But do Chinese hackers put henna in their beards?

Here's a Wall Street Journal op-ed I heartily agree with:

In the years following the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. faced a great threat from the Barbary states, which attacked trading ships, plundered the cargo, and made slaves of the crew. Some 20% of American exports went through the Mediterranean, where the Dey of Algiers demanded $1 million, or about 10% of the U.S. budget, plus a portrait of George Washington as ransom for American traders.

President Thomas Jefferson rejected the European practice of paying bribes, instead creating a navy that eventually freed the seas from piracy. U.S. Marines still sing a hymn "to the shores of Tripoli" and carry scimitar-shaped swords. A global law of the sea was eventually enforced, which protects freedom of commerce over any ocean at any time. Open sea lanes became the key network of the Industrial Age.

Thanks to Google and China, we have just had our Barbary moment for the Information Age. Computing and communications networks are the sea lanes of modern economies, made possible by open platforms such as email and the Web. If high-tech companies are the unarmed ships of our era, will the U.S. now protect the modern sea lanes that enable global communications?

The Chinese government's fingerprints are all over the cyber attacks against dozens of Silicon Valley companies, plus the hacking of the personal Gmail accounts of individuals in the U.S. and elsewhere. Although Beijing apparently aimed at accessing information from human-rights advocates, the violation of personal email privacy potentially can affect anyone, anywhere. This comes after many incidents of hacked computers at the Pentagon, congressional offices and other government agencies.

Before confronting China, Google examined the hacked Gmail account and laptop of a 20-year-old sophomore at Stanford, Tenzin Seldon, a leader of Students for Free Tibet. Foreign journalists in China, including a reporter in the Beijing bureau of the Associated Press, also had Gmail accounts hacked, with messages forwarded to another address.

It's one thing for China to censor access to the Web in its country by blocking sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. It's another matter entirely to reach into servers around the world to rummage through individual email accounts of citizens of other countries.

For Google, it would have been an unsustainable business policy to do nothing in response to having to tell its users that a foreign government is accessing its servers, undermining the integrity of the Web on which its operations are based. Google's threat to stop censoring its Chinese-language search engine is as powerful a response as a private company can make, creating a precedent that others would be wise to follow.

The U.S. government gets two cheers for its reaction. Last week, Hillary Clinton gave a speech at least rhetorically raising cyber security to a national priority. "We stand for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas," the secretary of state said. "We recognize that the world's information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it."

Her solution to the problem was less forceful. "In an interconnected world, an attack on one nation's networks can be an attack on all," she said. "By reinforcing that message, we can create norms of behavior among states and encourage respect for the global networked commons."

Establishing new norms of behavior, as Jefferson found with the Barbary states, takes more than speeches. The Chinese foreign ministry replied to the State Department request that it investigate the breaches with doublespeak, claiming Beijing "proscribes any form of hacking activity" and that "China's Internet is open."

The Chinese state-run newspaper Global Times said, "The U.S. campaign for uncensored and free flow of information on an unrestricted internet is a disguised attempt to impose its values on other cultures in the name of democracy. . . . China's real stake in the 'free flow of information' is evident in its refusal to be victimized by information imperialism."

For its part, the high-tech world, usually happy for technology to resolve its own problems, seems stunned by these cyber attacks.

"Had the Chinese shot intercontinental ballistic missiles into 33 U.S.-based businesses including those in the finance and defense industries as well as the Mountain View-based headquarters of Google, there would be no question in anyone's mind as to whether war had been declared on the U.S.," Techweb editor David Berlind pointed out in Information Week. "Let's be honest with ourselves. It was an act of war and it deserves more of a response from the U.S. government than it is getting."

Just as the traders of the 18th century could not protect open sea lanes by themselves, technology companies, even ones as powerful as Google, today cannot keep digital sea lanes open on their own. Washington has started to talk about the seriousness of the problem. Now it needs a plan to fix it.

Three points here:

1. The Barbary pirates were relatively easy to defeat in the 1800s, since their patron state - the Ottoman Empire - had declined precipitously from the superpower status it had earlier enjoyed. When a vigorous Ottoman Empire backed the Barbary pirates against Spain and Italy back in the mid-1500s, the pirates pretty much took on all comers and won. Today's Chinese pirates have an imperial backer that will not simply leave the pirates to face American retribution unaided.

2. It's great to see that the tech people have finally lost their starry-eyed techno-libertarianism and woken up to the fact that governments still matter, a lot. David Berlind's quote is one more nail in the coffin of the idea that IT will change China (or any country) on its own. The "China fantasy" is now promulgated only by the PR flacks of multinationals looking for cheap labor - and, soon, maybe not even by them.

3. It's interesting that the cartoonishly conservative WSJ is running an editorial about the limitations of private-sector action, the need for government intervention, and the importance of privacy rights, while my favorite liberal bloggers (e.g. Yglesias and DeLong, but thankfully not Krugman) are still scrupulously avoiding any part of the China subject for fear of touching off a Second Cold War. And by "interesting" I mean "bitterly ironic". Even more ironic in the context of the editorial; Jefferson, probably our most liberal president ever, didn't hesitate to stomp the original Barbary pirates. Interesting how ideologies evolve over the centuries.

On a related note, this article from CBS describes how the Chinese government's industrial espionage (on behalf of state-owned firms) rapidly neutralizes U.S. companies' gains from research & development spending:

At a place where they battle hackers every day, the computer security company McAfee, George Kurtz says the [Chinese] attacks [against U.S. companies] were sophisticated and precisely targeted, "designed to get in, cover its tracks and steal corporate secrets and get out."

And for the companies involved, those secrets are valuable.

"Think about the amount of money they spend on [research and development] on a yearly basis -billions of dollars," Kurtz said. "Having trade secrets and potentially source code taken can be very damaging to them.

"One of the huge drivers of Chinese economic growth over the last several decades has been the forced technology transfer from America to China," [author Peter] Navarro said.

Looks like piracy pays, big-time.


By the way, as you may have noticed, I've decided to make this "China week" at Noahpinion. Here's a couple (mostly) unrelated China links:

1.The "disappearing" of a Chinese human-rights lawyer
2. China's climate-change negotiator refuses to admit that climate change is caused by humans