WaPo reports:
The Justice Department has indicted five members of the Chinese military on charges of hacking into computers and stealing valuable trade secrets from leading steel, nuclear plant and solar power firms, marking the first time that the United States has leveled such criminal charges against a foreign country.
Before the trolls accuse me of supporting Chinese hacking operations, let's get one thing clear - the allegations of hacking in this case certainly look and smell like the sort of Espionage the Justice Department should expend resources prosecuting.
Putting aside the pot-kettle situation these Espionage charges create for the U.S., created by the fact that the U.S. itself has come under criticism after being caught spying for apparent economic gain, the allegations against the Chinese military provide an instructive moment.
The Obama administration has brought twice as many Espionage Act prosecutions for alleged mishandling of classified information than all past administrations combined, creating a chilling atmosphere for national security whistleblowers and the media. The Chinese hacking case brings the most famous prosecution against National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden into sharp focus.
Snowden risked his life to provide journalists with documentary evidence of NSA's illegal, wasteful, ineffective, and invasive mass surveillance operations, including (ironically) NSA's attempts to infiltrate foreign industry. Whether Snowden's actions were in the global public interest is no longer a matter of debate. He won the most prestigious award and American whistleblower can win, the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling, the country's paper of record agrees he is a whistleblower, and the journalists who reported on the revelations won The Pulitzer Prize for public service.
Yet the Obama administration tragically puts Snowden in the same category as the members of the Chinese military accused of actions far more befitting the Espionage label.
The costs of NSA's mass surveillance operations are far greater than the billions of dollars wasted and civil liberties sacrificed. The backlash against the Justice Department since unsealing the indictment against the has reverberated loudly as a result of the NSA's own spying activities. The Chinese responded to the criminal charge with predictable ire, but the NSA's own spying gives the Chinese complaints far too much credibility.
Over the last decade, U.S. government has surrendered the moral and ethical high ground necessary to credibly maintain unprecedented charges like those against the Chinese military, to the point where the only way the public learns about the government's actions is through whistleblowers, who must risk sacrifice their freedom, and the press, which the government chills through surveillance and tacit threats of criminal "co-conspiracy."
The question of how the U.S. ended up being on the defensive when charging is answered in the path the U.S. government started down in the days after 9/11.
PBS Frontline ran a must-watch documentary on this very question last week. Watch it here. The second half is scheduled to air tonight.
The Frontline piece paints an accurate and revealing picture of how the U.S. descended into secret mass surveillance, the negative repercussions of which we see in headlines worldwide on an almost daily basis.
