Alex Lo

My Take | 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

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Why you can trust SCMP

The American and Chinese flags wave. Photo: AP

Alex Lo

Published: 9:00pm, 4 Feb 2024

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.