Chinese officials have adopted a conspicuously low-key attitude toward the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) affair. Part of the reason may be that Chinese officials are rejoicing at the troubles bedeviling the rival agency. Another cause is likely a desire to avoid reminding people of China’s own extensive cyber espionage activities, one of the reasons why the NSA engaged in its questionable activities. But it is still imperative to make progress in our bilateral discussions and dialogue on this issue.
Richard Weitz
The last few days have seen several new developments. An influential panel appointed by President Obama to review U.S. communications surveillance policies has recently proposed several dozen reforms. Some of them are already in the process of being implemented. For example, President Barack Obama has himself called for having a public interest advocate argue against the NSA in hearings before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The White House has also already begun requiring higher-level reviews of decisions to monitor the communications of foreign leaders. The public exposure that the NSA has been tapping Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone continues to harm U.S.-German relations. Similar revelations of U.S. monitoring of President Dilma Rousseff’s communications may have just cost Boeing a possible multi-billion dollar with the Brazilian air force.
But some of the panel’s recommendations are impractical, such as mandating that the phone companies rather than the NSA retain the records of all U.S. calls. These companies do not want to store these records since they, unlike the NSA, can be subject to many civil lawsuits demanding that they, for example, surrender their records in a divorce trial. However, now that U.S. District Judge Richard Leon has ruled that the NSA’s practice of collecting massive volumes of data automatically in case the records might ever prove useful is probably unconstitutional, the NSA needs to explain why they require more time to develop the technology for more targeted searches.
In the past, the NSA leaders objected to discussing in public all their operations since they did not want potential adversaries to learn of them. But now that Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who leaked details about secret surveillance programs and is now offering to help Brazil counter NSA monitoring in return for asylum, has revealed so many U.S. secret programs, we might as well have a healthy debate on these issues.
The NSA and U.S. policy makers are undoubtedly frustrated that they can’t discuss all the other countries that engage in similar communications monitoring. In particular, both Russia and China are thought to have comparable if not equivalent capabilities, while Iran and North Korea are becoming more active in this domain.
According to the documents stolen and publicized by Snowden, China has been a major target of U.S. intelligence collection. This is hardly a major revelation considering the importance of China in the world and the need for Americans to understand Chinese policies and motives. Intelligence agencies monitor precisely those actors that can have the greatest impact on their economic, diplomatic, and security interests. That explains why the Chinese devote so much of their cyber collection efforts to gathering information on the United States.
Chinese military strategists have long perceived cyber operations as integral tactics of war. They have expressed interest in developing asymmetric capabilities that could negate U.S. military strengths, such as advanced information processing that provide U.S. commanders with superior situational awareness. Internet security analysts identify hackers from China, as well as Russia, as the leading source of cyber theft of international intellectual property, primarily by means of installing malicious software on foreign computers. For example, the cybersecurity company FireEye found evidence that Chinese hackers placed spyware on European government computers to gain insights on how these countries would address the Syrian crisis at the G20 summit.
Chinese officials deny that these individuals work for their government. In the diffuse and opaque cyber environment, determining whether seemingly independent actors receive state backing is difficult. But we should be even more concerned if Chinese hackers can act so independently of their government that they could, as recently suggested by the NSA in a U.S. TV profile, threaten to destroy millions of U.S. computers or sell sophisticated cyber techniques to other criminal groups, terrorists, or foreign governments that could also threaten U.S. cyber security.
Chinese cyber activities extend far beyond U.S. targets. Perhaps for this reason, there is little evidence that U.S. friends and allies have stopped sharing intelligence with their U.S. counterparts. Despite having to manage the embarrassing media revelations, they still receive invaluable insights from the NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies regarding international terrorism, Chinese cyber activities, and other national security issues they receive from the United States.
Both Chinese and U.S. intelligence operations make sense from their national perspectives. China would like to learn as much as possible about the U.S. military-industrial complex and ideally learn how to thwart and copy superior U.S. military technology. Meanwhile, the NSA wants to keep tabs on what China is doing, whether in the United States and in other countries. But Beijing and Washington share some common cyber interests, such as denying terrorists access to secure Internet communications or cyber-based recruiting and propaganda.
China and the United States have a lot to discuss in their newly established working group on cybersecurity, including how to widen areas of possible cooperation while developing permissible rules of behavior for an activity where capabilities often overleap effective legislation and policy oversight.
Richard Weitz is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Political-Military Analysis at the Hudson Institute.
