• Urgent warnings have been circulated throughout Nato and the European Union for secret intelligence material to be protected from a recent surge in cyberwar attacks originating in China.
• The attacks have also hit government and military institutions in the United States, where analysts said that the West had no effective response and that EU systems were especially vulnerable because most cyber security efforts were left to member states.
• Nato diplomatic sources told The Times: “Everyone has been made aware that the Chinese have become very active with cyber-attacks and we’re now getting regular warnings from the office for internal security.” The sources said that the number of attacks had increased significantly over the past 12 months, with China among the most active players.
• In the US, an official report released on Friday said the number of attacks on Congress and other government agencies had risen exponentially in the past year to an estimated 1.6 billion every month.
• Robert Mueller, FBI Director, has warned that, in addition to the danger of foreign states making cyber-attacks, al-Qaeda could in the future pose a similar threat. In a speech to a security conference last week, Mr Mueller said terrorist groups had used the internet to recruit members and to plan attacks, but added: “Terrorists have shown a clear interest in pursuing hacking skills and they will either train their own recruits or hire outsiders with an eye towards combining physical attacks with cyber-attacks.”
• He said that a cyber-attack could have the same impact as a “well-placed bomb”. Mr Mueller also accused “nation-state hackers” of seeking out US technology, intelligence, intellectual property and even military weapons and strategies…
• Dr Lewis said that neither the US nor any of its Western allies had formed an effective response to the Chinese threat, which has its origins in a massive boost to Chinese technology ordered by Deng Xiaoping, the late Chinese leader, in 1986. The West’s own cyber offensives have so far been directed largely at terrorists rather than nation states, giving China virtually free rein to penetrate Western systems with its own world-class hackers and increasingly popular Chinese-made components. “You almost have to admire them,” Dr Lewis said. “They have been very consistent in their goals.”

Related:

e9/11 Preparation: Bush Officials Plan Simulated Cyber-Attack

• WASHINGTON (AFP) – Former top US officials staged a digital doomsday simulation on Tuesday in which a huge cyberattack crashes cellphone networks, slows Web traffic to a crawl and plunges major cities into darkness.
• Dubbed “Cyber ShockWave,” the elaborate exercise was held in a Washington hotel room transformed for the day into the White House Situation Room, where the president and his advisers typically meet to address national emergencies.
• Former president George W. Bush’s Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff played the role of National Security Advisor as the “cabinet” sought to respond to a nightmare scenario drawn up by former CIA director Michael Hayden.
• As the “crisis” escalated, the officials discussed various actions including calling out the National Guard, nationalizing the utility companies and staging a retaliatory strike if the authors of the cyberattack become known.
• “If this is an attack on the United States the president, as commander in chief, has the authority to use the full powers at his disposal,” said former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, in her role as attorney general.
• “We’re in good shape from a command-and-control standpoint,” Charles Wald, a retired general acting as Secretary of Defense, reassured the team.
• “We can take action offensively if we know where to go,” said Wald, former deputy commander of US European Command. “Problematically, we don’t know where that is.”
• Three large video screens behind the participants displayed multi-color maps of the United States with a series of mock updates and a fictional television network, “GNN,” broadcast news reports on the cascading crisis.
• The simulated cyberattack was spread through a free application for smartphones about “March Madness,” the wildly popular annual US college basketball tournament.
• The “March Madness” malware contained video footage of the Red Army although a security adviser warned this may be a “red herring” and whether the attack was launched by a state, terrorists or criminals was not immediately clear.
• Launched from servers in Russia, it first crippled cellphone networks, then landlines, then the Internet and eventually the electricity grid in the entire eastern United States, exacerbated by a pair of bombings at power stations.
• New York, Philadelphia and Washington were plunged into darkness, airline traffic was disrupted and the financial markets ground to a halt.
• “This is a massive blow to the solar plexus of the economy,” said “Treasury Secretary” Stephen Friedman, former director of the National Economic Council.
• National Security Adviser Chertoff peppered the cabinet with questions.
• “If we were to shut a server down in Russia, would the Russians view that as an attack?” he asked. “If the attacker is either a state actor or a terrorist group what are our options for responding or retaliating?”
• Speaking after the scenario was over, Negroponte said it was fairly realistic. “None of it struck me as particularly outlandish,” he said.
• Former deputy CIA director John McLaughlin, who was bumped up to Director of National Intelligence for the cyber game, said Al-Qaeda would clearly “like to carry out something like this but we don’t know their capabilities.”
• “The Chinese and the Russians have the capability,” added Fran Townsend, Bush’s one-time Homeland Security advisor, who was promoted to Homeland Security secretary for the simulation.
• Wald, the Pentagon chief for a day, said: “I think the scenario we saw today is believable. I think we’re preparing for it. I don’t think we’re as prepared as we should be.”

