Spy charges expose US cyber hegemony mentality
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E-mail Xinhua, May 22, 2014
While the U.S. has touted threats to cyber security from abroad, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been one of the most active attackers of computer systems around the world.
China is in fact a major victim of persistent and large-scale cyber attacks from the U.S. targeting China's government institutions, schools, universities, companies and even individuals.
China has always requested that the U.S. give a clear and thorough clarification on why it targeted Chinese institutions and people, but the country has still not received it.
The unfounded charge against Chinese officers amounts to the same hypocrisy as a bandit calling for justice.
The Europeans were alerted to risks by a European Parliament report more than a decade ago that the U.S. uses sophisticated electronic spying techniques to gather economic intelligence.
The report put forward extensive claims that the U.S. NSA routinely tracks telephone, fax, and email transmissions from around the world and passes on useful corporate intelligence to American companies.
Among the allegations, the NSA fed information to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing, enabling the companies to beat out European Airbus for a multi-billion dollar contract.
U.S. intelligence, by virtue of data provided by nine Internet companies, including Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Yahoo, and other major telecom providers, tracked citizens' private contacts and social activities recklessly, according to the Washington Post.
Allegations of rampant U.S. electronic espionage have unfolded on a global scale in the wake of damaging revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
After it was exposed that Brazil's state oil giant Petrobras was also targeted by U.S. surveillance, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said the U.S. spying was out of economic and strategic interests instead of concerns about terrorism as Washington had claimed.
Instead of offering a sincere "sorry," Washington has found that mudslinging at other countries is a way to remedy its image, which has been tarred by its global spy program.
Unless the U.S. casts away the cyber hegemony mentality of turning the Internet into a tool to monitor the whole world and consolidate its own status, it will be impossible to build a just international order or avoid high-risk behavior online.
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