February 6, 2024 • 53 mins
The rise of the Internet Age allowed billions of people to access virtually endless stores of information, but it had a dark side -- one of which was the rise of a new kind of army: Groups that used viruses and software the way other militaries use missiles, spies and bombs. Join the guys as they explore the rise of the mysterious entity known as GhostNet -- what it did, how it got away with it, and why no one's been able to stop it.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the show, fellow conspiracy realist. We are returning
to you with a very strange classic all the way
from twenty eighteen, The story of Ghostnets.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Yes, this is one of those long investigations that turned
up with a really cool name for the bad guys.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What if in the age of the Internet,
you could create a new kind of army, something that
used viruses and software viruses, malware, you know, the same
way that other militaries use missiles and spies and bombs.
You know. Looking at this back in from twenty twenty
(00:44):
four from this vantage point, a lot of it is
surprisingly prescient.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
It's weird how long ago twenty eighteen actually was. Stop
when it comes to technological advancements and just where we
find ourselves now, that was forever ago.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Oh gosh, yeah it was. However, we are airing this
classic because we hope that you, like us, will find
some strange things to appreciate from the vantage of the
modern day. Because you're right, Matt, it was a long
time ago.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Yes, let's discover ghost net and ghost rat together right now.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Nol.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
They call me Ben. We are joined with our returning
guest super producer, Casey Pegram. Most importantly, you are here
that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
Today's episode is about war. What is it good for?
A war that some people will tell you is just
a few years in the distance.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
A ward that's already kind of happeningha.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
A war that other people will argue has already begun.
Right here are the facts. So the state of war
is changing in decades and centuries past. Most of us
who are not hundreds of years have only seen this
depicted in film right and photographs and such. In the
past ages and past conflicts, there would be things like
(02:36):
Napoleonic warfare. Napoleonic warfare is one of the reasons that
the Civil War here in the US was such a
bloody conflict. It's that thing where people line up in
rows and they all hold guns or some kind of weapon,
and then somebody in charge stands in the back and
makes them all march toward each other and just continually
(02:57):
shoot and see who's left standing at the end.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah, it's a combination of the technology available to wage
war and the rules that are set in place or
agreed upon. Just as what is the correct thing to
do in war?
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Right? Right? What is the ethical thing? The traditional thing?
How much do we value the lives of the people
we are sending to die? The answer in Napoleonic war
is with value. So war has changed, as you said, Matt,
and it is continually changing. There are a lot of
(03:35):
wonderful things we've talked about on the show that come
from war, usually advances in medical technology, but they're earned
through horrific experiences, and there are lots of other non
medical technological breakthroughs. Usually weaponize things that later have a
civilian use.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
And that's everything from well, not really zippers, but kind
of zippers, like clothing, really lots and lots of different
types of and kinds of clothing, to what's something else, oh,
velcrow food, yeah, food storage, just every upperware.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Well, everything probably in some way descended.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Comes from innovation from war because you have needs.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
So in this way, in just this relatively innocent, innovative way,
one could argue that war is an economic necessity. The
more realistic and way less inspiring ted talkie version of
war's and economic necessity is the one that admits that
(04:39):
despite all the ideological clap trap people are fed by
their leaders, war is typically going to be about dominance
and resource extraction, controlling the stage, the theater in which
these blood drenched plays occur. And now we have moved
(05:00):
past long past napoleonic warfare to what we would have
considered modern warfare, which would be smaller groups of people
or larger groups dividing into smaller groups, practicing things that
were once seen as very dishonorable, like guerrilla tactics, you know, hide, shoot,
(05:21):
avoid rents, and repeat and use information available to better
target things. That's why we have now we live in
a world of unmanned aerial vehicles that in theory are
targeting specific threats and never getting it wrong, not once.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
A lot of the technology is very much one sided,
which is why being at the top of the technology
game is so important.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Yeah yeah, And it's hard to overstate that. And a
lot of nations, even the very advanced nations, are working
with these strangely uneven levels of sophistication computers in one
part or in one department could be top notch, bleeding
edge sci fi stuff that the public won't see for
another ten to fifteen years. But the same country, maybe
(06:12):
even in the same building, could have computers that are
doing equally important tasks that are hopelessly outdated, like they're
pre windows. They're on IBM, you know, like all the
Hacker film screens in the nineties.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
The greens with the monocolored Yes, yeah, those do still exist,
and Windows ninety five machines in highly important like water
treatment plants, something as simple as that, even if it's
not war.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Yeah. I don't remember if which show this was on,
but I think we did an episode before either here
on car stuff about how distressingly easy it is to
compromise infrastructure, like all the traffic If you were in
the US and you're listening to this, unless you're in
a very, very large city, the odds are that most
of your traffic lights are controlled by a central thing,
(07:03):
and you can you can hack into it, don't you're
not telling you to.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
And the terminals are usually immediately there, next to right, So.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
You cannot just mess up one traffic light. You can
mess up all of them.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
Did you ever see that episode of mcguiver where he
like uses like a credit card and sticks it inside
and you know, he opens up the traffic box and
he like gets the lights to change on command by
like you know, using some kind of plastic device to
like break the circuit. I can't remember that what he did,
it was very mcgivory, but yeah, he called he basically
it was kind of messed up because he actually caused
a pretty catastrophic looking pile up.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
And as like mcguiver, that's not cool.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
You don't kill mcguver y. Yeah, uh that's and that
is for the record, the original mcguiver, the good one,
hot take. Yeah, sure, fine, no regrets, but it's true
where we have uneven progress as a species, especially in
this field, and according to prominent think tanks like the
(08:02):
Rand Corporation, this new face of war, we're evolving past
guerrilla tactics, past just sending people out with good human
intel or sigent signal intelligence.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
And it's less about who has the biggest gun.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Right exactly, It's more about who has the best information.
So all of the think tanks are more or less agreeing.
