I urge you to read China’s Cyber-Militia at National Journal. I found the tone of the article a little breathless but the topic and the material presented is extremely interesting. It charts the cases of computer hacking and, possibly, espionage being carried out by Chinese hackers, possibly with the approval and assistance of the Chinese military.
Whether the Chinese government is involved in this or not I think that computer hacking and espionage constitutes a real threat which our government by inclination and organizational culture is unlikely to be able to deal with. Government agencies are inclined to seek large, over-arching, standards-based, manageable solutions to problems and if ever a problem called out for a distributed solution it’s computer hacking and espionage. Plus I can’t honestly imagine U. S. government employees having the tenacity, ingenuity, and training to engage in the activities required for computer espionage of our own effectively. For one thing civil service pay scales have a hard time dealing with skills that are rare and highly in demand in the private sector and people with the temperament for computer hacking don’t typically have the temperament for the federal bureaucracy. I don’t believe that a character like Garcia in the TV program Criminal Minds exists (a highly-skilled maverick computer hacker working with state of the art equipment). As evidence I’d point to the FBI’s inability to get its own computer modernization project off the ground, which I wrote about some time ago.
A good start would be to improve computer security in sensitive locations including government agencies, the computers of government employees, utilities, transportation, and so on. That would mean dumping Microsoft Windows which IMO is intrinsically insecure, a move which I really can’t imagine happening.
There was an interview on NPR with Richard Clarke yesterday that covered this topic and was quite interesting.