from Hacker News

China suspected of breaching U.S. Postal Service computer networks

by dbin78 on 11/10/14, 3:36 PM with 46 comments

• by mike_hearn on 11/10/14, 6:25 PM

  Still, “it’s perfectly appropriate for us to do everything we can to embarrass and punish the Chinese if they’re in our systems, whether or not we’re in theirs,” said former National Security Agency general counsel Stewart A. Baker. “It’s the case that the U.S. and Russia and other countries are much more cautious about getting caught because they think there are going to be consequences. It’s only the Chinese that think there are no consequences to getting caught.”

  Stewart Baker making himself look foolish again! Last time he popped up on HN:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8559454

  I really wonder how someone can come out with stuff like this. I doubt the PRC feels one iota of embarrassment for even one split second, and if senior US officials really bring up Chinese state sponsored hacking "every time they meet with their counterparts in Beijing" then the US Government is living up to its reputation as plumbing the depths of hypocrisy. They embarrass only themselves.

• by semenko on 11/10/14, 4:47 PM

  They buried the lede a bit -- since I doubt organized attackers are after the personal information of postal service employees:

  "It is also possible that the Chinese were after other types of data, analysts said. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, at the request of law enforcement officials, takes pictures of all addressing information from envelopes and parcels.​"

  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mai...

• by jamesli on 11/10/14, 6:37 PM

  It was USSR before. It has been China since 1990's. An imaginary and powerful enemy has to be created. Iraq, Iran, Afganistan are too small for the title.

• by sitkack on 11/10/14, 6:52 PM

  Good thing we photograph every piece of mail, OCR and store that information indefinitely.

• by omgitstom on 11/10/14, 9:01 PM

  “Acting too quickly could have caused more data to be compromised,” Partenheimer said.

  This statement really confuses me

• by jamesli on 11/10/14, 8:10 PM

  "For one thing, the Chinese may be assuming that the postal service is more like theirs — a state-owned entity that has vast amounts of data on its citizens, said James A. Lewis, a cyber-policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies."

  State-owned? That is true. "has vast amount of data on its citizens"? Please do some homework before speaking.

• by bicknergseng on 11/10/14, 6:03 PM

  As a side note, I really hate article titles that use this kind of wildly inaccurate accusation. The nation of China did not breach the U.S. Postal Service, a Chinese government team did. Still inaccurate and vague, but there's a world of difference between the United States launching a drone strike and the CIA, an agent of the US, launching a drone strike.

  Edit: I've read more than enough articles where the agent or actor is NOT a member of the government, yet still referred to as "China" or "America". However, even in situations where it is a member of the government or of a company, I still think the connotations conveyed by imprecisely labeling the actors totally throw off expectations and perceptions.