China now a Clear and Present Danger

[lovinthehd]

Blaming China for all the tech we exported to them freely....meh.

 

[Irvrobinson]

China's ambitions are a minor concern by comparison.

I think you're in for a big nasty surprise, so long as the current Chinese government remains in power. These folks make Trump look like a nice guy.

 

[Irvrobinson]

Blaming China for all the tech we exported to them freely....meh.

Haven't been paying attention? China IP theft is at the top of the USG security concerns.

 

[lovinthehd]

Haven't been paying attention? China IP theft is at the top of the USG security concerns.

I've been paying attention to China longer than most. I remember when they were column 2 duty rates and we hadn't helped them out yet. Yes, of course it's a problem, just saying we helped bring it on....

 

[Irvrobinson]

I've been paying attention to China longer than most. I remember when they were column 2 duty rates and we hadn't helped them out yet. Yes, of course it's a problem, just saying we helped bring it on....

What is a column 2 duty rate, and what does it mean?

 

[lovinthehd]

What is a column 2 duty rate, and what does it mean?

We used to punish the commie states with column 2 duties, punitive duties, often 100% (and more), i.e. not so favored nations (let alone other sanctions). To fight cheap labor costs and government subsidies. Only ones remaining are Cuba and N.Korea....

 

[cpp]

What is a column 2 duty rate, and what does it mean?

Rate that applies to countries without normal trade relations status with the United States , known as the "bad boy rate" , the only countries currently noted as column 2 are Cuba and North Korea.

 

[Irvrobinson]

We used to punish the commie states with column 2 duties, punitive duties, often 100% (and more), i.e. not so favored nations (let alone other sanctions). To fight cheap labor costs and government subsidies. Only ones remaining are Cuba and N.Korea....

Okay, but how much do you know about high-tech IP theft? Licensing them chip design (EDA) tools is a bit different than hacking into the IP tools vendor's development environment and stealing the source code or the design documentation.

 

[Mr._Clark]

I absolutely do not trust China, but I don't think they care about internal US politics so long as it doesn't get in their way. I don't think they have a chance of doing anything other than becoming more powerful regionally. As for a broken and discarded US-led system, Trump just about delivered that to them.

Your description of "what Trump followers want" sounds a lot like fascism to me. As for defeating him with votes, his defeat was a very narrow one; a matter of 60k votes in a handful of swing states. He could easily have won. He very likely would have won re-election were it not for his naked incompetence in the handling of a pandemic. He could not even be bothered to do the one task that is a paramount responsibility of any political leader, he shrugged off the most elemental duty of a president, and that resulted in the unneeded deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, yet he still nearly won re-election. Yes, it was proven that he could be defeated by votes, however, it was also proven that nearly half the country is fine with widespread sickness and death so long as their hatred and vindictiveness are validated by the executive branch. China's ambitions are a minor concern by comparison.

"I don't think they have a chance of doing anything other than becoming more powerful regionally."

Your view that China doesn't even have a "chance" of doing "anything" other than becoming more powerful regionally, appears to be at odds with the view of the Biden White House: “This is a significant vulnerability that could have far-reaching impacts. First and foremost, this is an active threat.”

Your view also seems to be at odds with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which put out an emergency directive and said the breach “poses an unacceptable risk to Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies.”

White House calls Microsoft email breach an ‘active threat’

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that the Biden administration is closely following the breach of a Microsoft email application, reportedly carried out by Chinese hackers, calling …

thehill.com

Here's what Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Emergency Directive 21-02 says:

>>>CISA has determined that this exploitation of Microsoft Exchange on-premises products poses an unacceptable risk to Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies and requires emergency action. This determination is based on the current exploitation of these vulnerabilities in the wild, the likelihood of the vulnerabilities being exploited, the prevalence of the affected software in the federal enterprise, the high potential for a compromise of agency information systems, and the potential impact of a successful compromise.<<<

Redirecting…

You said previously "China and Russia, among other states, are very much cybersecurity threats, but there isn't much we can do to address that since we have a serious internal threat in the Republican party."

