Chinese Steal More from US Defense Contractor

It seems like we have so many instances of the theft of information from contractors that we might want to do something about how contractors protect information they are given.  The Defense Department (DoD) has the ability and programs to do something, but they don’t.  This is gross negligence.

I started to keep track of the instances of theft by the Chinese, but it took up too much of my time.  They were doing it repeatedly, in various industries, different armed services, with greater and greater gains each time.  When the same thing happens over and over, somebody at the top or somewhere else in the Administration needs to get this under control.

We do have an Industrial Security Program that can do much more more but it’s charter is classified information and the latest story to hit us Does not involve classified information, even though it should have.  The aggregate of large quantities of unclassified data often is a higher classification than the individual pieces, something the Navy alludes to here.  The fact is all the large contractors have huge amounts of sensitive data given to them on a range of programs that make that data classified.  The services don’t want to call this out, and the contractors don’t either.  Contractors are doing work on this data at home, on their personal and corporate computers, and they don’t want to change that.  So, they ignore aggregation and take a chance.  Now they are just beginning to realize what huge targets theses contractors make, even though they should’ve been figuring this out ten years ago.  Defense doesn’t want to spend the money to do oversight of contractors.  That is not just stupid;  it is reckless.  It requires work in two large areas of security, classification of aggregations and computer security.

The first thing is a government problem since contractors cannot classify anything.  The second is a contractor problem because the government cannot protect information they give to contractors.  The government is unwilling to oversee the latter, or do much about the former.  In the meantime, the Chinese steal us blind, and build weapon systems that can defeat ours.  The bulk of that kind of thing is in the DoD.  Get it together and do something.