In this post nuclear society, we have everybody still has nukes, right,
but a lot of people you don't want to use them.
That's political suicide. So now we're trying to find better
(08:43):
ways to steal, bag or borrow information, and that leads
us to something called strategic information warfare. This is the
term the US eggheads prefer to use. It has another
term in other places. It's one subgenre of what we
would call asymmetrical warfare. If we're three different nations, sorry,
(09:07):
if we're four different nations and we're in a conflict
and one of us, Matt, let's say you're America and
you have the world's most powerful navy.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
I most certainly do.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
There's no reason for US other countries to spend billions
and billions and billions of dollars trying to catch up
with you when we can just leapfrog you and build
a battleship killer or an aircraft carrier killer, something that
is less expensive to build and almost impossible for you
to defend against.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Matt, why are you always flexing that superior navy and air.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Force because I can print dollars getting a little too.
Speaker 4 (09:44):
Big for them pants.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
You'll never know my black budgets.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Yes, it's true. It's all true. And Matt, you know,
those are great pants Matt.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
Has they have their American flag pants.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Yeah, Matt's taking awaaring his uncle Sam outfit just twenty
four seven, which just has to weird out your kid.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
You know. He comes to love it and he calls
me Sammy. He says, Sammy, what are we doing today?
And I'm like, we're gonna find some natives and we're
gonna take all their landowna their blankets with the plague. Oh,
I'm sorry. I think I was roll playing a little
too hard. Now, America there for it. America is great.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Well, America is a country, and all countries have blood
on their hands. I would challenge anybody. It's the name
one that does not.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
That's actually my favorite song of the moment.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
It's called Country Blood, Country Blood by Toby Keith. That
sounds great. Sounds Uh sounds great Toby Keith. Uh probably
would fit oddly enough. This is soft track, but Toby
Keith would fit in more into psyops, right, propaganda warfare.
If you want to freak out people in foreign country,
play your own music really loud, sounds very patriotic, and
(10:58):
then play it for hours like the Barney so has
often been used when law enforcement is making a siege
of some kind of compound or commune anyway. So now
we've got the basic logic, why bother to try to
build a battleship when you can build something that kills
a battleship, or you can build something that teaches you
(11:20):
how to kill a battleship, and you can do it
for a lot less money. This is why we get
this is how we get to information warfare. This is
why hacking is so important. Stealing information from another country
or from another business, you know what, forget about Uncle Sam.
Let's just say go to Northrop Grumming, figure out what
(11:41):
they've got going on, right, And there are a million
ways to do it.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
And I just would say hacking that that kind of
tactic really is an underdog tactic because it's it requires
that there is someone that has something that is worth stealing, right,
And I completely see that logic, I understand it's it's God,
I don't want to get into it too much, but
the psychology of a suicide bombing or a kamakaze, right
(12:10):
when you get into that idea of we do not
have the technology to meet this group in warfare. Like
you're saying, battleships and build battleships, but we can do
something that destroys a battleship.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Right, Yeah, I see what you're saying.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
And that's essentially what this is. We cannot build this thing,
but we can take the information, and we can know
what you're doing, and we can basically use some of
the other guerrilla tactics and things because now we know
what you're doing.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Yeah, that's absolutely correct. And the US in particular is
seen as very vulnerable to these sorts of hacking attempts
because operational security is such a tough thing for the
world's largest military to be. You know, it's it's like
you could get ninety here on something, but that other
(13:01):
ten percent is devilishly difficult. And this is where we
see the emergence of things that have been called, often
by various journalists pundits I think I even did it
a few years back, have been called hacking armies, state
sponsored well kind of kind of a state sponsored groups
(13:24):
used to compromise the security of rival governments, obtain intelligence,
and in a lot of cases target high value individuals
such as officials in the military, key industries, or officials
in political campaigns and so on. So for example, of
that super producer Casey Pegram is a general and he
(13:44):
has some kind of he has some kind of intimate
knowledge of something, then he would be he would be
a target worth looking as an individual. Good news is
most people are not most people. He just it doesn't matter.
The primary thing is where you work and what your
position is there, and maybe maybe maybe if you're related
(14:05):
to somebody really important. And the thing is, most of
these hacker armies operate in their home countries in a
way that their sponsors, their patrons can claim plausible deniability
if they're caught or suspected. So there was that Russian
botnet army that influenced Western social media. The story broke
(14:29):
in the wake of the previous presidential election. But this
botnet army was active on things, on a lot of
things for much longer, you know, like even on subreddits,
which is weird, and definitely on YouTube, which is weird.
And you have to wonder what their priorities are. But
according to Russia, the actual Federated States of Russia, their
(14:49):
official position is yet not with us. You know, if
they were doing some pro Russia only pro Russia is
personal feeling, not like we're not paying them to do it.
It's just they just like us so much, you know.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Yeah, they're doing it out of their own fields.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
And we have not paid it. And this is a
very familiar line from Russia. It's oddly enough, it's one
we don't see us too often on the US side,
because the US has a really bad time as a
really tough time getting the top notch hackers often.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Oh yeah, just.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
Because mainly because of the drug use policy for security clearance,
which I think they've walked back. So maybe it's I
don't know, maybe the really good US hackers are just
all completely secret and never commented on. Maybe the US
has a group of patriotic hackers, but Russia is clearly
playing paying these people, paying and playing paying to play
(15:50):
these people. So also, thank you man. So now we
have to ask about the other countries who has the
most effective hacker army. Most people, most of us in
the West, would just, like an a knee jerk reaction, say, well,
it's the USA. Obviously, it's the USA. Partner. You know,
we have the we've got the money, we've got the means,
(16:11):
we've got the motives, America bald eagles, rock flag and eagle.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
You know, yeah, but America hasn't been an underdog for
a long time.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
And I think you raised a very important point regarding
that perspective. So then maybe other people would say, oh,
it's it's Russia. Clearly it's Russia. They would say, look,
it's we know about the botnet. It's Russia. And then
other people would say, no, no, you guys are being ridiculous.
