Marriott Data Breach Traced to Chinese Hackers, US Readies Crackdown on Beijing
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"In accordance with the law” is the sneaky part that lets them add all kinds of 'Chinese characteristics' to whatever topic is being discussed. Their 'law' is often phrased very broadly and interpreted with lots of freedom and in practice is whatever the CPC wants. This is how they say one thing and do another, always "according to the law".
Wasn't there a country that alleged yellow cake, WMD and other things in order to facilitate a grand mess in the Middle East. All perfectly legal according to the law, right?
Gulf of Tonkin would be a much better example.
did everyone forget the Snowden docs? NSA program ROYALCONCIERGE already hacked into Starwood hotels and stole their entire database of booking and guest dox. worst of all, the hack is persistent and tips off NSA in real time the moment Abu Bakr Baghdadi checks in. or what if this hack was oh say The Shadowbrokers using NSA'S backdoor to shame NSA and close the peep hole spying on every guest of every Starwood hotel in the world? how do we really know this hack wasn't NSA itself? who can you trust? trust no one. only believe what you have seen with your own 5eyes and certainly never let spooks who lie for a living trick you into going along with another Iraq war based on forged evidence with all the Intelligence chiefs and crooked FBI directors swearing to you on national TV that you just need to trust them, because the evidence is classified, so they can't prove it to you, but you need to get on board with believing in the new false flag Gulf of Tonkin and cheering for the new war. if you don't support the war, then you disrespect the troops and you should get the fuck out of America.
by the way,the Mirai hotel in Hong Kong where Snowden escaped to is a Starwood hotel. isn't it funny that ROYALCONCEIRGE didn't tip off NSA as to exactly where Snowden was the whole time? or maybe it did work and they were watching him all along.
Your linked article makes no such claim. The specified program mentions neither the NSA nor Starwood Hotels nor hacked databases. It's a GCHQ program that appears to work on email messages collected elsewhere.
I can also imagine how this line could be blurry... perhaps the government quietly permits more profit motivated blackhat operations in exchange for some intelligence sharing. And really the perfect "cyber attack" shouldn't be attributable at all.
Why would it matter if the claim were Russia, China, or North Korea?
I've long wondered if we're going to see cyber warfare "letters of marque" at some point.
In retaliation to cyber attacks on US companies, the US government could designate Chinese firms with connections to the Chinese government (and particularly those which support the Chinese military) in letters of marque, allowing retaliatory IP theft, permission to cause damages, etc.
If the Chinese government is behind these attacks on US companies, than we are in a de facto state of warfare.
But federal law enforcement could simply decline to pursue private actors who attacked adversary states. Plausible deniability, to an extent.
Our way of life is kind of fucked, to be blunt, and our consumer tech culture could use a cull.
Those who don't understand or respect tech...they haven't been (explained/bitten by) the consequences of their ignorance.
Live by the sword...What if NSA already did the same to China? That's their mission, isn't it? China's "NSA" succeeded but became public.
Our NSA might have succeed dozens of time but China keeps it a secret.
I've seen one these "lone wolf" actor preemptively collecting emails of a very high profile target via sophisticated penatration (APT? LOL), then sold these data to a state-owned enterprise. In exchange his hacking violations were cleared.
The government simply kept a loose end to these kind of foreign hacks. For domestic offense, the rules are very strict. Some dude famously posted some kind of minor XSS vulnerability of a random PLA veteran management site, then the hole public disclosure site was shutdown by the government and site admin was jailed. LMAO. So today the Chinese underground market was more active than ever before, because there are no more free bugs.
Everything you just said--if legitimate and if identified via IC-contracted *INT--would with near-certainty be classified and appropriately compartmentalized. If it's research from an outside institution, it'd be more interesting to read it.
This is extremely weak reasoning. Any state actor would have the ability to cover its tracks, and more importantly to frame other state actors.
The article ends with a bit of classic anti-communism fear mongering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLA_Unit_61398
Mandiant's report: https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye-www/services/pdf...
Connecting to a government-supported operation has already be done before [0]. There probably isn’t that much difficulty to do it again.
One is from Norse, a widely discredited and now defunct security firm, ironically infamous for their false attributions.
Two are journalists. Enough said.
One is Seth Rogen the actor. Enough said.
