China Hardly Needs Spies When It's Allowed into Our Computers

An brief story buried in the New York Times business pages suggests that China could be piping your personal data into its computers back in Beijing.

Monday night’s story by Nicole Perlroth and John Markoff, which appeared in print today, was innocuously headlined “Symantec Dissolves a Chinese Alliance,” suggesting it was run-the-mill industry news.

Maybe it is in Silicon Valley, but it astonished me.

“Less than four years after Huawei Technologies and Symantec teamed up to develop computer network security products, the joint venture is being dismantled because Symantec feared the alliance with the Chinese company would prevent it from obtaining United States government classified information about cyberthreats.”

Now, I may be the last person outside Silicon Valley to know it, but I was startled to learn that the world’s dominant supplier of software to protect home consumer and business computers from unauthorized entry was in cahoots with a company in China, the world’s nest of hacking vipers.

And Huawei is not just any Chinese company, it turns out.

OWS Snitch is Partner in Private Security Firm with Busted Secret Service Agent

A business partner of the self-appointed spy who stole hundreds of Occupy Wall Street emails last month and posted them online was convicted of using excessive force as a Secret Service agent, court records show, and sentenced to six months incarceration in a halfway house.

Kevin Schatzle lists himself as one of two managing partners at Provide Security, a private intelligence and security firm whose Web site listed no physical address. His co-managing partner is Thomas Ryan, who last month infiltrated OWS and pilfered protesters’ e-mails and social network postings, which he claimed showed the movement’s plans for violence.

Provide Security boasts that its “associates are handpicked from the ranks of highly trained and experienced former agents of the US Secret Service, members of U.S. Special Forces, Global Intelligence Agencies and other premier law enforcement organizations.”