China has not been conducting attacks on foreign companies via the Internet for 5000 years and it's not inappropriate to question an environment which forces US-based companies to deal with sophisticated computer attacks just because they're doing something China doesn't like.
We've been very good about ignoring what China does in China. (One could argue that Americans, myself included, are exceptionally good at this actually!) This recent wave of controversy is about what China does outside of China.
I would expect the same outcry to occur if any other country was staging the type of operations the PRC regularly conducts in foreign infrastructure. Frankly, the fact that outcry is so long in coming is the only thing that surprises most people in security.
I agree that people need to be careful to not go overboard, but your assertion that no one should ever be critical of China because they're different is equally absurd. Different systems deserve to be appropriately examined and talking about the ramifications of each is both appropriate and necessary.
While I agree that the criticism is well-deserved, industrial espionage is really nothing new.
Google's move certainly deserves the spotlight, but I find the sudden shift of attention to industrial espionage a bit knee-jerking and sensationalist.
Heck, shouldn't you be more worried about military espionage, which has been happening for ages in every country?
Just a reality check question: Do you think for a moment that the American CIA doesn't infiltrate foreign networks if i thinks it has a security interest in doing so?
I think it would be appropriate for people in China (and everyone else, for that matter) to discuss exactly the extent it was occurring and if it was hindering their enterprises there, discuss exactly the effects of such issues.
I would have no objection to stories of such things being posted on HN and I wouldn't object to those stories as anti-American. In fact, I think Americans frequently post such stories, we just often don't have good intelligence on what our government is doing.
That said, as a security researcher who has read some of the reports involved, I do think the PRC may in fact be operating on a far broader range of targets than our own government. In particularly their tendency to include any corporations they want is probably different than how we do things most (but not all) of the time. These may or may not just be stylistic differences and I would welcome a debate on which ones were more troublesome.
I would not blast such stories as racist, which is what the poster I was responding to was essentially doing.
(As an aside, just because it's a pet peeve: Please, the CIA? They're not the ones you have to be concerned with, the American government has a broad and vast array of different intelligence agencies, the CIA is not the most likely one to be doing this type of work. The CIA's job is to be one of the most visible intelligence agencies, a job they do very well.)
Those are good points. I do not disagree with any of them, and thanks for the reminder about the many intelligence agencies.
I think that if it were just about discussion and having an opinion it would be owe thing, but this anti-China meme is really growing in force, and seeming to turn into real moral outrage and disgust, which I think are not constructive emotions for understanding another country...
We've been very good about ignoring what China does in China. (One could argue that Americans, myself included, are exceptionally good at this actually!) This recent wave of controversy is about what China does outside of China.
I would expect the same outcry to occur if any other country was staging the type of operations the PRC regularly conducts in foreign infrastructure. Frankly, the fact that outcry is so long in coming is the only thing that surprises most people in security.
I agree that people need to be careful to not go overboard, but your assertion that no one should ever be critical of China because they're different is equally absurd. Different systems deserve to be appropriately examined and talking about the ramifications of each is both appropriate and necessary.