The following is an excerpt from Noah Shachtman | January 25, 2012 | Wired.com |
Newt Gingrich isn’t the only politician who’s freaked out by China and Russia’s online spying. But the new Republican presidential frontrunner may be the highest-profile political figure all but openly calling for cyberwar with Moscow and Beijing.
“I think that we have to treat state-based covert activities as the equivalent of acts of war,” Gingrich said in response to a question about countries that target U.S. corporate and government information systems. “And I think that we have to respond to that and create a level of pain which teaches people not to do it.”
American officials have grown increasingly concerned about massive and strategic efforts by China and Russia to use U.S. network vulnerabilities to steal American know-how. “Trade secrets developed over thousands of working hours by our brightest minds are stolen in a split second and transferred to our competitors,” Robert Bryant, the national counterintelligence executive, said in November. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who chaired a classified task force on the subject, called it “the biggest transfer of wealth through theft and piracy in the history of mankind.”
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