(Read between the lines on this one…just “practicing”…)

• “Our retaliation should not be restricted to merely military matters, and we should adopt a strategic package of counter-punches covering politics, military affairs, diplomacy and economics to treat both the symptoms and root cause of this disease,” said Luo Yuan, a researcher at the Academy of Military Sciences.
• “Just like two people rowing a boat, if the United States first throws the strokes into chaos, then so must we.”
• Luo said Beijing could “attack by oblique means and stealthy feints” to make its point in Washington.
• “For example, we could sanction them using economic means, such as dumping some U.S. government bonds,” Luo said.
• Chinese has blasted the United States over the planned $6.4 billion arms package for Taiwan unveiled in late January, saying it will sanction U.S. firms that sell weapons to the self-ruled island that Beijing considers a breakaway province of China.
• China is likely to unveil its official military budget for 2010 next month, when the Communist Party-controlled national parliament meets for its annual session.
• The PLA officers suggested that budget should mirror China’s ire toward Washington.
• “Clearly propose that due to the threat in the Taiwan Sea, we are increasing military spending,” said Luo.

• The world’s largest Internet search company and the world’s most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity.
• Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according to cybersecurity experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google — and its users — from future attack.
• Google and the NSA declined to comment on the partnership. But sources with knowledge of the arrangement, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the alliance is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information without violating Google’s policies or laws that protect the privacy of Americans’ online communications. The sources said the deal does not mean the NSA will be viewing users’ searches or e-mail accounts or that Google will be sharing proprietary data.
• The partnership strikes at the core of one of the most sensitive issues for the government and private industry in the evolving world of cybersecurity: how to balance privacy and national security interests. On Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair called the Google attacks, which the company acknowledged in January, a “wake-up call.” Cyberspace cannot be protected, he said, without a “collaborative effort that incorporates both the U.S. private sector and our international partners.”

(Two assumptions: 1) that Google hasn’t already partnered with the NSA before - this is just a legal gloss 2) There will be no mission creep? Ha, riiiight.)

• Washington (CNN) — The Pentagon will no longer shape the U.S. military to fight two major conventional wars at once, but rather prepare for numerous conflicts and not all in the same style, according to a draft of a new strategic outlook the Pentagon is announcing on Monday.
• The change will be addressed in the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, a congressionally mandated document that looks at future threats and the military’s requirements to mitigate them.
• According to Pentagon officials, Defense Secretary Robert Gates will be asking for $708 billion, including funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — $44 billion more the 2010 budget of $664 billion.
• The last major review was released in 2006 and the Pentagon’s view of the world has changed dramatically in the four years since.
• The 2006 review was heavily focused on the threat of a large-scale conventional war with China and that country’s saber rattling over Taiwan. It also stressed the need for more of and a greater role for special forces troops for use in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• The 2010 review still stresses the threats from China, but will look at the need to defend against a growing threat of cyber attacks — without directly tying China to past cyber attacks, according to Pentagon officials — and China’s focus on preemptively striking and crippling an adversary’s ability to tell what it will do next ahead of a large attack.
• “Prudence demands that future conflicts could involve kinetic and non-kinetic (use of explosive weapons and laser weapons) attacks on space-based surveillance and communications,” according to the draft.

