Until recently, Hollywood looked upon China with a mix of dread and desperation, but Hollywood’s view on Beijing has—in Washington parlance—evolved, because China is now where the money is.
While the story presented fresh evidence of Chinese hacking, the aftermath presents more questions than answers about U.S.-China relations, as well as the connection between U.S. media and Chinese government.
The accumulated evidence should retire the old notion that China’s most sophisticated hackers are just patriots freelancing from their parents’ basements.
Geng Yansheng, a spokesman for the Ministry of National Defense, says “The claim by the Mandiant company that the Chinese military engages in Internet espionage has no foundation in fact.”
Is this recent hacking really something new? Or merely our "threat inflation,"* cued both to the impending sequestration menace and February 2013 SOTU mentions of new efforts in cyber-security?
The report does not reflect the facts and is not professional, and the PLA has never supported any cyber espionage activities, China's defense ministry said on its official website in response to the accusation.
Obama administration officials acknowledged that China’s involvement in cyber-attacks is a near-constant subject of conversation between the nations’ officials but that there have been few signs that China is willing to stop the attacks.
From their website:
McClatchy's Washington-based journalists are part of the wider McClatchy network of news professionals who work in 14 states and 29 communities.
Our work appears on a variety of McClatchy's news products, from websites like this one, to mobile and tablet apps and on the printed pages of 29 separate newspapers. In all, more than 40 million people read McClatchy journalism each month.
The McClatchy Company has a long and storied history, beginning with its first newspapers founded during the gold rush days in California in the mid-19th Century. In 2006, McClatchy acquired the Knight Ridder Co., extending its reach across the United States from Florida to Washington State.
McClatchyDC's journalists are proud of our tradition of independence. Although our offices are just a few blocks from the White House, we aim to cover Washington from an outside-the-Beltway perspective. Relying in part on McClatchy's newsrooms, we report not just about the people who make the decisions in D.C. We also focus on the citizens of America, who must live with those decisions.
As a result, McClatchy's journalists have produced uniquely important journalism. We were alone in questioning the Bush administration intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction before the Iraq invasion. McClatchy led the reporting on the politicization of the Justice Department under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in the U.S. Attorney's scandal of 2007. Similarly, our journalists have done groundbreaking work on Goldman Sachs and the nation's financial collapse; on the Obama administration's insider threat investigations, military justice and on immigration.
At least 40 companies including Apple Inc., Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. were targeted in malware attacks linked to an Eastern European gang of hackers that is trying steal company secrets.
Within twenty-four hours of registration, Sina Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter) deleted the microblog account of Frank Hsieh, former premier of Taiwan’s pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Ironically, Hsieh’s last tweet before he lost the power to post on Weibo was: “Whether or not there is freedom of speech does not depend on how freely you speak when you criticize high officials or people in power, but whether you lose your freedom after you speak.”
