100 people aged 20-64, 45 over 65), that chronically lives on the edge of famine, and that has a population increasingly aware of what could be compared to what is, the PRC government is not treating its poor or its farmers (22% of whom will be over 65 as early as 2030—the current generation) very well.  And so it’s not treating its society or its economy with any foresight.

For instance:

In December 2010, when [Fu Liang]  says a campaign of harassment drove him off the small plot where he ran a fish farm, the local government paid Mr Fu just nine yuan ($1.45) a square meter for it.

The plot was quickly resold for 640 yuan [$103.11] per square meter to a developer, a national database of land transactions shows.  The developer has built villas that sell for 6,900 yuan [$1,111.67] a square meter.

A markup of a factor of nearly 10 at each stage.  Fu’s 9 yuan meter of fish farm was worth far more than he was paid.  In another sense, it was priceless, since he didn’t want to sell.

Mr Fu now is unemployed, one among tens of thousands of former farmers who inhabit the impoverished fringes of Chengdu, a city in southwestern China.  He has no heart to start another business.  “What’s the point if the government can just destroy it?” he says.

With no sense of irony, the PRC’s new president, Xi Jinping, claims to want strengthen that demographically unstable society and its unstable economy—through property (land) ownership.  After all, as Fu pointed out,

precarious land rights mean little incentive to invest in improving agricultural output, and no asset that can be sold to fund a move to the city.  Low compensation for the millions ousted from their land—coupled with ineligibility for social benefits because they aren’t registered as urban residents—means for many a life of poverty on the edges of the cities.

And no incentive to bring additional children—boys only, mind, in a mandated one child environment, with the bias’ own long-run population sustainability implications—into the world.  And the one-child policy was put in place explicitly to achieve the population reduction about to occur sharply.

Fat chance for any serious change:

“Push forward scientific development and advance social harmony,” proclaims a banner draped across one construction site, parroting a catch phrase of Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao.  Mr Fu, surveying a noodle bowl of highway overpasses, said, “A few years ago, this was all farmland.”

Because farmland—the means of feeding the population—stands in the way of progress.  Xi will have a great deal of trouble reversing that, especially with the money to be made converting farmland to urban land.