And in return for defiling the most expensive military project in the history of the world we get… to confirm what we already knew? That the Chinese were thieving their way to what took the West decades of R&D and tax-payer dollars to attain?! :dubious:
Also, why is this seemingly failed military program being clung to so resolutely, despite the fact that it’s clearly been compromised? I mean, they can’t even guarantee it’s not still being hacked right now! –
Lastly, and at the risk of asking the blatantly and asininely obvious:** WHY IS SUCH SENSITIVE INFORMATION IN THE DOMAIN OF THE INTERNET? WHY ISN’T IT KEPT OFF-LINE?!**
Personally, I don’t think that Snowden is a bad guy. In the main, I believe he did us all a favor. It is too bad that the powers that be left him no alternative…
Anyway, regarding your first point, which president are you talking about? It looks like the thefts took place with 1.5 years left in the Bush administration; are you implying President Bush was spineless? Or are you talking about the President that inherited this fiasco (Obama)? Just out of curiosity, can you tell me how you imagine this would work out?
I am not sure what we would come back with after that, but it would probably include references to a shining city on a hill and an axis of evil and the American populace would get bored and go back to watching Monday Night Football.
Because development, testing and research involves dozens upon dozens of geographically distributed sites, not to mention all the oversight and reporting paperwork that has to go up the chain to the Pentagon, the congressional evaluation committees and what have you. Then back again.
That doesn’t mean you can access all that stuff by typing www.statesecrets.com in your browser ; but it’s still technically on-line. Keeping every data exchange strictly snail mail would be ridiculously impractical.
Anecdotally, I used to work as sys.admin in a very small company that nevertheless had a couple guys debugging part of the Rafale’s autopilot software. Our network wasn’t wide open, far from it, but neither it nor the company’s offices were Fort Knox. And the code monkeys would bring some of the software home to work over the WEs. Hell, come to that nobody ever did a background check on me, yet I had all the passwords.
When you’ve got hundreds of thousands of people working on something, you’re bound to have weak spots and carelessness somewhere.
[QUOTE=Stringbean]
This would be a good time for a president with a backbone to call them out to the whole world.
[/QUOTE]
'Cause Lord knows the US are the poster children for data privacy ;).
Nations spy on each other. All of them, all the time. It’s just a game.
I think when you factor in the fact that the F-35 was developed for multiple branches the costs aren’t nearly as extreme.
Just keeping up the tradition. The USSR (and the Chinese of course) got the plans for the atomic bomb from us, as well as for the stinger anti-aircraft missile (and a bunch of other stuff). How’d that work out for them in the end?
Why do you think the F-35 is a failed program? Because the Chinese got the stealth data?? Or do you have some other reason for making this assertion?
If it’s the stealth data then while it might help them build a stealth 5th gen fighter of their own (maybe), I don’t see how that affects our own program. If both sides (sides not likely to fight anyway) have the tech then we are back to an even footing wrt stealth. And all of this assumes that simply stealing some of the data gives them all of the other aspects to build the things, which, I think, is a pretty big leap, at least in the short term.
Maybe because they have a differing opinion on the subject and it’s not nearly as cut and dried as your 2013 YouTube video is making it out to be? Just a thought.
Because it would be difficult to get the various agencies and organizations, let alone the manufacturers keyed in if it was all kept in a vault somewhere and guarded by steely eyed myrmidons in plate armor wielding chain mini-plasma rail guns. And it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The Soviets managed to steal the plans and data for an atomic bomb, something far more strategically important at the time…a time way before there was an internet.
Okay. But (correct me if I’m wrong) the Lackheed Martin data breach was related to the hackers essentially sitting on online symposiums the company conducted over the period of 2~3 years…? (If memory serves).
As such, why would such sensitive meetings be conducted through Skype (?) and how could it go on for so long unnoticed? You may have heard, the U.S. have been conducting their own cyber espionage, too (:rolleyes:). So, why did they not cotton on to their Chinese competitors’ new-found booty of information before their own ‘Rokheet Maatin’ literally publicly showcased their F-35 knock-offs!? What kind of utterly useless “hacking” are the N.S.A. and its ‘five brown eyes’ doing with the untold billions of tax-payer funds they’re given – hackneyed human’s rights violation related tripe which Mao’s portrait already hangs in Tienanmen in proud testament of? The role playing of basement dwelling perverts to their own citizen’s pornography browsing and fap cam activities?! :dubious:
All this while the N.S.A. are supposed to be at the cutting edge of this kind of stuff and therefore one would be forgiven for thinking that they would be privy to any such eavesdropping… at very least within a reasonable time frame from when such intrusions occur. You know… like… within a few FREAKING YEARS!! FFS… :smack:
Are the Chinese really that far ahead of the West with respect to this kind of warfare? If so - and in light of their resultant, seemingly fast-catching-up military technological capability - is the lone superpower handover already upon us?.. even so soon after taking the mantle of the world’s largest economy??
