Few have vaulted from anonymity to the front pages more spectacularly than Edward Snowden, the former government contractor who revealed secrets from the National Security Agency's spying program.

NBC News will devote an hour of primetime on Wednesday to the first American television interview with Snowden, who disclosed secrets from the National Security Agency. Brian Williams, the anchor and managing editor of "NBC Nightly News," traveled to Moscow last week for an exclusive, wide-ranging interview with Snowden. The interview airs Wednesday at 10 p.m. Eastern/9 p.m. Central.

While some call Snowden a traitor who disclosed American secrets, others call him a patriot who exposed violations of the constitution.

Although his intense gaze and stubbled chin became the face of an international debate over privacy and security, many questions remain about his motivations, the exact extent of his removal of documents, and his future.

The impact of Snowden's disclosures, however, is already widespread. President Barack Obama appointed a review panel that criticized the NSA's domestic data collection. Obama recommended in March that the NSA end the warrantless collection in bulk of metadata on Americans, which can show the most intimate details of an individual's life and the patterns of movement and communication of millions. And the House recently passed a bill to end that bulk metadata collection.

Here, in anticipation of Wednesday's special report, is a primer on Snowden's life, his actions, and his impact.

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What did he disclose?

Snowden is a former systems administrator for the CIA who later went to work for the private intelligence contractor Dell, first inside a National Security Agency outpost in Japan and then inside an NSA station in Hawaii. In early 2013, he went to work for contractor Booz Allen Hamilton inside the same NSA center in Hawaii.

While working for the contractors, at some point Snowden began downloading secret documents related to U.S. intelligence activities and partnerships with foreign allies, including some that revealed the extent of data collection from U.S. telephone records and Internet activity.

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What are the key disclosures?

Among the revelations are the NSAs bulk collection of phone and internet metadata from U.S. users, spying on the personal communications of foreign leaders including U.S. allies, and the NSAs ability to tap undersea fiber optic cables and siphon off data.

Based on the Snowden documents, NBC News reported on Jan. 27 that British cyber spies demonstrated a pilot program to their U.S. partners in 2012 in which they were able to monitor YouTube in real time and collect addresses from the billions of videos watched daily, as well as some user information, for analysis. At the time the documents were printed, they were also able to spy on Facebook and Twitter.

NBC News also reported on Feb. 7, based on the documents, that British spies have developed dirty tricks for use against nations, hackers, terror groups, suspected criminals and arms dealers that include releasing computer viruses, spying on journalists and diplomats, jamming phones and computers, and using sex to lure targets into honey traps. According to the documents, which come from presentations prepped in 2010 and 2012 for NSA cyber spy conferences, the agencys goal was to destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt enemies by discrediting them, planting misinformation and shutting down their communications.

What is his background?

Snowden, now 30, was born June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, N.C., where he lived with his parents, Lonnie, a Coast Guard officer, and Elizabeth, known as Wendy. The family moved to Maryland in the early 1990s, while he was still in grade school, and his parents divorced. He lived outside Baltimore with his mother, a federal court employee.

Snowden was, by his own admission, not a stellar student. He dropped out of high school in his sophomore year. But by that time, he had developed a fascination with computers and technology and was able to develop considerable skills on his own, and via friends and online forums. After attending a community college off and on, he passed a General Educational Development test in the early 2000s, receiving a high school equivalency credential.

He enlisted in an Army Reserve Special Forces training program in 2004 with the intention of fighting in Iraq to fight to help free people from oppression, he later told Britains Guardian newspaper. But he said he broke his legs in a training accident, and Army records show he was discharged after just four months.

He also worked briefly as a security guard before beginning his intelligence work in 2006, when he was hired by the CIA as a computer systems administrator.

How did Snowden gain access to top-secret documents?

Despite being a high-school dropout who eventually received a GED equivalency credential, Snowden was granted top-secret clearance when he was hired by the CIA.

He maintained that clearance during subsequent jobs with CIA and NSA contractors Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton.

