The column, by Joshua Pollack, a contributor to Arms Control Wonk - which also inspired the name of this blog - is titled Is the cyber threat a weapon of mass destruction?
The article discusses China's recent attack on Google, observing that placing aggressive cyber activity on a par with WMD is inaccurate. Overall China's activity is more akin to spying then to warfare. However, the article states:
The damage to goodwill has been considerable. It isn't shocking that one major power spies on another, or necessarily even intolerable. As the saying goes, "It's all in the game." But the game has never been friendly, and there's something breathtakingly crude about how it's being played today. The attempt to capture as many computers as possible is aggressive and indiscriminate, reaching into the lives of private citizens in the United States and beyond. In a particularly insidious turn, the spies have been known to take advantage of professional contacts between Americans and Chinese in order to assemble convincingly spoofed messages and to mine e-mail address books for targets.
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