Pay attention. Look past the illusion of the single nation state.
(16:42):
Look at international surveillance. These cooperatives like five Eyes, which
is terrifying.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Yeah, because that's that's a bunch of countries working together,
combining forces and then saying, hey, we got all this land,
and we got all this sea around the land. Let's
just monitor.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Everything, and let's do it in such a way that
we're never actually technically breaking our own domestic laws.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yeah, we just happened to share some information.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
It's brilliant. It is so immoral and brilliant.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
We've all got Gmail drafts open in accounts that we
share right.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Right, oh for portray us. So with all this stuff,
the problem is people tend to overlook the role of
China's digital superspies. And we want to be really careful
in this episode because there's so much when the nationalism
stuff comes into play, there's so many people fall in
(17:39):
this slippery slope of racism, you know, and jingoism. And
it's important to note that even the smallest countries are
full of people with different viewpoints. Very very very rarely
does an entire country move in lockstep and agree on something.
You know, is there are a ton of people here
(18:00):
in the US that completely don't think China is a threat,
don't want some sort of war, and that problem that
that variety of views is even larger in China. But
they're also probably they're also probably the biggest culprit or
(18:25):
biggest propagator of digital warfare today.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
And we've seen that already in when we were talking
about infiltration and corporate infiltration and the use of getting
into systems, taking intellectual property from other countries and then
kind of building your own version of it. China. Again,
(18:50):
it's hard to even speak about it, but groups in
China have a very long history of doing.
Speaker 4 (18:55):
This that's almost like on the level of corporate Esponi and.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Is corporate, but then if you imagine it we're just
kind of moving it over a couple of steps to
military espionage in this way.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
Especially since because, like you said at the top of
the show, so much of the technology is created at
the military level before it, you know, ends up in
the public sphere.
Speaker 4 (19:17):
So it's just a way of like getting proprietary technology early.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
And one of the main factors here is that China
is home to one point four billion people. It's the
most populous country, and they've been doing this for a long,
long long time. They see it's right, and it's hard
to even speak about it.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Well, China is that they and the stuff they don't
want you to know of this episode.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
It is China's government.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
We could call it the PRC if that.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Yeah, that's that is that is good? The People's Republic
of China. Yeah. Yes. And they also made something. They
created a program, a group of networks and a network
of people that is doing something and it's called.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Ghost Net. Oh, GhostNet pretty good? Huh yeah, great, Dame.
Speaker 4 (20:14):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
At least that's what it's called.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
Isn't that the the name of a Mission Impossible movie?
Or is that that Ghost Nation?
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Ghost It's something?
Speaker 4 (20:22):
Rogue Nation?
Speaker 3 (20:23):
What was it called I thought ghost protocol, ghost protocol maybe,
and there was also like a Tom Clancy video game
called ghost Recon I believe nice.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
So we we have to we have to figure out
what that is. Hey, god, it's impossible. Okay, it's ghost protocol,
ghost protocol.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
I'm a fan of that. Are you a fan of that?
Speaker 2 (20:44):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (20:44):
They're fun so much running, a lot of running and jumping,
and you know, you can really tell that Cruz takes
doing his own stunts very seriously. There's a lot of
one takes, you know, not a lot of cutting, slicing
and dicing.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
That's good stuff.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
And it's still not as dangerous as again, to return
to our original tone, ghost net. But what is it?
We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor. Here's
where it gets crazy. So commercial fisher fishing people, members
(21:21):
of the commercial fishing industry who listen to the show.
It's a shout out to a very specific part of
the demographic here.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Deadly as catch.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Yes, yes, you all will be familiar with ghost net.
From a different perspective, ghost net can mean one of
two things in the world of commercial fishing. Ghost nets
or ghost gear are lost or discarded fishing nets that
float through the ocean, and every year they trap and
kill millions and millions and millions of marine animals. It's
(21:53):
a tragedy. The ocean ecosystem is collapsing. Your grandchildren may
not be able to eat fish. But that's the story
for another day.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Which what are you gonna do? Go out there and
capture all the nets?
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Yeah, good luck, good luck. You try to capture the net,
but the net will capture you. Did it without making
it a Soviet Russia joke, at least in the world
of hacking, however. The ghost Net no Spaces is a
sophisticated program operating in China designed to capture information from
Ministries of Foreign Affairs, embassies, international organizations, high value target
(22:32):
type individuals, news media institutions and NGOs non government organizations.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Basically high value everything.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
So how do we find out about this?
Speaker 3 (22:43):
So ghost net was discovered when the office of Get This,
the Dali Lama in Darmasala, India, contacted experts to investigate
if this facility was being bugged, and a researcher at Cambridge,
a guy named Ross Anderson and also Shashir not Garaga
at the University of Illinois wrote this about this event.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
The Office of the Dalai Lama started to suspect it
was under surveillance while setting up meetings between his Holiness.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
I wish people will call me his Holiness. That'd be awesome.
What do you have to do to get that title?
Speaker 5 (23:13):
You have to be the Dali Lama or maybe a
pope their holiness. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, his Holiness and
foreign dignitaries. They were looking to surveil these meetings between
His Holiness, the Dalai Lama and foreign dignitaries, so they
sent an email invitation on behalf of the Dalai Lama
to a foreign diplomat, but before anyone was able to
follow up with a phone call, the diplomat's office was
(23:35):
contacted by the Chinese government and Warren not to go
ahead with the meeting.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
So this is important because it means one of two
things happened. Either when the Office of the Dalai Lama
sent that email, the government of China knew what was happening, right, yes, somehow,
or when the embassy received the email, the government of
(24:02):
China found it and knew what was happening.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
So yeah, they had one side of it. At least one.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Side right, and so mister Nagaraja travels to Dharamsala. Then
September of two thousand and eight, I believe and discovers
that the Tibetan computer system had been breached from inside China.
