Showing posts with label china. Show all posts
A Busy Saturday
What has me worried is the idea that the Democrats ACTUALLY DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS IS THE END OF THE ROAD. What if they actually aren’t capable of recognizing when they’ve lost? Or when we’ve run out of other people’s money? None of these people work for a living. Their concept of where money comes from and how wealth is created (and destroyed) is completely divorced from reality because they live in a government bubble. And the very small minority among them that do understand this from previous jobs and experience are okay with Progressive policies aimed at leveling/equalizing/delivering-economic-justice because they just assume that the economy can handle some siphoning. And usually it can. But not at this volume or for this time scale.
At this point, we hear about "erratic" behavior that doesn't ostensibly involve sex. What exactly are the "new questions"? This is a cheap and ridiculous article in my view. A woman who is unhappy with her sexual relationship with Wu has called his office but has not called the police, and now we're supposed to review everything else we know about him in some new context? Is this the way we are to do politics in America now?
Note that the woman who has brought this chaos into Wu's career is shielded by the newspaper's policy not to "use the names of victims of sexual assault without their permission." That's convenient. I think if you are going to have a policy like that, you should not report at all unless the alleged victim has reported a crime to the police. It's not fair.
At least 32 people died when a high-speed train smashed into a stalled train in China's eastern Zhejiang province Saturday, state media said, raising new questions about the safety of the fast-growing rail network.
The accident occurred on a bridge near the city of Wenzhou after the first train lost power due to a lightning strike and a bullet train following behind crashed into it, state television said.
The total power failure rendered useless an electronic safety system designed to warn following trains of stalled trains on the tracks up ahead, and automatically halt them before a collision can occur, the report added.
It showed one or possibly two carriages on the ground under the bridge, with another hanging above it. Several other carriages derailed in the accident near Wenzhou, some 860 miles south of Beijing.
More than 200 people have been taken to hospital, the official Xinhua news agency added.
One train was heading from Beijing to the coastal city of Fuzhou, the other was running from Zhejiang provincial capital Hangzhou, also to Fuzhou.
"The train suddenly shook violently, casting luggage all around," Xinhua quoted survivor Liu Hongtao as saying.
"Passengers cried for help but no crew responded."
The Untold Stories: What You Won't See On the Evening News
Ballin' The Jackal: Anti-American Tunes At White House State Dinner?
Lang Lang the pianist says he chose it. Chairman Hu Jintao recognized it as soon as he heard it. Patriotic Chinese Internet users were delighted as soon as they saw the videos online. Early morning TV viewers in China knew it would be played an hour or two beforehand. At the White House State dinner on Jan. 19, about six minutes into his set, Lang Lang began tapping out a famous anti-American propaganda melody from the Korean War: the theme song to the movie “Battle on Shangganling Mountain.”
The film depicts a group of “People’s Volunteer Army” soldiers who are first hemmed in at Shanganling (or Triangle Hill) and then, when reinforcements arrive, take up their rifles and counterattack the U.S. military “jackals.”
The movie and the tune are widely known among Chinese, and the song has been a leading piece of anti-American propaganda by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for decades. CCP propaganda has always referred to the Korean War as the “movement to resist America and help [North] Korea.” The message of the propaganda is that the United States is an enemy—in fighting in the Korean War the United States’ real goal was said to be to invade and conquer China. The victory at Triangle Hill was promoted as a victory over imperialists.
The song Lang Lang played describes how beautiful China is and then near the end has this verse, “When friends are here, there is fine wine /But if the jackal comes /What greets it is the hunting rifle.” The “jackal” in the song is the United States.
Grim Reality: Where To Go To Survive A Mine Disaster
Rescue workers were struggling Sunday to reach 11 coal miners missing underground after an accident that has triggered anguished comments on the Internet comparing China's woeful mine-safety record with the concern for human life displayed by the rescue of 33 miners in Chile.
The state-controlled Xinhua news agency said 26 miners were killed Saturday in an avalanche of coal dust triggered by a gas explosion at a mine in central Henan province.
It was the second deadly accident at the pit, owned by a consortium of companies including state-run China Power Investment, Corp.