One is Sabu from LulzSec, a script kid turned FBI snitch, who is way out of his league commenting on this.
One is Marc Rogers, who I don't know personally, but I doubt he maintains his skepticism today. In any case, a security expert to be certain, but not an expert in attribution and not privy to the evidence (only some of which has ever been made public). Worth noting that he published followup blog posts to the wikipedia-linked citation that walked back his skepticism quite a bit (http://marcrogers.org/2015/01/24/wrapping-up-the-whole-sony-... - "In my eyes, the preponderance of evidence definitely suggests North Korean involvement or someone trying very hard to make it look like North Korean involvement."). He basically settled on it being plausible, but concerning, and acknowledged that he wasn't privy to the evidence.
I'm fine with the prospect of China hacking the US. It fits in just fine with my world view. However, there's also the sinking of the Maine, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and Iraqi WMD. Skepticism is called for.
[1]Although to be fair, Saddam _wanted_ his neighbors to believe he had WMDs. It was a sort of a reverse 'boy who cried wolf' and then not wanting to lose face kept playing games (which fooled many to believe more than they should have with flimsy independent evidence that he had WMDs (including many in the opposition parties).
Not that anybody in the Bush administration would have cared, everybody there was well aware of this fact, that's also the reason why they tried to play up the fictitious "Saddam al-Qaeda" link [1] for a while and why the whole WMD thing just became a joke to them a mere year after the invasion [2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Ritter
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_li...
The US had no justification for doing what it did in Iraq, literally the whole world said "No" resulting in the biggest global peace protests in human history, the UN said "No", yet the US went straight ahead with it's "coalition of the willing".
Framing this like the "US just wanted to spread democracy out of the goodness of her heart" is not only dishonest, it's extremely cynical. The US isn't some "nice good guy", it didn't go into Iraq because it cared so deeply about the Iraqi people, it went in there for its own geopolitical interests.
Saddam was a dictator and an all around bad guy [he gassed, he killed indiscriminately], he also, like Marshall Tito, kept a lid on the pressure cooker. But, yes, there was reason to get rid of him. If I take your claim at face value, Democrats claiming Trump should be impeached is the height of folly because they have no reason to want to unseat him.
Just like Syria used to be an "ally in the war on terror" when Assad tortured terrorist suspects for the US, only to then turn around and use said torture as a pretext for "regime change actions" [1].
This is a common theme with US foreign policy, not just in the MENA region, and it's a major factor for the US not only losing international goodwill but also stirring up anti-US sentiments because most rational people see it for what it is: Hypocrisy
You also don't need to take any of my "claims" at face value, they've been considered established facts since the very beginning [2], particularly outside of the US [3]. Only in the Anglo-Saxon sphere was there any support for the invasion and most of that support was fabricated through influencing the narrative in the media [4].
The fact that you are still able to deny this, over a decade after, with all of its consequences undeniably impacting the world to this day, speaks bounds and volumes about the levels of indoctrination that happened back then.
What happened in Iraq was one of the greatest injustices in modern history and a major factor for radicalizing moderate Muslims, the "War on Terror" did nothing but create more terror. Exactly how Osama wanted 9/11 to play out, just like it kicked off massive refugee streams into Europe, lasting to this day.
Yet here you are, still trying to justify it like it's been the most normal thing in the world.
[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-pro...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/19/syria-...
[2] https://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0919/p12s2-woeu.html
People do this all the time because people working in the sector know [0] that attribution, with anything "cyber", is near impossible, if the attackers know what they are doing it actually is impossible. As such most attribution usually boils down to guessing games based on code samples and used attack vectors but rarely, if ever, on anything actually solid.
[0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/01/attack_attrib...
That's why it's important to point out the difficulties of attribution or else people will simply take it as they see it, without even questioning it.
In that context questioning it is not "hedging" anything, it's inquiring about actual evidence, which most rational people should be asking for instead of "hedging" based on political beliefs.
This is wrong. Schneier has no idea what he is talking about (as usual). The funny part is that he opens with skepticism about the North Korea/Sony hack, of which many were skeptical early on, but now is not disputed by anybody. So he was wrong about that too. So very wrong. Especially this line:
More likely, the culprits are random hackers who have loved to hate Sony for over a decade, or possibly a disgruntled insider.
