US charges of PLA hacking likely to hurt rather than protect American business
Donald Gasper says scrapping of Westinghouse deal would be no bad thing, given safety concerns
Last month, the US Department of Justice launched a highly publicised indictment against five employees of the People's Liberation Army, accusing them of cyberhacking to steal US commercial secrets.
This came - was it merely coincidence? - just after the exposure by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden of further details of massive spying activities by American intelligence agencies, involving targets on several continents.
The US allegations have been vigorously rejected by the Chinese side. Whatever the truth, it seems the United States may have inadvertently damaged its own commercial interests while arguably doing China a favour.
Among the US accusations was one concerning a PLA employee named Wang Dong, who reportedly goes by the colourful nickname of "UglyGorilla".
He is supposed to have stolen from Westinghouse Electric, the US company controlled by Japan's Toshiba, plans for its next-generation nuclear reactor. According to the indictment, starting from 2010, at least 1.4 gigabytes of information were stolen from the company's computers. That's the approximate equivalent of 700,000 pages of e-mails and attachments.
There's just one thing the Department of Justice investigators appear not to have been aware of, however: Westinghouse was on the verge of clinching a deal to build eight of its new AP1000 reactors in China. Reuters reported on April 21: "China may sign as early as next year the first of several contracts for eight new nuclear reactors from Westinghouse Electric Co, as the government presses ahead with the world's biggest civilian nuclear power expansion since the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan."