Removing the documents was not complicated for someone with his access and expertise, NBC News reported in August. When Snowden stole the crown jewels of the National Security Agency, he didnt need to use any sophisticated devices or software or go around any computer firewall. All he needed, said multiple intelligence community sources, was a few thumb drives and the willingness to exploit a gaping hole in an antiquated security system to rummage at will through the NSAs servers and take 20,000 documents without leaving a trace. Its 2013 and the NSA is stuck in 2003 technology, said an intelligence official.

NBC also reported in August that intelligence sources said Snowden accessed some of the secret documents by assuming the electronic identities of top NSA officials. Every day, they are learning how brilliant [Snowden] was, said a former U.S. official with knowledge of the case. This is why you dont hire brilliant people for jobs like this. You hire smart people. Brilliant people get you in trouble.

Whom did he give the documents to?

In late 2012, Snowden began to reach out to journalists, and in 2013 he leaked documents to Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras.

The Pulitzer Prize board in April awarded its highest honor, the medal for public service, to The Washington Post and The Guardian for their articles based on the documents provided by Snowden. The award echoed the Pulitzer given in 1972 to The New York Times for its reports on the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam War.

The executive editor of The Washington Post, Martin Baron, said when the Pulitzers were announced, "Disclosing the massive expansion of the NSAs surveillance network absolutely was a public service. In constructing a surveillance system of breathtaking scope and intrusiveness, our government also sharply eroded individual privacy. All of this was done in secret, without public debate, and with clear weaknesses in oversight."

Without the disclosures, Baron said, "we never would have known how far this country had shifted away from the rights of the individual in favor of state power. There would have been no public debate about the proper balance between privacy and national security. As even the president has acknowledged, this is a conversation we need to have.

Congressman Peter King (R-N.Y.) tweeted that "awarding the Pulitzer to Snowden enablers is a disgrace."

How much information did he take?

Government officials initially said that it could be up to 200,000 classified NSA documents, and later gave the estimate of 1.7 million. Officials, including NSA Director Keith Alexander, have assured the public that the government knows the scope of the leak.

But Snowden has not said how many documents he took, and NBC News reported in August that officials say the NSA has been unable to determine how many documents he took and what they are.

What was in the documents?

Among the revelations from documents in the Snowden trove are the NSAs bulk collection of phone and Internet metadata from U.S. users; NSA spying on the personal communications of foreign leaders, including U.S. allies; and the NSAs ability to tap undersea fiber optic cables and siphon off data.

Did anyone suspect he was taking documents?

Snowdens CIA supervisor at the CIA during his assignment in Geneva placed a critical assessment of his behavior and work habits in his personnel file and voiced the suspicion that he had tried to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access, the New York Times reported after he was identified as the leaker.

The supervisors cautionary note and the CIAs suspicions apparently were not forwarded to the NSA or its contractors, and surfaced only after federal investigators began scrutinizing Mr. Snowdens record once the documents began spilling out, the newspaper reported, citing unidentified intelligence and law enforcement officials.

And the Wall Street Journal reported in August 2013 that a federal review of his employment at the CIA and the intelligence contractors found the final security check that Snowden underwent in 2011 was inadequate. Investigators failed to verify Mr. Snowden's account of a past security violation and his work for the CIA, didn't thoroughly probe an apparent trip to India that he had failed to report, and they didn't get significant information from anyone who knew him beyond his mother and girlfriend, it said.

Separately, the U.S. Department of Justice has joined a whisteblowers lawsuit against USIS, the company that vetted Snowden, alleging the company faked 665,000 background checks it conducted for the Office of Personnel Management. It is not clear whether Snowdens check was among those that, according to the criminal complaint, were fraudulently classified as complete. (The case is still pending. The company told NBC News in January that "a small group of individuals" was responsible for the bogus checks and a source said they had been terminated.)

What is he charged with?

In a criminal complaint unsealed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on June 21, 2013, the U.S. Justice Department charged Snowden with theft, unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person. The latter two charges are violations of the 1917 Espionage Act.

Each of the three charges carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years, for a total of 30 years. Additional counts could be added.

Snowden has retained a prominent Washington attorney who has represented several clients charged with violating the Espionage Act, reportedly in hopes of negotiating a plea deal.

Why did he do it?