Who’d have thought selling out the world’s economic independence, resources, land and sovereignty for low cost labour wrought, cheap crap destined for landfill would have come back to bite us on our fat, ‘round-eye’ behinds. Even as a secular free-thinker, I think I, too, am starting to hear the trot of those ‘myriads of myriads’ of horsemen… :rolleyes:
I’m not exactly tracking whether the Snowden leak is just rehashing the Chinese espionage efforts that stole unclassified information seven years ago, which has been publicly known about for about two and a half years, or if there’s an allegation that there were additional thefts not previously reported.
If this is rehashing news that’s a few years old, then what we seem to know is that a huge amount of unclassified data was stolen, but it doesn’t seem that any classified info was stolen. Why are there so many technical documents about weapons systems? Because it doesn’t make sense to have the instructions given to every wrench turner in Fort Worth or Groton to be classified about how to install an F-35 gonkulator or an automated submarine flange cap.
Theft of those types of documents is important, but the idea that a major weapons system should be cancelled because of it is dumb. D-U-M-B. The idea that China is technologically ahead of us in weapons development is even more silly, except in a few niche areas (like ballistic anti-ship missiles, which we’ve never bothered to develop but are now quite potent).
And let’s just get this out in the open: Pierre Sprey is mostly, but not totally, a crank. If he’s such a genius, who here regrets the fact that the F-16 has a radar? He didn’t think one was needed.
How should they know ? Any security system some guy invented some *other *guy can figure out, given time and coffee. Any log or record no matter how discrete can be found and edited, or any “hack” masqueraded to look like a legit access. And since a document that has been cyber-stolen is still there…
It’s not so much that they’re so very far ahead - they just spend an inordinate amount of time, manpower and resources on this stuff. For them, it’s still cheaper than to come up with their own designs or R&D, since y’all are reliable sources of such.
Oh yes. Maybe not today, but 20 years from now ? No question. But it’s not a zero-sum game, you know. Their gain is not your loss.
I never used the term “ahead”. I said “fast-catching-up”. And if they are indeed destined to be the new, lone hegemony, what was the $600bil p.a. for? To puff out jingoistic hick chests a few inches further before the imminent deflation into hangdog shame?
As for the anti-ship missile tech; your seeming dismissal of said ordnance belies the fact that without naval power projection, the U.S. has little to nada influence in Asia and its contained trade routes. The land-based equivalent of was why ‘we’ indaved China in the 1850’s, you know… Further, without a military viewed as pre-eminent on the global stage, questions will begin to be asked of the U.S. economy and why its fiat currency should be worth what it is and, indeed, why it is the world’s base trade currency.
(‘America needs a permanent war economy.’ -Charles Wilson, GMC head, c.1945)
Well, that pretty much renders everything and anything governments have said in order to justify funding for “cyber security” as null, void and a big bunch of bovine excrement. Something I think most who know even a little bit about 1’s and 0’s, already knew.
Well, that is how things get done. No gold medals have ever been awarded for wasting a lot of money and being the biggest blowhard. …at least, not in any non domestic U.S. competition.
How so? Traffic jams many times more gridlocked than before? A fraction of the resources to share? Queuing at the supermarket checkout interminably longer than we now do? 1.4 billion is not a number that should be underestimated… Just sayin’.
Or, you could say that now that the Chinese have caught up technologically due to the thefts, it’s even more important to build the thing because if you don’t and China does, you’ve just put yourself at a major disadvantage.
If the word got out that the Germans had stolen all the data of the Manhattan project, would you go, “Oh well, they’ve got the data too. Might as well shut it down!” Or would you go, “Holy shit! They’ve got our data! We’re going to have to work twice as hard and spend twice as much to beat them!”
Everyone knows that if the plans to your major weapon are stolen, the rebels will find a convenient exhaust port that will blow the entire thing to hell with a single shot.
