China has been busy on the Internet:
China likes the opportunities that the Internet provides for espionage from your basement. No need to put on a tuxedo and head out into the world. Just grab your coffee (or more likely Red Bull), and in your pajamas hack into the Pentagon or some defense contractor:
China has a lot of successful Cyber War practices worth copying. Even before the Internet reached China in 1987, many Chinese studying or working in the United States were already aware of it, and its potential. A decade later Internet use began growing rapidly and that’s when some Chinese officials saw in the Internet unprecedented espionage opportunities. China has been hacking away at U.S. targets for over a decade now and shows no signs of slowing down, despite growing U.S. efforts to erect better defenses.
I have no doubt that China has gotten a lot of information this way. And we should do a better job of defense. We should be willing to strike back, too.
But I have to say that I'd be very disappointed in our national defense people if we haven't used a decade of Chinese cyber war intrusions to send information we want them to find.
I mean, Iran runs Photo-Shop exercises and announces fantastic weapons that only their own rubes and low-information (isn't that a delightful euphemism for "ignorant"?) foreigners believe. We couldn't do that and be believed by the Chinese.
But if the Chinese steal Defense Department strategy and use guides along with an industry technical analysis of how great some weapon works, that's going to be believed more readily, no?
Or maybe the stolen document "reveals" our disappointment in all the money wasted on a weapon or sensor that we just couldn't get to work; or perhaps we complain about some non-existent critical flaw that we hope won't be noticed until we can patch it.
Or maybe the stolen document discusses our assessment of a new Chinese base as one we think is used by their Department of Agriculture for seed-usage outreach.
Or what if the Chinese get our "analysis" of Taiwanese defense infrastructure that leads to the Chinese wasting half of their missiles on pointless targets in the first hours of war?
And if a war breaks out between America and China, and some of the assumptions that China had about our capabilities turn out to be false, all their knowledge about our military becomes suspect until they can sort it all out based on actual results.
We've have an opportunity, here. And if the Chinese think they are as clever as we are stupid about this whole cyber thing, we could have a lot of surprises for the Chinese if it comes to blows.
Or, they could just be stealing us blind, I suppose. Let's hope we never find out one way or the other.
