Enter the Cyber Dragon

I am far from being a cyber-expert, something this post will no doubt reinforce.  But reading this article from Vanity Fair online this morning, I've come to a very basic understanding that produces an actionable irony. To wit:  there are two basic truths bound up in China's emerging cyber-thuggery.  The first, is that the internet in China is--in effect--centrally managed and ridiculously well-policed by CPC, largely to ensure domestic stability.  The second, is that Chinese cyber-thuggery is coming from government, military, industrial and private entities within the Middle Kingdom.  The irony here is that these two truths could not coexist without the explicit and complicit action of the Chinese government.  Put another way,  China could dramatically reduce cyber-thuggery if it wanted to using the exact tools and techniques it uses to squash internal dissent.  But--it clearly doesn't want to.

The United States and other commercial powers need to relentlessly and publicly hammer home the irony of a police state which cannot police its citizens.  We should lead a whisper campaign within the international financial community that seeks to undermine confidence in the integrity of electronic financial transactions with Chinese entities.  After all--with such an active cyber-culture alive and well within China, a responsible party with fiduciary responsibility would be well-advised to insist on potentially onerous or delaying steps on financial transactions due to the obvious leakiness of internet beyond the Great Firewall of China.

I'll apologize in advance to Raymond and the others for the cyber-attack that may come our way after this post.  I've already been victimized professionally once by (very likely)  Chinese cyber-crime, in which after I distributed an issues brief (critical of some Chinese action) to an extensive mailing list (in the "To: line--first mistake), elements of that mailing list were "spear-phished" (I believe is the term) by an entity with a yahoo account that used my first name in it.  Ten or twelve addresses at a time received email with a file which--when opened--took down certain operations on their end.  Several emails of this type went out.

We cannot let a fear of "alienating" China dissuade us from insisting that they play along with the basic rules of the international game.  And those who profess to support the international systems under attack here must not shrink from calling the Chinese on their behavior.

Bryan McGrath