This is not merely a Chinese version of What’s good for General Motors is good for the country. Traditional economic espionage involves stealing industrial secrets; the merger of state and corporate interests, as well as the world's growing connectivity, add a new dimension of peril. Last week's intelligence assessment notably reported that for the first time that Beijing can conduct cyberattacks against critical U.S. infrastructure.
Consider that a strategic attack on our homeland could come not from long-range bombers and missiles but from cyber-assaults that take out electricity grids or even cause mass highway accidents by hacking self-driving car networks.
I admit that I have no idea what our capabilities are to fight this threat. By its nature it is kept quiet and so I don't know what we can do right now even as I read speculation about what they can--or could in the future--do.
Part of me says not to worry too much because comparisons of what we can do now and what China could do in a decade necessarily look scary.
But China has already stolen a lot of advanced technology and valuable information (people, the Navy is under "cyber siege"); and the look down the road a decade away is pretty scary.
