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Comment by justicezyx | Hacker News Reader

As an ethical Chinese myself, I'd like to reiterate that this type event is government-backed. And I am confident that HNers respect the boundary between Chinese people and the government.

I do want to point out that general Chinese people in mainland China view these type of activities negatively as well. It should not be thought as the general people endorse such activities, they were mostly made unaware of these, as always.

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As a foreigner living in China, I can say that the populace is like many other countries. You have your normal people who don't really keep track of what's going on, you have your informed people who have informed opinions and realize that the world is a complicated place, and then you have your crazies who are filled with distrust of other nations and conspiracy theories in the name of nationalism and patriotism. There are some people who view these activities as negative, and there are some people who view these activities as positive, and there are some people who never even think about it. We must acknowledge there are many in China who do endorse these activities too, just as there are people in the US who feel bombing North Korea is the right thing to do. There is no need to make things look nicer than they are, just as there is no need to make things look worse than they are.

And ironically, let's face it, every country is doing something in the spy game, China is not alone in using underhanded methods to steal secrets and intelligence. And each country can easily spout their justifications too.

I'm not sure what your point is in your last two sentences. Should the US not defend its interests against foreign powers?

OP is saying that the US doesn't have the moral high ground and anyone spouting off about how badly China is acting is just being asinine since we do the exact same thing to everyone (and if we weren't then our intelligence agencies need to get off their asses and do it).

There is a fine line in spycraft. Stealing secrets from companies for commercial gain is just pathetic. Can't innovate, just hack it and steal it.

> Stealing secrets from companies for commercial gain is just pathetic. Can't innovate, just hack it and steal it.

Learn your history. Everyone does it. Europeans and Americans did it. Now the Chinese are doing. The only reason we're bitching is because now we're the targets instead of the thieves.

Do you have any links about about industrial scale hacking for commercial profit by those regions?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/09/spy-vs-spy-3

Everyone is standing on the shoulders of someone else.

Industrial espionage is older than the digital age and is not confined to hacking. It has been happening for centuries and many civilizations have undertaken efforts to take knowledge that was legally protected.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_int...

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/porcelain-corporate-es...

Harris, John (1998). Industrial Espionage and Technology Transfer: Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited. p. 680. ISBN 0-7546-0367-9.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-industrial-esp...

https://theintercept.com/2014/09/05/us-governments-plans-use...

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/12/10/the-new-ind...

https://searchinginhistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/francis-cabo...

https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-na...

https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=3729

The fact that we don't hear much about our own examples of stealing other civilization's secrets is just a matter of the fact that we are now ahead. If the tables were turned just like they were in the past, we'd go right back to stealing other people's tech. To say that other people shouldn't do things that we have and would do makes little sense. That isn't to say that we shouldn't protect ourselves, it's just to say that people need to stop the damn moralizing as if we were any better.

When was it that the NSA was caught stealing lists of clients from Embraer and giving them to Boeing? I can't remember if it was 2015 or 2016...

I hadn't heard of this before, but now I'm curious - do you have any more details on this?

It was in 2013. And the international press seems to be much more focused on Petrobras, where the NSA stole a lot of data than Embraer where it just stole some emails.

Here's a link:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra...

While it's nowhere near the scale of what China has done and is doing, NSA has engaged in industrial espionage to benefit the US economy as well. Few nations can say their hands are clean when it comes to this stuff.

> As an ethical Chinese myself

What is unethical about nation states spying on other nation states' militaries? The aerospace industry - of every country - is intimately entangled with their defense departments.

I am afraid that there is a tenancy to equalize people and the government, especially for Chinese...

I don't think most do, I don't.

But, I don't think China is somewhere I would want to live and it has nothing to do with the people. Then again for the same reason ok wouldn't want to live in the US right now

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