"White House sources partly confirmed an alarming report that U.S. government computers -- reportedly including systems used by the military for nuclear commands -- were breached by Chinese hackers." Fox News.
During the Cold War--the one with the Soviet Union--each side was constantly probing, constantly surveilling the other, by spy planes for instance or, in the case of submarines, by the "pings" they gave off which revealed their location (I don't think submarines ping anymore). I was in grad school at the height of the Cold War and I remember learning of some of the extravagances of these cat-and-mouse games. One time, between pings, the U.S. snuck a sub into Murmansk harbor, Murmansk being then, maybe now too, the most heavily guarded of ports, and beat it out before the Rooskis knew they had been in.
These cat-and-mouse games could wear on a fellow I promise this will come back to current Chinese computer hacking and when they didn't wear on the nerves they could be tedious, the whole business could be tedious. Mischief allays tedium. Mischief is caused by tedium. I remember being told or reading, I can't remember which (my lack of memory would have made me a poor spy), that some U.S. guy who had authority to order this kind of mischief got tired of the constant, tedious--and clumsy--Soviet surveillance and decided to order all U.S. submarines to go "dark" (no pings) at the same time, and for a prolonged time. And so they did. And the Rooskis shit. "Boris, where go Americans?" The U.S. guy ordered the U.S. subs to scurry in the dark as fast as they could to different, preferably secure, Soviet waters. And they did that too. And then the U.S. guy ordered all U.S. subs worldwide to simultaneously ping their new locations. And all Rooski military officials worldwide shit simultaneously. The Americans did it just because. Just to show the Rooskis we could; to show them we were goood, and to show them they were not as good as they thought they were.
And now we come back to China. The Chinese sure get caught a lot doing their shit. For every one story like today's, like their attacks on Google, that becomes public, there have to be a hundred, or a thousand, others that we, the public, never know about. But I think official-we, the U.S. government and private U.S. companies that are hacked, know the vast majority of the time. When you get publicly caught this many times, you're not very good, you're clumsy, like the Soviets were. And you're being caught a hundred or a thousand times more that the public never knows about. Maybe not the Chinese either, maybe they don't know all the times they get caught :o. That would make U.S. guys laugh.
Image: "The Artist as He Imagined Himself Laughing," Messerschmidt (1777-1781).
