This commentator is playing fast and loose with the facts. Statements like "...To date, the largest documented offensive cyber operations in the world were conducted by the USA..." revolve around what you mean by the word "documented", as neither side has admitted anything. This article is full of that kind of thing. Prevarication "everybody has a cyber espionage unit" and more.

More troubling is the substitution of the narrative for the analysis. Look, I'm a firm believer that something like the military-industrial complex has been long-running in the states, but don't get your causality mixed up.

Put differently, even paranoid people have enemies. Even states engaged in fear-mongering have things to fear. The two are not mutually exclusive, and simply because it might be hip to start using the phrase "military digital complex" doesn't mean that there aren't real threats. We begin to substitute slogans for analysis. That's bad.

I have been expecting more apologia for the Chinese on HN, but probably because of the technical nature of those who post here, they haven't got a lot of traction. Good. From what I can see, the Chinese are most likely engaged in serious and ongoing state-sponsored attacks against many western targets. I understand that the details of these attacks are going to leak out slowly over the next several years, and that's fine with me.

I really wish the spirit of what this author saying was true -- that this is all just ginned up. I really do.

But it's not.