• Yet Shi knows well the perils of speaking her mind in China, where undercover police and mercenary thugs wait to pounce. She has twice been snatched off the street, held incommunicado on the assumption that she would eventually abandon her cause and go home.
• Shi is a victim of the secretive realm of “black jails” — unlawful detention facilities that have sprung up across China to discourage persistent petitioners considered pests by government officials.
• Each year millions of rural Chinese bring their problems to functionaries in Beijing and other cities. Yet very few of their cases are ever resolved, and most end up in legal limbo, activists say.
• But the torrent of cases clogs the civil system, and puts political pressure on administrators to settle them. Activists say lower-level officials have responded with organized kidnappings in which petitioners — many plucked from the streets outside government offices — are held in clandestine jails in state-owned hotels, nursing homes and psychiatric centers.
• The theory: You can’t lodge a complaint if you don’t show up.
• “The Chinese petitioning system is completely broken,” said Phelim Kine, an Asia researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch. “And the government is outsourcing its problems to a thuggish black industry.”
• Since 2003, the illegal jail network has grown as top Communist Party officials looked the other way, and thousands of petitioners disappeared.
• After at first denying the jails’ existence, the Chinese government recently acknowledged the problem. An article in the December issue of Outlook magazine, which is owned by the official New China News Agency, cited at least 73 black jails in Beijing alone.
• The article says an estimated 10,000 people at a time have been detained in hundreds of jails.
• The black-jail system reportedly sprang up years ago, after the government abolished another system that allowed officials to jail petitioners they considered threats.
• Under the current for-profit system, private jail operators receive $22 to $44 a day per person, increasing the incentive to prolong captivity, according to the Human Rights Watch report. The fees are paid by local officials.

(And to “save” education CA Governor Schwarzenegger wants to turn prisons from state control over to privately run institutions…setting conditions for CA and then nation-wide black jails? This is not to say things aren’t bad enough when you are in the big house.)

China Unleashes the ‘Sgt. Pepper’s of Dogfight Videos’

ha, wtf.

On this rare map, China is the center of the world

• Washington (AP) — A rarely seen 400-year-old map that identified Florida as “the Land of Flowers” and put China at the center of the world went on display Tuesday at the Library of Congress. It will eventually be housed at the University of Minnesota.
• The map created by Matteo Ricci was the first in Chinese to show the Americas. Ricci, a Jesuit missionary from Italy, was among the first Westerners to live in what is now Beijing in the early 1600s.
• Known for introducing Western science to China, Ricci created the map in 1602 at the request of Emperor Wanli.
• Ricci’s map includes pictures and annotations describing different regions of the world. Africa was noted to have the world’s highest mountain and longest river.
• The brief description of North America mentions “humped oxen” or bison, wild horses and a region named “Ka-na-ta.”
• Several Central and South American places are named, including “Wa-ti-ma-la” (Guatemala), “Yu-ho-t’ang” (Yucatan) and “Chih-Li” (Chile).

via: thedaytheytriedtokillme:

• The FBI report estimates that since 2003, the Chinese Army has specifically developed a network of over 30,000 Chinese military cyberspies, plus more than 150,000 private-sector computer experts, whose mission is to steal American military and technological secrets and cause mischief in government and financial services. China’s goal, says the FBI report, is to have the world’s premier “informationized armed forces” by 2020. According to the bureau’s classified information, the Chinese hackers are adept at implanting malicious computer code, and in 2009 companies in diverse industries such as oil and gas, banking, aerospace, and telecommunications encountered costly and at times debilitating problems with Chinese-implanted “malware.” The FBI analyst would not name the affected companies.
• One of China’s most effective weapons, according to the FBI report, is a continuation of what Pentagon security investigators originally dubbed Titan Rain; it is a Chinese scanner program that probes national defense and high-tech industrial computer networks thousands of times a minute looking for vulnerabilities. The Chinese military hackers, the FBI analyst told me, enter without any keystroke errors, leave no digital fingerprints, and create a clean backdoor exit in under 20 minutes, feats considered capable only for a military or civilian spy agency of only a few governments.
• These attacks are proliferating. The FBI report lays out the identifiable attacks originating from China just on the Defense Department computers; they increased from 44,000 in 2007 to 55,000 in 2008, and topped 90,000 last year. “They probe, they test our responses, as quick as we make changes and fix vulnerabilities, they are moving a step ahead,” the analyst told me.
• The Chinese hackers aren’t after credit-card numbers or bank accounts or looking to steal private identities. Instead, they are hunting for information. Although the barrage of attacks may at times appear random, the FBI report concludes that it is part of a strategy to fully flush out U.S. military telecommunications and to better understand—and to attempt to intercept—intelligence being gathered by American spy agencies, particularly the National Security Agency.

