Cyber thievery threatens our standard of living

A major concern behind this protest site is is grounded in the belief that the federal government is incapable of intelligently defending our standard of living. That concern has been raised here and elsewhere. Part of the perception comes from the profound differences of opinion between the two parties. They usually cannot agree on even basic things and that typically leads to a failure to act decisively or intelligently.

Don't invent it, steal it

Theft is a powerful tactic our economic competitors can use to gain economic advantage. In the face of the chaos and inaction in formulating American policy and the rise of the internet, our competitors can and do easily steal innovations needed to efficiently compete against us. In the past, it was industrial and military espionage doing damage on a small or modest scale. Now its cyber theft doing damage on a staggering scale.

Some analysts believe that cyber theft of American technology and other intellectual property, e.g., entertainment, could literally destroy the American economy (link to one analysis). While the U.S. federal government dithers and does little or nothing, other countries, particularly China and Russia, have got their act together and are executing a coordinated national policy. They are drilling into us and stealing and sabotaging the U.S. economy and military as fast as they possibly can. Unfortunately, our government is distracted and paralyzed by endless election cycle warfare.

More evidence of U.S. incompetence in defending itself is from the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ published an opinion by three experts on Friday, Jan. 27, 2012 (page A15; article online). These experts really ought to know what they are talking about, given their credentials. Their comments speak for themselves.

"Each of us has been speaking publicly for years about the ability of cyber terrorists to cripple our critical infrastructure, including financial networks and the power grid. Now this report [from the U.S. Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive - reports page] finally reveals what we couldn't say before: The threat of economic cyber espionage looms even more ominously."

"The report is a summation of the catastrophic impact cyber espionage could have on the U.S. economy and global competitiveness over the next decade. Evidence indicates that China intends to help build its economy by intellectual-property theft rather than by innovation and investment in research and development."

"Yet today's legislative framework severely restricts us from fully addressing domestic economic espionage. . . . . Congress and the administration must also create the means to actively force more information-sharing. While organizations (both in government and in the private sector) claim to share information, the opposite is usually the case, and this must be actively fixed."

In view of the rhetoric coming from the endless political election season, is what you hear from our politicians comforting or not? Are they focused on real issues, on political nonsense or something else? Did congress show competence or generate confidence when it tried to deal with an internet-related theft problem in the recent SOPA/PIPA incident? (Even Hitler didn't like SOPA)

We are in for some real economic and national security damage if congress and the executive branch aren't up to the job of defending us. We can't even estimate the extent of the theft according to the Counterintelligence Executive report (page 4):

"Estimates from academic literature on the losses from economic espionage range so widely as to be meaningless - from $2 billion per year to $400 billion or more a year - reflecting the scarcity of data and the variety of methods to calculate losses."

Given that, annual losses could be more than $400 billion/year. That's not trivial. It is fair to guess that annual losses are around $150 - $250 billion annually - also not trivial. It is reasonable to argue that our government and elected politicians they are not intelligently defending the American standard of living, despite their vociferous claims to contrary. Unfortunately, that self-serving defense is just empty politics as usual.