Matt Turpin
Appearances
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
I think we should be very clear that Beijing is next to certain that the United States would intervene militarily if they attack Taiwan, right?
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
So if you take that as a given, so if Beijing calculates that the United States is going to intervene militarily, and I think increasingly just kind of over the past three, four years, they've increasingly concluded that Japan would also intervene militarily, and we've seen similar sorts of actions across Japanese infrastructure. then you need to develop and create the kinds of capabilities
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
that would make that intervention much more difficult. And that means sort of a whole scale look at the infrastructure that would support any sort of US military mobilization. Now, we may think of this as sort of a regionally contained conflict, but of course, as soon as the US and the PRC are involved in direct military conflict, it will become a global affair.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
So they have looked through our entire infrastructure chain to figure out where do they place themselves to ensure that they have optionality to be able to do that. And if they're willing to sink U.S. aircraft carriers. then they're going to be willing to turn off US energy supplies and pipelines and refineries and go after factories.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
We just should be very clear that if they've made the decision to start killing American service members, it isn't as if they're going to say to themselves, well, we just kind of think the US infrastructure is off the table. So I think we have to be very clear about where this goes. And so all of the folks that run that infrastructure need to be very serious about
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
You're a target of a nation-state actor for destruction and disablement.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 3: The Most Dangerous Time in American History
It spans sectors and industries globally. across the entire U.S. economy. This is not simply directed simply at the most advanced military aspects, but it's things like DuPont and their secret recipe for making white paint, which had been a very valuable product for them. And then they see that it's stolen and that entire line of product is sort of taken away from them.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 3: The Most Dangerous Time in American History
We might think to ourselves, well, white paint is not that big a deal, but there's quite a bit of intellectual property that goes into making something that can stay bright white forever. long periods of time and why that would be valuable. And those are the kinds of things that got stolen. And the U.S. government has had very little recourse to be able to go after those.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 5: A Cyber Detente
So, I think folks seem to forget that in 1991, George H.W.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 5: A Cyber Detente
Bush brought a Section 301 investigation against the Chinese government for theft of intellectual property and violations of copyrights and other things, and used that to force the Chinese government to a negotiating table so that they would actually start to abide by international rules around respecting copyrights and respecting intellectual property.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 5: A Cyber Detente
The Bush administration got to a negotiated settlement in 1991. and then chose not to impose sort of retaliatory tariffs on what Beijing was doing. Beijing agreed to fix its things. And then essentially four years later during the Clinton administration, the Clinton administration is back in 1995, renegotiating compliance on those agreements, right? That Beijing is not compliant.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 5: A Cyber Detente
And essentially that is the story that we've been dealing with from then on.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 5: A Cyber Detente
I think we should place ourselves back into sort of the position that our own leaders in the United States were in, as well as leaders from numerous other countries around the world were in, in the early 1990s. They're looking at the world coming out of the Cold War. We've watched the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. We've watched the Soviet Union implode.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 5: A Cyber Detente
We've seen the Chinese Communist Party come under significant pressure from its own citizens. in June of 1989, culminating in a massacre of students in Tiananmen. And so you're looking at that landscape and you're saying to yourself, you know, this process, this Leninist sort of political system is truly on its deathbed. China is a nation at war with itself.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 5: A Cyber Detente
And so for the United States, I think in the policymaking community, by the end of 2015,
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 5: A Cyber Detente
it had really sort of sunk in that our hopes were sort of dashed, that Xi Jinping was not going to be the reformer that we had hoped he would be, that by continuing to sort of blindly help the Chinese economy develop, become more wealthy, more technologically advanced, underneath the leadership that was manifesting in Beijing, we were essentially making our lives much, much more difficult and much more dangerous.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 5: A Cyber Detente
Spring of 2013, the Obama administration had commissioned the Blair Huntsman Intellectual Property Commission report, which finds that the Chinese are stealing $300 billion a year worth of intellectual property.