These computers contained details about the locations of refugees, Tibetan
(24:32):
refugees and the location of schools that were possible targets
for the Chinese. Assimilation is one way to say it,
assimilation tactics, but also the repression of Tibetan culture. So
they got hacked and then they launched into an investigation
(24:53):
that took almost a year before they reached their conclusions.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Yes, in two thousand and nine, it was a ten
month investigation by the Monk Center for International Studies in Toronto,
and they revealed that this thing, ghost net, not only
taps into their emails, but it also turns them into
giant listening devices.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Like a like an Amazon Alexa, right.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yes, oh my god, or a Google Home or whatever
else you've just got sitting in your living room like me.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Wait, wait to like but like a reverse that thing, right,
because it's not it's not assisting you, it's not personally
assisting you. It's more personally helping itself to your information
and passing it on to whoever has.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Control, which which Alexa is doing as well.
Speaker 4 (25:32):
Right, we just have the illusion that we control it.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Just don't get intimate around it. And here's a fun
one for the one who has one of these devices
in your house as you're listening to this podcast. Uh,
I'll do the one for Alexis someone do the one
for Google. Don't know what happens, hey, Alexa, tell us
Amazon's official privacy policy. It's not gonna do it. No,
(25:55):
there's no way to make it happen.
Speaker 4 (25:56):
Hey Google, when's Lady Gaga's birthday?
Speaker 1 (26:00):
I feel like that's way less important.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
That's you, Hey Google, erase all of your records? There
you go.
Speaker 4 (26:11):
I just can't do that, you know, I can't do that?
Speaker 2 (26:16):
All right? Whatever?
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Google, Hey Alexa, play desposito.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
No, do you realize we've alienated literally everyone that's listening
to us on any of the devices right now?
Speaker 2 (26:25):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (26:25):
No, absolutely, that's part of the show. And I don't
think it'll work if you're listening to it all one
of those devices already.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
I don't. Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Write in and let us know and we hope that
that harmless prank hasn't done anything. The only reason I
bring it up is because those listening devices themselves are
notoriously imperfect at answering questions. There's a wealth of research
going on now to make these devices better at answering questions.
(27:00):
But I maintained that there's some questions they are simply
refusing to answer. Oh yes, such as privacy questions. What
happens to those recordings if you do think you have
erased them?
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Yeah, the built in answers to a lot of those
questions have changed, especially as they get as they become
memes online. By the way, we just forgot to mention Siri,
the one that's like sitting on the desk and looking
at Siri right there, there's one in my pocket. Yeah,
Casey's got one out there, pretty sure. Oh lord, yep.
(27:32):
They're just in everybody's pocket now.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
So it's true we have become the eyes and ears
that we feared our parents did. But the thing about
this program, ghost Net, is that it did not even
have the It did not even have the the pretense
of control or privacy concerns. It didn't even have the
(27:54):
theater of that that we see in Amazon and Google
because there was there was that no need. People weren't
supposed to know about this. The report stopped short of
outright accusing the government of the PRC for creating this network,
and instead they said everything, but they said the vast
(28:16):
majority of these attacks originate from inside China. What they
meant was, all of these attacks originate from inside China.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
But they could be independently operating. They just happened to
be in China.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Right right, right. Someone is very patriotic, and they say,
you know what, not only am I a supremely talented
computer whiz, but I'm also not just patriotic, but I'm
plugged into the internal, often unstated policy goals of the
(28:49):
Chinese military and government just because I like the country
so much. So I'm just going to do this even
though the government has come forward and said that it's
a crime to go to jail due to breaking the
laws of the country I love, and the country I
love is going to put me into You know what
I mean is it's a lot of that's a lot
(29:13):
of It's just a lot in general to try to digest. Right,
So again, we have to be fair. It's unclear whether
they're independent or state sponsored. But that goes back to
the idea of plausible deniability. And another thing that's important
here too is that it's a little bit of a
lower simmer because a lot of other countries like Russia,
(29:35):
the US, Israel, or whatever, will have cyber attacks or
digital attacks that are blatantly violent, targeting things and in
many cases have a little bit of a little bit
of a style on them, a little bit of swag,
so that despite official deniability, it can be an open
secret about who did this. Like stuck'snet, clearly Israel US
(29:59):
right to cripple or at least mitigate the progress of
the Iranian nuclear program, Russia taking out various power grids
and then saying, oh, no, it's very sad.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
That's weird. Well, yeah, a lot of times what at
least I'm seeing, And please write in and correct me
if I'm incorrect about this, Oh I will, Because with
these kinds of cyber attacks and security threats, where the
or originating or the area where an attack originates physically
is harder. It's becoming harder and harder to understand or
(30:37):
to verify, I guess, so you really have to look
at motive, like you're saying, ben like who what power
would want this to happen or want this area to
be infected or you know, this sector in this military
or something.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
And then is this some weird star trek four D
level chess. It's interesting because one researcher said, this could
be happening in China without the knowledge of any Chinese nationals.
We can't forget that there are no clean nor ethical
intelligence agencies. That's not how intelligence works. Instead, Okay, so
(31:12):
Ronald Dibart, one of the researchers said, and I quote here,
we were a bit careful about it, knowing the nuance
of what happens in subterranean realms. Whoa you could tell
this guys, yeah whatever. This could also well be the
CIA or the Russians. It's a murky realm. We're lifting
the lid on, right, And at first I was very
(31:34):
skeptical about that, but it's a really good point, yes,
because if you wanted to make the government of China
look bad, dysreputable, or terrible, then just send some of
your own dirty boys in there to do an operation.