I'll be honest, I was skeptical of that one too. But I knew what I didn't know, so instead of challenging experts or trying to get my uninformed opinion out in the public sphere, I kept that to myself. And when I heard someone who I know would know make the NK claim without hesitation, it made me re-evaluate some assumptions. When it turned out that they were correct, I knew it was not a lucky guess.
Attribution is not easy, but it's absolutely not impossible in all cases, or even difficult in many cases.
People who understand technology make a lot of assumptions about how attribution works, and then make assertions like this. Attribution isn't simply that the bad packets came from a Chinese IP address.
A good rant on the topic is here: http://www.robertmlee.org/russian-election-meddling-grizzley...
This is to say nothing about this particular case. I have no idea how solid the attribution is here. But the same comments to dismiss the whole idea of attribution out of hand come up every time, and they don't get it.
We shouldn't take it on blind faith that some attribution is accurate because it appears in the press. But we also should not interject with uninformed speculation about how we think attribution works, and then attack that straw man so they can cast aspersions on the motives of those making said attributions.
And when did that happen? You do realize that the US DoJ charging somebody still isn't "evidence"? Just like claims that some NK agents coded something are mostly based on code heuristics and usually nothing else.
> Attribution isn't simply that the bad packets came from a Chinese IP address.
Where did I ever claim that? It's the whole reason why I pointed out what I did. Even your linked "rant" agrees that much:
> Attribution is not done with single pieces of evidence or a smoking gun it is done as analysis on complex data sets most of which is not even technical
"most of which is not even technical"
Just because you are clustering together a bunch of assumptions still doesn't make them any more than assumptions. Just like companies working in the sector have a vested interest in making it look like they are more certain than they actually are because nobody pays them for "maybes", people pay them with the expectation of getting solid answers.
In that context, it does not really help to harp on about "MOs" and how other security firms totally agreed with some attribution, they are all just wild-guessing based on what they expect the opposition to use and what fits their "MO". Assumptions which are extremely easy to exploit for anybody willing to go the distance.
Sorry, but let's just agree to disagree, it's clear there ain't anything else left to do here.
>Attribution is not about having a smoking gun. Attribution is a good example of doing true intelligence analysis; there are no certainties and you only can come to an assessment such as low, moderate, or high confidence. Almost every single piece of data put forward in that assessment can and should have counters to it. Very reasonable counters as well.
Which is completely in line with.
> People do this all the time because people working in the sector know [0] that attribution, with anything "cyber", is near impossible, if the attackers know what they are doing it actually is impossible.
And that is plain and simply right. There is no credible way to actually attribute anything cyber. You can make an argument, that something looks like it was done by X, but not that something was actually done by X.
1. Attribution is not about proofing something, or finding "the one proof", but about verbalizing that there are indications that someone might be responsible. And quantifying this likelihood.
2. Having a reasonable level of attribution of cyber attacks cant ever be realistic if your opponent isnt a moron, as the indications you work with can be artificially created to fool you. There is no way to differentiate between a high likelihood attribution and a clever enough framing. While this is also true for real life attribution, for lets say chemical weapons, it is much easier to create indications in cyber attacks. And the incentives to do so are clear.
You are taking one reasonable critique, that you cant expect a "one proof" in attribution and turn it around to make attribution to something that could actually proof something. The limit of attributions is that you can vocalize, to what degree something looks like it was done by someone. Nothing less but also nothing more.
You likely aren't aware (because you're speaking from ignorance) but you just called literally every intel agency "a moron" here. Even the NSA TAO has been attributed, beyond any doubt whatsoever, multiple times.
Given that you're digging your heels in and seem to be more interested in making false assertions than learning, I see no need to continue this. You've never worked in attribution or threat intel. Why do you feel the need to have a strong opinion about it? Do you do the same thing for other complex topics that you know little about? It's not a good look.
This is directly from the rant you posted.
"Attribution is a good example of doing true intelligence analysis; there are no certainties"
>Why do you feel the need to have a strong opinion about it?
A lot of people try to use attribution as something it isnt is, as evidence. There is no reason to muddy the water and use the misrepresentation of attributions for political means. This nonsense gives the entire field a bad rep. Its intelligence analysis and not forensics.
I find it a bit rich to call others ignorant, when your argument consists of nothing more then the assertion that your counterpart is wrong and unnamed experts would agree with you.
Every attacker makes mistakes. It's not a matter of "knowing what they're doing". They're human.
