Behind U.S.-China cyberwar debate

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We live in a society of law and order for sure! In­ deed, the U.S. likely has more laws than any nation on earth. Many, if not most, are derived from the U.S. Constitution and its associated Bill of Rights, both of which have been subjected to endless revisions or reinterpretations over the centuries to meet the needs of modern capitalism, the present social order that prioritizes the rights of the one percent over those of the vast majority.

Perhaps the single most cited “law” that trumps all others in virtually all circumstances is the govern­ ment’s invocation of U.S. “national security interests” against all who would infringe on it. Whether applied to military matters, civil liberties and democratic rights, trade, economic competition, or business more generally, the nation’s courts never flinch from subordinating the rights of individuals, unions, social justice organizations or even the health and wellbring of the entire nation to the fundamental needs of the capitalist ruling elite.

This includes spying on the entire population, de­ porting without legal recourse two million immi­ grants, interrogating hundreds of thousands of Mus­ lim-Americans, banning or thwarting mass protests, and the murder and torture of accused “criminals” who have been denied their rights of due process. It also includes prioritizing the profits of trillion-dollar oil corporations to life itself, wiping out affirmative action in the name of a “colorblind” society, re-seg­ regating and privatizing public education, obliterat­ ing pensions and hard won social programs at every level, banning access to legal abortion, criminalizing the poor and imprisoning the largest number and proportion of the population in the world.

In the name of “national security” or the associated “war on terror, or even in the name of “democracy,” the rights of all have been eroded faster and with greater intensity than at any time in the modern era.

In the name of this “national security,” the U.S. Jus­ tice Department on May 19 indicted five Chinese hackers—all members of the Chinese People’s Lib­ eration Army. The five were charged with 31 counts of espionage based on National Security Agency and FBI claims that they had employed cyber-war and re­ lated surveillance techniques to steal U.S. corporate secrets from Westinghouse Electric, the U.S. Steel Corporation, and other companies. The five were al­ leged to be members of the Shanghai-based and now well-known Unit 61398 of the Chinese People’s Lib­ eration Army, which the NSA had tapped into in order to steal what it claims are some 700,000 pages of evi­ dence that they claim proves their case.

No one, according to two multi-page articles in the May 20 and May 21 New York Times, seriously believes that the U.S. government has even a slim chance of pursuing the matter other than for its pro­ paganda value or to “shame” the Chinese govern­ ment. Nevertheless, in John Dillinger-era style, the FBI printed the names and photographs of the five on old-fashioned “WANTED BY THE FBI” posters, pre­ sumably for public display in U.S. government build­ ings, as if a curious passerby might see the poster and subsequently turn in the accused.

U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder, according to The Times, “said that while nations routinely spy on one another for national security purposes, it was out of bounds for China to use state espionage opera­ tions to gain commercial advantage.”(!)

An accompanying “News Analysis” piece by David E. Sanger in the May 20 Times was entitled, “With Spy Charges, U.S. Draws a Line That Few Others Rec­ ognize.” Sanger wrote, “Spying for economic advan­ tage,” says Holder, “is not U.S. policy. This is a tactic that the U.S. government categorically denounces. As President Obama has said on numerous occasions, we do not collect intelligence to provide competitive advantage to U.S. companies or U.S. commercial sec­ tors.”

The Times analyst rejected, as did the Chinese gov­ ernment the following day, Holder’s distinction be­ tween what the U.S. government insists is spying to protect its “national security interests” and spying to gain economic advantage. Sanger wrote, “For ex­ ample, the U.S. spies regularly for economic advan­ tage when the goal is to support trade talks; when the Clinton administration was locked in a high-stakes negotiation in the 1990s to reach an accord with Ja­ pan, it bugged the Japanese negotiator’s limousine. At the time the chief beneficiary would have been the Big Three auto companies and a smattering of parts suppliers. It is also widely believed to be using intel­ ligence in support of trade negotiations underway with European and Asian trading partners. But in the view of a succession of Democratic and Republican administrations, that is fair game.”

Sanger continued, “Companies can also be tar­ gets. Documents released by Mr. [Edward] Snowden showed that the American government pried deep into the servers of Huawei, one of China’s most suc­ cessful Internet and communications companies. The documents made clear that the N.S.A. was seek­ ing to learn whether the company was a front for the People’s Liberation Army and whether it was inter­ ested in spying on American firms. But there was a second purpose: to get inside Huawei’s systems and use them to spy on countries that buy the company’s equipment.”

The following day, May 21, The Times carried anoth­ er front-page article, entitled, “U.S. Snooping on Com­ panies Cited by China: A Response to Charges Against 5 in Army.” The article provided meticulous details on U.S. economic spy operations around the world, stating, “Now, every one of the examples of N.S.A. spy­ ing on corporations around the world is becoming Exhibit A in China’s argument that by indicting five members of the People’s Liberation Army the Obama administration is giving new meaning to capitalistic hypocrisy. In the Chinese view, the United States has designed its own system of rules about what consti­ tutes ‘legal’ spying and what is illegal.”

There is no doubt among any of the leading capital­ ist nations that spying to gain economic advantage is the rule, not the exception. No serious capitalist com­ petitor would expend millions or billions of dollars in research and development if the data or “intellectual property rights” could be obtained by sophisticated surveillance operations overwhelmingly funded by the state power that exists to defend and advance the interests of always competing industrialized nations. There are no exceptions to this iron law of competi­ tion—a law that in and of itself is testimony to the irrational nature of capitalism.

Were we to live in a truly civilized society—that is, a socialist world—the scientific and technical achieve­ third-rate players by comparison, but nevertheless compelled by the logic of their “profit above all” so­ cial systems to use whatever means available to re­ main competitive in the deadly game of never-ending rivalry for the world markets, resources, and the domination and exploitation of its peoples.

Edward Snowden was one among 1.4 million U.S. contractors with security clearance, which enabled him to open the door on the monstrous Orwellian truth that freedom in its truest meaning is increas­ ingly illusory in capitalist society.

Civil libertarians and defenders of democratic rights learned, perhaps for the first time, that the Bill of Rights has been largely shredded in the name of “na­ tional security” and the “war on terrorism.” No one is free from government spying on their private lives and persons. But Snowden, as well as whistleblow­ ers Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, revealed an equally ominous threat to human existence—the threat derived from the fact that U.S. and world capi­ talism recognize few, if any, limits to the methods they employ to achieve world domination.

Unintentionally perhaps, the whistleblowers re­ vealed that capitalism cannot be reformed. It must be replaced with a new social order that prioritizes hu­ man needs and the democratic and collective organi­ zation of society for the common good and not for the private profit of the one percent. This will be the first society in human history in which the majority truly rule in their own interests and through their own in­ stitutions. It will be a society free from the tyranny of the elite minority—a truly egalitarian society, within which the full potential of human beings can and will be fully realized. That social order is socialism. n Socialist