When it comes to technology issues, does this country's right hand know what the left hand is doing? Reading the on-line IT trade journals, the only possible answer I can come up with is a resounding “no”.
The latest example: a U.S. House of Representatives probe into hack attacks on government servers that appear to have originated in China.
To anyone following computer security issues, this is about as surprising as the discovery that the sun appeared to rise in the East this morning.
In America's corporate board rooms, however, the sun must be rising somewhere else, because, by an amazing coincidence, the hot new place to which corporate America is shipping IT jobs and company data as fast as it can is - China.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but it strikes me as just a wee bit suicidal to be cheerfully sending confidential data to a country which:
- Is run by an autocracy that hasn't changed its hostility toward human rights since the Tiananmen Square massacre
- Has an attitude towards intellectual property protection that is (to say the least) indifferent, and
- Now appears to be hosting criminal attacks against our infrastructure.
But, hey: why let a little thing like homeland security stand in the way of a quick boost in corporate profits and the resulting hike in executive bonuses? We need to keep our priorities straight, after all!
Of course, the fact that attacks have originated from servers that appear to be in China doesn't necessarily mean that those attacks are orchestrated or condoned by the Chinese government. Indeed, why bother to attack American assets at all when American corporations are giving them away in return for cheap, obedient labor and a political system that makes independent trade unions impossible?
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