Spy charges expose US cyber hegemony mentality

BEIJING - The United States has indulged in its cyber hegemony mentality again as it filed ungrounded commercial cyber espionage charges against five Chinese military officers.

It is really amazing to see that the biggest cyber bully, which has virtually no credibility left in the cyber world, could still stand at the moral high ground to accuse others.

The US has repeatedly and arbitrarily made baseless accusations about China's cyber espionage in recent years, reflecting its hypocrisy and hegemony.

US cyber hegemony is aggressive and dangerous in nature.

Even as overall US defense spending witnessed cuts, the Pentagon is still beefing up its cyberspace force at the US Cyber Command, doubling its budget to 447 million US dollars this year, the Washington Post reported earlier this year.

The cyberspace force is also expected to be expanded from about 1,800 people today to more than 6,000 by the end of 2016, according to the plan.

The US president has the power to order preemptive cyber strikes, the New York Times reported last year. And The Times reported that Obama ordered an escalating series of cyber attacks against Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities.

While the US has touted threats to cyber security from abroad, the US National Security Agency (NSA) has been one of the most active attackers of computer systems around the world.

China is in fact a major victim of persistent and large-scale cyber attacks from the US targeting China's government institutions, schools, universities, companies and even individuals.

China has always requested that the US give a clear and thorough clarification on why it targeted Chinese institutions and people, but the country has still not received it.

The unfounded charge against Chinese officers amounts to the same hypocrisy as a bandit calling for justice.

The Europeans were alerted to risks by a European Parliament report more than a decade ago that the US uses sophisticated electronic spying techniques to gather economic intelligence.

The report put forward extensive claims that the US NSA routinely tracks telephone, fax, and email transmissions from around the world and passes on useful corporate intelligence to American companies.

Among the allegations, the NSA fed information to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing, enabling the companies to beat out European Airbus for a multi-billion dollar contract.

US intelligence, by virtue of data provided by nine Internet companies, including Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Yahoo, and other major telecom providers, tracked citizens' private contacts and social activities recklessly, according to the Washington Post.

Allegations of rampant US electronic espionage have unfolded on a global scale in the wake of damaging revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

After it was exposed that Brazil's state oil giant Petrobras was also targeted by US surveillance, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said the US spying was out of economic and strategic interests instead of concerns about terrorism as Washington had claimed.

Instead of offering a sincere "sorry," Washington has found that mudslinging at other countries is a way to remedy its image, which has been tarred by its global spy program.

Unless the US casts away the cyber hegemony mentality of turning the Internet into a tool to monitor the whole world and consolidate its own status, it will be impossible to build a just international order or avoid high-risk behavior online.