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The short answer is that the American private sector is not doing enough by itself or in cooperation with the U.S. government. The reasons are: CEOs want to use computing systems to make money. That's their job. If the Chinese penetrate their systems and steal intellectual property, that's a long-term problem. But because most CEOs think in terms of quarters or annual earnings, my analysis is that they have not opted to spend the millions of dollars that would be necessary to harden their IT systems. They don't want anything to go public because it would anger the Chinese government and it probably would cost them their jobs in a blitz of angry shareholder lawsuits. For similar reasons, very few U.S. companies have cooperated with the U.S. government in tackling human espionage cases, with the exception of GE. In general, the private sector has taken the view that national security is the government's job. Clearly the Chinese have exploited this gap in the American political and economic system. You ask a fascinating question about the NSA/CIA networks. No one really knows, but my guess is that those guys are still secure. They have invested in relatively new systems and are sensitive to these issues. But the Pentagon is massively behind. Which is why it is such a tragedy that the Defense Department's $10 billion JEDI project is tied up in political knots.

Jul 24, 2020
at
2:45 PM