U.S. announces first criminal charges against foreign country for cyberspying | Hacker News Reader

U.S. announces first criminal charges against foreign country for cyberspying

washingtonpost.com

90 pointsRogerh9171 comments

The point that most of you are missing is that the NSA's intelligence gathering activity and activities of that class are completely unrelated to these charges. They are being charged with economic hacking activities. Trade secrets were being lifted and handed to Chinese companies. An analog would be like the NSA harvesting data from Samsung and then passing it to Apple, which is the type of stuff that we have no evidence of thus far. Regardless of your feelings on the NSA's actions, this isn't the same type of "all countries hack each other" activity.

And if you think metal and solar companies are the only one suffering these sorts of attacks, you're crazy. I think it's just that the other victims don't want to be named publicly for a variety of reasons. This sort of activity is a serious problem, but you can't just file charges all willy-nilly. Fortunately the U.S. already had economic actions in motion through resolution channels pertaining to the dumping of solar tech, so it makes this sort of thing much easier to do I think.

>An analog would be like the NSA harvesting data from Samsung and then passing it to Apple, which is the type of stuff that we have no evidence of thus far.

What ?

We've known that the NSA was engaging in corporate espionage on behalf of American corporations for a long time now and the American government doesn't even deny it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/820758.stm (from 2000)

>The journalist, who has spent much of his life investigating Echelon, has offered two alleged instances of US snooping in the 1990s, which he says followed the newly-elected Clinton administration's policy of "aggressive advocacy" for US firms bidding for foreign contracts. The first came from a Baltimore Sun report which said the European consortium Airbus lost a $6bn contract with Saudi Arabia after NSA found Airbus officials were offering kickbacks to a Saudi official. The paper said the agency "lifted all the faxes and phone-calls between Airbus, the Saudi national airline and the Saudi Government" to gain this information. Mr Campbell also alleges that the US firm Raytheon used information picked up from NSA snooping to secure a $1.4bn contract to supply a radar system to Brazil instead of France's Thomson-CSF.

>former CIA director James Woolsey, in an article in March for the Wall Street Journal, acknowledged that the US did conduct economic espionage against its European allies, though he did not specify if Echelon was involved.

That's not the same thing as stealing trade secrets and giving them to a domestic company.

The European Parliament report is here: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...

Here is an example:

Who: NSA, What: Wind wheel for electricity generation, developed by Aloys Wobben, an engineer from East Frisia, Aim: Forwarding of technical details of Wobben's wind wheel to a US firm, Consequences: US firm patents the wind wheel before Wobben; (breach of patent rights)

Sounds exactly like "stealing trade secrets and giving them to a domestic company" to me.

I couldn't find the original source "Aktenkriegerì, SZ, 29 March 2001", but it sounds like a news report. If you can find the source, I would be happy to read it and judge it based upon its reported sources.

The European Parliament report cites a single journalist, Nicky Hager. This particular allegation was based on interviews with anonymous French intelligence sources.

Basically, the French government selectively leaked to a New Zealand journalist, to justify retaliation (tariffs at the EU level, which never materialized) against the US government for burning their Saudi deal.

There has never been any credible evidence that US intelligence agencies pass trade secrets to American companies.

http://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/960011/trans-atlanti...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enercon#Patent_dispute "the patent in question was registered in 1991, three years before the alleged espionage event"

True, though then France and other countries should be filing charges against the U.S. then, right?

True, and they are welcome to do so, though France might not be in the best position given the breadth and depth of its reported economic espionage of specific trade secrets and such.

So... and this question is for anyone...

what does any of this mean ????

Is it all basically posturing and everyone is stealing secrets from everyone whenever anyone can ???

I mean... does this just mean that the US is the only country that actually sued anyone for it ? I mean... even though we do the same thing too as anon1385 pointed out?

We're just playing dirty to make sure everyone else plays fair!

To be fair, I do agree with you.

Our leaders ask for intelligence about the activities of foreign nations and foreign companies. The US naturally avoids such actions because we have, in many cases, the most to lose, and tu quoque leads to MAD.

The article you linked to only has allegations of when a competing company lost a contract.

>NSA harvesting data from Samsung and then passing it to Apple, which is the type of stuff that we have no evidence of thus far.

There have been many, many stories published in the world's leading newspapers about NSA industrial espionage:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/nsa-busted-conducting-industria...

The NSA's own slides list "economic" as one of the main reasons for spying. And none of this is at all new:

https://www.fas.org/irp/program/process/991101-echelon-mj.ht...