Speaker 4 (31:49):
Gotta get them dirty boys on the scene.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
I know, I like that phrase. So The US has
also repeatedly warned about China's increasing capabilities in the realm
of electronic warfare. But we're I don't know, we're setting
the context. We should probably walk everyone through how this happens,
(32:12):
because right now, the way it happens might surprise you.
It feels relatively simplistic.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Yeah, so you know what, let's take a word from
our sponsor and then we'll go through the what an
attack looks like. Okay, so the GhostNet is attempting to
infect you. Here's what's going to happen.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
First, you get an email, Casey, can we get an
email cube? But it's an email from someone you know.
It's not like, what's a made up name?
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Uh, Lauren vogelbamb.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
That's a great example. Actually, Okay, let's say it is
Lauren Vogela is someone you know. So you get this
email from someone you know, maybe someone you work with,
maybe a family member, but it's someone you trust, and
most importantly, it's someone that you have had a previous,
ongoing conversation with via these email addresses. And the email
itself is not going to be something blatantly like a scam.
(33:21):
It's actually going to be pretty pretty nuanced and sophisticated,
so it wouldn't be an email from Lauren. By the way,
for longtime listeners, you all you all know her from
our previous episode on Diamonds. We'll probably have her on
the show a little bit later as well. Longtime friend
of our show, personal friend of all of us, host
of Savor correct brain stuff. So maybe we receive an
(33:43):
email from her and it says instead of like, hey, omg,
lull click this crazy link, it says something like.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Because that's pretty blatant.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
We've all seen those nouns, right, kitty emoji, right right,
it says something like it says, suddenly, hey, Ben. Earlier
last week, we were talking about, uh, you know, we
were talking about the differences between types of camels, or
between lamas and al pockets. And I'll think, oh, yeah,
(34:13):
I talked about that. I found this great interviewer. I
found this great article about this, and I thought you
would like to read it, like, oh man, yeah, okay,
I want to learn more about lamas a pacas. I'm in, yeah,
I'll pacas whatever. I need to know these things. And
then you click on a word documentary PDF that's there,
and when it opens up, it is actually about the
(34:34):
difference between lamas and our pockets.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
Ye, And it actually opens up with word or whatever
in Adobe.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
And it looks legit and you read it and you
think like, oh, what a great friend. Following up on that.
Speaker 4 (34:43):
This operates as expected. Nothing amiss here.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Not at all. But if we could get a sound
cue that indicates a pivotal shift in tone here.
Speaker 4 (34:53):
But that was good man.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
What's actually happening as you're reading this is that a
virus is downloading very quickly into your computer. This virus,
a trojan, often a trojan called ghost rats, will allow
the hackers based in China, access to your camera, your microphone,
access to screenshots, access to your files, and it will
(35:18):
also be able to log keystrokes. That last part is
incredibly important.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
Yeah, key logging. Let's just I think we glossed over
it a little bit. Ben Ghost Rat G H zero
S T R A T.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
I love that Forrest Whitaker movie Ghost Rat in the
Way of the Samurai.
Speaker 4 (35:38):
Oh yeah, Jim Jarmush directed number.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
It was a little slow for me, but overall I
enjoyed it.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
It's gonna say ghost Dog, Okay, I think there is
a did the soundtrack though, and stuff that I want
you to know.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
And yeah, so this this thing happens. You're learning about
Loma's alpacas and then you are unwittingly becoming a an
alexa for these people. You're like a node a serie. Yeah,
you're a node. And ghost Rat itself is interesting because
(36:12):
it was very, very successful. We also should mention, Noel,
I think you alluded to this a little bit earlier,
that this occurs in the civilian world as well. Numerous voyeurs, hackers,
people with a crush or something. We'll hack into a
victim's webcam just to watch them, you know what I mean.
(36:33):
I can't remember. We're talking about this on air off air,
but not to steal nuclear secrets or something. What's different
here with ghost Rat and with ghost net is a
their names are way cooler and b Civilian webcams are
not typically going to give away things like troop movement
or the new design for a jet engine, or nuclear
(36:54):
payloads and their locations.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
Yeah, we'll just call those ghost creeps.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
Those are just ghost creeps. The Chinese government again officially
denies any involvement with cyber Spine. Spokesman for the Chinese
embassy in London in two thousand and nine, when this
was first breaking news, said Beijing had also fallen victim
to hackers and dismissed this report as part of the
(37:18):
Dali Lama's media and propaganda campaign. So it was just
a it was a frame job by the Dali Lama himself. Wow,
But yeah, that's that's how he It wasn't the numerous
allegations and proven instances of human rights abuses by the PRC.
(37:39):
Note he said that he thought the best way to
go at them would be a hacking accusation. Interesting, so
they said, this is smoke and mirrors, this is nothing,
pay no mind. But the problem is that a long
long time before that, the Chinese government decided to make
control of information one of them the main parts of
(38:01):
the country's policy. In two thousand and three, at the
tenth National People's Congress, the Chinese Army, which is controlled
by the Party. Very important difference here, the Chinese Army
announced the creation of information warfare units and a general
at the time, Dai ching Ming, said internet attacks would
always run in advance of any military operation to cripple enemies.
(38:26):
Said that in two thousand and three, and then in
two thousand and nine they're saying, we would never do
anything like that. The Dali Lama is trying to get
in your head. Yeah, Westerners.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
Well it's really interesting in two thousand and three that's announced.
I'm trying to imagine how many full scale military conflicts
China has engaged in up into this time, and really
all I can think of is the South China Sea stuff,
but it's not really full military engagements. No, where they've
performed into internet attack in front of an actual military advance.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
Well, they just said military operation, and a military operation
can also be a domestic operation or an operation on
the border.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
So largely intelligency, it could be as well.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Yeah, sure, so it doesn't have to be an out
and out war, but it could easily be just like
you're saying, a series of small conflicts in the South
China Sea as they attempt to enlarge their maritime border
or excuse me, get everybody else to agree with what
they feel like their maritime border is that government feels.
