China's cyber espionage poses costly risk to the United States

The arrests of 11 people on charges of espionage for the Russian government were a case of old-fashioned spy craft straight from the annals of the Cold War: dead drops, moles and communicating in code, known as steganography. Yet Russia is not alone in trying to crack U.S. secrets. China is engaged in a massive espionage effort against the United States that exceeds Russian efforts on a crucial front: cyber espionage.

The Chinese military — namely the People's Liberation Army — is behind many of the cyber intrusions into U.S. government and corporate computer networks as part of a broad effort to steal technological, military and political secrets. This form of espionage costs the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars per year and represents a dangerous threat to U.S. national security.

In early 2010, news reports from Washington indicated that Google, along with other U.S.-based corporations, was being hacked by unnamed parties in China. A progressive political organization, Patriot Majority, asked me and a team of journalists and researchers to investigate the likeliest source of the attacks. After combing through government documents, military and technical literature, we concluded the Chinese military was likely behind many cyber intrusions against the U.S.

Why? In 1995, the U.S. Navy humiliated the People's Liberation Army during the Taiwan Strait Crisis by a massive show of force, as not one but two aircraft-carrier battle groups sailed unmolested between the mainland and Taiwan, quelling mainland threats of force. That episode underscored the technological inferiority of the People's Liberation Army in case of an actual shooting war.

And it set off a rush within China's huge but antiquated military to modernize. The military ramped up its spending to improve its technological quality in areas such as space and cyber warfare, as well as its traditional military's precision-strike capabilities. The conception of this effort came in the form of a book in 1999 called "Unrestricted Warfare." Written by two Chinese colonels and promoted as required reading for officers, it said, "The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden."

As a result, and under orders from President Hu Jintao, the People's Liberation Army reorganized to engage in cyber warfare in case of war — and to engage in cyber espionage during peace. In 2004, an army white paper stated that its primary goal in modernizing was "building an informationalized force and winning an informationalized war." The military shed 200,000 troops while investing between $50 billion and $100 billion per year. The government has even conscripted entire civilian companies, in fact, and rolled them into the army as cyber warfare units.