China suspected of breaching U.S. Postal Service computer networks (opens in new tab)

Obama is heading to China again, time to publish a story about them hacking again? This quote was interesting because it seems to confirm that the whole story is smoke and mirrors for some political agenda.

Before Snowden I actually bought into this whole 'the Chinese are hacking us' refrain. I don't see how they can keep up with it with a straight face anymore.

I think the US has zero credibility pointing the finger here. Spend 1/10th as much on defense as offense and then maybe complain your system protected by default passwords and zero encryption got "hacked".

The PRC doesn't feel embarrassment about this, but not because of anything the US is or isn't doing. The way they see it, espionage is a fair method of catching up to (and then exceeding) the US, and if it keeps working then maybe the US should actually do something about it. After all, it's not like the Chinese ever voted for strong "intellectual property" protection, they see it as a rule imposed on them by the rest of the world instead of some universal behavioral norm.

The US complaining about their hacking just proves to them how effective it is.

Now, the US engages in strategic espionage for different reasons (just as China actually engages in strategic espionage, which the US doesn't complain about in public). But US representatives should be embarrassed here just because their whining proves the point to the PRC.

The US doesn't engage in economic espionage, and then turn around and give/sell intellectual property to US companies.

Cause at this point everyone knows the US is trying to get into _everyone's_ systems, so it probably sounded hypocritical to himself for him to say it's a big deal when China does it. He's got to come up with something.

It's too late for "gentlemen do not read each other's mail".

IMO the real goal is HUMINT, getting access to a list of people with security clearance (including all of their personal information) meaning China can now easily target them individually. Blackmail or pay them off, convert them to informants/spies within the postal system. A postal system now flush with tons of data about every American citizen.

It's much easier to have people embedded in the system, long term, extracting data... than it is to exfiltrate data remotely from China via hacking.

The data these people have access to is quite an important intelligence asset:

> the Chinese may be assuming that the U.S. Postal Service is more like theirs — a state-owned entity that has vast amounts of data on its citizens, said James A. Lewis, a cyber-policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Second, he said, the trend in intelligence is the same as in the commercial sector: amass big sets of data that can be analyzed for previously unknown links or insights.

So the US spying made Chinese spying easier (as expected). Wonderful.

I worked for USPS. When I saw this title I immediately assumed that China was after the main database which contains information on basically every US citizen. As a developer I had access to some databases and was told that USPS had the third largest database in the world. This was before Facebook, but still, there is a lot to be had other than employee information.

Not really- while the USPS does take pictures of all mail, there is no specific evidence that the hackers were after or accessed that data- making it speculation and not news.

That is not the lede, it is an offhand comment by a unnamed analyst, but don't worry it will show up as the lede on the TechDirt blogspam version.

> It was USSR before. It has been China since 1990's. An imaginary and powerful enemy has to be created.

I agree that espionage is over-emphasized -- everyone does it. Also I agree that some like to imagine enemies; it fits their narratives. That doesn't make every enemy imaginary.

The USSR was a real enemy. Many Chinese leaders openly proclaim themselves our enemy and they take aggressive actions against us; among the public, aggressive nationalism is at least somewhat popular. Hopefully the relationship doesn't turn out that way, but it's a real risk that I don't think we should ignore.

Sadly, in the "right" hands (or after the "right" catastrophy), nothing is too small for the title. Or it can be just made up, like "they're throwing babies out of incubators". And just as sadly, this goes both ways, "the west" also served as an excuse for decades of atrocities in China and Russia.

Got a source on "every"?

I am not sure if I agree with your rationale. An agent of a government acts on behalf of his or her government. According to your reasoning, a nation cannot breach a system or wage war because it is an agent that does the hacking or a soldier that does the firing.

Nevertheless, I liked this excerpt by the NSA's general counsel:

> Still, “it’s perfectly appropriate for us to do everything we can to embarrass and punish the Chinese if they’re in our systems, whether or not we’re in theirs,” said former National Security Agency general counsel Stewart A. Baker. “It’s the case that the U.S. and Russia and other countries are much more cautious about getting caught because they think there are going to be consequences. It’s only the Chinese that think there are no consequences to getting caught.”

Are they not agents of the nation of China?

I think it's accurate to describe NSA instrusion sets as the work of agents of the United States.

Or does it change context when it's an organization you don't like (NSA) ?

The actors are members of a larger system, the government, and act on its behalf and in most cases with its explicit approval and support. They're all parts of the same entity and by trying to distance the actor from the system would be to remove some level of responsibility that all parties share in.

Also, I don't think there's a world of difference between saying the CIA launched a drone strike and America launching a drone strike. I know the general public would like to believe they are not personally responsible for what our country does but as citizens, we collectively share in what we as a whole have decided to do or what those we've put in charge have decided to do.

Functionally, what's the difference? Supposedly a Chinese government team would be acting on behalf of the nation of China and at their orders. I don't think anyone would interpret that as saying that every single Chinese citizen was involved.

Are you trolling? What is the difference?