This article deserves broader
distribution and is a clear portrayal of what has been Chinese policy from the
beginning. Unsurprisingly really, we
have command economy that is using money and credit to scramble into the modern
world while simultaneously uplifting a billion people out of a peon economy
into been effective consumers and producers in a modern economy. Respect for
rights and other legal forms we have has clearly lagged and we are now
discovering some of the flagrant abuses.
Yet I see all this as an
evolution and hope that it never becomes too messy. The grass roots are now beginning to assert
their legitimate rights and the huge distributed oligarchy is now beginning to
visibly be reined in. These same forms
will be needed by the new rulers of China
I must admit I no longer become
much exercised over massive economic abuse.
Perhaps a half century provides ample perspective. I know that the genie of change is long out
of the bottle and the benefits too clear for even a brilliant demagogue to ever
derail it at all.
Globally the same is true. One can get angry seeing what has been done
to Zimbabwe North Korea and yes, for Iran Burma
With intelligence experts saying the country turns a blind eye to the
'patriotic hackers', Canada
BY STEPHEN HUME, VANCOUVER
An electronic stealth operation allegedly based in China hacks into Nortel Networks Inc., Canada
Queen's University professor David Skillicorn points out that after the
hackers penetrated Nortel around 2000, they began stealing technical papers,
research and development reports, and strategic business plans.
After that, Nortel couldn't compete for contracts "because the
hackers had their technical knowledge, their financials, their bids, before
they sub-mitted them," Skillicorn told Postmedia News. "How can you compete
in an environment like that? These hackers weren't into Nortel just out of
curiosity. They were using the stuff they got."
A Wall Street Journal report quotes Brian Shields, a 19-year Nortel
veteran who led the internal investigation into the hacking. Shields apparently
found spy software so deeply embedded in company computers that it took years
to realize the size and pervasiveness of the problem.
There's a bigger concern. In bankruptcy, Nortel sold off assets to
other major telecoms. Those assets may have included computers and routing
hard-ware already infected with the same spying software.
Nortel had plenty of other serious problems. Its top executives now
face charges they fraudulently misstated financial reports. Still, it's worth
noting who now occupies the business landscape littered with the rubble that
once was Nortel.
It's Huawei, one of the Canadian company's chief rivals from China
There's no suggestion Hua-wei, which rocketed from a no-name start-up
in 1987 to its rank among the world's top three vendors of telecommunications
equipment, had any-thing to do with Nortel's problems - internal or external -
and eventual collapse.
However, there's a fascinating irony in Huawei announcing it will
double the staff at the research and development centre it established in
Ottawa in 2010. It plans to expand its research, development and engineering
staff from 120 to 250 employees by 2013, right at the epicentre of the market
crater left by Nortel.
In the meantime, there's a report from McAfee, the Inter-net security
company. It reports that for five years hackers ran-sacked the computer systems
of at least two Canadian government agencies. Even a fraction of the stolen
data represents a massive economic threat to Canada China
And in 2010 a background paper prepared for Parliament warned of
"an ongoing and increasingly aggressive cyber espionage campaign being
waged against U.S. interests
and those of its allies," with China
"China's suspected cyber spying first gained public interest in
2003, when reports emerged that it was behind a massive, coordinated operation
in which sensitive government and private-sector computer systems in the United
States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada had been
compromised," the report said.
To point out China 's
apparently pervasive role in the alleged theft of economic, industrial,
military and diplomatic secrets and other intellectual property is not to
indulge in Sinophobia, although apologists for China
So let's be clear. The Chinese Communist Party and the government it
controls are neither the culture of China Canada
And this examination must inevitably lead to questions about what this
phenomenon signifies for a Canadian political landscape that a Conservative
majority government seeks to recast, in part by promoting a sudden and dramatic
expansion in economic engagement with China, a nation which is rapidly emerging
as our chief ally's major military and economic competitor.
China, of course, denies nefarious activities. A student of history
might say, the more things change in strategic geopolitics, the more they stay
the same.
Five hundred years ago, English privateers plundered the Spanish Main . They were judiciously ignored and publicly
lamented by the English Crown, so long as Spain
Today, intelligence experts say China
The U.S. Defence
Department, in a report on security developments involving China Washing-ton , D.C. , reported that state-owned enterprises in China
"They are run by high-level [Communist] Party cadres or their
children," said Derek Scissors, a research fellow in Asian economics with
the Heritage Foundation.
He listed the key industrial sectors controlled by the Communist party
to advance state goals: information technologies, telecommunications, oil and
gas and shipping.
Given the prevalence of these state-owned enterprises and the degree of
control that China exercises
over Internet portals, security and telecommunications, it beggars belief that
"hackers" capable of operating on such a scale and for so long as the
ones who looted Nortel and rummaged about in Canada
The Pentagon's 2011 report to the U.S.
Congress, for example, says specifically that Chinese technology companies
maintain close ties with the Chinese military and have been linked directly to Beijing
The U.S. department
of defence maintains that "economic espionage, supported by extensive open
source research, computer network exploitation, and targeted intelligence
operations" are part of China
The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development warned in 2010
that state-owned enterprises of foreign governments can be effective as
"Trojan horses," serving as conduits of illicit technology transfers
as well as outright espionage.