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/1999/11/outfront-0

I would also point out that U.S. law specifically criminalizes economic espionage on behalf of foreign governments, but economic espionage on behalf of the U.S. government is not illegal.

TL;DR: It's absurd to think that the NSA isn't spying for economic information. Tons of evidence has been presented.

1. The NSA have been implicated in economic hacking/spying/espionage throughout the Snowden leaks.

2. The only - ONLY - country to have engaged in cyber WARFARE, is the United States; by unleashing stuxnet/flame on another sovereign state.

This is beyond hypocritical of the Americans. Not only does the US violate their own and international laws but to have the gall to stand in front of the world and sanctimoniously blow their own trumpet, it's disgusting.

>1. The NSA have been implicated in economic hacking/spying/espionage throughout the Snowden leaks.

Do you have a source? Curious because I have only seen things related to eavesdropping or bulk data collection. I am wondering if I missed something major.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-braz...

I see no proof on that page. I just see the word of a reporter, on most of his other reports there were links to slides or documents.

I hope this part is true:

>"What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of – or give intelligence we collect to – US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line."

Sounds like they are capturing data like this but not giving it you. What would they need it for? I dont see an honest reason or response.

Whatever the NSA say, the opposite is true. Whatever Snowden has provided, has been found true.

Come on. Wake up. They crossed every single line so far anyone can imagine. Of course they're doing industrial espionage.

Without actually arguing truth or falsehood here, you realize you're basically saying any accusation made against the NSA must be true, because they're so evil, and the evidence of their evil is the accusations made against them?

Sure, maybe they are involved in industrial espionage, that would actually seem less insane than some of the other things they've been accused of, for which evidence actually exists, but arguing that it must be true because it has to be true is just using cynicism as an excuse for intellectual laziness.

I dont see anything in the article someone else brought up linking to a Snowden doc. I want to see the Snowden doc that talks about Petrobras specifically.

Glenn Greenwald didnt even write that article, thats another reason I am having problems with the credibility. It sounds like a Fox News type channel in Brazil is making accusations but I want evidence not hearsay.

Link:http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-braz...

The slides are in the video broadcast by Fantastico:

http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents...

Regarding number 2, I believe the snowden leaks implicated the US and Israel for Stuxnet? The wikipedia source for that claim is http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/08/snowden_us_israel_st... which refers to this email interview: http://cryptome.org/2013/07/snowden-spiegel-13-0707-en.htm

>Interviewer: Did the NSA help to create Stuxnet? (Stuxnet is the computer worm that was deployed against the Iranian nuclear program.)

Snowden: NSA and Israel co-wrote it.

An analog would be like the NSA harvesting data from Samsung and then passing it to Apple

This sort of activity is a serious problem, and the NSA does engage in it. The US is no better than other countries in this regard.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-braz...

http://thehill.com/policy/international/198506-report-spies-...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/09/12/huawei_ac...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/nsa-busted-conducting-industria...

Did you accidentally post the wrong links? None of those provided more than speculation about the scenario under discussion (spying on foreign companies and passing the data to domestic companies). Mostly, all they discuss is spying against foreign governments or on government owned companies.

I honestly thought it was a very public 'secret' that China and Chinese companies 'adopt' much of their technology from elsewhere. Why else are we advised to travel with (essentially) burner laptops and phones when in China?

Is that not the case? If it's not, is this really the first time the US has had ample evidence or incentive to move forward?

US-Sino relations are volatile. I'm sure this has been discussed privately for years, but it was politically risky to talk about publicly. This is the first time they decided to take it public with force.

US and UK agencies openly state that their mission includes economic interests e.g.

http://www.gchq.gov.uk/how_we_work/running_the_business/over...

"We are primarily a foreign-focused intelligence agency, with a signals intelligence role that can only be exercised for three limited purposes: In the interests of national security In the interests of the economic well-being of the UK In support of the prevention or detection of serious crime."

How is the PLA hacking American companies and accessing designs different from the NSA hacking Huawei and accessing source code? Their justifications differ, but not their actions.

In case A, the PLA hands the data off to Chinese competitors for economic gain. In case B, no such activity happens. There's no economic leverage, just intel. We know the Chinese spy on us for strategic reasons, and we're not filing a case against that activity.

Basically, the military is acting as an arm of corporate espionage. That's a big no-no.

In case B, the NSA might not hand a briefcase of schematics to US companies for economic gain. But they have used stolen data to influence trade negotiations for the benefit of US companies. In both cases, the military could be said to have acted as an arm of corporate espionage, no?