• Jan. 11 (Bloomberg) — China supplanted the U.S. as the world’s largest auto market after its 2009 vehicle sales jumped 46 percent, ending more than a century of American dominance that started with the Model T Ford.
• “China is becoming the center stage of development for the 21st century global auto industry,” said Bill Russo, a Beijing- based senior adviser at Booz & Co., which advises automakers. “Economic growth has directly translated into growth in automobile sales.”

But can China learn from the last empire’s failures: the United States building its economy around the car and war? and See 2020: China Rises, the US Declines and the Planet Strikes Back.

• Much will change in 10 years. China will rise, the global South will grow in importance, the U.S. will decline. These phenomena will be eclipsed by devastating planetary changes.
• Our two wars have been sucking us dry in two countries where state-owned Chinese companies have just scored significant economic victories.  “While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda [in Afghanistan],” wrote Wines, “China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world’s superpower is focused on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce.”
• Under George W. Bush, the U.S. set out, in part, to turn the Greater Middle East into an American “lake” of energy reserves via two invasions, and you know how that worked out.  The Chinese, on the other hand, only last year sent their warships abroad — to hunt pirates as part of an international flotilla in the Gulf of Aden — for the first time since the eunuch Zheng He commanded a Ming dynasty armada that reached Africa six centuries ago.  Unfortunately, as Michael Klare, TomDispatch regular and author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, makes clear below, China’s leaders are as unlikely to learn from our deepest mistakes as they were 30-odd years ago when China’s post-Cultural Revolution leadership looked our way and made a logical but calamitous decision: that the auto industry —all those millions of individual cars burning fossil fuels — would be a crucial pillar of their future industrial development.
• Right now, they may still seem to be acting out a key lesson of this American moment:  Stay off the hard stuff. You know, all that advanced weaponry (and the military-industrial complex that goes with it), all those aircraft carrier battle groups, all those “expeditionary forces” ready to be sent thousands of miles from home to fight “little wars.”  Once again, however, as Klare suggests, our present symbols of “power” are likely to be their paragon and the future will be a mess.  It’s not enough, it seems, to make money, not war.  Once you have the money, it has to be spent on something and our imaginations remain so limited.
• Too bad.  Here’s where you could only wish the future might be a little less predictable.  No such luck, Klare tells us, when it comes to military power as the measure of greatness on planet Earth in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

• China’s military is under attack. At least its Web site is…from hackers.
• In a sign that China’s Ministry of National Defense faces the same kind of Internet security challenges that militaries around the world have reported, its new Web site was attacked more than 2.3 million times within a month of going online in August. The state-run People’s Daily newspaper reported that revelation Wednesday in an interview with the editor-in-chief of the Chinese defense department’s Web site, Ji Guilin.
• In the report, Ji said the Web site battled down a variety of hackers and no harm was done to China’s national security. He said the Web site has boosted its network security.
• Ji didn’t say where the hacker attacks originated.
• Militaries elsewhere, of course, suggest sophisticated attacks on their national defense systems and secrets sometimes come from China. Articles here, here, here and here.
• An October report on China’s ability to “Conduct Cyber Warfare and Computer Network Exploitation” that was prepared for U.S. authorities concluded China’s ability to conduct “informationization” — cyber snooping — appears high. The report’s summary concludes with the lines, “If Chinese operators are, indeed, responsible for even some of the current exploitation efforts targeting U.S. Government and commercial networks, then they may have already demonstrated that they possess a mature and operationally proficient [computer network operations] capability.”