Snowden has said in interviews that he acted out of the belief that the spying program was illegal and immoral.

"My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them," he told The Guardian in his first interview.

Snowden also has said he didnt trust the Obama administration, having seen it prosecute whistleblowers at an unprecedented rate.

Did he have foreign help?

Snowden has denied suggestions that he worked with or for foreign governments. NBC reported in January that law enforcement officials have not found any evidence that Snowden was working for Russia as a spy.

What damage did Snowdens leaks do to the U.S.?

That is a matter of considerable debate.

The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, has called the Snowden disclosures the most significant leak in U.S. history. "Edward Snowden has done more for our Constitution in terms of the Fourth and First Amendment," Ellsberg said, "than anyone else I know."

Privacy advocates say that Snowdens revelation of the extensive U.S. spying operations was a bold and necessary step that forced the federal courts, the Congress, and the Obama administration to re-examine the previously secret programs and, in some cases to reform them.

But U.S. officials, members of Congress, and others have said that the Snowden disclosures harmed national security by enabling foreign spies.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said the revelations caused "huge, grave damage" to the nation's intelligence capabilities.

Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified in March that the Pentagon might need to spend billions to overcome the damage done to military security by Snowden's leaks of intelligence documents. Unnamed intelligence officials were quoted by AP saying that the agencies were scrambling to maintain surveillance of terror groups after they changed their methods of communication in the wake of Snowden's revelations.

The officials have not given details of any specific damage caused by the Snowden leaks.

The U.S. was also embarrassed by the disclosures or by the behavior being disclosed when the Snowden documents revealed that the U.S. has eavesdropped on the personal communications of foreign leaders, including allies.

Where is he now?

Since August of last year, Snowden has been living at an undisclosed location in Russia, under temporary asylum granted by Russian authorities as they consider his application for permanent political asylum.

What happens next?

His one-year temporary asylum in Russia expires on Aug. 1, but it could be extended if Moscow has not ruled on his request for permanent asylum.

It is also possible but considered unlikely that Russia would hand him over to U.S. authorities at that point.

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Who Is Edward Snowden, the Man Who Spilled the NSA's Secrets?

Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor and press freedom advocate who has lived in Moscow in exile since 2013, hasn't uttered a word publicly on Russia's move to criminalize independent reporting about its invasion of Ukraine.

Snowden is the president of Freedom of the Press Foundation, a California-based charity that tracks "press freedom violations" in the United States as minor as journalists being denied access to press conferences. As recently as Jan. 26, Snowden urged Danish citizens to resist their government after it threatened to impose lengthy prison sentences to members of the media who reported on state secrets.

RUSSIAN POLICE ARREST MORE THAN 3,000 PROTESTERS ACROSS 49 CITIES

But Snowden hasn't said anything publicly, let alone issued a call for active resistance from the Russian people, about the legislation signed into law by Russian President Vladimir Putin last week that threatens imprisonment of up to 15 years for spreading what the Russian government deems to be "fake information."

Examples of "fake information" in the eyes of the Russian government include any reporting about its invasion of Ukraine that isn't sourced directly from the Russian Defense Ministry.

The law has led numerous Western news outlets to suspend reporting in Russia in recent days.

The change to the criminal code, which seems designed to turn any independent reporter into a criminal purely by association, makes it impossible to continue any semblance of normal journalism inside the country, Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait said Friday.

Snowden and the Freedom of the Press Foundation did not return requests for comment.

Snowden issued numerous tweets in the lead-up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine criticizing the Biden administration for claiming Russia's invasion was imminent and blasting American media for "pushing for war."

"So... if nobody shows up for the invasion Biden scheduled for tomorrow morning at 3AM, I'm not saying your journalistic credibility was instrumentalized as part of one of those disinformation campaigns you like to write about, but you should at least consider the possibility," Snowden tweeted on Feb. 15.

Snowden hasn't posted a tweet to his 5.1 million followers since Feb. 27, three days after the start of Russia's invasion.

"I'm not suspended from the ceiling above a barrel of acid by a rope that burns a little faster every time I tweet, you concern-trolling ghouls," he said. "I've just lost any confidence I had that sharing my thinking on this particular topic continues to be useful, because I called it wrong."

