China, convenient target of US hacking accusations: Analyst
Press TV has conducted an interview with Steven D. Kelley, former NSA contractor in Los Angeles, about Washington accusing Beijing of stealing personnel data of millions of Americans.
The following is a rough transcription of the interview.
Press TV: Mr. Kelley, China seems to be the convenient boogeyman here. How do you feel about that accusation?
Kelley: Well I think “convenient” is probably a very good word to describe. They could point it in any direction that would be convenient, if Russia would certainly be convenient. My first thought when I heard about this was it might be something more domestic like Anonymous perhaps or a group like this but obviously with the war drums beating, China certainly is a convenient target.
Press TV: And recently obviously cyber security has been of major concern in the US. What has happened that we are seeing this weakness when it comes to cyber security?
Kelley: Well it is not so much of a weakness. It is more of a tit-for-tat or seeing our so-called enemies doing the same thing that we are doing, obviously what we are doing is certainly more extensive than what they are involved in. But I would like to just remind everybody that as we know all of our hard drives are pretty much hardware to allow them backdoors and even this new law that they passed here, they redubbed the Patriot Act to the Freedom Act. Obviously who cares where they store the information they are still going to have access to it and there is no computer anywhere that they cannot access anytime. So this is really smoke and mirrors.
Press TV: And so obviously when it comes to this information gathering, it is through hacking etc. How dangerous can this really become?
Kelley: Well they like you to think that somebody is stealing a nuclear launch code or something of this nature but the reality is that it is more mundane. What they are really looking for is dirt that they can gather on people to be used for extortion purposes and this is historically what they used to control people, foreign and domestic. And certainly if they feel that the Chinese are doing this to us, then the most likely target of the mining effort, the data mining is going to be dirt, personal dirt on individuals that they can use to compromise their ability to make decisions, strategic or otherwise.
AHK/MKA
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