America must learn that people in glass houses should not throw stones

China most likely runs global cyberespionage, but it’s nothing compared to the US and its allies, as shown in the latest domestic CIA spy case

Alex Lo

Published: 9:00pm, 4 Feb 2024

Why you can trust SCMP

As I have observed before, from debt trap diplomacy to genocide, whatever the United States accuses China of doing, you can be sure it has already done it for much longer and on a much more massive and unimaginable scale. So it is with global cyberespionage. I mean, after Edward Snowden, who is Washington fooling?

In recent years, though, either taking turns or collectively, spy chiefs or their deputies of the so-called Five Eyes alliance of English-speaking nations have been warning the world that China has been running a global espionage campaign, especially cyberhacking.

But the 40-year jailing of whistleblower and former CIA software engineer Joshua Schulte last week gives the game away, again.

I am sure China is spying everywhere, but who isn’t? Who can rival the Five Eyes themselves, which practically invented electronic warfare and surveillance in the last century?

In late October, intelligence chiefs from the US, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand coordinated a publicity blaze to issue a collective warning that the Chinese are snooping everywhere. What? As opposed to the Five Eyes and their other allies and partners, say, Israel and India? Are we supposed to trust them? Certainly the mainstream news outlets have had no trouble acting as unpaid – or paid, who knows? – stenographers for those spy chiefs. As I have reported before, it’s now a revolving door for top US intelligence bosses to retire and end up working as pundits for CNN, NBC, MSNBC, Bloomberg, Fox etc.

Aren’t spies paid to dissimulate and misdirect, if not lie outright? Do you think their intelligence bosses would be any better? For sure, the Godfather is a perfect gentleman who just happens to run his nasty and brutal gang of criminal underlings.

For all his myriad convictions including child porn, Schulte’s real crime is that he leaked details to WikiLeaks about spying software – what the CIA itself calls “cyber weapons” – developed by a clandestine unit called the Centre for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) to hack into computers, smartphones and hi-tech televisions to spy on people worldwide without their being aware.

What is it with these whistleblowers, with child porn for this guy, and rape charges against Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks? Well, you know, just so the public doesn’t think these are heroic people standing up against the most powerful government in the world, but are all sex pests.

According to a CNN report, the CCI programmes “targeted individuals through malware and physical hacking on devices including phones, computers and TVs. To hide its operations, the CIA routinely adopted techniques that enabled its hackers to appear as if they were Russian, according to the documents published by WikiLeaks.”

Only Russians? Anyway, thanks to such efforts as the CCI and CIA, next time you and your family, or your lover, sit in front of your latest giant flatscreen TV, wave and say hi to your American Big Brother watching you on the other side of the world. And please, keep your clothes on.

China says it detained ‘foreign spy’ accused of passing secrets to MI6

But spying on your phones and TVs is small cheese for Americans. I am a fan of sci-fi horror maestro H.P. Lovecraft but the book that has most terrified me recently is this, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy. It is written by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, two political scientists respectively at Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University, so it’s not a conspiracy theory. Among their many alarming exposes is that the US can monitor almost all international communication. This is because many “data chokepoints’’, located along fibre-optic cables that are the backbone of the global internet, are controlled by the US. Prisms installed in them split the beams of light carrying information into two streams, with one going to the intended recipients and the the other diverted to US data processing centres for further analysis by high-powered computers.

Forget China’s “supercomputers”; they may be better off with lo-tech balloons.