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Comment by brown9-2 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this sort of the entire purpose of an signals intelligence agency?

China is a target of US hacking. The US is a target of Chinese hacking. And so on and so forth for any other country's names you can swap in or any other intelligence gathering mechanism you can replace "hacking" with.

One part of this story that has always seemed baffling is his shock that espionage, the act of stealing secrets or convincing someone to betray their oaths and steal secrets for you, requires some less-than-moral activities.

And by disclosing that he possesses documents that he says describe U.S. hacking against China, he appeared to be trying to win support from the Chinese government.

This seems to be transitioning from leaking to let Americans know how their civil rights are being violated into something else.

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While its impossible to say what exactly his motives are here, there is definitely some civic value in having this information out there. The tremendous growth in the 'cybersecurity' apparatus - a massive hiring boom for contractors and military personnel, the development of an entirely new military command structure, a raft of new legislation - is justified by the enormous threat supposedly posed to U.S. infrastructure and national security by Chinese hackers. If it turns out that we actually have parity - or an advantage - then the justification for massively increased military budgets and authority is diminished.

It's like Kennedy and the non-existent "missile gap" that was used to justify a hawkish defense policy in the Cold War.

Furthermore, cyber-attacks against civilian infrastructure veer into the realm of "acts of war", depending on what they're trying to accomplish. If the NSA is mounting an aggressive paramilitary campaign against Chinese infrastructure that's definitely something that should be made known to the American people.

> This seems to be transitioning from leaking to let Americans know how their civil rights are being violated into something else.

Something else far different indeed.

China is not an evil country but they are not pure as the driven snow either. They are aggressively pushing to gain access to resource-rich ocean areas that do not belong to them under UNCLOS.

On the other hand China almost certainly knows better than Snowden does how they are doing against NSA attempts, if only because of their own counterintelligence. So if I were Snowden I wouldn't think of giving China that kind of intel, it can only harm his standing here at home (and with those Asian countries under China's guns...) and wouldn't even help China as much as he seems to think anyways.

P.S. Why is no one pushing for a criminal investigation regarding the process used to give computer geeks security clearances? :)

It's comical to me that everyone in this forum all of a sudden is an expert on Chinese-US cyber-espionage.

Could you tell us how exactly you know that Snowden almost certainly couldn't have had access to intelligence that China would find useful?

On the contrary, Snowden was sitting on a veritable gold mine. But information about the U.S. hacking China is hardly it. They see it just as much as we've tracked down their PLA hacking unit.

Even with all of this going on, affront to liberty that it is, I'd be more upset if we weren't trying to hack China. An up and coming communist superpower, and a potential military and technological rival? Of course we're trying to hack the bejesus out of them. Everything we accuse them of doing - penetrating our media, penetrating our infrastructure, whatever, we're trying to do. This is not even controversial, this is the part of their job they're supposed to be doing, 'owning other countries.'

This isn't even that much of a reveal by Snowden considering 1) the Chinese would already know about this and 2) a lot of details about NSA's TAO group have already been published (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/10/inside_the_...).

So now he is using the secrets he learned to buy favor from the Chinese government?

They don't even have to know it. It's one of those things they would just assume.

If he did indeed reveal this, how is it "buying favor from the Chinese government"? It's hard to imagine the government of China doesn't already know about these attacks.

The beneficiary of this information is the U.S. public, so they can actually have a real discussion about cyber warfare, rather than simply believing the government line of "China hacks us, and we only defend...". How can we have a real discussion about our role in the world if we're told only about foreign aggression and not our own?

Not controversial? Obama certainly characterizes it as controversial when he talks about China conducting cyber-attacks on the US.

Well, yes, he's a politician. But not to expect that China's conducting cyber-attacks on the US anyway would just be stupid. I meant not controversial in that espionage is what governments have been doing since the dawn of civilization, it's expected behavior, even if the methods might be new. Yes, of course China's spying on us. Yes, of course they're trying to hack our systems. It's not a surprise is what I'm saying.

They're a large, modern communist nation, competing with us politically and economically. There's a lot of political capital to be made playing them up as the successor to the Soviet Union in American minds. The next Red Menace.

I'm genuinely curious why you seem to emphasize "communist" in all your descriptions of China.

Because, in terms of the politics, that's the red meat (pun only slightly unintended.) Their being 'communist', and communism being percieved as atheistic, anti-capitalist and militaristic, is what makes them the bogeyman, that's why the media and the government go out of their way to make their efforts seem so dangerous and terrifying because being 'communist' makes them our de facto enemies (because we're the God Fearing Capitalist Shining City on a Hill.)

If China was a predominantly Muslim country, plug 'terrorists' into the same socket, it would amount to the same difference, in terms of the rhetoric. If we found out Britain was spying on us (ECHELON aside), or Germany or Poland, whomever, it wouldn't have nearly the same sort of ominous sense of 'the other' that the spectre of China/Russia/the Middle East do.

I certainly didn't mean to imply anything tacit about China being communist having anything to do with their attempts to expand their influence or anything. It's what they should be doing.

One could also present them correctly as a very authoritarian state, antithetical to personal freedom and civil liberties. Maybe there's no political benefit to be gained by saying that.

True.

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