The Russian government granted Snowden permanent residency in October 2020. Snowden says he has never cooperated with or received funding from the Russian government.

Snowden worked at the CIA prior to a stint as a contractor for the National Security Agency. In 2013, he left his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii, flew to Hong Kong, and soon disclosed hundreds of thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists. Snowden revealed not just domestic surveillance programs, but also exposed global national security operations by the U.S. and its allies. Snowden, who was granted asylum by Russia and lives in Moscow, was charged with violating the Espionage Act.

The House Intelligence Committee, which released a redacted 36-page report on Snowden in 2016, argued Snowden was not a whistleblower and was, and remains, a serial exaggerator and fabricator.

Snowden caused tremendous damage to national security, and the vast majority of the documents he stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests they instead pertain to military, defense, and intelligence programs of great interest to Americas adversaries, the HPSCI report read. He handed over secrets that protect American troops overseas and secrets that provide vital defenses against terrorists and nation-states."

The report also cast doubt on Snowden's timeline of events: Two weeks before Snowden began mass downloads of classified documents, he was reprimanded after engaging in a workplace spat with NSA managers. Despite Snowdens later claim that the March 2013 congressional testimony of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was a breaking point for him, these mass downloads predated Director Clappers testimony by eight months.

The report indicated that in June 2016, the deputy chairman of the Russian parliaments defense and security committee publicly conceded that Snowden did share intelligence with his government.

Snowden also gave a 2013 interview to the South China Morning Post while hiding out in Hong Kong, claiming that we hack network backbones ... that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers. He also claimed that the NSA hacks Chinese cellphone companies and that U.S. spies hacked Chinese universities.

The committee sent a bipartisan letter to then-President Barack Obama, saying Snowden "took the material to China and Russia two regimes that routinely violate their citizens' privacy and civil liberties."

Among the signatories were current Democratic Chairman Adam Schiff, former Republican Chairman Devin Nunes, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, then a congressman.

Trump tweeted about Snowden dozens of times before becoming president, calling the leaker a traitor and a spy as he lamented that we are being embarrassed by Russia and China on Snowden.

Im not that aware of the Snowden situation, but Im going to start looking at it, Trump said after being asked about a possible pardon in August 2020.

Then-Attorney General William Barr said he was vehemently opposed to pardoning the traitor.

The day Trump left office without pardoning him, Snowden tweeted: I am not at all disappointed to go unpardoned by a man who has never known a love he had not paid for.

Originally posted here:
Why so silent? Edward Snowden has gone underground since Russia's ...

For kids across the country, its summer vacation time.

And in between days at the playground or family trips, some kids are staying busy learning advanced tech skills.

Though summer camps across the board saw a surge in early enrollment, one option popular with families is STEM camps, which offer training in science, technology, engineering and math.

The idea is that camps like these keep young brains active outside of school and could even inspire the next generation of tech leaders.

On the outskirts of Chicago, one summer camp is hoping to do just that. WBEZs Susie An has the story.

At a Code Ninjas center in suburban Chicago, kids are learning about robotics and how to program and code. Tensions are high as three teams race to build a cart out of Legos. The cart is attached to a computer program, but a bug was intentionally introduced into that program, and the kids have to fix it.

Jacob Liokumovich, whos headed to the sixth grade, has chosen to work alone.

I like building whatever comes to me while Im building. Thats how I build, he says.

Soon to be seventh-grader Alarese Gaden and third-grader Oliver Liokumovich have joined forces.

I have a lot of Lego sets at home that I build with, Alarese says.

The youngest team is made up of three 8-year-olds.The goal is to see who can program the fastest cart.

The coding camps owner and director, Nawroz Pirani, says it wont be such a rude awakening for these kids once they go back to school. He also has kids building their own websites and designing games. This week of camp costs $349.

Its not your traditional type of learning, Pirani says. Theyre learning a coding language and STEM skills, and its going to be useful for them.

Pirani says those STEM skills are important now, but he predicts that in the next 10 or 15 years, itll be even more necessary for people to know some kind of computer language.

