China syndromeA first: U.S. indicts Chinese military officials for cyber-theft of U.S. companies’ industrial secrets
Yesterday, the U.S. Justice Department announced the indictment of five Chinese military officers for stealing data from six U.S. companies. The move marks a break from a policy followed by both the George W. Bush and the Obama administrations. Since the middle of the last decade, the United States has tried to deal quietly with the Chinese government’s massive, comprehensive, and systematic cyber-theft campaign of stealing the industrial secrets and intellectual property of hundreds of American technology companies. That quiet campaign has had no effect, and the Chinese cyber-theft campaign continued – and escalated – with seeming impunity. The staggering scale of China’s cyber-theft campaign, however, made it necessary to change direction, and yesterday’s move by the Justice Department is an indication that a change of course has been made.
Six years ago, in April 2008, referring to a story we published a year earlier (in February 2007), we wrote:
Here is the opening paragraph of a story we wrote last year:
During the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, Ross Perot said that if the proposed North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were to go into effect, we would all be hearing a “giant sucking sound” made by millions of U.S. jobs heading south for Mexico. There is a new giant sucking sound being heard: That of American and European trade secrets, patents, and other pieces of intellectual property being brazenly and systematically stolen by China in its effort to short-cut its way to global economic pre-eminence.
We went on to quote the 2007 annual report of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which stated that China’s massive, all-embracing, methodical, and relentless industrial espionage and theft campaign poses the “single greatest risk” to the American technology sector (see “‘Intellectual vacuum cleaner’: China’s industrial espionage campaign, pt. 1,” HSNW, 3 April 2008).
Yesterday, the U.S. Justice Department announced the indictment of five Chinese military officers for stealing data from six U.S. companies. The move marks a break from a policy followed by both the George W. Bush and the Obama administrations. Since the middle of the last decade, the United States has tried to deal quietly with the Chinese government’s massive, comprehensive, and systematic cyber-theft campaign of stealing the industrial secrets and intellectual property of hundreds of American technology companies. That quiet campaign has had no effect, and the Chinese cyber-theft campaign continued – and escalated – with seeming impunity.
The staggering scale of China’s cyber-theft campaign, however, made it necessary to change direction, and yesterday’s move by the Justice Department is an indication that a change of course has been made.
The New York Times reports that Attorney general Eric Holder announced that the United States, for the first time, would try to bring officials of a foreign government to the United States to stand trial for infiltrating American computer networks to steal data beneficial to U.S. trade competitors.
The Justice Department also distributed “wanted” posters with the pictures of the five Chinese military officers.
“The range of trade secrets and other sensitive business information stolen in this case is significant and demands an aggressive response,” Holder said yesterday.
