President Obama Is Right On US-China Hacking

I strongly recommend watching the excerpt on the Charlie Rose show titled Obama: Blunt Conversation With China on Hacking. I reproduced the relevant part of the transcript below and added emphasis to key points.

CHARLIE ROSE: Speaking of pushing back, what happened when you pushed back on the question of hacking and serious allegations that come from this country that believe that the Chinese are making serious strides and hacking not only private sector but public sector?

BARACK OBAMA: We had a very blunt conversation about cyber security.

CHARLIE ROSE: Do they acknowledge it?

BARACK OBAMA: You know, when you’re having a conversation like this I don’t think you ever expect a Chinese leader to say "You know what? You’re right. You caught us red-handed."

CHARLIE ROSE: You got me. Yes.

BARACK OBAMA: We’re just stealing all your stuff and every day we try to figure out how we can get into Apple --

CHARLIE ROSE: But do they now say "Look? See you’re doing the same thing. We’ve been reading about what NSA is doing and you’re doing the same thing that we’re doing and there are some allegations of that. And the man who is now unleashing these secrets who’s telling everybody is in Hong Kong.

(CROSSTALK)

BARACK OBAMA: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: And may be talking to the Chinese.

BARACK OBAMA: Well, let’s separate out the NSA issue which I’m sure you’re going to want to talk to and the whole full balance of privacy and security with -- with the specific issue of cyber security and our concerns --

CHARLIE ROSE: And cyber warfare and cyber espionage.

BARACK OBAMA: Right. Every country in the world, large and small, engages in intelligence gathering and that is an occasional source of tension but is generally practiced within bounds. There is a big difference between China wanting to figure out how can they find out what my talking points are when I’m meeting with the Japanese which is standard fare and we’ve tried to prevent them from --

(CROSSTALK)

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

BARACK OBAMA: -- penetrating that and they try to get that information. There’s a big difference between that and a hacker directly connected with the Chinese government or the Chinese military breaking into Apple’s software systems to see if they can obtain the designs for the latest Apple product. That’s theft. And we can’t tolerate that.

And so we’ve had very blunt conversations about this. They understand, I think, that this can adversely affect the fundamentals of the U.S./China relationship. We don’t consider this a side note in our conversations. We think this is central in part because our economic relationship is going to continue to be premised on the fact that the United States is the world’s innovator. We have the greatest R&D. We have the greatest entrepreneurial culture.

Our value added is at the top of the value chain and if countries like China are stealing that that affects our long-term prosperity in a serious way.

This is an amazing development for someone aware of the history of this issue. President Obama is exactly right concerning the differences between espionage, practiced by all nations since the beginning of time, and massive industrial theft by China against the developed world, which the United States, at least, will not tolerate. I am so pleased that this issue is at the top of the agenda between the US and China and that the President and his team, as well as Congress, are taking it so seriously.

Comments

C.S.Lee said…
hi Richard,

It's more of technology stealing activity, looking at how good China is into reverse engineering, and if they can obtain the data, they will be able to rebuild the same thing, that basically saves a lot of time and money needed to be spent on R&D, and quickly go into mass production and money making.

It's the shortcut ;)
5:14 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti...
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technica...
Read more