This also seems to be at odds with the Biden administration, which has said it will take action against Russia:

>>>The Washington Post reported last month that the administration would impose sanctions on Russia for the breach. Psaki said on Feb. 23 that a response from the administration will come in “weeks, not months.”<<< (from link above)

Biden seems to be taking other actions as well, but perhaps this is all just political theater:

>>>President Biden on Friday called on the United States and other democratic nations to shape the “rules of the road” on cybersecurity and tech issues, particularly as part of efforts to confront China and Russia. . . .

Biden zeroed in on confronting China on these issues, in particular on ensuring greater transparency in terms of individuals and groups behind major Chinese companies. . . . Biden also noted that setting norms in cyberspace was essential to standing up to Russian aggression.

“This is also how we are going to be able to meet the threat from Russia,” Biden said. "The Kremlin attacks our democracies and weaponizes corruption to try to undermine our system of governance ... that’s why addressing Russian recklessness and hacking into computer networks in the United States and across Europe and the world has become critical to protecting our collective security.” . . .
Biden discussed the hack with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their first conversation after Biden took office, and a top White House official said earlier this week that Biden will soon roll out “executive action” to address “gaps” in U.S. federal cybersecurity once the review of the SolarWinds incident is complete.

“The challenges with Russia may be different than the ones with China, but they are just as real,” Biden emphasized. “It is not about pitting East against West, it’s not about wanting conflict, we want a future where all nations are able to freely determine their own path without a threat of violence or coercion.”

Biden calls for creating ‘rules’ on cyber, tech to combat China and Russia threats

President Biden on Friday called on the United States and other democratic nations to shape the “rules of the road” on cybersecurity and tech issues, particularly as part of efforts to confront Chi…

thehill.com

Fortunately, the Biden administration does seem to view the recent hacks as a threat and they do seem to be taking action:

>>>The Biden administration is expected to put together a task force to deal with major cyber intrusions that Microsoft said this week were linked to China, according to a US official. . . . "We are undertaking a whole of government response to assess and address the impact. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an emergency directive to agencies and we're now working with our partners and looking closely at the next steps we need to take. This is an active threat still developing and we urge network operators to take it very seriously," a White House official said. . . .

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that "everyone running these servers -- government, private sector, academia -- needs to act now to patch them."
Psaki's warnings followed a tweet by national security adviser Jake Sullivan Thursday evening that underscored how concerned the Biden administration is. He urged IT administrators nationwide to install software fixes immediately. Sullivan said the US government is monitoring reports that US think tanks may have been compromised by the attack, as well as "defense industrial base entities."<<<

Biden administration expected to form task force to deal with Microsoft hack linked to China | CNN Politics

The Biden administration is expected to put together a task force to deal with major cyber intrusions that Microsoft said this week were linked to China, according to a US official.

www.cnn.com

 

[lovinthehd]

Okay, but how much do you know about high-tech IP theft? Licensing them chip design (EDA) tools is a bit different than hacking into the IP tools vendor's development environment and stealing the source code or the design documentation.

Does it matter how much I know? I know it exists. I wasn't saying it didn't exist, or that our problems are entirely from tech we exported, but that we kind of have been hoisted by our own petard starting with such. We have to up our game/defenses for sure.

 

[Mr._Clark]

I absolutely do not trust China, but I don't think they care about internal US politics so long as it doesn't get in their way. I don't think they have a chance of doing anything other than becoming more powerful regionally. As for a broken and discarded US-led system, Trump just about delivered that to them.

Your description of "what Trump followers want" sounds a lot like fascism to me. As for defeating him with votes, his defeat was a very narrow one; a matter of 60k votes in a handful of swing states. He could easily have won. He very likely would have won re-election were it not for his naked incompetence in the handling of a pandemic. He could not even be bothered to do the one task that is a paramount responsibility of any political leader, he shrugged off the most elemental duty of a president, and that resulted in the unneeded deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, yet he still nearly won re-election. Yes, it was proven that he could be defeated by votes, however, it was also proven that nearly half the country is fine with widespread sickness and death so long as their hatred and vindictiveness are validated by the executive branch. China's ambitions are a minor concern by comparison.

Here's what Adam Schiff said about China recently:

>>>In the interim, China has continued to transform, committing to an agenda placing the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” at the center of its domestic and foreign policies. This has laid the foundation for a competitor that is simultaneously economically dynamic and politically regressive.

