Cyber Pirates

Gordon Crovitz:

In the years following the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. faced a great threat from the Barbary states, which attacked trading ships, plundered the cargo, and made slaves of the crew. Some 20% of American exports went through the Mediterranean, where the Dey of Algiers demanded $1 million, or about 10% of the U.S. budget, plus a portrait of George Washington as ransom for American traders.

President Thomas Jefferson rejected the European practice of paying bribes, instead creating a navy that eventually freed the seas from piracy. U.S. Marines still sing a hymn "to the shores of Tripoli" and carry scimitar-shaped swords. A global law of the sea was eventually enforced, which protects freedom of commerce over any ocean at any time. Open sea lanes became the key network of the Industrial Age.

Thanks to Google and China, we have just had our Barbary moment for the Information Age. Computing and communications networks are the sea lanes of modern economies, made possible by open platforms such as email and the Web. If high-tech companies are the unarmed ships of our era, will the U.S. now protect the modern sea lanes that enable global communications?

The Chinese government's fingerprints are all over the cyber attacks against dozens of Silicon Valley companies, plus the hacking of the personal Gmail accounts of individuals in the U.S. and elsewhere. Although Beijing apparently aimed at accessing information from human-rights advocates, the violation of personal email privacy potentially can affect anyone, anywhere. This comes after many incidents of hacked computers at the Pentagon, congressional offices and other government agencies.

Before confronting China, Google examined the hacked Gmail account and laptop of a 20-year-old sophomore at Stanford, Tenzin Seldon, a leader of Students for Free Tibet. Foreign journalists in China, including a reporter in the Beijing bureau of the Associated Press, also had Gmail accounts hacked, with messages forwarded to another address.

It's one thing for China to censor access to the Web in its country by blocking sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. It's another matter entirely to reach into servers around the world to rummage through individual email accounts of citizens of other countries.

For Google, it would have been an unsustainable business policy to do nothing in response to having to tell its users that a foreign government is accessing its servers, undermining the integrity of the Web on which its operations are based. Google's threat to stop censoring its Chinese-language search engine is as powerful a response as a private company can make, creating a precedent that others would be wise to follow.

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The NY Times says China has become caustic in its response to suggestions that it investigate the cyber attacks. It sounds like a non responsive cover up which suggest to me, that the state really was behind the attacks or complicit despite the denials. If it was not, what objection could it have to investigating the source of the attacks?

When it comes to cyber attacks, China is becoming a rogue state sponsor or protector of information piracy. If not it needs to stop protecting and start investigating for the source of the attacks.