US Weighs Sanctioning Russia As Well As China In Cyber Attacks 78
New submitter lvbees7 writes with news that U.S. officials have warned that the government may impose sanctions against Russia and China following cyber attacks to commercial targets. According to the Reuters story: The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said no final decision had been made on imposing sanctions, which could strain relations with Russia further and, if they came soon, cast a pall over a state visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping in September. The Washington Post first reported the Obama administration was considering sanctioning Chinese targets, possibly within the next few weeks, and said that individuals and firms from other nations could also be targeted. It did not mention Russia.
Sanctioning NSA/FBI for spying all? (Score:3, Insightful)
A little consistence would be nice.
Re:Sanctioning NSA/FBI for spying all? (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair, I think the problem with Russian/Chinese cyber attacks is that they're designed to embarass governments and disrupt civilian life or gain commercial advantage - leaking people's personal details, or stealing corporate secrets.
The US' argument is probably that it's programs are oriented wholly towards state security rather than to gain explicit commercial advantage or simply to be dicks for the sake of it.
There's still some hypocrisy, but this is a fairly reasonable explanation for the most part. I don't see the US hacking into China or Russia's massive state run organisations and releasing all the personal data they hold just for shits and giggles to embarrass them.
So I think the point the US is making is that rather than descend quite to their level, it'd rather punish them. The alternative is that the US expands it's programs to steal more Chinese/Russian corporate data, and to generally make life miserable for their citizens by stealing and releasing all their personal data, or DDoSing their bank websites and such.
Yes, as a non-American US spying is incredibly annoying, but you can't really use it as a catch all "But you do it too!" argument against every initiative the US takes in this area.
Personally I'd much rather see this sort of response, than I would all out international cyber warfare where as with all warfare where it just escalates and escalates, and the only real victims are civilians who lose their jobs and become victims of identity theft and so forth.
So yeah, US spying is wrong, but this response is far better than responding in kind and risking escalation.
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Things like Stuxnet is not at all what the person was talking about. They're talking about hacks to try to embarrass people or steal corporate secrets. Stuxnet was to take down a nuclear program, which is clearly a geopolitical, not industrial, goal.
My personal opinion: countries breaking into each other's governments or trying in general to gather/use classic "spying" data for geopolitical purposes is fair game. State-sponsored industrial espionage is not. That said, even in the first case, one runs the r
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Hacking a foreign government's computers to steal secrets? Fair game.
Hacking a foreign defense contracting company? Eh, probably fair game too.
Hacking a foreign non-military company to provide commercial advantage? Nope, out of bounds.
The US has held this viewpoint for a long time - I seem to remember some issue something like 15-20 years ago where it came out that Air France had bugged the seats of its planes on behalf of French intelligence (or was accu
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You completely failed to grasp everything I said.
I didn't say the US doesn't carry out cyber attacks, I said it limits it's cyber attacks largely to real or perceived threats to it's national security. Iran's nuclear program was very much in that remit - whatever you think about Iran's nuclear program, the US clearly believed they were gunning for nuclear weapons, or were at least at risk of developing nuclear materials that could leak into the hands of terrorist groups - based on that not wholly unreasonab
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To be fair, I think the problem with Russian/Chinese cyber attacks is that they're designed to embarass governments and disrupt civilian life or gain commercial advantage - leaking people's personal details, or stealing corporate secrets.
Whereas here in the good ol' US of A, we have corporations that do that.
Can we maybe get the FBI to look into Google's attacks on my privacy?
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When Google hacks into your Hotmail account to find out more information about you, you can feel free to prosecute them. When you throw everything you can at them, shouting "take it all!", you can't really complain.
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The U.S. is going to feel really bad one day when China announces that it's freezing all electronics exports to the U.S. for a period because of U.S. attempts to put spyware on routers sent to China.
I just hope they do it right as Apple is ramping up for a new iPhone launch. There is nothing prettier that watching an Apple hipster cry.
Re: Sanctioning NSA/FBI for spying all? (Score:2, Insightful)
Idk about Russia but China deserves it. From trying to DDoS Gothub for hosting VPN software. The same to Hong Kong protest sites during the protests, ans even HK government site and polical party site (HK Democratic Party). And that's not to mention paying the HK triad to stab random people during the protests to control it. And generally waging cyber war on its citizen with so much censorship, China deserves it.
I'm from Hong Kong but in China now so the VPN going on...
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What's the Chinese version of "cutting off your nose to spite your face"?
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The US is consistent. The US is the good guy, everyone else are the bad guys. Bad guys play dirty, that means whatever the good guy does to fight the bad guys is OK. I thought everybody knew that.
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China and Russia are likely to respond in kind with sanctions of their own, more than justified of course. The whole thing is a backhand trade deal. Can't block certain imports/exports or you get in trouble with the WHO, so just accuse the other side of cybercrime and enact sanctions instead. The other side gets to ban some US stuff in exchange.
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There's also a move away from English as second language - Portuguese and Chinese (and German, for some reason) becoming more popular by the minute.
I'm taking a wild guess you're Brazilian?