Well, I don’t know what they’ve said, so… But cyber security is not an unattainable myth. You just have to invent a better system before the other guy’s time and coffee breaks the old one. It takes constant, and I mean *constant *innovation and improvement. Which takes time and money, which takes taxes. Aaaand a million sphincters just tightened, all at once
It’s just a matter of priorities. You spend a lot more time and effort than them on various kinds of R&D because a) it promises to make curbstomping third world nations easier than ever, b) jobs jobs jobs and c) you have nobody else to steal it from.
Since money, time and eggheads aren’t infinite, choices have to be made.
I… wut ? How does China having e.g. combat planes on par with yours lead to longer checkout lines or more traffic jams ?
Their economy catching up doesn’t mean they’re going to take over the land. Quite the opposite : at some point, they’ll reach your/our technological, social, cultural level. So they won’t have to steal and bootleg, or at least have nobody to bootleg from. So they’ll in turn pour their brainpower into R&D, and renewable energy, and generally speaking all the shit we’re brainstorming. And we’ll all benefit from that to some extent, the same way Europe benefits from e.g. some military egghead in the US inventing (and the US government implementing) GPS.
Yeah, there’ll be more competition for the rarer resources, but in turn that also means more drive to find ways to do without (or make them less rare), on both sides of the fence.
From what I’ve heard, the F-35’s main selling point is it’s leaps ahead of the enemy, and can shoot down the enemy before the enemy can shoot it down. If the enemy has the plans, what good is it? It’s a huge waste of tax payer money and it’s obsolete before it’s active and it’s hemorrhaging ridiculous amounts of money every minute it exists.
Anybody who’s truly interested in the F-35 or the American military generally really should read this article from the Atlantic Monthly: The Tragedy of the American Military. It’s an excellent examination of what’s wrong with the military, including a thorough look at why we’re spending over a trillion dollars on a plane that may never fly a single mission.
Granted. But it seems distinctly, with all the delays and excuses, that the JSFs are constantly playing catch-up, even before they’ve even gone into service. If these things are already of a dubious competency when compared to what their Ruski / Sino contemporaries, it seems like pissing in the wind to persist with them in their current form. This, in particular when you consider of the costs involved and that if the F-35s are merely to combat the likes of Islamic State and other troglodytic adversaries, and not Russia or China, why spend so much money on something so apparently overkill? Just doesn’t add up…
I know this. It’s just that governments seem to think we don’t. I once heard (about a decade ago) an IT analyst say that the only computer that is ‘safe’ from intrusion / its information being accessed, is the one that has its HDD pulverised into dust, flushed down the toilet and the rest of its components buried in an unmarked grave in a remote region where no one is ever likely to visit. I’m starting to think this colourful statement wasn’t all hyperbole…
Well, actually, it’s a known fact that a lot of land is being bought up by those Chinese who can afford it, that many of these affluent Chinese have foreign passports and that the accelerated rise of China hasn’t exactly come with much consideration to the country’s environment; especially with respect to a place where one would choose to raise their children. With those ingredients, I think it’s a reasonably safe bet that the way the face of humanity may look like in, say, 2200 will likely be near unrecognisable to a person from 2015. …and I don’t just mean the Jetsons-esque transportation we’ll be availing.
Except that it doesn’t work this way. For one thing and contrary to what the OP seems to be saying, the Chinese didn’t get ALL of the plans. They didn’t get the more classified stealth materials plans. But even if they did, it won’t suddenly make all stealth obsolete, since as far as I know WE haven’t figured out how detect the things much better than anyone else as yet, and we’ve been playing with this technology for decades now. The Chinese, even if they had everything we did would still have to figure out how to make it all work first. You can’t simply read some plans and catch up to the folks who have been working on this stuff for decades in an instant…there is a whole bunch of engineering you need to still work out, not to mention materials science.
And even when they chug through all of that and are up with us that STILL doesn’t render the stealth tech obsolete, since they aren’t going to be selling their best, sooper sekrit fighters or stealth detectors (presuming they figure out how to build one) to everyone else who might have a disagreement with the US in the next few decades.
The debate about how good or bad the F-35 is, to me, a separate issue. Personally, I think a lot of people are underrating the thing and looking at the costs without accounting for the fact that it’s a fighter designed not only for multiple roles (air to air, air to ground, carrier based, VTOL capable, etc) but for multiple services and even multiple countries using them in different ways. Yeah, the individual costs are expensive, but it’s an air frame that will probably be with us for decades at least. Regardless, the basic concept of stealth is not going to be suddenly rendered obsolete simply because the Chinese (or anyone else) stole some plans.
