02.23.13
Shoeshine: He stole for liberty and safety!
In the last fifteen years the US government, military and intelligence agencies have established a solid reputation as regular liars about everything. Particularly when it comes to national security.
Everyone knows this. Everyone also knows the mainstream news has abandoned caring about it.
So every week, something intelligence insulting is repeated again, delivered on menaces, or a single menace, that is threatening the republic, or worse, stealing wealth.
This week it was triggered by a report issued by Mandiant, a computer security firm interested in drumming up business, publicity and currying favor with the US government.
Mandiant’s report told about the Shanghai group, a Chinese military run espionage operation against everything in the United States, all from one building.
It is not news that the Chinese have an extensive espionage campaign conducted through cyberspace and in the real world, against this country. It does and it’s really annoying.
In fact, it is probably safe to say the building in Shanghai is, by far, not the only place involved in it.
But this report was delivered conveniently to capitalize on the Obama administration’s executive initiatives, all virtually pointless, to increase the nation’s defenses against alleged catastrophic cyberattacks on the infrastructure.
And various ex-military men, now lobbyists for big security firms, have been trotted out.
They conveniently say their bits, the traditional scripted theater of fear-mongering on the Chinese menace and cyberwar.
Special mention goes to Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and CIA, now a big can of cyberwar shoeshine for the Chertoff Group where he’s cashing in his chips.
This is how it has worked for the last decade or so. You do your time at the top of the national security heap, pursuing the process of war.
No one cares if you’re good or bad, you’re never replaced, just boosted up and the vast majority of Americans never know or can remember your name. You’re never exposed to the costs of war and the enemy can’t get at you, the lowers suffer that. But for being part of the army of colorless but very important men of national intelligence service, you proceed to the private sector where you are rewarded even more handsomely as totem pole and lobbyist for more predatory defense spending in your specialty.
Hayden’s comments for a story on the cyber-victimization of US corporations by Chinese intelligence for NBC have been so pompous and self-serving they bring on gales of laughter.
So I preserved them in a ROFLBOT cartoon.
Though the United States limits its espionage to national security interests, intelligence officials said, China has launched a well-organized campaign to steal American corporate secrets via the Internet.
“I know states steal secrets. Our states steal secrets. And we’re actually pretty good at it. But we self-limit. We steal things that are valuable and useful for your security, for your liberty and for your safety,??? Hayden said.
“This is stealing American wealth. It’s stealing American jobs. It’s stealing American competitive advantage,??? General Michael Hayden, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, said in an interview with NBC News.
This has become the common nonsense from the shoeshine corps of cyberwar. The Chinese are stealing our wealth, it is the greatest theft of the future in history.
There is never any figure attached to it because no such figures can be estimated.
On the other hand, one gets all kinds of figures on the loss of American wealth in the economic charts presented weekly by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman on his blog at the New York Times.
Of course, the data on these losses did not result from cyberespionage on everything in the US by the Chinese military.
It was the result of the global economic calamity brought on by the Wall Street financial district, a job of our own devise.
And this illustrates the disconnect between the Michael Haydens and the rest of us. None of this means anything to them except as careerism, a way of increasing self-worth, pure and simple.
The Haydens of government have no connection with the country beyond the DC/northern Virginia national security megaplex. If they actually believe the weird and ludicrous things they say, it’s only because they’ve spent their careers working in an environment where they’ve never been exposed to potentially damaging criticism and superciliousness.
So whatever Michael Hayden was stealing in the name of liberty and safety (say that again, feel the sneer forming on your lips) for us, it didn’t trickle down to the rest of America. And it never will.
Furthermore, while he was head of the CIA Hayden was at the center of the drone war and while he has been tepidly critical of the president’s current pursuit of it once he was out of power, he has spoken out of both sides of his mouth on the subject. Hayden blows whichever way the wind does, apparently.
Gen Michael Hayden believed the results [of the drone program] had been spectacular.
“A significant fraction of al-Qaeda senior leadership in the tribal region has been ‘taken off the battlefield’,” he said.
“That used to mean ‘killed or captured’. In the last couple of years it simply means killed. We just aren’t doing any capturing.”
Ironically the CIA’s drone programme was greatly accelerated under President Obama who has authorised more than 160 Predator missions – four times as many as his predecessor, President George W Bush, targeting not just al-Qaeda but Taliban leaders also hiding in the border areas.
The programme has been highly contentious and controversial.
Gen Hayden denied the attacks were state-authorised assassinations. He said the US was at war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and was simply acting in self-defence.
When I pointed out that legally the war was in Afghanistan not Pakistan, he said that was not how the American administration looked at it.
This raises the ridiculous question sometimes posed in sarcastic 140-character tweets on Twitter: “Why don’t we launch a drone strike or a cruise missile on the Chinese hacker building in Shanghai?”
The answer’s obvious. They’re not destitute nobodies in the sandy wastes of the most desperate places of the world. They’d fight back.
(As a side note, this is the degenerate state of debate on cyberwar. Ten years ago you could occasionally find critical voices saying something on it for news agencies. Now that’s all gone, the only thing left being to do it on Twitter with a hashtag or two.)
Besides, corporate America depends on China — to disappear the wealth of Americans who used to work for Apple and … and … and, you know.
The shoeshine of cyberwar — from the archives.