Hacking is Spying Using New Technology It has become quite commonplace for governments to not only hack other country’s sites, but also to spread viruses through them. You might say it has also become a corporate business to try and find out other company’s trade secrets. Nothing has really changed. This may seem like a strange statement to some, but we have been doing these things since there were governments and companies. The difference is we are now using the most modern technology to do it, which surpasses any technology we had before. In the past the way you did a lot of these things was by using spies. Some historical cases of corporate espionage were quite interesting. China had a monopoly on tea. The British loved tea. The British were very powerful at the time. So, what does such a powerful country do to take advantage of the Chinese? They hire someone to go to China and steal tea plants. The stolen plants were taken to British controlled India. The famous East India Company did the dirty deed. They used a Scottish botanist Robert Fortune who somehow disguised himself as a Chinese merchant. Even when we are talking about modern times things happen which do not always involve computer hacking as the main way to get secret info a company has. Let me give you an example. One company which is famous today decided to buy another company’s trash hoping to get some of their secrets out of it. You see there are other ways to find out trade secrets without resorting to computers. Another way companies and even governments try and learn company, and national secrets is by blackmailing someone high up in a government or company. They offer them money when they know they are in financial trouble, and it is enough where it is hard for them to turn it down. When and if they ever get conscience problems then they get blackmailed. The same is true for sex. Girls or men make the casual acquaintance of someone and come on to them and if there is a sexual liaison, photos and video are secretly taken and used for blackmail if it becomes necessary. One famous computer company had a board which was getting very angry about leaks. They hired investigators. The investigators came on the scene as reporters and even company directors. They did everything to find the leaks including also examining the garbage. What happened next was something the company never expected, the attorney general got involved and the company had to make a large settlement for what they did which included examining the phone records of employees and board members. They were also sued by some newspapers at the time. I think the phony reporters pretended to be from the papers which sued. All in all, the idea of spying on one’s own company turned out to be a very bad and costly idea. When you’re the top dog in technology you have to expect to be the target of attempts to learn about what you have, and that is one of the reasons the United States is under such a barrage of hacks and spying events. One scientist who was of Chinese extraction worked for twenty years in a top-secret laboratory in the United States, until one day he disappeared with a thumb drive full of information. It turned out he left the country and went to China. Some people believed the reason he did this was he had family in China, and a threat had been made if he didn’t retrieve certain secrets, harm would come to his relatives. This is another thing which happens. When one has family in a foreign country their safety can always be used against someone. Heck even people in this country can have their families threatened. It is much easier for a foreign country like China to do this if the family members are there. When a country wants to destroy something in another country without that country being able to prove they did it what is easier than using a computer virus? Take the case of the United States wanting to slow down Iran’s nuclear program so we developed a virus which claimed to be harmless to everything except Iran’s centrifuges. The virus was sent onto the internet and made its way to its intended target where it did what it was made to do. I always wondered about this, and how many computers had problems and never suspected why. The virus could not have been 100% innocuous to every other computer and computer-controlled device in the world, it must have done some unintended damage. There is a story about an American spy who in the late 1700 came up with a plan. He had worked in a cotton mill but cotton mills here were all obsolete and hand operated machines were everywhere. In England however they had powered machines and even though the United States was the world largest supplier of cotton, the huge profits were in the mills. The man was Samuel Slater and he decided to go to England. He knew it was against English law to take any machine, or process out of the country, but he had an excellent memory and decided to take advantage of it. He got a job in an English cotton mill for a time then left the country. Slater found out a mill in New England was experimenting in powered machinery but was failing. He went there and within a year he was able to reconstruct an English powered machine from memory. This is an early case of national, and maybe corporate espionage. Many developing countries say we got our start by taking from more developed countries so why shouldn’t they be allowed to do the same. They have a lot of resentment towards us when we try and enforce our patents and copyrights. Probably the most intense spying and espionage takes place between countries when they are at war with each other. World War II was no exception. We tried everything to steal the Japanese code and we did. This allowed us to know what the Japanese were saying to each other, but we couldn’t use all the information because they would have known we broke the code and changed it. We also did the same with the German enigma machine. The Germans had developed a message coding machine which looked like a typewriter but it could encode messages with millions of possible variables unless you knew the settings. We eventually were able to get one machine and using a primitive computer broke the code. Today we hack and spy, yesteryear we spied, but it is only the latest manifestation of stealing and there could be new ways in the future of doing this.
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