Why Is The BBC Defending Chinese Computer Hacking?

2/2/13: BBC COVERS FOR CHINESE HACKING INTO AND PLANTING SPYWARE IN COMPUTER SYSTEMS OF NEW YORK TIMES, WALL STREET JOURNAL, WASHINGTON POST. A BBC presenter reading the news starts with a report that 3 U.S. newspapers revealed hacking attacks on themselves. (1)  As I'm listening, I'm waiting for her to say “China” or “Chinese.” After blowing smoke and drawing verbal doodles she finally gets around to mentioning the attacks' timing being around articles about China, like the only evidence is that circumstantial thing. Then she puts on some limey dude (the sole commentator in the piece) to bat away the idea that China did it. He says that the reason there are “fingers pointing at” China (this indirect reference to the facts is as close as the BBC gets to mentioning the facts, or “accusations,” if you prefer, but BBC didn't even mention accusations) is because China has it in for dissidents, but “equally it could have been regular spammers.” Spammers! Spam is junk commercial email. This has absolutely nothing to do with spam. And in fact, as the reporting by the American newspapers previously made clear, it could not “equally” have been spammers, or anyone else. The BBC entirely ignored the facts presented by the NY Times that proves China did it.  (2)

As the BBC story is obviously derived from articles the victim newspapers ran about the attacks, starting with the NYT, which detailed the LINKS TO CHINA discovered by security experts they hired, the BBC WELL KNOWS it is not mere idle, unfair speculation that China is doing it. In the case of the NYT, they targeted reporters and editors working in China, plus the attacks were traced back to Chinese hacker groups linked to the military and using familiar Chinese computer crime techniques and spyware. [Minutes later, NPR's On the Media opened with the words “Chinese cyber-attack” on NYT.]

The New York Times didn't leave any doubt as to who attacked its computer system for 4 months. Their article announcing the siege, which came out on January 30, three days before the mendacious BBC report, opens with these words:

“For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked the The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.”

No ambiguity or uncertainty there.

And naturally, as the article points out, the Chinese made “efforts to hide the source of the attacks, which investigators say is China.” Not “suspect” or “might be” or “there are indications of.” IS China.

The Times also reported that the malware used is the same malware the Chinese have used before, over and over.

And that the attacks originated from the same computers in the same Chinese military-front “school” that previous Chinese attacks on U.S. military contractors have originated from.

And that the Chinese attack on the Times stole reporters' passwords and attempted to identify the sources for a story the Chinese rulers didn't like, specifically the expose of big boss Wen Jiabao's greedy family.

And the attacks would begin at 8 am Beijing time, most days.

And Chinese officials even threatened the Times with “consequences” for the story. (But maybe it was just some spammers disguised as Chinese officials and they fooled the Times. It's a possibility, right BBC?)

The Chinese Foreign Ministry, as always when their cyber-warfare breaks into public view, lied through its teeth and denied it was them, piously stated that Chinese “law” bars such things, and for good measure waxed indignant over the “baseless” accusations. (Actually, proven fact.) But that's exactly what they do every time they're caught red-handed. They're nice and consistent that way. Just as their cyber-attacks have a consistent m.o. (Modus operandi.)

The highly organized, persistent, sophisticated, months-long covert siege and infiltration, which included the placing of backdoors in the Times' system (no, BBC, “spammers” can't do all that) started when the Times was preparing the story about how the family of the corrupt current “prime minister” of China, Wen Jiabao, amassed a fortune worth billions of dollars. The attackers were specifically hunting for the sources for that story. (For good measure the regime blocked access to the Times website when the story came out. God forbid the Chinese people find out the nature of the people ruling them. At least our political masters wait until they're out of office to pile up the wealth, and modestly limit themselves to millions, like Bill Clinton, or hundreds of millions, like Al Gore. Or like Britain's Tony Blair's millions.) The email accounts of the author of the Times' stories on Wen's family, the Shanghai bureau chief, were broken into.

But no customer data of the Times was targeted by the “spammers,” as the BBC would call them. There was no pecuniary motive in this 4-month-long infiltration.