(39:36):
So it's strange because we're hearing conflicting reports from government
officials depending on the situation. The Pentagon has been obsessed
with this and quite uncomfortable with it. They conducted a
number of investigations and one of the reports that they
issued said that Chinese progress in this sphere is pretty impressive.
(40:01):
They're scared, but they were impressed.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
And I said, China has made steady progress in recent
years and developing offensive, nuclear, space, and cyber warfare capabilities,
the only aspects of China's armed forces that today have
the potential to be truly global.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
So what they're saying there is that right now the
Chinese government, the Chinese military, the capacities that they have
in terms of military hardware are are making them a
regional power. Right in the economic sphere. They are truly
a global power, but if it comes down to you know,
(40:40):
guns and bombs and explosions, they can control a region,
but they can't lock down a globe.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
Yeah, but they're focusing on nuclear, space and cyber which
are the three things that can reach pretty much anywhere
in the world.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
They also are are building out a bluewater navy, yeah,
which is I think we talked about this in the past.
So there are not to get two in the weeds
with it, but there are three ways to rate the
navy of a country. The first is brownwater. Brownwater navy
is mainly at the coast. The second is greenwater. The
(41:18):
greenwater Navy can project force to other closer areas in
the region. It can go across a sea or something
like that. Right. A bluewater navy, which there are very few,
is able to project force anywhere across the globe. The
US is the biggest bluewater navy, which is why you
hear about the US being involved in all sorts of
(41:40):
maritime conflicts around the world. It's kind of where Britain
was during its days of naval glories.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yeah, chances are chances and days of naval Yeah.
Speaker 4 (41:51):
No ideas of naval glory and naval gazing.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yeah, that's what it feels like, just.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
The idea that there could be numerous, let's call them,
naval units deployed in anywhere in the world at any time,
and there probably are because there are bases. There are
naval bases throughout the world.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
We've got our stuff just parked and we've got the
supercarriers essentially that are out there that can just be
a base wherever you want it to be.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Yes, the US has eleven supercarriers, which are exactly if
you describe matt they're moving naval bases and now I
think because of twenty eighteen, officially China only has one
overseas logistics base. I think it's in Africa, and it
does have an aircraft carrier, or it's building one. It's
(42:46):
either building it or it's just built it. The point
is that stuff takes a much longer time ye become
to reach fruition. But this hacking stuff where all you
need or all you need are a few vulnerabilities in
one in one place and a few very very smart
(43:07):
people within internet connection in another. So everybody else's research,
all other government's research indicates this is the goal of China.
If so, this is the stuff that the Chinese government
doesn't want you to know because they maintain that this
is not happening, depending on who they talk to. Because
(43:29):
as we know, if you're a politician, you're making a
speech to a domestic audience, it's very different from what
you'll say to the United Nations most times, well.
Speaker 3 (43:40):
Totally, I mean, like a good example is with Donald Trump,
who recently did a speech for the United Nations and
caught some flak in the form of a little bit
of a laughing at a statement that he made. That
is not the kind of reception he would be even
as like a kind of controversial president. Any president would
be used to speaking in front of a more friendly
(44:01):
domestic audience, let alone an audience of their base.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Yeah, and that's usually why. One thing unusual about that
speech I was alluding to is that he was he
was speaking with the same talking points he would use
for his domestic base. Yeah doesn't fly right, Yeah, which
other which other presidents usually wouldn't do, regardless of what
country they are representing. But this means that right now, technically,
(44:32):
officially on the record is isually we cannot say the
government of China is currently sponsoring a ton of ongoing
attacks to compromise various businesses and countries.
Speaker 2 (44:48):
We can't even say that they did it in two
thousand and nine.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
But here's the thing, right, multiple attacks. Most of these attacks,
especially ghost NETT, but also with these other the programs
have been traced to an island in China called Hainan,
and this island is home to a signals intelligence facility
run by the government. Is also home to the third
(45:11):
Technical Department of the People's Liberation Army. Which is their
cyber one of their cyber warfare places. So it may
not be sponsored by them. May maybe yeah, I mean
you could tell that. I don't believe it, that's my opinion.
But it's certainly in the same neighborhood, so maybe it's
someone who works there and is so patriotic that they're
(45:33):
doing this on their free time somehow. And keep in
mind that ghost Net happened ten years ago, has discovered
ten years ago, So whatever is out there now is
whatever the successors are, they're far beyond that, and they're
probably far beyond most of the technology available to citizens
here in the West. One of the servers was verified
(45:54):
to be a Chinese government server, So for people who
believe this PRC, that's a smoking gun. Wow.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Okay, let's just for a little bit of perspective. This
is two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine when
this is occurring, when computers across the globe and sensitive
areas were turned into Amazon alexis. That occurred five years
before the Amazon Alexa premiered. So so whoever is doing
(46:22):
this was way ahead of the game, way way ahead
of the game, and they.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
Figured out you think maybe some of the technology that
goes into like these lists, these Alexas and these personal
assistants may have had its origin and military technology.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
I didn't say that. I don't think like a bugging
device was the reason companies wanted you to have a
bugging device in your home. I don't think military applications
of bugging devices had anything to do with voluntary bugging devices.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
Just so we're on the same page, I mean, it
is just an extension of like stuff like Facebook, where
we just you know, no one even needs to surveil
us anymore because it is dumping all our information out
into the interwebs, right, So why would it not be
a logical next step that we would just actively and
voluntarily install bugging devices in our own homes, you know,
using our ingenious powers of free will, right right.
Speaker 1 (47:18):
And the spookiest thing of it all is, you know,
to the point we just made, we don't know whatever's
happening now, technologically speaking, in terms of surveillance, we might
not know about it for another ten five ten years.
