“Hillary Clinton and Admiral Mike Mullen. The nuclear weapons labs at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. The U.S. Departments of Homeland Security, State, Energy and Commerce. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Lockheed Martin, Dow Chemical and Coca Cola. Adobe, Yahoo and Google,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes for Fortune. “That, according to an alarming (and alarmingly hawkish) article in the Wall Street Journal‘s weekend edition, is a partial list of U.S. interests targeted by a group of Chinese hackers who over the past decade have allegedly drained terabytes of military and commercial secrets from U.S. servers… [The] report strongly suggests that Apple was among the dozens of U.S. companies targeted.”
“Reader Carl Levinson, who recommended the Journal piece, is convinced that the campaign against Apple and the pattern of data thefts are both part of a broad, state-sponsored attack on American interests. Levinson, an early computer pioneer and long-time China hand, makes a strong case that what we are seeing now is ‘blunt, corrupt mercantilism,'” P.E.D. reports. “‘China is going to keep eviscerating America until we put our foot down,’ Levinson writes. ‘It’s simple freakonomics — we must make it ‘cost too much’ to cheat us. Regrettably, that means a hard-nosed trade war.'”
Read more in the full article here.