Back in the robotics class, the teams have constructed their carts and now theyre going through lines of code. But some are hitting a few snags. Alarese is disassembling the cart.

Im trying to fix it because this got taken off, and we have to re-add the wheels, she says.

Her partner, Oliver, isnt paying much attention.

The team of 8-year-olds is being squeezed for time. Twins Michael and Gabriel Mendez have become enamored with Fred and Fredalina, Lego characters they created who have an extensive backstory.

We need to deliver Fred and Fredalinas lunch, the twins say.

Teammate Henry Voicu tries to get them back on track.

Were not going to deliver food to Fred and Fredalina, Henry says.

In the end, everyone is able to successfully debug their cart programs, including the team of 8-year-olds. But the kids dont have enough time to see whose cart wouldve been the fastest. Although most suspect that Jacob, the sixth-grader who worked alone, wouldve won. But hes being modest about it.

I mean, its been the fastest for pretty much everything, but maybe. I really dont know, he says.

Hell be coming back to later sessions to test more of his skills.

We did a show last year with the CEO of one of the highest-profile student coding programs, Girls Who Code. CEO Tarika Barrett shared how the program adjusted during the pandemic to teach students in areas with limited internet access.

She said it took a lot of coordination.

One funder for some coding summer camps is the National Security Agency. Yes, the government.

Bloomberg has a piece on the program, called GenCyber, which consists of over 100 camps across the country. The agency funds them but does not set the curriculum. More than 20,000 students have attended the program, which was started in 2014, just a year after Edward Snowden first leaked secret NSA documents.

Lastly, if youre thinking about jumping into a brief coding boot camp for an income boost, we have an article from Vox all about the promise of the six-figure salary associated with adult coding programs and how those expectations might not line up with reality.

Excerpt from:
Kids spend the summer in STEM camp - Marketplace

From July 8 to September 4, 2022, UCCA Edge presents The Stutter of History,the first comprehensive survey of work by Thomas Demand (b. 1964, Munich, lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles) in China. Capturing the uncanny intersections of history, images, and archtectonic forms, the exhibition features over 70 photographs, films, and wallpapers that span the arc of the artists career, and focuses on four important areas of his work: large-scale photographs depicting seemingly banal yet historically significant scenarios reconstructed from news images or other sources; Dailies based on images taken on his phone; photographic studies of paper models from other creative disciplines in Model Studies; and his moving image work. The exhibition is curated by Douglas Fogle for the non-profit organization the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography and is organized at UCCA Edge by Ara Qiu, Mason Zha, Zhang Yao, and Lin Luqi. UCCA Edge thanks audiences for their understanding regarding the impact of recent pandemic-related restrictions on the exhibitions originally planned opening date and duration.

For Demand, The Stutter of History lies in the gap between existing images that depict the world around us, the 1:1 paper models he meticulously builds to reconstruct these images, the photographs he takes of these models, the subsequent destruction of the models, and the para-photographic forms that then relaunch into the world. In the first section, Demands large-scale photographs depict scenarios from the margins of recent history, from the Gangway (2001) that Pope John Paul II descended on his visit to unified Berlin, to the polling centers for the contentious 2000 United States presidential election (Poll, 2001). A selection of works confront images associated with the Nazi regime and other traumas in German history, such as Room (1994), the site of a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944, and the ransacked Office (1995) of the Stasi. Closer to the present day, the Refuge series (2021) re-creates the bleak, generic Russian hotel room presumably occupied by American whistleblower Edward Snowden.

As a counterpoint to the public and monumental, the Dailies series (20082020), shown on the third floor, consists of photographs of paper models Demand reconstructed based on images taken with his iPhone. They depict the ordinary, sometimes humorous, and often overlooked moments that populate everyday lifea pile of unopened mail, a poster on a telephone pole, plastic cups stuck in a fence.

In his Model Studies, Demand enters into dialogue with models from other creative professions. The photographs on display here make fragmented and abstract studies of well-worn paper models from the architecture studio SANAA and the radical paper dress patterns of fashion designer Azzedine Alaa, offering an alternative dimension to the use and haptic materiality of models.