Zambian locals rioted and blocked a road leading to Chinese-owned Collum Coal Mine Ltd. on Saturday to protest the shooting of at least 11 miners, allegedly by Chinese supervisors during a protest over low wages, police officials said Sunday.
On Friday, miners at Collum Coal Mine, in the Sinazongwe District of southern Zambia, demonstrated against low pay and poor working conditions. Gunshots followed, allegedly fired by two Chinese supervisors, wounding 11 miners, two of them critically, according to Zambian police and government officials. They were taken to a hospital.
Zambian police arrested the two Chinese supervisors allegedly involved.
Confusion Is Next: The NY Times & Immigration
Han Chinese workers, investors, merchants, teachers and soldiers are pouring into remote Tibet. After theviolence that ravaged this region in 2008, China’s aim is to make Tibet wealthier — and more Chinese.
Chinese leaders see development, along with an enhanced security presence, as the key to pacifying the Buddhist region. The central government invested $3 billion in the Tibet Autonomous Region last year, a 31 percent increase over 2008. Tibet’s gross domestic product is growing at a 12 percent annual rate, faster than the robust Chinese national average.
Simple restaurants located in white prefabricated houses and run by ethnic Han businesspeople who take the train have sprung up even at a remote lake north of Lhasa. About 1.2 million rural Tibetans, nearly 40 percent of the region’s population, have been moved into new residences under a “comfortable housing” program. And officials promise to increase tourism fourfold by 2020, to 20 million visitors a year.
But if the influx of money and people has brought new prosperity, it has also deepened the resentment among many Tibetans. Migrant Han entrepreneurs elbow out Tibetan rivals, then return home for the winter after reaping profits. Large Han-owned companies dominate the main industries, from mining to construction to tourism.
The Bottom of the Page: Stories of Note From the Blogroll
Karim Wasfi, director and conductor of the Iraqi National Symphony, was waiting in the lounge of the Rasheed Hotel one recent afternoon for two things: the arrival of a 13-year-old American pianist scheduled to headline a rare concert here; and the Steinway grand he was supposed to play.
The prodigy, Llewellyn Kingman Sanchez-Werner, was coming from New York. The piano was coming from the symphony's rehearsal space, just five miles away from the hotel. Mr. Wasfi was more worried about the piano.
To a fundamentalist, there was kind of a “well, duh” reaction to this recent headline:
It’s scarcely surprising to learn that members of an ethno-religious group – whose ancient scriptures advocate endogamy and proscribe marrying outside the group – would be genetically similar. What I didn’t realize, however, was that some revisionist historians have cast doubt on the Biblical geneaology of the Jews:
The two genome surveys . . . refute the suggestion made last year by the historian Shlomo Sand in his book “The Invention of the Jewish People” that Jews have no common origin but are a miscellany of people in Europe and Central Asia who converted to Judaism at various times.
So, for those of you keeping score:
Genesis, Exodus, etc. . . . . . 1
Revisionist historians . . . . 0
With special assistance from the Sony corporation, we have made several changes to your original Karate Kid, a warmongering, Reagan-era film that was pock-marked – like the blemished faces of your pimply American teenagers – with the backward, revanchist rhetoric of that era. In our new Karate Kid, we no longer have young New Jersey teenager Daniel and his economically disenfranchised mother seek a new life in the state of California. Instead, we have young ‘Dre’ – played with scrappy insouciance by Jaden Smith (son of your American movie star, Comrade Will Smith!) – seek his fortune in a more suitable land of opportunity: mainland China. In the new Karate Kid, a heartless American automotive company in Detroit shifts the job held by Dre’s mother to Beijing. Since America offers no other possible job opportunities for her, she is forced to make the only economically rational decision: move herself and her son 10,000 kilometers to the (Far) East, even though they don’t speak Chinese!
What we are witnessing in this election cycle is the slow death of traditional statewide campaign journalism. I noticed the same pattern (and the same nearly reporter-free campaign trail) in Kentucky last month as I covered libertarian Rand Paul's decisive defeat of the state Republican establishment in the GOP Senate primary. Aside from an occasional AP reporter, virtually the only print journalists whom I encountered at campaign events were my national press-pack colleagues from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico and the Atlantic Monthly.Newspapers like the Louisville Courier-Journal and The State, South Carolina's largest paper, have dramatically de-emphasized in-depth candidate coverage because they are too short-handed to spare the reporters. A survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) found that newsroom staffs across the country have declined by 25 percent since 2001.