Furthermore, the attack pattern matches previous attacks on U.S. corporations that were traced back to China. These attacks originate from Chinese schools with links to the Chinese military. The security company Mandiant, which the Times hired to trace the assault and provide countermeasures to, was able to specifically identify the exact Chinese hacker unit doing the attack, one of about 20 attack groups that Mandiant monitors. This particular unit of the Chinese cyberwar army has broken into computer systems of hundreds of Western organizations, the Times reports. It is also tracked by and has been traced back to China by the FBI and AT&T.  (3)

These offensive arms of Chinese cyberwarfare and repression target Tibetan activists, dissidents, U.S. Government agencies and corporations (especially military contractors, from whom they steal weapon blueprints and information to make knockoff armaments; computer tech firms like Google and Hewlett-Packard; and media companies) banks, and governments and corporations of other nations.

You may recall they broke into the Dalai Lama's email account, among other such crimes.

Their aims are quite sinister- to build up a threatening military machine in order to neutralize U.S. military power and thus enable China to bully and intimidate its neighbors, seize islands and undersea oilfields it wrongly claims the rights to, ultimately invade Taiwan or force its acquiescence to a Sino version of Anschluss (but one unwanted by the Taiwanese); and to track, spy on, and target for repression dissidents and anyone who resists or challenges the oppressive rule of the Chinese “Communist” Party oligarchs, plus attempt to neutralize people abroad who support the causes of democracy, human rights, or Tibetan rights in China.

The Times article reported that since 2008 the Chinese oligarchs have been targeting reporters in order to discover their sources and contacts and repress them.

The Chinese are darn lucky that someone like me will never be President of the U.S. I would have long ago ordered retaliatory cyber-attacks on the Chinese.

But there's an asymmetry here. What secrets do the Chinese have that are worth stealing? The U.S. doesn't care about Chinese media sources (which are mostly government bosses anyway), nor is their inferior technology worth stealing. (The U.S. doesn't need the plans for a Chinese stealth jet that's a knockoff of the U.S.' own warplanes, for example.) I suppose one could try and ferret out embarrassing information about their horrible system and venal rulers to make public- but ultimately that's low-grade harassment, although it apparently drives the Chinese oligarchs, with their emperor complexes and deep insecurity over maintaining their illegitimate rule, to distraction. (See what they just did to the NY Times?) And actually wrecking Chinese computer infrastructure would risk retaliation on the U.S. The same applies to trying to cause physical destruction, as the U.S. and Israel have done to Iran's nuclear centrifuges for example. The U.S. is too vulnerable to be too aggressive in response. So the U.S. must mainly play defense.

Here we see the weakness of the U.S. political system manifesting itself. A Federal bill to set security standards for large corporate computer systems was killed in Congress, because the corporations don't want to spend the money, and don't want to submit to Federal oversight of their systems.

And a big reason the U.S. takes so much crap off China is that large U.S. corporations are still high on the illusion of getting rich off of “1.3 billion Chinese consumers.” So they keep letting their Chinese “partners” rip-off their technology and manufacturing know-how, after which they're forced out with their tails between their legs. This keeps happening to Japanese and European corporations too. The Chinese ripped off Japanese high-speed rail patents and knowledge, they've ripped off Siemens, and on and on. GE is handing them jet engine technology! The U.S. Government should ban that. But it won't, because the U.S. Government is the handmaiden of the largest U.S. corporations and basically does their bidding. But you better pack your toothbrush for a stay in Federal prison if you try to send some radios to Cuba or socks to Iran or coloring books to Palestinians. That's not an exaggeration either.  (4)

Which is why someone like me could never be President of the U.S. I would never be a corporate gigolo, hence I am unqualified to be President. Literally unqualified by the operative if unspoken requirements of the job. Not that I'm unhappy about it. If I were a politician it would bother me.

Of course, all these attacks are heavy felonies under Federal law. The U.S. Government just drove Aaron Swartz to suicide using those laws. Mere “unauthorized access” to a computer is a serious felony carrying a long prison term. The U.S. consistently uses computer “crime” laws to go after dissidents who challenge its power.

But don't expect the U.S. to indict any Chinese computer aggressors working for the Chinese military, nuch less those who ordered the attacks. No doubt the top rulers of China have violated U.S. conspiracy laws in arranging the attacks, at a minimum. China is powerful, and Western dissidents who resist U.S. oppression and secrecy are weak. The U.S. goes after the weak and vulnerable, not the powerful.