In the interim, China has continued to transform, committing to an agenda placing the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” at the center of its domestic and foreign policies. This has laid the foundation for a competitor that is simultaneously economically dynamic and politically regressive.

Perhaps of greatest concern is China’s embrace of totalitarian tactics that pose a direct challenge to the very idea of liberal democracy.

Beijing seeks to build a world in which its ambitions are unchallenged and individual freedoms give way to the needs of the state.

Beijing is accomplishing this through the development of systems of social control. We have seen this most clearly in China’s Xinjiang region, where over one million ethnic Muslim minorities have been interned in concentration camps against their will. Throughout China, the Party continues to work on the creation of a panopticon of constant and unrelenting surveillance. These systems are increasingly marketed for export, giving would-be authoritarians and wannabe dictators around the world the tools and playbook they need to follow China’s example.<<<

News Item | Permanent Select Committee On Intelligence

Here's more from Adam Schiff:

>>>We are witnessing the resurgence of authoritarianism across the globe, and it poses a growing challenge to the very idea of liberal democracy. China, with its expanding economic, military, and diplomatic might, is at the forefront of this neoauthoritarian challenge. Beijing seeks to build a world in which its ambitions are unchallenged and individual freedoms give way to the needs of the state. The United States must rise to meet this challenge—and that task begins with understanding China’s intentions and capabilities.<<<

The U.S. Intelligence Community Is Not Prepared for the China Threat

Absent significant changes, the United States will be ill-prepared to compete with China on the global stage for decades to come.

www.foreignaffairs.com

Here's an article by Human Rights Watch about Chinese surveillance:

>>>This report provides a detailed description and analysis of a mobile app that police and other officials use to communicate with the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP, 一体化联合作战平台), one of the main systems Chinese authorities use for mass surveillance in Xinjiang. Human Rights Watch first reported on the IJOP in February 2018, noting the policing program aggregates data about people and flags to officials those it deems potentially threatening; some of those targeted are detained and sent to political education camps and other facilities. But by “reverse engineering” this mobile app, we now know specifically the kinds of behaviors and people this mass surveillance system targets.

The findings have broader significance, providing an unprecedented window into how mass surveillance actually works in Xinjiang, because the IJOP system is central to a larger ecosystem of social monitoring and control in the region. They also shed light on how mass surveillance functions in China. While Xinjiang’s systems are particularly intrusive, their basic designs are similar to those the police are planning and implementing throughout China.

Analysis of the IJOP app reveals that authorities are collecting massive amounts of personal information—from the color of a person’s car to their height down to the precise centimeter—and feeding it into the IJOP central system, linking that data to the person’s national identification card number. Our analysis also shows that Xinjiang authorities consider many forms of lawful, everyday, non-violent behavior—such as “not socializing with neighbors, often avoiding using the front door”—as suspicious. The app also labels the use of 51 network tools as suspicious, including many Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and encrypted communication tools, such as WhatsApp and Viber. <<<

China’s Algorithms of Repression

This report presents new evidence about the surveillance state in Xinjiang, where the government has subjected 13 million Turkic Muslims to heightened repression as part of its “Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism.” Between January 2018 and February 2019, Human Rights Watch was able...

www.hrw.org

 

[cpp]

A lot of ip theft from China. https://www.natlawreview.com/article/department-justice-s-national-security-division-chief-addresses-china-s-campaign-to

 

[cpp]

People that think China is doing nothing to harm the US are out of touch with facts or they are apart of the Chinese culture and their Communist ideology . The DOJ has been prosecuting agents for years. And a lot live right there in the US. https://www.justice.gov/nsd/information-about-department-justice-s-china-initiative-and-compilation-china-related

 

[Trell]

People that think China is doing nothing to harm the US are out of touch with facts or they are apart of the Chinese culture and their Communist ideology . The DOJ has been prosecuting agents for years. And a lot live right there in the US. https://www.justice.gov/nsd/information-about-department-justice-s-china-initiative-and-compilation-china-related

From reading this thread I don't think anyone in this thread does not think that China is aggressive and is doing harm, and not just to USA. Claiming that the Chinese culture is the same as Communism is way off, though of course they have their own version of it. Calling China Communist today is sort of a stretch.

