If there's been one consistent theme running through the revelations provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, it's that the gulf between what the U.S. says on the global stage and what it does in practice is anywhere from huge to cavernous. None of this is particularly troubling in and of itself -- hypocrisy is par for this particular course. But we are now likely to see some material blowback from America's hypocrisy.
That's because the most recent tranche of revelations catches America doing something it has very vocally accused China of doing: exploiting networking gear with malware and surveillance technology before it is sold to customers around the world. The U.S. Congress kicked up a huge stink about the Chinese network manufacturer Huawei, which they ultimately blocked from doing business in the U.S. on the premise that the Chinese government was seeding Huawei hardware with surveillance bugs (something, incidentally, the U.S. had good reason to suspect they were doing). Now, though, the U.S. has been exposed as doing just that to its own networking firms.
Industrial espionage is typically designed to enhance a country's economic position. But the exposure of such espionage may deal a serious blow to the economic fortunes of U.S. tech firms (one study noted that U.S. cloud companies may stand to lose $35 billion after the Snowden revelations). It may also fracture the global nature of the Internet itself.
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearworld.com/blog/2013/12/america_to_china_do_as_we_say_110178.html at January 01, 2014 - 10:02:33 PM CST
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