For the past two years NASA and JPL have been under heavy hacker attack from China, according to NASA’s inspector general.
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The Chinese people seem to have a low opinion of patent or copy rights.
They also have a different opinion of imagination in general. I have heard a few Chinese students say that they don’t have to have an imagination they just have to pass the tests and get a job. Inventing something new is just not normal in their culture.
I have heard Chinese businessmen actually say. “Why invent something new when they can make just as much money copying and selling something someone else did already.” Stealing and idea is not really stealing.
So of course their government would reflect this philosophy.
Why invent when you can steal it.
Its easy enough to stop. Just have each government organization set up a dummy computer network and fill it with wrong information. The same can be done with every company out there.
Eventually they will stop because they have no way to find out what is good info or bad.
I don’t know why they’d want to hack NASA, they have a more capable space program than we do. I’d think that they’d be more interested in our superior welfare-check printing technology.
There is some evidence that the Chinese culture is not an innovative culture.
They invented stamps to use in printing, but in over a thousand years never invented movable type.
They invented gun powder but after 1500 years never invented the cannon or hand gun.
They invented paper, and a seismograph but they never put the two together.
They used the square sail which has a very hard time sailing against the wind. They also knew of the lateen sail from the middle east and India which moved against the wind and turned very well but didn’t make great power. In 5 hundred years they never combined the two.
They are doing what they have always done. Copying only what they know works.
Three years. The report Keith Cowling points to at NASA WATCH came out last year (“February 29″).
It’s obnoxious. I trust we’re responding tit-for-tat and taking punishing countermeasures.
OTOH, maybe this is the modern age’s equivalent of the code breaking that governments engaged in back in the 1930′s and 1940′s? We’re all under increased scrutiny these days, with each of our actions, each of our emails, each of our phone calls, each of our store purchases being examined for hints that we are tax evaders, terrorists, Palmolive soap users, pederasts, gun nuts, rude to American Indians, salacious toward cheerleaders, etc. Why should corporations and government organizations expect less rigorous examination?
Ya, it would be naive to think that we are not also engaging in this type of behavior.
There are some people who think that China is not a threat and that we are not competing with them but incidents like this show that they are and we are.
The astonishing part is that they had full access to JPL for two years. We should have known and done something about it.
I remember Chinese hackers trying to get into the company I worked for which had no great secrets. I just think it’s very common. What are a few billion young guys to do without any girlfriends?
What the hell are we going to get off of them?
What have they developed on their own in the last 20 years?