> In case B, the NSA might not hand a briefcase of schematics to US companies for economic gain

Saying that the NSA wouldn't do that is stupid, and anybody who says otherwise is either ignorant or otherwise malicious.

The US government aids its corporations in every way it can, and it has done so throughout its history.

Except corporate espionage is not just about economic leverage, it can also be just about intel. You don't have to steal IP for it to be corporate espionage.

Basically, the military is acting as an arm of corporate espionage. In the US.

"which is the type of stuff that we have no evidence of thus far"

Not so. I apologize for putting you in the position of trying to prove a negative but

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/world/no-morsel-too-minusc...

specifically lists by topic "... the agency’s official mission list includes using its surveillance powers to achieve ... “economic advantage” over Japan and Brazil, among other countries."

Their own list of customers includes "United States Trade Representative"...

Combine the revolving door policy between .gov and .com with the merger of .com and .gov for all practical purposes, and ...

>They are being charged with economic hacking activities. Trade secrets were being lifted and handed to Chinese companies. An analog would be like the NSA harvesting data from Samsung and then passing it to Apple

Yes, of course, the bright red line isn't international espionage, it's economic espionage! [1]

[1]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-braz...

The US is bombarded with the ideology that politics and economics are separate subjects. When naturally, the point of that distinction is to severely mislead. (Capitalism itself couldn't exist without a huge infrastructure of laws and violence which supports it, like violence towards people who violate abstract social rights to "property".)

I can't think of any other reason besides economic hacking activities for tapping into Angela Merkel's (or Dilma Roussef's, or any other head of state) cellphone.

So yeah, we do play this game too, at a different scale. Not petty IP theft, but geopolitical buggery.

> An analog would be like the NSA harvesting data from Samsung and then passing it to Apple, which is the type of stuff that we have no evidence of thus far.

Not entirely true. Years ago, there was a big scandal where Boeing and Airbus were in a bidding war, and a US intelligence agency passed some vital data to Boeing in order to ensure the economic health of a big military contractor. (Unfortunately I have trouble finding a good source; googling for Boeing/Airbus scandals turns up a crazy number of results. I now find myself wondering why the one I remembered stood out.)

There was clear information that "If Agency will find that information gathered from NSA program will benefit to US it will be used, even if it's private commercial information". So yes, it's related to NSA. And very funny.

It's so strange seeing a person in full military outfit (and Chinese) on FBI's "cyber" most wanted list: http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/cyber

When it pretty much has always been 20-something eastern-euro/Russian and the odd middle eastern hacker.

Where? They might not be on that page anymore.

I swear there were no Chinese entries on that page the first time I looked...

I find that pretty hilarious

Also Wang Dong

For those who are calling the actions of the US "hypocritical" and others who are indiscriminately defending the US by saying "but we didn't do this and that" - don't forget to distinguish between individuals and countries.

Those who are doing this in China are most likely not doing this for China - they are taking advantage of state resources to benefit themselves and their cronies. As much as they are stealing from the US, they are stealing from their own citizens. This is good old-fashioned corruption.

The loop of corruption tends to be more subtle and longer in the US, but it's also most likely the case many people who are engaged in espionage, corporate or otherwise, are out for themselves and using the information, expenditures, etc, to directly or indirectly benefit themselves.

Random people from China and France and the US arguing among themselves pretending that the enemy is definitely the spying apparatus in the other country and not their own and so on is kind of missing the point and worse, doing exactly what the perpetrators want us to be doing. The discord between nations, manufactured or not, is their raison d'etre - it's what keeps them funded.

With that said, holding specific individuals responsible and make their lives difficult is sounds pretty good to me. I wish this happened more often, for US officials abusing their authority as well as foreign officials.

Edit: The point isn't that these people aren't employed by the Chinese government, but that the end goal is almost certainly private gains. China isn't some single unified entity where all government employees are working tirelessly for "China" or in this case, to benefit corporate titans who are much richer than they are - economic espionage on behalf of specific private sector entities is almost certainly about some quid pro quo by which government employees are monetizing their official capacity.

This is exactly what I thought. Think about the organizational challenge and the bureaucracy involved, there's no way for a "secret" spy unit's head to evaluate the economic value of all those targets, select for the ones needed, carry out the operation and distribute gained information to the corresponding domestic parties. It must work in the opposite way: the military set up the unit and recruited/trained the people for strategic missions like hacking through US military and private contractors. In the process of doing this, these people came across many other stuff, which they sell to other players through black market or backroom dealings to compensate themselves over the laughable salary they receive from the government. And I guess that's also how they got caught in the first place.