Unless you want to suggest that on one hand they are sophisticated enough to infiltrate all kinds of hardened systems, but still dumb enough to let themselves get caught in the act while doing so/leaving evidence behind pointing straight back at them.
That's why the vast majority of cyber attribution is rarely based on actual technical evidence, but rather on cui bono assumptions and by ascribing certain tools as exclusively used by certain actors. And because none of this a secret, it's a pretty easy to exploit methodology [0].
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/wikil...
So what exactly was the Obama Administration getting an agreement on? China was doing it before, stopped after a publicly acknowledged agreement with the Obama Admin, and then it's so far fetched that they'd start up again during an increasingly aggressive trade war as to be worthy of false flag considerations - I don't think so.
If it was China in this case, it's nothing more than par for the course for how they've been behaving for the last decade plus. It's an invaluable tool in their arsenal for dealing with the US in a variety of regards.
there was also that time they made the company fire that employee https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16515274
Now, they say that their #1 economic rival is using hacking to steal data. But, there is no evidence.
At least, before the Irak invasion, the US made some efforts to forge some fake proofs that Sadam had weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. Trump, in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday, said that he would consider intervening in the Huawei case if it would help serve national security and help get a trade deal done with China. Such a move would essentially pit Mr. Trump against his own Justice Department, which coordinated with Canada to arrest Ms. Meng as she changed planes in Vancouver.
I wonder if it's because Huawei's equipment or staff played a role, or if they just want to use Meng as a bargaining chip in the demands regarding cybersecurity and IP.
It's a direct method of pressuring China's political elite.
It's also from the justice department, meaning multiple groups of eyes were on this decision, not a few anti-China hawks. China does have a history of this kind of behavior.
It's definitely the government's SOP to try and exfiltrate data from the west, and it's no small secret. I feel everyone is getting pretty nonchalant about it.
Edit: witness the downvotes - my point exactly.
It doesn't take much.
With that said, China has a history of bad behavior, especially with regards to cyber-warfare against US companies.
There also seems to be more acceptance of that even in the business world. I get contacted by Chinese tech companies offering partnership deals because I've made YouTube videos about electronics and they tend to have interesting contractual agreements surrounding social media.
For instance, no other tech company has ever asked me to censor negative user comments if I review their product but multiple Chinese companies have requested exactly that. One of them worded it as "silencing the slanderous tiny trumpets".
Love it!
It feels to me either my personal bias of where I think the world opinion stands is off (e.g. # of ulta-defensive of China comments > I expect), or there is in fact organized pro-china comments. Maybe a mix of both!
https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi...
I think there might be a lot of confirmation bias going on
The Snowden leaks showed without a doubt that US intelligence has no qualms collecting and admitting to spying on ALL communication between non-US citizens. Without telling anyone... hacking a marriot database is peanuts in comparison.
Somehow whatever the US does to protect its interests is moral but when another country does the same its evil or "concerning". Bullshit US paternalism.
Whataboutism is about responding to a criticism of your countries internal problems with a criticism of theirs. This is not about internal problems, its about what one country can do to another.
But surveillance is one issue (which is valid and we should talk about it). Stealing intellectual property using your intelligence apparatus in a way that benefits your state-sponsored businesses is another. We can talk about that too.
I’m talking about the Chinese governments perspective. From their perspective, until the the NSA stops spying (whether its criticized by US citizens or not) it does not make sense for China to stop spying either, purely to equalize the playing field. I’m against spying too but i can understand why any country wants to protect its interests.
In China, that is not possible. Freedom of speech does not exist nor does freedom of press. Whether critizing made a difference (btw, yes it did. Snowden’s revelations has had a profound impact on spying on citizens, not just in the US but in the history of mankind in the digital age) is irrelevant.
China deserves criticism and so does US. The difference is that in the US, we can freely critize everything without the fear of anything. China has no such luxury and therefore, it needs even more criticism.
The closest you come to that is with the CIA Vault 7 stuff (from WikiLeaks) which as we now know probably came from Russian sources, was probably also exaggerated, and we don't have any proof that it was used outside of targeted operations. It would be dumb for government not to develop tools for dealing with other nation-state hackers.
In fact, maybe that's exactly how we can pin attribution to China in this case.
