Actor Claude Rains is perhaps best known for his role as Capt. Louis Renault in the 1942 film “Casablanca.” In a memorable scene, he orders a popular cafe shut down on orders from his German overseers. ADVERTISING Actor Claude Rains
Actor Claude Rains is perhaps best known for his role as Capt. Louis Renault in the 1942 film “Casablanca.” In a memorable scene, he orders a popular cafe shut down on orders from his German overseers.
“How can you close me up? On what grounds?” asks the cafe owner, played by Humphrey Bogart. To which Renault replies, “I’m shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on here.”
Just then, a croupier hands Renault a pile of money. “Your winnings, sir,” he tells him. To which Renault replies, not the least bit sheepishly, “Thank you very much.”
We were reminded of this scene Monday when the Obama Justice Department indicted five members of the Chinese military on charges of hacking the computers of five U.S. companies — Westinghouse Electric, Alcoa, Allegheny Technologies Incorporated, U.S. Steel and SolarWorld.
Attorney General Eric Holder declared himself shocked, shocked that Beijing would stoop to such cyberespionage. And he vowed that the U.S. “will not tolerate actions by any nation that seeks to illegally sabotage American companies and undermine the integrity of fair competition in the operation of the free market.”
We imagine that John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, the network equipment company, must feel a little like the cafe owner in “Casablanca.”
Indeed, while the Obama administration has decided to crack down on China’s alleged hacking, it has not responded in a meaningful way to recent revelations that the National Security Agency has secretly installed surveillance technology in servers and networking gear — including products made by Cisco.
In a letter Thursday to President Obama, Mr. Chambers cites reports that NSA actually has intercepted IT equipment in transit from manufacturers to customers. Those reports also included a photograph of a Cisco product being modified.
Cisco’s CEO warns that the actions of the NSA, tacitly sanctioned by the Obama administration, have undermined confidence in the U.S. technology.
“This confidence is eroded,” he wrote the president, “by revelations of governments’ surveillance, government demands that make it difficult for companies to meet privacy expectations of citizens and laws of other countries, and allegations that governments exploit, rather than report, security vulnerabilities.”
That erosion of confidence has already hurt U.S. companies, like Cisco, doing business in foreign markets.
And nowhere more than in China, ironically, where Cisco saw its revenue decline 18 percent in the third quarter of 2013 — which the Silicon Valley company last November attributed to a backlash against U.S. tech companies suspected of secretly working with the NSA and other U.S. spy agencies.
In December, several leading tech companies — Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo! and AOL — sent a letter of their own to both President Obama and Congress.
They declared it “time for the world’s governments to address the practices and laws regulating government surveillance.” They urged Washington “take the lead.”
We think that is a far more productive strategy against state-sponsored surveillance activities targeting U.S. businesses than indicting Chinese or other foreign agents on charges for which they are unlikely to stand trial, much less be convicted and jailed.
— From the Orange County Register