And ghost Neet, as far as we know, has been
(47:39):
responsible for a minimum of one two hundred and ninety
five computer system attacks on embassies for ministries, government offices
pretty much every exile center for the Dalai Lama in London, India,
and New York City. It's only one of multiple similar
operations running out of China. There are tons, and they
(48:00):
all have really cool names.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
Just on the side take away from today's episode Ghost
Neet just kind of spooky.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
Unlike other nations which tend to practice overt attacks, you know,
crippling power grids, China's programs seem much more focused on
just collecting sensitive information so that other parts of the
military can act on that. That's so far at least,
and odd mixed signals are coming. In twenty fifteen, then
(48:29):
President Obama with President Xi Jinping, who will be president
of China for a long long time now, to address
a range of issues. And they talked about economic espionage.
And when they talked about that, they said they reached
an agreement. They said neither government, the PRC, nor the
US will conduct or support cyber enabled theft of business
(48:51):
secrets that would provide competitive advantage to their commercial sectors. Importantly, disturbingly,
they did not agree to restrict government espionage because most
countries are cool with that, or most countries won't come
out against it. Because they all do it exactly.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
You can't be against something that you that everybody knows
you're doing.
Speaker 1 (49:13):
Sure, you can against all kinds of stuff. And that's
the thing, of course I would I would propose to
you all and everyone listening, that all countries also support
theft of business secrets.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
Yeah, I think so. It's just you can't. You're not
going to put the rubber stamp of your country on it.
You can. You've got a million different ways to obfuscate
who's actually doing that.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
That's true. And I don't know this is more of
a socio philosophical perspective here. But the reason I think
all countries will also support or attempt to commit industrial
LESBIONA is because I think it's increasingly misleading and a
(50:04):
myth to pretend that business and government are separate. In
many cases, it just doesn't make sense. I mean, look
at Russian oligarchs for the most part, and the function
of Russian governance. Look at the largest companies in the
largest countries, and many times there's just so much bleedover
(50:26):
from who controls what that While it's comforting to say
that businesses and governments may be separate, while it's technically
supposed to be the case in practice, it really isn't.
Speaker 2 (50:40):
Yeah. I mean you can donate as unlimited funds to
a campaign, when you can get government contracts for just
a number of military applications and other applications, when there's
a revolving door between business and government, I totally feel you.
Speaker 1 (50:57):
And I'm saying it's I think you. I'm not even
I'm not even specifically talking about the US so talking
about well, I know global phenomenon, And.
Speaker 2 (51:06):
I guess what I'm just saying is when you can
use the United States as an example like the one
for in a lot of ways, is the leader or
at least the main bully when we're doing it, then
it seems like you probably do it, or it's happening
everywhere else.
Speaker 1 (51:23):
And then the question is what to do next? Do
you want to fight against it? Do you want to
do you want to fight against it? Do you want
to join the empire right? Or do we just think
about changing your password? Run in a couple of virus checks.
You'll probably be able to catch anything from two thousand
(51:44):
and nine. You know, even even something like Norton Anti
virus can find that. But what about the twenty eighteen stuff.
Speaker 2 (51:54):
You just gotta kind of hope, cover up your cover
up your cameras. Yeah, as much as you can take
out the mics, because there's really no way to stop
that mic from getting turned on.
Speaker 1 (52:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (52:07):
In case, yeah, you just have a white noise generator.
It's like shitting on your monitor where the mic is.
Speaker 1 (52:15):
Well, we want to we want to hear what you think, folks. No,
obviously we are not ourselves professional black nor white hat hackers,
but we want to know if you believe there's propaganda
involved here? Is the government of China really sponsoring these things?
Are they just patriotic hackers? Is the West making it
(52:35):
look worse than it is to justify future military action?
Speaker 2 (52:39):
What kind of programs is the West doing right now
to places like China? Do you have any info on that?
Tell us and not? You can tell us anonymously, Yeah
you can, you can.
Speaker 1 (52:52):
You cannot tell us anonymously Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. Yeah,
we'd love to. We'd love to hear from you. You can
find us on Here's where it gets crazy, But you
can contact us anonymously, at least anonymously to us are
our long serving the hapless intern at the NSA we'll
probably know everything about you.
Speaker 2 (53:12):
Shout out to you, Matt. Hopefully you've made it that far,
and that's the end of this classic episode. If you
have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can
get into contact with us in a number of different ways.
One of the best is to give us a call.
Our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. If you
don't want to do that, you can send us a
(53:33):
good old fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (53:34):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (53:38):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to the show, fellow conspiracy realist. We are returning
to you with a very strange classic all the way
from twenty eighteen, The story of Ghostnets.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Yes, this is one of those long investigations that turned
up with a really cool name for the bad guys.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What if in the age of the Internet,
you could create a new kind of army, something that
used viruses and software viruses, malware, you know, the same
way that other militaries use missiles and spies and bombs.
You know. Looking at this back in from twenty twenty
(00:44):
four from this vantage point, a lot of it is
surprisingly prescient.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
It's weird how long ago twenty eighteen actually was. Stop
when it comes to technological advancements and just where we
find ourselves now, that was forever ago.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Oh gosh, yeah it was. However, we are airing this
classic because we hope that you, like us, will find
some strange things to appreciate from the vantage of the
modern day. Because you're right, Matt, it was a long
time ago.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Yes, let's discover ghost net and ghost rat together right now.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Nol.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
They call me Ben. We are joined with our returning
guest super producer, Casey Pegram. Most importantly, you are here
that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
Today's episode is about war. What is it good for?
A war that some people will tell you is just
a few years in the distance.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
A ward that's already kind of happeningha.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
A war that other people will argue has already begun.