I'll repeat my previous position:
> [...] surveillance is one issue (which is valid and we should talk about it). Stealing intellectual property using your intelligence apparatus in a way that benefits your state-sponsored businesses is another. We can talk about that too.
There is a difference, imo, and we should continue to talk about what China is clearly doing.
Yes, there is equally horrible shit going on with both sides. But that is absolutely no justification for accepting it.
I'm against spying too, but if everyone else does it I can understand why China would want to also purely to equalize power. Its the same situation as nukes - i dont like them, it would be great if no one had them, but if some already do i fully understand why others would want to get them.
My answer is this - what we are seeing I feel is a build-up to a massive power shift in the coming decades. As the climate changes and resources undoubtedly become scarce (water, food, etc) something will eventually trigger a conflict between the major nations, which currently people refuse to believe is a possibility. I'd guess the relative economic stability of the last several decades has lead to this.
When the curtain inevitably falls, which would you prefer to take the baton. A quasi-democratic nation (US) that has clear pitfalls but at least a large portion of people living in relative freedom of thought, or the nation which has revoked the need to run elections, actively black-bags people for saying the wrong thing about their government, and institutes wide ranging censorship on a variety of important issues?
Neither side is perfect, but it must be objectively said that the humanitarian state of affairs in China is dismal.
Currently we are seeing the government in China stifling dissent as well as preparing to quash as much possibility of it in the future, while actively probing "the other side" for weaknesses.
In any strategic sense, what's going on right now should be concerning. And while the thought of 'picking sides' does honestly suck, I'll throw the question back at you.
What would you prefer?
None of the above, as the U.S. is pretty much an oligarchy at this point. There was a study showing that unless you have a sizable sum of money, your priorities simply aren't worth much to lawmakers.
Why is there no single payer for example, even as the majority of the population is for it?
So to answer your question, I'd much prefer a world where the U.S., China, Russia, India, Brazil and the European Union are roughly on equal footing and then there are a bunch of smaller states that can try different systems, without getting economically strangled by the U.S. the moment their system isn't 100% predatory capitalist like in the U.S.
That way, any of these will have to think long and hard before commuting to a significant unilateral action, resulting in a much better equilibrium than we have now.
Anyways, as to your question -
In short:
The way I see it, China will not displace the US as a global power anytime soon. It may become a 2nd global power in addition to the US. I think a multipolar world is healthier than a unipolar world for the same reasons competition makes markets better.
I think much of the frenzy around China is a US-centric reaction to the them potentially losing its spot as clear #1, but the world is better off without a clear #1.
More details:
China is absolutely not a democracy the way the US is. I do agree the US treats its OWN people better than China. But I'm not a US citizen - thats not really relevant to me.
The US is historically much crueler to foreign enemies than any other country - no one else comes close to how many countries they have invaded, bombed, etc. We have already seen them invade and kill millions in Iraq under scarcity of oil. If things head towards scarcity again, who is to say they wouldn't do the same things again? China by comparison has mostly left other countries alone.
I care about how the power balance affects the rest of the world besides US/China. As do 6B others. I absolutely support people’s right to argue for their own benefit, but they must atleast recognize that is what they are doing. Honestly im really tired of seeing a constant default equivocation between “whats good for the US” and “whats good for the world”. Those are often different things.
Before you put US on the same pedestal of morality as China, you must equate them on apples to apples basis. Picking and choosing horrible things US has done in the past is very convenient.
I immigrated to US and I’ve travelled extensively over the world. If you’re picking and choosing Guantanamo, Iraq war, etc. then I can do the same about Tianman square.
Let’s objectively assess the situation without picking and choosing - I can do the same about positive aspects of US: functioning justice system, representative democracy, cultural diversity and acceptance, LGBT rights, freedom of speech, freedom of press, right to run for public office, ... we could go on and on about this with no end.
I have a humble request: When arguing about A, please do not talk about B to escape the reality and scrutiny that A deserves. It’s distracting and tiring.
Digital espionage/cyberintelligence/hacking is a boring standard part of intelligence for ANY country that has the capability.
I brought up the Snowden stuff only as evidence that the US does it too. The point is not to criticize the US, the point is any country that can do digital espionage, China included, is doing it, simply because no one wants to fall behind in a global arms race. I don’t think that makes China the evil boogie man.