What most amazes me about this huge decline: It brings us no closer to a realistic elite public acknowledgment of innate limits of ability. Rather, the official fantasy gets maintained in the face of copious evidence against the secular religious faith in equality of ability. As John Derbyshire points out, in elite circles public protestations of faith in education to raise up poor performers continues unabated. It is remarkable that during the Middle Ages the Catholic Church abandoned its faith that the Earth was the center of the universe under the weight of far less evidence than the amount of evidence that exists today for the view that group differences in student performance are due to group differences in average ability. Our secular left-liberal defenders of their faith demonstrate far stronger public attachment to irrational beliefs than the Catholic Church did in a supposedly far less rational era of faith in the supernatural.
A few days before the game, Jay's father called me. He and the other parents of his son's team were "very, very concerned." Even alarmed. Apparently, as the championship game neared, the boys were doing a lot trash-talking at each other. Surely we could all agree that the real reason for thecompetition was to teach the boys cooperation and sportsmanship. Playing the game would mean one of the teams would lose, which would lead the winning team to "bragging rights in the schoolyard." And that would not be healthy. It would undermine the real lessons to be learned about self-esteem and mutual respect.He dwelled on these points for a while, finally landing heavily on the notion that this was a wonderful opportunity for us, as parents, to "frame the situation as a teaching moment." Eventually, he got to themoney point: He and the other parents of Jay's team wanted to cancel the championship game. After all, we could all agree that both teams were already winners, right?Initially, I was nonplussed. But I heard myself saying something like, "You're way over-complicating this. The purpose of playing the game is to win it. And by the way, the winning team has earned bragging rights."
Our Embarrassing Climate Diplomacy
I don't believe in global warming. I agree that there is climate change - it has changed over the millenia, for good and for bad - but I don't believe that humans have had an appreciable effect on climate change, and have little chance of manipulating the climate to our benefit. I suspect a lot more people share this view. Sadly, the poli-sci majors and law school graduates who make up the West's political elite are absolutely convinced that we are doomed doomed doomed based as much on scary graphics and movies with portentious music as on "science." Things have gotten so bad that our foreign policy has descended into the farce of nagging developing countries about their emissions. Unsurprisingly, we are being rebuffed out of hand India Rejects US Carbon Limits Plan
India is an ally, but don't worry, we are nagging our rivals, too: Energy Secretary Warns China On EmissionsIndia dismissed suggestions that it accept binding limits on carbon emissions, with a top official Sunday delivering a strong rebuke to overtures from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the two countries to work together to combat climate change.
The rejection of the U.S. proposal was made in the middle of Mrs. Clinton's first visit to India as secretary of state and came just as the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama is gearing up to push for a new global pact on climate change.
"There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have among the lowest emissions per capita, face to actually reduce emissions," Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh told Mrs. Clinton and her delegation."And as if this pressure was not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours," he said, according to a written account of Mr. Ramesh's remarks to Mrs. Clinton in their meeting. Mr. Ramesh handed out copies of the account to reporters at a news conference afterward with Mrs. Clinton standing nearby.
In meetings with senior Chinese energy officials and in a speech at prestigious Tsinghua University, Mr Chu continued the Obama administration's efforts to push for greater action on climate change. China recently surpassed the US as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases. While acknowledging that the world's developed Western nations have contributed most of the carbon dioxide already trapped in the atmosphere, Mr Chu warned that China could add more in the next few decades than everything the US emitted since the Industrial Revolution. Carbon dioxide is the most common greenhouse gas. Mr. Chu said in the speech to students of China's top science and engineering school that "The developed world did make the problem, I admit that. But the developing world can make it much worse." Painting a grim picture of a world faced with making a tough choice between something bad might happen or something very bad might happen even if global warming is addressed, Mr Chu urged China to invest more in energy efficient technologies in partnership with the US.