Bottom line is this, for your Particular corporation to be really helped by your government, there must be some corruption involved. I think this is true everywhere, but especially true in China.

"Those who are doing this in China are most likely not doing this for China - they are taking advantage of state resources to benefit themselves and their cronies"

Quite the contrary. Odds are that the people in China that could access computers, and the people that could spend months doing this ARE working for the government of China.

It is the Government of China he who has resources, not so individuals.

Individuals in China could be at much script kiddies. Education is poor at the moment, and most people are so poor that just buying a computer is a sacrifice.

But Government is very powerful there.

You think that people that work in the intelligence industrial complex don't use information they are privileged to for their own economic advantage? Heck, even members of congress are allowed to buy and sell stocks in companies even when there are conflicts of interest.

It may not be as direct as "I'll sell you 10k files from your main foreign competitor", but just because its done at arms length in the US doesn't make it any less corrupt.

Nice timing, Cisco just sent Obama a letter complaining about NSA tampering...

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27468794

I've yet to read up on this. But my initial reaction is: And zero accountability for those responsible for the gross systems mismanagement that too often enabled this activity.

I fear that security on the Internet is moving towards "rubber hose" security. It's not about truly securing systems and processes; instead, physical means will be used to intimidate and "punish".

And even then, it's not the truly responsible who are being intimidated. Nor, in the current circumstance, are the physical measures directly effective.

Instead, we have propaganda. "Don't look at our mistakes and neglect. Spend your anger and frustration on these foreign nationals, all conveniently framed for maximum effect. And never mind that we (government as well as private industry) do the same -- we're the 'good guys'."

I'd say this is an instance of the pot calling the kettle black but the US has done far more than simply spy on foreign companies so calling it straight up hypocrisy is a huge understatement.

Magicians misdirect the audience using similar tactics.

This is the equivalent to a woman in a skimpy outfit walking around on the stage, and bending over in a low-cut dress, while the magician switches one object for another.

I wonder if the Chinese will charge a few Americans with something in retaliation.

Standing on its own, this action is pointless. As part of a larger strategy to provide evidence to justify future tariffs or sanctions, it would make sense. My guess is that's where the US is heading with this.

hmmm... before Snowden said it out we didn't know anything about what NSA is doing, but at that time, the US government was always saying China is doing what NSA is doing.

I was not accusing anything, but you see, the announcement is lack of persuasion.

The spying game seems to be a zero-sum game. After charged china for spying for business, the US government may find it won't have any effect, then the best strategy will turns out to be doing the same. Think about the billions of the dollars companies spend as political contribution.

After the war begins, It really doesn't matter who shot the first bullet.

There is a lot of justifiable skepticism regarding spycraft. Read declassified accounts of the cold war. What happened swings between delusional paranoia -- where the Soviets thought the US & UK were preparing for a pre-emptive nuclear strike, to extremely serious, where the Soviets knew everything the US Navy was doing for a year. At best a zero sum game, at worst, it creates situations where wars start based on things that just aren't true.

Espionage is a bit different, but still a mess.

Presumably the only enforcement the US can take against those indicted here is financial -- which would mean assets that fall within the US's control. How does Beijing react?

The most interesting end effect of this could be the US's loss of criminal enforcement on the global financial system, reversing much of the benefits of post 9/11 anti-money laundering policy. Co-operation occurs when both sides benefit. I suspect some people in the US State Dept are very annoyed today.

No doubt said Chinese persons are distraught at the prospect of never being able to visit Disneyland. Short of WWIII there isn't much way to enforce such a verdict over foreigners on foreign soil.

I wonder what the motivation is behind these charges. I have a hard time believing this to be remotely comparable to what NSA is doing both in term of technical capability and scale. I mean, ffs, these "military hackers" use their initials in the aliases. (according to FBI's wanted page)

Nice moral high ground there!

Well, as they say, best defense is a good offense.

And this sort of thing is why you keep the moral high ground. Too bad, it would have been an excellent case otherwise.

I didnt realize Keith B. Alexander was Chinese. Good job on bringing appropriate charges and finally impeaching that bastard.

..oh wait

US Press Release - 'China are the bad guys and don't forget it!'

This just in: pot calls kettle black.

Hypocrites.

When can we file criminal charges against the US government?

At any court you like. It happens all the time.

Sure, if they want to be sued.

in what court exactly ?

Ironic. I guess.

Im surprised it isn't Russia they are going after. I guess the justice dept. didn't get the memo.

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