And I don’t appreciate the straw manning and condescension. I’m not trying to make some broad “China is better than the US” argument.
> And I don’t appreciate the straw manning
If you have to turn "scrutiny" into "makes it the evil boogie man", that's kind of a giveaway. I would call this the compiler error of online comments, and static typing can catch errors without having to run the program every time. Which doesn't only save you time, but the readers too; starting the program, getting bogus results, freeing memory and writing a bug report takes much more time.
> I’m not trying to make some broad “China is better than the US” argument.
I don't know what you tried, but going by what's written here, you responded to the criticism of nonchalance with "the problem is that $random_stuff_about_the_US_nobody_denies", as if that refutes said criticism.
When there is an article about a disease, wouldn't it make sense to talk about all sorts of other diseases instead, so nobody thinks that disease is "the evil boogie man"? Are comments about US spook stuff also riddled with comments about China or Israel or any other the hundreds of nations, just so nobody gets the impression that "the US is the only country doing this"?
Why not simply assume everybody knows these very basic things? It's not like any comments (I saw) imply that they don't, unless you read that into them.
I think the mistake you make here is that we're talking about China's interaction vs the rest of the world and comparing that to U.S. interaction vs the rest of the world, which is more important to many than what is done domestically, because most of the people on here aren't in China, but the U.S. interference affects them even if they're not in the U.S., which is mostly not true for China.
How many coups has China been involved in as compared to the U.S. for example? Because these affect people on the other end of the globe from the U.S.
Why was there a military-style raid on Kim Dotcom in NZ, for something that is possibly a crime in the U.S.?
Why was there pressure put on Sweden to prosecute TPB from the U.S. side?
How come the U.S. claims to believe in the free market, but when a Chinese firm gets competitive there, they try to block them?
How come U.S. feels entitled to bomb in foreign territory, where they were not invited by the local government? Without UN approval at that?
How come U.S. feels entitled to bully other nations at the UN to vote their way on Palestine?
How come is it OK for the U.S. to attack a country that did not attack them?
How is it OK to go to war on a completely false pretext?
How is it OK for the U.S. to use chemical weapons?
How is it legal for the U.S. to commit terrorist acts in other countries?
How is it OK for the U.S. to tell other countries that they can't have nuclear weapons even as the U.S. is the only country to ever use the in war?
How is it moral for the U.S. to block civilian and medical goods, starve a country and help commit war crimes?
There are plenty of more local issues too, like the War on Drugs, the targeting of minority communities, the infiltration of civil rights groups, the jailing of whistleblowers and intimidation of journalists etc. but the above affects much of the world in some way or another.
This is why U.S. behavior is seen as such a problem outside its own borders. China has nowhere near the worldwide reach the U.S. does.
It is very much possible that Chinese hackers got this data because they could and it is lucrative and then sold to players including govt. And US intelligence is only passing selective info. to show Chinese govt as the primary perpetrator.
Not that situations haven't arisen where exec is in disagreement with intel (Iraq, for instance) but that's pretty rare. And it's hard to tell exactly until more info comes in and other agencies corroborate.
My point was that this isn't one person trying to start something. Multiple people had to be involved if what the Times is reporting here is correct.
Not everything is a conspiracy.
Even then, it was more complicated than that because Iran was on the verge of attacking Iraq (which is probably why the admin and military were pushing to move in the first place).
Tangent aside, it's different when US administrative, US intelligence, and multiple other countries are in agreement about Chinese hacking and intellectual property theft.
There's plenty of examples of the CIA manufacturing evidence, doing coups etc. so that doesn't mean much either. What matters is the result.
This is not my position, but it's very clear that is the most vocal sentiment being expressed and seems to be the most prevalent even among those who aren't very vocal.
I don't think these folks have any more faith in China than they do the US, moreso, they don't see China as as much of a threat to themselves and others as the US.
As an European, I just don't think China has as much power over me as the U.S.
Also, ask Kim Dotcom who he thinks is the bigger problem.
They need to understand there are real consequences for these actions.
What about all the hundreds of billions of dollars in other goods that are manufactured there that the West is reliant on?
I also want to see consequences for these actions, but the situation is more nuanced than you seem to realize.
Would the western countries, companies and consumers suffer economically? Sure, but sometimes it's necessary to make sacrifices for the greater good, and it would be very shortsighted to ignore the threat China poses to the world.