Barbarians at the digital gate

At the same time, increasingly we cannot even learn what laws and legal interpretations are being used to "govern" (or, "rule") us. Particularly with regard to that same data mining, but far from exclusively that.

Our "regime" is fearful of exposure to public knowledge, but is busy scarfing up as much public and private data as possible.

P.S. Substitute "government" with "commercial", in the above, and you have the other half of the picture, here. Corporations building data towers and relationships that remain largely opaque to those they study.

Some quotes commented:

"hacking—both for purposes of monitoring and to steal commercial intellectual property or government secrets—has become the Chinese way"

The free nature of Internet allows by default also such "condemnable acts" like monitoring. Everyone can do it and I mean starting from an individual looking who's talking what about him/her up to organizations social/economical/political/etc. in nature, including governments. Why is it suddenly "the Chinese way"? About the "stealing", well - you may redefine the term say, to fit your view/interests in judge court (to imprison folks like Aaron Shwartz), or to bend the game's rules if you are a corporation looking to criple the competition, but the abuse of power can only go so far as a given higher authority is able to go. You therefore may name things as you like inside your courtyard, but don't forget about couryard's limits and do not fall into clownish play.

"alerting incidents" [...] the report noted, though it left the specifics of those incidents to a classified annex.

We hope their denials are better grounded [...] when confronted with evidence of hacking.

Interesting read, isn't it? Double-standards at its best!

"It is much more efficient for the Chinese to steal innovations and intellectual property," they wrote, "than to incur the cost and time of creating their own."

A strong and amusing claim for ownership of information/innovation/intellectual property, popped out of the ilusion that it belonged/belonges to someone in the first place.

That's right as far as it goes, though nobody should get the idea that Beijing's cyberraids are part of some Robin Hood-like quest to spread the technological wealth around.

Smells like brainwashing. This is how _ONE_SHOULD_ think, huh?

It's also a plain-old crime, undertaken by a government that fancies itself the world's next superpower but acts like a giant thievery corporation.

An interesting (and very twisted) view - the assumption and assessment of moral conduit at the level of governments regarding the hacking activities...