http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/hackers-cyber-china-russia/396812/
By MOISÉS NAÍM
The Atlantic
June 25, 2015
This month, two years after his massive leak of NSA documents detailing
U.S. surveillance programs, Edward Snowden published an op-ed in The New
York Times celebrating his accomplishments. The “power of an informed
public,” he wrote, had forced the U.S. government to scrap its bulk
collection of phone records. Moreover, he noted, “Since 2013, institutions
across Europe have ruled similar laws and operations illegal and imposed
new restrictions on future activities.” He concluded by asserting that “We
are witnessing the emergence of a post-terror generation, one that rejects
a worldview defined by a singular tragedy. For the first time since the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we see the outline of a politics that turns
away from reaction and fear in favor of resilience and reason.”
Maybe so. I am glad that my privacy is now more protected from meddling by
U.S. and European democracies. But frankly, I am far more concerned about
the cyber threats to my privacy posed by Russia, China, and other
authoritarian regimes than the surveillance threats from Washington. You
should be too.
Around the time that Snowden published his article, hackers broke into the
computer systems of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and stole
information on at least 4 million (and perhaps far more) federal
employees. The files stolen include personal and professional data that
government employees are required to give the agency in order to get
security clearances.
The main suspect in this and similar attacks is China, though what
affiliation, if any, the hackers had with the Chinese government remains
unclear. According to the Washington Post, “China is building massive
databases of Americans’ personal information by hacking government
agencies and U.S. health-care companies, using a high-tech tactic to
achieve an age-old goal of espionage: recruiting spies or gaining more
information on an adversary.”
[...]
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