is part of the so-called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance. Now China-or, more specifically, the Chinese telecom Huawei-is hoping to build 5G mobile-phone networks all over the world, including in the United Kingdom, which along with the U.S. Security experts I’ve spoken with warn that while China started off at a disadvantage in 5G development, years of industrial espionage have allowed them to leapfrog the United States. (Plenty of people would have trouble distinguishing a real iPhone from a Chinese “clone,” just as they would struggle to find the differences between a real Louis Vuitton bag and a knockoff.) As clumsy and impolitic as Donald Trump’s trade war is, he’s not wrong that China has taken advantage of American innovation. Apple, for example, took a decade or more to develop the touchscreen technology that went into the first iPhone Chinese companies copied it all in a matter of years. Stealing intellectual property, after all, is much easier than creating it yourself. According to one of the investigators on the team, the Chinese simply dispatched deep-sea divers to locate a piece of this new hardware, go down to the bottom of the ocean and grab it.įoreign espionage has long been an underreported fact of life in Silicon Valley. As it turned out, however, the heist had been old-school. The investigators performed the usual digital forensics, running background checks on employees with access to the labs, checking data logs to see if hackers had breached the company’s servers, and so on. The telecom assumed there had been a spy in their midst, and brought in a team of investigators to find out who was responsible. A Chinese competitor had apparently re-created the technology, even improving on the original design, and was about to start installing it off the coast of China. Soon after the update was completed, however, the telecom made a terrifying discovery. So last year one of America’s telecom companies installed a secret new technology to improve its underwater infrastructure. But of course information can always travel faster. It is estimated that there are nearly 750,000 miles of internet cables lying across the ocean floor, long threads of silica, surrounded by copper and plastic, that connect the world’s continents to each other at two-thirds the speed of light.
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