On China's cyberwarfare capabilities
The thing that China has going for it that we do not have is people. The number of people within the People's Liberation Army, within the sort of intelligence apparatus of China, which is a very opaque system in its own right, is believed to be thousands of people, who are basically hired hackers who spend much of their day aggressively trying to penetrate the computer networks of U.S. corporations especially. China is sort of gathering information that they can then pass on to Chinese businesses and corporations that give them a leg up in negotiations and in the global marketplace. They're trying to advance their economy very quickly and stealing information to do it.
Less clear is how sophisticated their sort of military offensive apparatus is compared to ours. For instance, if China ever went to war with us in the South China Sea, let's say, how sophisticated and how good would their hackers be trying to break into our naval systems and confuse our ships? We know less about that but I think the conclusion we have to reach is that because they're having so many more people doing this than we do — I mean, we have a few thousand — that China is a really formidable force. And that makes a lot of sense that they would put so many resources in this. China will never be able to, at least in the near future, challenge us in a conventional military way. They can't go head-to-head with us on land or on the sea. Cyber is a place where they can gain an extraordinary advantage and do a lot of damage.
On the U.S. government positioning itself as a victim
The United States government loves to come out and talk about how relentlessly we're being hacked and how our intellectual property is being stolen from our businesses. And that's true.
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But what that covers up is that we are also one of the most aggressive countries going out there breaking into other countries' systems and spying on them. And we are one of the few countries that we know of that has launched offensive operations in cyberspace. We have used computer viruses to break infrastructure, physical things that are connected to computer networks. Very few countries are known to have done that.
I think one of the reasons why U.S. officials have been keen on showing how we're victimized is because they believe that U.S. businesses have not done enough to secure their own computer networks. From the government's perspective, they can't go in and necessarily force those companies (at least not yet) to improve their defenses, so it's been sort of more of a strategic, rhetorical calculation on the part of the government to come out and say, "We're victimized, it's terrible, lots of information is being stolen, and the only way we can stop this is you corporations have to do better security and work with us and let us help you do that."
So there's a reason why the U.S. has tried to play that victim card so repeatedly: It's because they want to get results from private businesses.
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