terrapinsanity.com

Success in world markets and influence in world affairs depends critically on technology and a nation’s ability to shape its workforce into the next generation of leaders. This is where America has shined – innovation, daring, investment in education and freedom to try new things all made us the dominant force of the last century.

This freedom also enabled competitors to watch what we did, learn from our experience and ante into the game without the overhead of upgrading legacy infrastructure. Industrial wannabe countries could launch their rise with new technology (pioneered here) without the headache of figuring out what to do with the previous generation technology (and its workforce) that might have led to the new tech in the first place.

Today nobody learns better from us than China, via lessons we give for free … and those it takes from us.

Having given up our leading role in most other industries, America’s last edge is in research and education around technology. We’ve been good at it and China both knows it and wants it. In effect we are at war, one that China wages well and America isn’t even fighting, where research prowess is one of the decisive factors in the question of whether East or West will dominate the world in the new millennium. The list of skirmishes is long but you see more in the news nearly every day. A few illustrating our point:

• China cyber warfare efforts repeatedly targeted Google for its technology.
• Chinese products ship with malware designed to give China control over industrial systems. (Did you like the software hack that took out Iranian centrifuges, crippling their nuclear program? Then you’ll love what China ships in its SCADA – supervisory control and data acquisition – systems to industry across the US.)
• China continues to run intense cyber attacks on US officials.

Is this espionage the work of China? Of course. In other reports, Chinese networking surveillance is credited with almost completely eliminating rogue cyber crime in that country. What that leaves are the sanctioned and authorized efforts – you know, only efforts approved by the government.

The University of Maryland already kowtows to China.

• That country’s students have first dibs on slots for our freshman admissions – admit decisions aren’t sent to Maryland taxpayers’ families until two months after Chinese scholars’ letters go out and we learn how many fall seats will be left over for us.
• Our faculty play the game by accepting all-expense-paid trips to travel in China in return for agreeing to deliver their research along the way, if not also pause between visits to the usual tourist spots in order to teach how to use new technology.
• Maryland resources support Chinese visitors, embedded in our laboratories and responsible for channeling it back to the mother country.
• Our previous university president, Dan Mote, is on record as saying one of our purposes of active study abroad programs is to prepare Maryland students to go get jobs in China.

And let’s not forget, that days after IARPA – the Intelligence Advanced Projects Agency – announced it would locate in College Park at our M-Square, China announced it would set up a laboratory in M-Square, with UM’s help of course. What a coincidence!

Is our commentary on this just some sort of gloom mongering? If it is, then we are not alone. On April 26 of this year, Supervisory Special Agent David Musgrove, of the FBI’s Cyber Crime Squad in Baltimore (one of the largest such units because of the density of government facilities in this region), told UM’s Cyber Security Center (in its seminar series) that “China is stealing this country blind”, and moreover UM is one of the key conduits of research and intellectual property that go out the door. The feds recognize that full time agents of China are responsible for collecting technical information, which in some cases may be applied more quickly back in China than here, and for leveraging our laboratory facilities as a cheaper and superior resource for designing new products to sell around the world. A good laboratory can cost millions. Why would China capitalize in labs when the US is willing to pay Chinese technicians to work for them in our facilities?

A consequence of all this is, again according to Musgrove, that “our service men and women face their own country’s technology on the battlefield.”

What are the odds that network protocol and router technologies which are critical to monitoring China’s own people (e.g. to crush the Jasmine Revolution) came from College Park’s computer science program, itself a center of research in protocols and network tech? What are the odds that our cutting edge coursework in mobile devices will get more attention in Beijing than in DC?

NCIX Poster

And who can name the first technology that came to College Park in any ‘technology exchange’? Thus we come to the sad point of this note, that in spite of the backdrop painted above, Maryland’s role in the global conflict on-going today will be to expand our efforts … on behalf of China. President Wallace Loh, in his June 13 letter to the community, reported on his participation in an official state visit to China, his “ancestral land”. Read for yourself how our campus has rosier relations than ever with China, and in particular how we schmooze with the Confucius Institutes – a front group monitored by DHS as haven for agents of China’s extensive central propaganda department (news and information media) and overseas intelligence collection (espionage.)