While the US government is filled with nervous nellies like Sec. Chu, who fears the Heavens & the Earth, and possibly his own shadow, China and India are filled with ambitious technocrats who would like to make as much wealth as we ahve over the decades, but which we have now declared to be politically incorrect. According to the Obama Administration, if other countries won't get on board, we will just have to pay for the emissions reductions ourselves. Has this been thought through? Commerce Secretary America Needs To Pay For China's Emissions
So we'll either have a trade war or more massive increases in the cost of living - for Americans. Where's the diplomatic leverage? I would love hear what the developing world's diplomats have to say about our climate proposals behind closed doors. Whatever it is, the word "smart" probably doesn't come up.It’s bad enough that the Obama administration wants to penalize all Americans for their energy use through the cap-and-tax scheme that will hobble our economy and hike electricity and gas costs, but until now they only proposed to penalize us for our own energy use. With China refusing to join the West in economic suicide, who will pay for their emissions? Commerce Secretary says that the American consumer is to blame for China’s energy-production emissions — and we’ll pay for that instead of the Chinese:
Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said something amazing—U.S. consumers should pay for part of Chinese greenhouse-gas emissions. From Reuters: “It’s important that those who consume the products being made all around the world to the benefit of America — and it’s our own consumption activity that’s causing the emission of greenhouse gases, then quite frankly Americans need to pay for that,” Commerce Secretary Gary Locke told the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai
Enjoy The Silence
This week's explosion of violence in western China between native Uighurs and Han Chinese has exposed the deadly fault lines in China's ethnic mix. It has also exposed the hypocritical silence from the International Community that cares not a whit for the behavior of autocrats but happily jeers the US's imaginied sins: China Locks Down Restive Region After Deadly Clashes
The Chinese government locked down this regional capital of 2.3 million people and other cities across its western desert region on Monday and early Tuesday, imposing curfews, cutting off cellphone and Internet services and sending armed police officers into neighborhoods after clashes erupted here on Sunday evening between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese. The fighting left at least 156 people dead and more than 1,000 injured, according to the state news agencyTo begin, there is the odd silence of the grievance mongers in the "Muslim Street," who stand ready to riot over rumors of flushed Korans in US prisons, but who are over the hills and far away when a dictatorship like China's kills their co-religionists. I am not a whiny Leftist, so I won't bore you with any fake outrage. I prefer the grim acknowledgement of eternal truths about human nature: China Silences The Muslim World
There is always talk about whether there is such a thing as American Exceptionalism. I don't think I will step on any toes when I say that the sophisticated American liberal elite would say "no, not really." The president himself has said as much. But, there is such a thing as Ameican Exceptionalism, whether you want to believe in it or not. Any country that takes it upon itself to stand astride the world stage has this. Would you deny that there is Russian Exceptionalism? French Exceptionalism?Han settlers take almost all the good jobs, business opportunities, and positions in the government and Party apparatus. Beijing has continually stripped Xinjiang of its mineral resources and crops. And now the Han are trying to take from the Uighurs their distinct identity. Beijing once thought that economic development would assimilate this minority, but relentless modernization — exploitation, really — has only created resentment. And so have policies that are intended to repress Uighur culture. Uighurs are ordered to shave their beards, not fast at Ramadan, and not pray in public outside mosques. Mosques are tightly controlled, and religious instruction for the young forbidden. Uighur-language instruction has been eliminated. In Kashgar, now known as Kashi, the government has been razing the buildings in the Old City to destroy the remnants of Uighur culture.
And, of course, Beijing employs brute force. The latest official death toll from this week’s disturbances is 184, but that number appears to undercount the dead. Observers say that this is the most deadly series of riots in China since the Tiananmen massacre twenty years ago, but that assessment is questionable. Ethnic fighting flared in Yining, the capital of the short-lived East Turkestan Republic, in early 1997. The unrest is thought to have led to at least several hundred deaths, and subsequent executions added to the toll.
Yet the death of hundreds, and probably thousands, of Uighurs and the systematic destruction of their culture has been met with an eerie silence from Muslim nations.
This week we have seen Chinese Exceptionalism at work: Chinese Exceptionalism
The great part about being a Chinese dictatorship in a world with one rule set (Adam Smith's), is that your paramilitary forces can slaughter
140156 protestors without even a whimper from the global community. Western political elites just don't care because a) business with China is more important than human rights and b) China reacts like a spoiled child when chastised, which makes it not worth the hassle. Of course, the reaction we see today on Chinese repression may become the same we see when similar things happen in the developed world.
