Cyber-Goggles: When China’s Tool Box Looks Like a Pile of Cyber-Hammers

Last week, the cybersecurity firm FireEye released a report largely declaring victory over Chinese cyberspying. The report itself is suspect. It spends two pages talking about internal issues — such as Xi Jinpeng’s efforts to consolidate power in China — then throws in a timeline designed to suggest actions the US has done has led to a decline in spying.

The timeline itself is problematic as it suggests both indictments — of some People’s Liberation Army hackers targeting industrial companies and one union, and of Chinese businessman Su Bin — as IP hacks.

In May 2014, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted five PLA officers, marking the first time that the U.S. Government has charged foreign government personnel with crimes related to commercial cyber espionage. Although China warned that the move “jeopardizes China U.S. cooperation,” the Department of Justice indicted another Chinese national, Su Bin, the following August for allegedly orchestrating a cyber-enabled economic espionage operation targeting U.S. defense companies.

Neither should be classified so easily (though the press has irresponsibly done so, especially with respect to the PLA indictment). As I have laid out, with one exception the PLA indictment treated the theft of information pertaining to ongoing trade negotiations — something the US engages in aggressively — with the exception being the theft of trade information that China might have gotten anyone as part of a long-standing nuclear technology transfer deal with the target, Westinghouse. And while Su personally profited off his spying (or that’s what he said as part of pleading guilty), the targeted items all have a military purpose.

Without any internal evidence to back the case, FireEye declares that these indictments (the former of which, at least, relies on intelligence shared by FireEye division Mandiant) had an effect in China.

In 2014, the U.S. Government began taking punitive measures against China, from indicting members of the PLA to raising the possibility of sanctions. These unprecedented measures, though met with skepticism in the U.S., have probably been taken much more seriously in Beijing.

[snip]

In 2013, when we released the APT1 report exposing a PLA cyber espionage operation, it seemed like a quixotic effort to impede a persistent, well-resourced military operation targeting global corporations. Three years later, we see a threat that is less voluminous but more focused, calculated, and still successful in compromising corporate networks. Rather than viewing the Xi-Obama agreement as a watershed moment, we conclude that the agreement was one point amongst dramatic changes that had been taking place for years. We attribute the changes we have observed among China-based groups to factors including President Xi’s military and political initiatives, the widespread exposure of Chinese cyber operations, and mounting pressure from the U.S. Government.

The report then shows an impressive decline of perceived attacks. But even there, there’s no granularity given about where FireEye is seeing the decline (or whether these numbers might rise as it response to attacks on companies that will call FireEye in for hacks that started months or years ago). Again, in its description of the ongoing attacks, FireEye includes a lot of things that every country but the US would consider to be clear national defense hacks.

In the wake of the report, there has been some even more overheated victory laps about the success of the US-Chinese agreement in 2015, as well as this utterly absurd piece insisting that the US doesn’t engage in economic espionage. The piece is particularly nonsensical for how it uses evidence from Snowden.

More importantly, the U.S. does not steal information to give to its companies, as a rule. That none of the documents released from the vast trove of material pilfered by Edward Snowden points to this kind of commercial espionage is indicative. Those who control the Snowden documents are eager to release anything that would harm the U.S., yet they have not yet produced an example of information being given to a U.S. company.

[snip]

What we know of American espionage against foreign companies (thanks to Snowden) is that the intent of the espionage against commercial targets is to support other American policies: non-proliferation, sanctions compliance, trade negotiations, foreign corrupt practices, and perhaps to gain insight into foreign military technologies.  The U.S. as well as other nations who care about such things regard these as legitimate targets for spying—legitimate in the sense that this kind of espionage would be consistent with international law and practice.  This spying supports foreign policy goals shared by many countries, in theory if not always in practice.

I say that because there’s no evidence from most domestic companies that NSA interacts with — not the Defense contractor targeted in a cyber powerpoint, and certainly not any of the telecoms that partner with the government. You would, by definition, not see evidence of what you’re claiming. Moreover, ultimately, this is retreat back to a fetish, the description of certain things to be a national good (like the trade negotiations we’ve indicted China for), but not others.

Ultimately, American commentators on cybersecurity continue to misunderstand the degree to which our corporations — especially out federal partners — cannot and are not in practice separated from a vision of national good. Though discussions about the degree to which tech companies should be wiling to risk overseas customers to spy without bound is one area where that’s assumed, even to the detriment of the tech company bottom lines.

