US cyber thief cries thief

Uncle Sam never ceases to play the role of world cop, however, most of the time it turns out to be nothing but a thief crying thief.

On Monday the US Justice Department filed unprecedented “criminal charges” against five Chinese military officers, accusing them of hacking into US companies to gain trade secrets.

In the ridiculous “indictment”, “Chinese hackers” targeted US nuclear power, metals and solar products industries and are accused of stealing trade secrets and business espionage.

Such a groundless charge is just one of the cards the US plays after the Prism scandal revealed the true color of the IT leviathan in the cyber world.

Before Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower, disclosed the US global surveillance program, the US had repeatedly accused China and Russia of cyber hacking.

However, the truth was that the self-claimed guard of “free cyber world” kept spying on its rivals, its allies and neighbors, as well as its own citizens.

As the sole hegemony power of the cyber world, the US owns 10 of the 13 root servers that are essential for the global Internet’s operation, the NSA keeps spying and the US military is adept at cyber warfare.

China, “a main hacker” as the US claims, is a true victim of cyber attacks. Latest Chinese official data shows that in the past two months, more than 2,000 Trojan horse networks or botnet servers in the US remotely controlled 1.18 million host computers in China, and more than 2,000 IP addresses in the US had implanted backdoors in nearly 2,000 Chinese websites, involving 57,000 backdoor attacks.

Hypocritical as the US is, exposed to cyber security, it resorts to new excuses to continue to be the only “Mr. Right”.

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said the five Chinese officers stole trade secrets and “sensitive, internal communications” that provided Chinese companies with bargaining chips against US competitors.

Holder had said that “all nations are engaged in intelligence gathering”, but the PLA spied “to gain commercial advantage, and that is what makes this case different.”