America is still hearing about slavery and Bull Connor, events that are decades in the past, and which represent a vanished world. China is engaging in deadly ethnic and religious chauvanism right now. This is a vision of the world as it has been and as it apparently will be. Do you like what you see? The liberals at the NY Times do :A Strongman Is China's Rock In Ethnic Strife:
The nine-minute speech by the bureaucrat, Wang Lequan, was mostly government boilerplate: the riots were no homegrown problem, but “a massive conspiracy” to sabotage ethnic unity; Urumqi citizens should “point the spear toward hostile forces at home and abroad,” not at their neighbors; attacks on Han or Uighurs alike were heartbreaking.
Then he turned to the Han who were on the streets, repaying the riots’ blood debt. “Comrades, to start with, such action is fundamentally not necessary,” he told them briskly. “Our dictatorial force is fully able to knock out the evildoers, so there is no need to take such action.”
On the Barbie
News out of SF is usually dominated by the City's silly progressives that it's easy to forget that there is just as much silliness in SF's ethnic neighborhoods. In Chinatown, some are upset that a one-time gangster - the immortal "Shrimp Boy" - is muscling in on the Chinatown farmer's market: Change In Chinatown Market Under City Scrutiny
A notorious former gangster has taken over a Chinatown street market that is financed by San Francisco taxpayers, a development that has set off alarm bells at City Hall.
Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow - who was once sentenced to 25 years in prison on gun charges but says he's gone legit - was named manager of the Chinatown Night Market on Friday by the Chinatown Neighborhood Association, a group with close City Hall ties.
The potential embarrassment of Chow's involvement, we're told, prompted a contentious closed-door debate about the city's $35,000 grant to the program - with Board of Supervisors President David Chiu cautioning against the deal, Mayor Gavin Newsom's staff largely noncommittal, and Planning Commissioner Bill Lee arguing to move ahead.
In all the drama over Democrats v GOP, liberal v conservative, etc v et al., it's refreshing to see someone getting involved in politics for some good old fashioned corruption and graft. Shrimp Boy, you will be surprised to know, used intimidation tactics against his rivals. He is also a suspect in the unsolved murder of a Chinatown merchant three years ago. Shrimp Boy denies all.
"Under this kind of monitoring," he said, referring to a tracking ankle bracelet that authorities still require him to wear, "do you think anyone with common sense would do anything stupid?"
Case Closed!
In the Small World file (and just to show that Shrimp Boy knows where the action is in politics): he and Norman Hsu had some dealings years ago: Hsu And The Shrimp Boy. You should read the whole thing.
Free Market in Chains
The always charming Chi-Coms are demanding that PC makers provide them with software that prevents computers from accessing "dangerous" websites. The excuse is the ever-popular "pornography," but reality is dangerous (to the regime) political ideas: China Squeezes PC Makers (subscription required)
China plans to require that all personal computers sold in the country as of July 1 be shipped with software that blocks access to certain Web sites, a move that could give government censors unprecedented control over how Chinese users access the Internet.The government, which has told global PC makers of the requirement but has yet to announce it to the public, says the effort is aimed at protecting young people from "harmful" content. The primary target is pornography, says the main developer of the software, a company that has ties to China's security ministry and military
When the article says "PC makers," they don't mean goofy little no-name Chinese brands. dell and HP are being asked to do this. The best part of this charming initiative is its name: the "Green Dam Youth Escort." Use of the word "green" shows how hip and with it the Chinese are. They promise a "green, healthy, and harmonious Internet environment" that prevents "harmful information on the Internet from influencing and poisoning young people." Thanks Al Gore!
Gold Fever As Miracle Cure For Dollar Flu
Naked Capitalism links to a Financial Times article about China's stockpiling of gold as a way of diversifying away from the dollar: China reveals big rise in gold reserves
China has nearly doubled its gold reserves in the last five years as it
diversified its enormous foreign exchange reserves away from US dollar assets,
the head of the country’s secretive foreign exchange administration said in a
rare disclosure on Friday.The country now holds 1,054 tons of gold, up from the 600 tons it last
disclosed in 2003, according to Hu Xiaolian, head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (Safe), which manages the country’s $1,954bn in foreign exchange reserves.The spot gold price rose 1 per cent on Friday as investors saw the news as a
sign China will further increase its gold holdings as it continues to diversify
reserves away from the US dollar.
