US cyber thief cries thief

No matter whether at the shirt-sleeve Sunnylands summit in June last year or on the sidelines of the G20 summit in St. Petersburg, US President Barack Obama tried to convince Chinese President Xi Jinping that the US worried about cyber threats over theft of trade secrets.

According to American political scientist Joseph S. Nye, author of Soft Power,: “American policy is not to steal intellectual property, while China’s policy appears to be the opposite.”

In his eyes, it is all right for both governments to hack into each other’s computers to steal traditional political and military secrets, as spying is not a violation of international law, but theft of intellectual property violates both the spirit and letter of international trade agreements.

The new excuse, in efforts to justify its own cyber espionage and defy others, will only end up in a joke to shame the US’ own cyber hegemony.

Let’s analyze from the US’ own theory. For example, does that mean the US government is fully aware of the purpose of 2,000 Trojan horse networks and the 57,000 backdoor attacks in the past months? So the purposes are only prying into China’s political and military secrets?

If yes, the US is bold enough to expose again the established sole hegemony’s massive surveillance over a rising power despite the latter reiterated its determination of peaceful rising. The US showed the world that the ball of trust deficit is in the US, not China’s, court.

If no, that means the US can’t identify the purposes of the hackings. Then how can it ensure that the US hasn’t spied on China for theft of China’s trade secrets?

In fact, many countries have been the targets of economic espionage. China, as the world’s second largest economy, is no exception. In 2010, Stern Hu, the Australian Rio Tinto executive was sentenced to 10 year’s jail after being found guilty of accepting bribes and stealing trade secrets.

At that time, the Western media criticized “China's secretive national-security apparatus becoming involved with a multinational company”, saying “the line between commercial information and state secrets is often not clear in China”.

Is the line clear in the US and other Western countries?

The US Department of Defense has written in its cyberspace strategy that DoD should work with inter-agency partners as well as private sector. The IT giants including Google and Facebook are all involved in the NSA’s surveillance program on Snowden’s list.

The clear line between commercial secrets and state secrets has been blurred in the US for a long time, but the US is still used to lecturing others.

If the US is truly devoted to promote international anti-hacking cooperation, it should immediately right its wrongs by withdrawing the “indictment”. If not the farce will backfire.