Yes, nearly-indiscriminate colossal-scale industrial espionage being funneled to state-controlled companies is NOT a cyber activity in which most nation states engage.
If your reply is going to be about British textile machinery or some one-off accusation from the last century, please focus on the scale of the accusations against the CCP, as well as consensus global norms of the current era.
>... please focus on the scale of the accusations against the CCP, as well as consensus global norms of the current era
There is no consensus on 'norms' for cyber-espionage and every country is operating the the gray-areas. There is no red-line that defines what an act of war is. It wasn't long ago that the NSA was listening to Angela Merkel's phone calls; this is far more aggressive than industrial espionage, in my book.
Every nation does industrial espionage - in the "national interest"
My assertion is that all advanced nation states engage in cyber warfare against one another, sometimes for the purpose of industrial espionage, sometimes for the purpose of achieving geopolitical goals (regime change, influencing elections, etc).
As long as we're talking about unsubstantiated claims (and yes, that is all they are at the moment unsubstantiated), I would hazard a guess that the U.S is by far the largest, most capable and most pervasive wager of cyber warfare and espionage of them all -which incidentally is probably the reason why they are so paranoid. One would have to be supremely naive to think otherwise.
Many tools used by these alleged Chinese state hackers were likely generously donated by the NSA themselves during their own cyber operations [1].
The consensus global norms of the current era is that everybody is hacking everybody at massive scale in order to further their own strategic interests -the same as it has always been. The only thing worthy of attention is the fact that these attacks are only being publicly disclosed now, coincidentally in the middle of a trade war, when the U.S administration is grasping for support from the American public against China.
There's important nuance here that has a large impact. I'm not talking about geopolitical espionage, which I'd agree goes in all directions.
I'm talking about concerted IP / business secrets theft which is then funneled to domestic companies. I call these companies "state-controlled" because they are ultimately susceptible to the authoritarian central government's will.
I can't think of anywhere else in the world where this is not only routine, but coordinated at massive scale. Can you inform me what I'm missing?
Edit: I disagree with your last point too. There's been plenty of reporting on Chinese IP theft dating back years, it's only increased in prominence. Trump is waging the trade war partially because of the history of hacking. It was a point of contention throughout Obama's admin too, but Trump is handling it his way. (Obama's answer was TPP, but deployed too late)
> I call these companies "state-controlled" because they are ultimately susceptible to the authoritarian central government's will.
If the companies are susceptible to the government's will, then attacks against the government would also be attacks on the companies. Defense and recovery against geopolitical espionage diverts resources away from those companies. Why is the drain on profit industrial espionage causes a problem while a drain on resources is acceptable?
You’re making a distinction between cyber industrial espionage and cyber geopolitical espionage and I’m not. I would classify all of these actions under the broad umbrella of cyber warfare. In this context, the OP’s assertion that Europe and the U.S need to “join the hard line on China” is based on the fundamentally flawed assumption that the EU and the U.S are simply innocent victims of cyber attacks. It implies that they, as pure, liberal and democratic as they are, have never, and would never engage in such reprehensible and illegal activities as hacking, unlike the big bad evil Chinese. It is my view that this is an untenable and fundamentally flawed position.
> I can't think of anywhere else in the world where this is not only routine, but coordinated at massive scale. Can you inform me what I'm missing?
Why would you need me to inform you about something that I’ve never claimed? My claim is that nobody’s hands are clean when it comes to cyber warfare, not that China has never before engaged in the type of espionage you describe.
> Edit: I disagree with your last point too. There's been plenty of reporting on Chinese IP theft dating back years, it's only increased in prominence. Trump is waging the trade war partially because of the history of hacking. It was a point of contention throughout Obama's admin too, but Trump is handling it his way. (Obama's answer was TPP, but deployed too late)
I’ve addressed the industrial espionage point above. As far as the trade war: Trump is waging his trade war because of the trade imbalance between the U.S and China as he has repeated ad nauseam since day one. There was a particular point in time (probably around the time of the as-of-yet unsubstantiated and unretracted Bloomberg Supermicro story) where the hacking narrative was retroactively shoehorned in as a reason. I stand by my opinion that the timing of this report, along with the other recent mountains of anti-China mainstream media stories and social media posts, is highly suspect.