The pessimistic view is that this as an attack on US economic and political power: breaking news: China has been secretly stocking up on gold:
My analysis is this: The Chinese want to weaken the U.S.'s power derived through its currency status. They have been setting the stage to do so for some time. However, they want to act in a way that benefits them in the short- and long-term. Cutting loose in an uncontrolled fashion now benefits no one with the world economy in dire straits. However, when the economy does right itself, you should see some major changes in the currency markets.
Or, we could be getting out of the grip of China's unhealthy focus on holding our currency and acting as our creditor. It would perhaps also reduce the phenomena of oceans of money flowing around the world that was memorably described in Smick's "The World Is Curved."
Perhaps without intending to, the US has become too dependent on China's investments in US currency, equity, and debt as a means of funding our ever-expanding budget deficits. China is welcome to try to diminish US power by reducing the dollar's reserve status. However, doing so would harm China as much as it would hurt us. It is hard to imagine such a thing coming to pass without a major war or economic disruption as its proiximate cause.
Hidden in Plain Sight
Hmmm. A Chinese national uses US banks to sell nuclear materials to Iran? Better put that story on page A19 in the "local & regional news section:"Indictment Says Banned Materials Sold to Iran:
Prosecutors in New York have charged a Chinese businessman and his company with a conspiracy relating to the sale of sensitive materials to Iran, covert transactions that prosecutors say violatedUnited Nations bans aimed at restraining Tehran’s rocket and nuclear ambitions.According to an indictment unsealed in Manhattan on Tuesday, the Chinese company sold tungsten, high-strength steels and exotic metals to the Defense Industries Organization, an arm of the Iranian military, from 2006 to 2008, often using shell companies to hide the transactions. Both Defense Industries and the Chinese parent company, the Limmt Economic and Trade Company, are banned by the Treasury Department from doing business in the United States.
The Big Switch
We might have 12 times more aircraft carriers than any other country in the world, but we have our vulnerabilities as well. Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated By Spies:
Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.
The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.
"The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid," said a senior intelligence official. "So have the Russians."
The espionage appeared pervasive across the U.S. and doesn't target a particular company or region, said a former Department of Homeland Security official. "There are intrusions, and they are growing," the former official said, referring to electrical systems. "There were a lot last year."
I think we know who is to blame: Those darn Patriotic Hackers!
Alt-Google Earth Malware
Some enterprising Canadians - hired by the Dalai Lama to find out why his group's computers seemed to be infected by viruses - have stumbled on to (ahem) Something Big: Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries:
A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, Canadian researchers have concluded.
In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.
...
Although the Canadian researchers said that most of the computers behind the spying were in China, they cautioned against concluding that China’s government was involved. The spying could be a nonstate, for-profit operation, for example, or one run by private citizens in China known as “patriotic hackers.”
Their sleuthing opened a window into a broader operation that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.
The researchers, who have a record of detecting computer espionage, said they believed that in addition to the spying on the Dalai Lama, the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.
Quick! Someone call Lynn Stewart and the ACLU! Civil liberties are being crushed for real this time!
The malware is remarkable both for its sweep — in computer jargon, it has not been merely “phishing” for random consumers’ information, but “whaling” for particular important targets — and for its Big Brother-style capacities. It can, for example, turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of an infected computer, enabling monitors to see and hear what goes on in a room. The investigators say they do not know if this facet has been employed.
The researchers were able to monitor the commands given to infected computers and to see the names of documents retrieved by the spies, but in most cases the contents of the stolen files have not been determined. Working with the Tibetans, however, the researchers found that specific correspondence had been stolen and that the intruders had gained control of the electronic mail server computers of the Dalai Lama’s organization.
Those darn patriotic hackers! What sort of mischief will they get into next?
As the world gets farther on-line, it would seem that our greatest secrets might have to re-enter the analogue world. Much of the US's military might is dependent on computers and satellite technology that may not be as secure as we like. We may never be able to leave homing pigeons and semaphores behind.