No one else believes that Portugese is a major world language, even people from Portugal.
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if you are willing to pay a bit more for quality?
The real question is - can you afford the quality?
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India and China have outsourced the West's pollution. They are building factories and power stations by the week with a 19th century regard [lack of] to the environment.
You do realize that this is exactly the reason a lot of *American* companies are building/using factories in China., right?
On a side note, you cannot just sanction Russia + China + India + Iran + N.Korea + Syria + Lybia + $evil_state_of_the_week since this would isolate the USA from most of the world's economy. Not to mention that the USA still relies on Russian rockets to get to the space station.
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IMHO, countries that care about pollution should set up a Pollution-Added Tax (PAT), equivalent to VAT, replacing their current patchwork of pollution regulations. Since VAT is already clearly in compliance with WTO rules (given that it exists), PAT should be as well. Just like how VAT works by taxing products at each stage of adding value to them during manufacture, PAT would tax them by the embodied pollution in their manufacture during that stage (plus any "delayed" pollution released when the product is
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"Sanction them. Exclude them from the world market".
Assuming much? We have already seen how sanctions on Russia have stimulated its economy while seriously damaging Europe's. I seriously wonder which of those (or both) the US government finds more rewarding.
The important question, however, is why the US government thinks that it can "exclude" other countries "from the world market". Given that the USA has less than 5 percent of the world's population, and has been spectacularly successful in lining up dozen
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This is why the WTO sucks. Tariffs give you leverage to negotiate both commercial and political issues. Trading with the USA is a privilege, not a right.
Why now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pollute like the earth was going out of style? Meh. Murder your own people? Meh. Play thought police at a level that would make Big Brother jealous. Meh. Invade a neighboring country? Meh. But steal a database or two? Now THAT really pisses me off.
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Assuming that the Chinese DID do it. For which we have the unsupported word of the US government, whose unbelievable incompetence and/or negligence allowed the theft to take place. What better - indeed, what more irresistible knee-jerk - reaction than to blame the horrid foreigners?
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Don't pull Superman's cape.
But without his cape, he's just Clark Kent.
Back on topic, this is just another sign that the American government has gone batshit crazy.
1. Export most of our manufacturing to China.
2. Impose sanctions on China.
3. ???
Start with H1B (Score:2)
Send them home enmass carrying the contagion of US culture. Assimilate our foes.
Flood the market (Score:2)
How is US Tailored Access Operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] going to get to the exported hardware if its not been shipped around the world?
Without that secret spyware and hardware been installed as delivered how will the product sold be found on an open network again?
The US mil had the right idea in the 1990's - flood the export market with tame US brands and watch as eve
Well, Jimmy's parents let HIM do it! (Score:2)
Reform may have been the the benign goal of the surveillance leaks, but as that just hasn't happened, the bar where right vs. wrong is set has been lowered along with the stock that is the United States.
Perhaps worse than people not caring (enough) that their whole world is fast becoming an Orwellian nightmare, we are now left without a credible nation to voice the message of Worldly evil.
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With "Our Government Has Weaponized The Internet. Here’s How They Did It" http://www.wired.com/2013/11/t... [wired.com] (11.13.13) even finding the "individuals and firms from other nations" is going to be tricky.
All the other 5 eye nations, their staff, ex staff and former staff, contractors and other "friendly" 3rd par
Has anybody ever heard of a firewall? (Score:1)
Just wondering.. we already monitor 100% of traffic leaving our shores, why can't we use that deep packet inspection to build a firewall?
Plus, we could whitelist packets from known addresses and charge a penny per packet for "trusted" delivery. That sucking sound you would hear is all of the call centers and offshore support organizations being sucked back to our shores....
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It depends on what the network evolved into. An encrypted, air gapped mil/gov only list of expert staff to a readable vendor friendly cloud database for finding or clearing skilled staff?
Say some distant country had freedom needs, a plain text, unencrypted list of cleared contractors would be great, no encryption to worry about, keys to request, logged trail. Get
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I agree that the evolution/purpose of the internet (and all wide area networks) can be exploited for nefarious purposes.
But, to not have a firewall is STUPIDITY!
Tea Leaves show that people/businesses/government entities can and will be sued for cyber security breaches. I'm just asking our government to do the most basic of functions that "a government" is created for, wielding the collective power of it's people. If a government can't protect it's own its not really fulfilling its purpose.
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The database was created for needs of powerful contractors and expensive projects in plain text. The question about projects listed in letter of commendation, work history is the open question. What agencies, gov, mil where told they could keep their own internal lists is also interesting and over w
The US has no credibility to sanction over hacking (Score:2)
Over other things... arguably... but hacking? No. pardon snowden and don't engage in that sort of behavior for a decade and you MIGHT get some credibility there. But what value is it to the US to sanction anyway?
We probably get more out of hacking than the sanctions anyway.
Baby Weighs Sanctioning Mother in Diaper Change (Score:1)
Russia: where all the oil is, with a big-ass army and a stubbornness that seems like 1 billion people
Good luck with those "sanctions" USA!