That's a pretty good definition of a bully. And a coward.

But to be “fair,” that could apply to many ruling classes. The ones with courage are few and far between. And not necessarily admirable. Those willing to defy the powerful can be righteous, like Ecuador's President Rafael Correa going to bat for Julian Assange and granting him political asylum (the U.S. of course wants to assassinate or imprison Assange, so Correa better watch for any bullseyes the CIA has pinned onto his own back), or evil, like Qaddafi of Libya, who wasn't shy about sticking his thumb into the eyes of Western powers, or Saddam Hussein, whose megalomania, hubris, and lack of judgment has been a two-decades-long disaster for his country, Iraq. And on the other hand, there were plenty of American generals straining at the leash to launch a nuclear holocaust on the Soviet Union right up into the 1960s. But they were insane.

But why would the BBC, the main fount of UK Government propaganda, want to run interference for Chinese attacks on the U.S.? Is this a passive-aggressive expression of UK resentment at being the U.S.' poodle? Or are they trying to ingratiate themselves with China? Or both? Or something else? Of course, the British even barely made a peep over the Chinese murder of a British businessman in China by the wife of Bo Xilai, the recently imprisoned former Chinese provincial lord. (5) That's not a courtesy the Russians got when they murdered the exiled Alexander Litvinenko in Britain. Maybe it depends on where you murder a British citizen. (Litvinenko had been granted British citizenship a few weeks before his murder. He worked with British intelligence.)

You better ask the BBC to explain themselves. That's their job, not mine.

Of course, these are the same creeps that provided facilities for the formerly “beloved” freak Jimmy Savile to molest children, then killed an expose about his career as a pedophile, and instead ran not one but three puff piece programs celebrating him after his death, and then made up for it by falsely accusing a Tory politician of molestation. And then lied and obfuscated about who does what in the BBC and who knew what. But just to make it all ironic, the NY Times' boss, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., went and hired the former boss of the BBC, who claims to be totally in the dark about it all, for a top executive post at the Times. Sounds like he'll make a great manager there. Either he's completely clueless and inept or completely dishonest and ethics-free. Evidence indicates the latter.

1) Bloomberg News was also attacked after publishing an article in June 2012 about the wealth amassed by the family of then “vice president” of China Xi Jinping. They're really touchy about people finding out how rich they are, these “communists.” They really need to stop wrecking the word communist and call themselves something else. How about “greedy oligarchs”?

2)  “Hackers in China Attacked The Times for Last 4 Months,” New York Times, Jan. 30, 2013.

3) The Times reports that the Symantec antivirus software they had installed on their network only caught one of 45 custom malware programs the Chinese had surreptitiously planted in their system. Another good reason not to pay for antivirus software- use the free versions from AVG, or avast!, or others.

4) I should mention in passing that China is not a total loss for U.S. corporations. McDonald's and Yum Brands are doing well in China, and Hollywood has pried open the door a crack- the Chinese allow a small number of cinemas to show a few censored versions of Hollywood shlock. And more significantly, the U.S. corporate system does benefit from China's cheap labor, allowing it to order up consumer products on the cheap and sell them for fat markups to consumers outside China. And since China is then stuck with lots of U.S. dollars from the resulting trade surplus, the Chinese government then buys U.S. Treasury securities to subsidize U.S. budget deficits. But that is really bookkeeping. The Fed could create money and give it to the Treasury to “pay its bills.” We just heard that the Treasury could mint a trillion dollar coin and “deposit” it in its “account” at the Fed. The real bottom line is that Chinese workers are serfs making goods for U.S. “consumers,” while simultaneously hurting U.S. “workers” by helping drive down wages in the U.S. Notice that to separate people into somewhat artificial categories of workers and consumers is a misleading trick of “economics.” Try “consuming” without money, and try getting money without employment or being dependent on an employee. Yes, there are also “entrepreneurs,” owners, and “professionals,” most of whom “work” in some sense of that word.

5) The British businessman Neil Heywood, who was a spy for MI6 and drove a Jaguar with the license plate “007,” according to the Daily Mail of Britain. (“British businessman murdered in China worked for MI6, claims extraordinary new report,” Nov. 6, 2012.)