Analysts say another key element in Chinese military theory is
"strategic deception," creating misperceptions about intent while
manoeuvring into a strategically advantageous position.
So let's consider Alberta 's oilsands,
frequently cited as a future source of crude oil in a magnitude similar to Saudi Arabia
Back in 2007, Chinese officials were publicly complaining that the
Conservative government was giving them the cold shoulder. In 2008, Stephen
Harper and the Conservatives even campaigned on a promise that Alberta
But in a paper in the Canadian Political Science Review published in
January, University
of Alberta Laura Way
Then in 2010, Sinopec, a state-owned enterprise ranked No. 5 on the
Fortune 500, bought into Syncrude. Sinopec promptly used its seat on the board
of Canada 's largest
oil-sands producer to veto plans to increase upgrading of bitumen in Canada China
Chinese companies have now invested almost $20 billion in acquiring
Canadian oil assets. And that's just in the past few years.
Ottawa not only appears to now lack the means to control these
resources, Way observed, it appears not even to aspire to control them, a peculiar
position for a nation whose government keeps touting itself as orchestrating
Canada's emergence as an energy superpower.
Robyn Allan, the economist who was formerly the Insurance Corp. of
British Columbia's president, points out in a recent Edmonton Journal article
that one strategic implication of the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline
project is that it promises a major negative impact upon other regions of
Canada.
"Enbridge documents filed with the National Energy Board confirm
that, once the Northern Gateway pipeline is built," Allan wrote, "oil
producers plan to restrict supply of conventional and heavy crude oil flowing
to Ontario
"The pipeline will be used to redirect 20 per cent of the sup-ply
currently going to refineries in Ontario to
refineries in northeast Asia . Reduced access
to reasonably priced feedstock will threaten the economics of Canadian
refineries and many will struggle to survive."
This shift would certainly be in the interests of China
Meanwhile, since 2006, U.S. government agencies have recorded 26 major
cases linking China to attempts to acquire technological secrets involving
everything from integrated microwave circuits to major weapons systems,
advanced materials research and uranium enrichment processes.
In 2010, "numerous computer systems around the world, including
those owned by the U.S. government, were the target of intrusions, some of
which appear to have originated within the PRC [People's Republic of
China]," says the Pentagon report.
Last year, as Finance Minister Jim Flaherty prepared for a G20 economic
summit in Paris , hackers penetrated Canada
Canada's Communications Security Establishment tracked this hacking
operation to the Chinese embassy in Ottawa and from there to computer servers
in Beijing, reported CTV News. Japanese diplomatic missions have been
compromised by a computer virus originating in China which provided outside
access to data on embassy servers and networks, reported the newspaper Asahi
Shimbun. It said that sensitive information in the Japanese parliament was
targeted for electronic espionage. The operation was traced back to China
In 2011, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission
reported that hackers routing commands through a ground station in Norway took total control of two U.S. China
A Reuters investigative team reported in 2011 that according to U.S. investigators, "China
Reuters said U.S. state department cables obtained by WikiLeaks and
made avail-able to Reuters by a third party reported that the department's
Cyber Threat Analysis Division had traced the intrusions to Chengdu, China,
right to the door of the Chinese army's First Technical Reconnaissance Bureau.
In 2010, the New York Times reported that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was informed by the FBI
that its computer net-works had been compromised and that hackers deploying
from servers based in China U.S. Asia policy experts.
In January of 2010, Google complained it had been attacked by hackers
trying to access the accounts of human rights activists in China
British, French and German governments all report being penetrated by
hackers which they traced back to China
Ed Turzanski, of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia,
was quoted by CTV News as saying that Chinese hackers conduct these
high-profile intrusions because there have been no consequences.
And so, permit me a few impertinent questions: How is it that our
federal government is suddenly fawning all over these guys, who are clearly not
our friends, nor the friends of our closest allies in the U.S. and NATO?
Defence Minister Peter Mac-Kay told Parliament that, "There is
growing and concrete evidence of a massive Chinese network actively spying and
reporting on the activities of Canadian citizens and engaging in economic cold
war activity." He said industrial espionage was costing the economy $1
billion a month.
"Chinese spies were and are tapping phones and waging campaigns of
threats and harassment, all actions that contravene Canadian laws," MacKay
said. "China
So how is it that our Conservative government is now so assiduously
courting the same people who are still, apparently, rummaging busily through
Canada's most sensitive financial information, stealing industrial and trade
secrets?
How is it that the 2008 campaign promise not to export Alberta's
oilsands bitumen to a country with lower environmental standards, such as
China, has morphed overnight into a plan to ship 190 million barrels a year -
to China?
These are all reasonable questions. They should be the starting point
for a national conversation.
Perhaps this sudden rapprochement with China
is a good idea; perhaps somebody's wisely hedging bets against perceived cracks
in the American empire; maybe it's a prescient strategy for more fully engaging
China
But maybe it's a really bad idea to be jumping into bed with our best
friend's principal competitor for influence in the Pacific; maybe the perils
inherent in possibly alienating the U.S., if push comes to shove over strategic
oil supplies, far outweigh the immediate benefits from sales to China; maybe
we're being played for suckers in the contemporary version of what Rudyard
Kipling called "The Great Game."
Meanwhile, somebody check those new pandas for bugs, please - and I
don't mean fleas.
shume@islandnet.com
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