Here’s what all this misses. There is spying of the old sort: spying on official government figures. And then there are decisions supporting national well-being (largely economics) that all countries engage in, pushing the set of rules that help them the most.

Discussions of China’s cyberspying have always been too isolated for discussions of China’s other national economic decisions. China steals just as much from US corporations located in China, but no one seems to care about that as a national security issue. And China buys a great deal, and has been buying a lot more of the things that it used to steal. The outcome is the same, yet we fetishize the method.

Which is why I find this so ironic.

A Chinese billionaire with party connections last year purchased the company, Wright USA, that insures a lot of national security officials in case they get sued or criminally investigated.

The company, Wright USA, was quietly acquired late last year by Fosun Group, a Shanghai-based conglomerate led by Guo Guangchang, a billionaire known as “China’s Warren Buffett” who has high-level Communist Party connections.

The links between Guo and Wright USA came under scrutiny by the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, as well as the Office of Director of National Intelligence, the coordinating body of all U.S. spy agencies, soon after Fosun announced the purchase of Wright’s parent company last November. The FBI has also launched a criminal probe into whether the company made “unauthorized disclosures of government data to outsiders,” according to a well-placed source, who like others, spoke to Newsweek on condition of anonymity because the information was sensitive.

(The FBI declined to comment, and Fosun denies the FBI has asked it for any documents.)

U.S. officials are concerned that the deal gave Chinese spy agencies a pipeline into the names, job titles, addresses and phone numbers of tens of thousands of American intelligence and counterterrorism officials—many working undercover—going back decades.

This happened after the Chinese acquired via the kind of cybertheft everyone seems to agree is old-fashioned spying the medical records and clearance records of most of Americans cleared personnel. And yet a Chinese firm was able to buy something equally compromising right out from underneath the spooks who oversee such things.

China will get what it wants via a variety of means: stealing domestically when Americans come to visit, stealing via hack, or simply buying. That we treat these differently is just a fetish, and one that seems to blind us to the multiple avenues of threat.

Recent Discussions of Neoliberalism

People seem to have trouble defining neoliberalism adequately, and especially when it comes to labeling Hillary Clinton as a neoliberal. In a recent article at Jacobin Corey Robins gives a short history of the neoliberal version of the Democratic Party, specifically aimed at the Clinton/DLC/Third Way. Billmon discussed this article in this storify piece, in which he describes three current factions in the practice of neoliberalism, There is the Neo-Keynesian version, as with Krugman; the Monetarist version, that of Milton Friedman and his many followers;, and the Supply Side version, like Paul Ryan and his economic advisors. Each of the factions has attached itself to a political ideology. Both of these pieces should be read by anyone seeking to clarify their thinking about neoliberalism.

Underlying all of them is the broader program described by Michel Foucault, which turns in large part on the notion of governmentality, a point made by Mike Konzcal in this review of Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. After I read that book, I wrote several pieces at FDL trying to comprehend the idea of governmentality and make it comprehensible. Here are links to several of those posts.

1. How We Govern Our Selves and Ourselves.

2. The Panoptic Effect.

3. Discipline for the Benefit of the Rich.

4. Control of Markets in Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics.

5. Liberalism and the Neoliberal Reaction.

The idea of governability is present in the texts I’ve been looking at. In Polanyi, we saw the transformation of the farm-dwelling peasant into the city-dwelling factory worker. Arendt touches on it with her discussion of people who cannot find a place in the productive sector of society, the superfluous people. Veblen writes about the enormous productivity of machine culture, and the changes it demanded of the worker, about which more later. The great problem is that machine culture required a tremendous amount of self-discipline from the workers to make factories function. The principal institutions of society were remade to enforce that self-discipline, from the Army to the schools to the government. Other tools included prisons and mental institutions.

In one way or another, all of these writers on neoliberalism seem to agree that the goal of neoliberalism is to replace the notion of the self as reasonably free citizen, responsible for the self, the family, the community and the state, with the notion of the self as a buyer and seller engaged in zero-sum competition with all other buyer/sellers. We are consumers of any and all goods and services, and entrepreneurial sellers of the self seen as a bundle of skills on offer to the highest bidder. Each separate transaction, buying and selling, is an opportunity for judgment by the all-knowing market. If we are successful, it’s because we are winners. If we are losers, we are superfluous. It’s an even harsher transformation of the human being than the one from peasant to factory worker.