As the sole proprietor of one of America’s least read blogs, I’m happy to welcome readers wherever I can find them. So, hello Chinese spies. Welcome aboard. The U.S. Government, on the other hand, is less happy to have learned that the Chinese have read the files of 4 million government employees with security clearances and have stolen their personal data. We all now seem to be living in an episode of “The Blacklist,” or possibly, after this latest infiltration, “The Manchurian Bureaucrat.”
Commentators on this security breach have suggested the three spy services most skilled at penetrating the security of sovereign states are the Russians, the Chinese, and the Iranians. That’s comforting. Others have argued that it may not be the government doing the hacking in Russia, but organized crime. With a kleptocrat at the top, that seems like a distinction without a difference. It seems safe to assume that if these tightly controlled states didn’t sanction such behavior it wouldn’t be happening.
Of course, if those three countries were making the list (or Angela Merkel, for that matter), the country identified as the most aggressive cybnerspook would probably be the United States. In other words, everybody does it. And since we pioneered the internet and its discontents, we do seem surprisingly bad at preventing their spooks from penetrating our cyberspace.
Part of this is owned to our libertarian notion of the internet as a Commons where everyone is welcome, free to come and go, read and be read. It’s a pleasant New England Town Meeting notion, but our adversaries, along with the usual swindlers and Peeping Toms, are all too willing to take advantage of this free access, picking the pockets of the town meeting attendees, reading their mail and looking into their bedroom windows.
Totalitarian states have the advantage in having no compunction about creating a restricted wired world in which Big Brother decides who can see what and controls all ingress and egress – or tries hard to do so. Thus we have an asymmetric cyberwar as a result of opposite cultures.
Closed cultures are harder to spy on; open cultures easy. And the computer systems created by laissez faire capitalists are vulnerable to malware, spyware, viruses and hacks as the track record of the notoriously corruptible Microsoft software proves. Always profitable, but never made safe, decade after decade. We are all going to have to accept our nakedness to our enemies or learn to live very differently.
I grew up in a small town, as did my father before me, where everybody knew everybody else’s business. He never said it in so many words, but the unspoken ethos of that time and place was – never tell anybody anything about your personal affairs. It’s nobody’s business but your own.
He was a perfectly genial man who actually had very little interest in other people’s secrets and had few of his own to keep, but he also had a bit of the Gary Cooper –yep, nope –thing about him. He didn’t go blabbing about private matters, which tended to encompass everything from his childhood, to his bank balance to his feelings about the opinions of others. He kept his own counsel, as they used to say. He wasn’t being deliberately secretive. He just didn’t expect anybody to be interested, and if they were rather thought that prying was bad manners.
How far away that is from our present tendency to share everything compulsively. Our ideas, our prejudices, our schedule, our whereabouts, our intimate relationships, our darkest secrets. We post and tweet and Flickr and blog and Instagram and Vine and Facebook and never shut up or distinguish between public and private.
We are astonishingly free with our information. We are as anxious as puppies to be liked and just as yappy. Our companies are lax about securing data that should be protected as breaches at Sony and Target and dozens of other companies show, including defense contractors. Our spy agencies leak. Congress and the White House leak. Sometimes it seems as if the only government employee who can keep his mouth shut is Clarence Thomas.
If we don’t return to the taciturn ways of our ancestors, we’ll be sorry. Many of us who shared too freely already are. And if we don’t begin to question our reliance on hackable computer networks for our daily survival, our lights may go out, our planes fall from the sky, our digitized money vanish and our vaunted defense prove worthless.
Are those tasked with keeping us secure getting the message? I don’t know and neither do you. But the Russians, Chinese and Iranians who read the mail and listen to the phone calls of our defenders probably know exactly how unprepared we are, our strong points and glaring weaknesses.
Twenty-six centuries ago in China, it was explained by Sun Tzu that the acme of skill is to defeat the enemy without fighting, and this can only be achieved through foreknowledge. This “cannot be elicited from spirits, nor from gods, nor by analogy with past events, nor from calculations. It must be obtained from men who know the enemy’s situation.” And the internet is where such information can now be found.