Finally, the exhibition investigates Demands commitment to the moving image in his explorations of stop-motion filmmaking, as demonstrated in the work Pacific Sun (2012). Housed in a specially built cinema-like intervention, Demand fastidiously reconstructed this epic, absurd stop-motion animation film from two minutes of security footage from the cruise ship Pacific Sun as it was hit by gigantic waves off the coast of New Zealand. Its frenzied moments of uncontrolled chaos culminate in climatic absurdity, a state that is central to the gulf between the disquieting, utopian potential of his paper models and the mass consumption of their photographic doppelgngers.

Apart from individual artworks, exhibition design is an integral part of Demands conceptual approach to artistic production. With his architectural use of textiles, wallpapers, and temporary structures, Demand creates an immersive environment for the spectator, in which image and world collide.

Accompanying the exhibition, the English-language catalogue The Stutter of History has been produced in collaboration between art director Naomi Mizusaki, the artist, and his longtime publisher MACK. The catalogue contains an introduction by Douglas Fogle, an essay by art historian Margaret Iversen, and an original prose fiction piece by author Ali Smith.

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Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History - Announcements - E-Flux

By Xin Ping

Hackddos, an Internet media outlet focusing on information security, recently released a report revealing that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been stealing indiscriminate data from Internet users around the world. Using advanced technologies and tools, the NSA has intercepted 97 billion pieces of global Internet data and 124 billion pieces of telephone data in 30 days. It has also used submarines to conduct cyber theft from undersea fiber optic cables.

This is just one more disclosure of the numerous cyber attacks by the U.S. According to a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a U.S. think tank, the United States has become the world's number one cyber superpower, especially in terms of cyber intelligence and cyber attack capabilities. As Mr. Edward Snowden revealed, the NSA organized and implemented at least 231 cyber attacks in 2011 alone, mainly targeting "adversaries" such as China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela. In 2010, U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies used the "ShockNet" virus to cripple Iran's nuclear facilities. In March 2019, a cyber attack by the U.S. caused a major power outage in Venezuela. Eighteen states across the country were affected and half the country was plunged into darkness, with power outages lasting more than 48 hours in some areas.

The U.S. targets not only its rivals, but also its closest allies and even its own citizens. In 2013, the U.S. "Prism" surveillance program targeted the then German Chancellor Angela Merkel among many other dignitaries. In 2015, WikiLeaks revealed that the NSA had wiretapped three French presidents, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande. In 1975, Frank Church, then Chairman of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that U.S. surveillance capabilities could be "turned around and pointed at the American people at any time, and no American would have privacy." In August 2013, three documents declassified by the NSA showed that the agency had collected 56,000 private emails and other communications from U.S. citizens with no relevance to terrorism each year between 2008 and 2011. The White House, however, argued that the targets of such surveillance programs were strictly "external" and that domestic intelligence was intercepted only "incidentally".

As an empire of hacking, the U.S. is not satisfied with simply collecting information through cyber surveillance. It has taken further steps to transform the new frontier of cyberspace into a new battleground for cyber attacks. On May 18, 2010, the U.S. Air Force announced the creation of an interim "Cyber Command". According to an article on the RAND Corporation website, the number of fully combat-capable U.S. cyber mission units will likely reach 167 by 2024, representing an increase of about 10 percent in personnel. And of course, the U.S. wastes no opportunity to conduct combat exercises of cyber war in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Paul Nakasone, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the NSA, publicly admitted that U.S. Cyber Command was "helping Ukraine strengthen its cyber defenses" with cyber warfare operations such as "Cyber Hunt Forward Operations".

As a thief cries "stop the thief", the U.S. has always depicted itself as a victim of cyber attacks. Nevertheless, unrivaled in malicious cyber activities, the U.S. has been a major threat to global cyber security. It talks the loudest about freedom and security, but has undermined them more than anyone.

(The author is a commentator on international affairs, writing regularly for Xinhua News Agency, CGTN, Global Times, etc... He can be reached at xinping604@gmail.com)

The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of Xinhuanet.

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Empire of Hacking: U.S. is the Biggest Threat to Cyber Security - Xinhua