 

[GO-NAD!]

U.S. And India Saw Startling Declines In Freedom Over Last Decade, Report Finds - NowThis (nowthisnews.com)

While the headline mentions the US and India:

China: “The world’s most populous dictatorship”
China and Russia are singled out as two of the most influential anti-democratic forces in the world by Freedom House. “The malign influence of the regime in China, the world’s most populous dictatorship, was especially profound in 2020,” researchers wrote, citing how the authoritarian government responded when the virus was first detected: “Beijing ramped up its global disinformation and censorship campaign to counter the fallout from its cover-up of the initial coronavirus outbreak, which severely hampered a rapid global response in the pandemic’s early days.”

The Chinese government is also criticized for the “demolition of Hong Kong’s liberties and legal autonomy,” interference in foreign elections, and continued human rights abuses. Acknowledging the vacuum of leadership left by the Trump administration — describing the U.S. as having “abandoned” the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2018, for example — China was able to step in where the U.S. stepped out, and increasingly bend institutions to its will, forming more autocratic alliances.

 

[highfigh]

Agreed. My gripe is that we've known about China's stealing of intellectual property for years, and we've done precious little about it.

That's not something they would make public knowledge. Well, unless someone makes it public 'under conditions of anonymity'.

 

[cpp]

That's not something they would make public knowledge. Well, unless someone makes it public 'under conditions of anonymity'.

Its public you just have to go find it.

 

[cpp]

From reading this thread I don't think anyone in this thread does not think that China is aggressive and is doing harm, and not just to USA. Claiming that the Chinese culture is the same as Communism is way off, though of course they have their own version of it. Calling China Communist today is sort of a stretch.

Well China is called the Chinese Communist Party .
"If Vladimir Lenin were reincarnated in 21st-century Beijing and managed to avert his eyes from the city’s glittering skyscrapers and conspicuous consumption, he would instantly recognize in the ruling Chinese Communist Party a replica of the system he designed nearly a century ago for the victors of the Bolshevik Revolution. One need only look at the party’s structure to see how communist — and Leninist — China’s political system remains.


Sure, China long ago dumped the core of the communist economic system, replacing rigid central planning with commercially minded state enterprises that coexist with a vigorous private sector. Yet for all their liberalization of the economy, Chinese leaders have been careful to keep control of the commanding heights of politics through the party’s grip on the “three Ps”: personnel, propaganda, and the People’s Liberation Army."https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/03/5-myths-about-the-chinese-communist-party/

 

[highfigh]

From reading this thread I don't think anyone in this thread does not think that China is aggressive and is doing harm, and not just to USA. Claiming that the Chinese culture is the same as Communism is way off, though of course they have their own version of it. Calling China Communist today is sort of a stretch.

While they have adopted capitalism in some ways, the CCP still own many businesses and when a privately-owned entity does well enough, they will take over its operation. Manufacturing in China often comes with many problems and as an example, woodworking machinery for consumers and lower level commercial use can't be made in the US anymore because it wouldn't be affordable, so they went offshore. They would hire one foundry to cast the parts to some spec, but what they were getting often hadn't been made accurately, the materials weren't what were needed, processes had been skipped or done badly and in many cases, the original manufacturer had hired another to do the work for less money. One result was cast iron that hadn't been allowed to relieve internal stresses, which warped and/or cracked over time and the overall quality was terrible, so they placed people in the plants to monitor the quality. Many brands of this machinery are made in the same or associated plants, built to spec. The quality has improved greatly. Same for many tools- many major companies that were US-owned are now owned by the Chinese.

Why do they have so many empty cities and apartment buildings? If they built them to keep people busy, it's similar to the saying I heard from someone who had lived in the Czech Republic- "We'll pretend to pay you, if you pretend to work".

They control communication, news and many other aspects of life that are allowed to be done without restriction in most countries, although they allow private ownership if someone 'gets along' with the Party.

They're getting to be a problem WRT their military, too. Even Russia is pushing back, but I would bet you have heard more about that than we do here in the US because of access to different media outlets.

China is communist in many ways, but have adopted other ways, in order to kill the enemy with its own weapons.

 

[highfigh]

Its public you just have to go find it.

Yeah, and we have access to top secret info? BS.