Jellyfish are Decimating Japanese Fishing

• KOKONOGI, Japan –The venom of the Nomura, the world’s largest jellyfish, a creature up to 2 meters (6 feet) in diameter, can ruin a whole day’s catch by tainting or killing fish stung when ensnared with them in the maze of nets here in northwest Japan’s Wakasa Bay.
• “Some fishermen have just stopped fishing,” said Taiichiro Hamano, 67. “When you pull in the nets and see jellyfish, you get depressed.”
• This year’s jellyfish swarm is one of the worst he has seen, Hamano said. Once considered a rarity occurring every 40 years, they are now an almost annual occurrence along several thousand kilometers (miles) of Japanese coast, and far beyond Japan.
• Scientists believe climate change — the warming of oceans — has allowed some of the almost 2,000 jellyfish species to expand their ranges, appear earlier in the year and increase overall numbers, much as warming has helped ticks, bark beetles and other pests to spread to new latitudes.
• The gelatinous seaborne creatures are blamed for decimating fishing industries in the Bering and Black seas, forcing the shutdown of seaside power and desalination plants in Japan, the Middle East and Africa, and terrorizing beachgoers worldwide, the U.S. National Science Foundation says.
• “These increases in jellyfish should be a warning sign that our oceans are stressed and unhealthy,” said Lucas Brotz, a University of British Columbia researcher.
• The invasions cost the industry up to 30 billion yen ($332 million) a year, and tens of thousands of fishermen have sought government compensation, said scientist Shin-ichi Uye, Japan’s leading expert on the problem.
• Hearing fishermen’s pleas, Uye, who had been studying zooplankton, became obsessed with the little-studied Nomura’s jellyfish, scientifically known as Nemopilema nomurai, which at its biggest looks like a giant mushroom trailing dozens of noodle-like tentacles.
• “No one knew their life cycle, where they came from, where they reproduced,” said Uye, 59. “This jellyfish was like an alien.”
• He artificially bred Nomura’s jellyfish in his Hiroshima University lab, learning about their life cycle, growth rates and feeding habits. He traveled by ferry between China to Japan this year to confirm they were riding currents to Japanese waters.
• He concluded China’s coastal waters offered a perfect breeding ground: Agricultural and sewage runoff are spurring plankton growth, and fish catches are declining. The waters of the Yellow Sea, meanwhile, have warmed as much as 1.7 degrees C (3 degrees F) over the past quarter-century.
• “The jellyfish are becoming more and more dominant,” said Uye, as he sliced off samples of dead jellyfish on the deck of an Echizen fishing boat. “Their growth rates are quite amazing.”
• The slight, bespectacled scientist is unafraid of controversy, having lobbied his government tirelessly to help the fishermen, and angered Chinese colleagues by arguing their government must help solve the problem, comparing it to the effects of acid rain that reaches Japan from China.
• “The Chinese people say they will think about this after they get rich, but it might be too late by then,” he said.
• Addressing the surge in jellyfish blooms in most places will require long-term fixes, such as introducing fishing quotas and pollution controls, as well as capping greenhouse gas emissions to control global warming, experts said.
• In the short term, governments are left with few options other than warning bathers or bailing out cash-strapped fishermen. In Japan, the government is helping finance the purchase of newly designed nets, a layered system that snares jellyfish with one kind of net, allowing fish through to be caught in another.
• Some entrepreneurs, meanwhile, are trying to cash in. One Japanese company is selling giant jellyfish ice cream, and another plans a pickled plum dip with chunks of giant jellyfish. But, though a popular delicacy, jellyfish isn’t likely to replace sushi or other fish dishes on Asian menus anytime soon, in view of its time-consuming processing, heavy sodium overload and unappealing image.