Right here are the facts. So the state of war
is changing in decades and centuries past. Most of us
who are not hundreds of years have only seen this
depicted in film right and photographs and such. In the
past ages and past conflicts, there would be things like
(02:36):
Napoleonic warfare. Napoleonic warfare is one of the reasons that
the Civil War here in the US was such a
bloody conflict. It's that thing where people line up in
rows and they all hold guns or some kind of weapon,
and then somebody in charge stands in the back and
makes them all march toward each other and just continually
(02:57):
shoot and see who's left standing at the end.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah, it's a combination of the technology available to wage
war and the rules that are set in place or
agreed upon. Just as what is the correct thing to
do in war?
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Right? Right? What is the ethical thing? The traditional thing?
How much do we value the lives of the people
we are sending to die? The answer in Napoleonic war
is with value. So war has changed, as you said, Matt,
and it is continually changing. There are a lot of
(03:35):
wonderful things we've talked about on the show that come
from war, usually advances in medical technology, but they're earned
through horrific experiences, and there are lots of other non
medical technological breakthroughs. Usually weaponize things that later have a
civilian use.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
And that's everything from well, not really zippers, but kind
of zippers, like clothing, really lots and lots of different
types of and kinds of clothing, to what's something else, oh,
velcrow food, yeah, food storage, just every upperware.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Well, everything probably in some way descended.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Comes from innovation from war because you have needs.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
So in this way, in just this relatively innocent, innovative way,
one could argue that war is an economic necessity. The
more realistic and way less inspiring ted talkie version of
war's and economic necessity is the one that admits that
(04:39):
despite all the ideological clap trap people are fed by
their leaders, war is typically going to be about dominance
and resource extraction, controlling the stage, the theater in which
these blood drenched plays occur. And now we have moved
(05:00):
past long past napoleonic warfare to what we would have
considered modern warfare, which would be smaller groups of people
or larger groups dividing into smaller groups, practicing things that
were once seen as very dishonorable, like guerrilla tactics, you know, hide, shoot,
(05:21):
avoid rents, and repeat and use information available to better
target things. That's why we have now we live in
a world of unmanned aerial vehicles that in theory are
targeting specific threats and never getting it wrong, not once.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
A lot of the technology is very much one sided,
which is why being at the top of the technology
game is so important.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Yeah yeah, And it's hard to overstate that. And a
lot of nations, even the very advanced nations, are working
with these strangely uneven levels of sophistication computers in one
part or in one department could be top notch, bleeding
edge sci fi stuff that the public won't see for
another ten to fifteen years. But the same country, maybe
(06:12):
even in the same building, could have computers that are
doing equally important tasks that are hopelessly outdated, like they're
pre windows. They're on IBM, you know, like all the
Hacker film screens in the nineties.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
The greens with the monocolored Yes, yeah, those do still exist,
and Windows ninety five machines in highly important like water
treatment plants, something as simple as that, even if it's
not war.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Yeah. I don't remember if which show this was on,
but I think we did an episode before either here
on car stuff about how distressingly easy it is to
compromise infrastructure, like all the traffic If you were in
the US and you're listening to this, unless you're in
a very, very large city, the odds are that most
of your traffic lights are controlled by a central thing,
(07:03):
and you can you can hack into it, don't you're
not telling you to.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
And the terminals are usually immediately there, next to right, So.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
You cannot just mess up one traffic light. You can
mess up all of them.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
Did you ever see that episode of mcguiver where he
like uses like a credit card and sticks it inside
and you know, he opens up the traffic box and
he like gets the lights to change on command by
like you know, using some kind of plastic device to
like break the circuit. I can't remember that what he did,
it was very mcgivory, but yeah, he called he basically
it was kind of messed up because he actually caused
a pretty catastrophic looking pile up.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
And as like mcguiver, that's not cool.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
You don't kill mcguver y. Yeah, uh that's and that
is for the record, the original mcguiver, the good one,
hot take. Yeah, sure, fine, no regrets, but it's true
where we have uneven progress as a species, especially in
this field, and according to prominent think tanks like the
(08:02):
Rand Corporation, this new face of war, we're evolving past
guerrilla tactics, past just sending people out with good human
intel or sigent signal intelligence.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
And it's less about who has the biggest gun.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Right exactly, It's more about who has the best information.
So all of the think tanks are more or less agreeing.
In this post nuclear society, we have everybody still has nukes, right,
but a lot of people you don't want to use them.
That's political suicide. So now we're trying to find better
(08:43):
ways to steal, bag or borrow information, and that leads
us to something called strategic information warfare. This is the
term the US eggheads prefer to use. It has another
term in other places. It's one subgenre of what we
would call asymmetrical warfare. If we're three different nations, sorry,
(09:07):
if we're four different nations and we're in a conflict
and one of us, Matt, let's say you're America and
you have the world's most powerful navy.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
I most certainly do.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
There's no reason for US other countries to spend billions
and billions and billions of dollars trying to catch up
with you when we can just leapfrog you and build
a battleship killer or an aircraft carrier killer, something that
is less expensive to build and almost impossible for you
to defend against.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Matt, why are you always flexing that superior navy and air.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Force because I can print dollars getting a little too.
Speaker 4 (09:44):
Big for them pants.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
You'll never know my black budgets.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Yes, it's true. It's all true. And Matt, you know,
those are great pants Matt.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
Has they have their American flag pants.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Yeah, Matt's taking awaaring his uncle Sam outfit just twenty
four seven, which just has to weird out your kid.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
You know. He comes to love it and he calls
me Sammy. He says, Sammy, what are we doing today?
And I'm like, we're gonna find some natives and we're
gonna take all their landowna their blankets with the plague. Oh,
I'm sorry. I think I was roll playing a little
too hard. Now, America there for it. America is great.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Well, America is a country, and all countries have blood
on their hands. I would challenge anybody. It's the name
one that does not.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
That's actually my favorite song of the moment.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
It's called Country Blood, Country Blood by Toby Keith. That
sounds great. Sounds Uh sounds great Toby Keith. Uh probably
would fit oddly enough. This is soft track, but Toby
Keith would fit in more into psyops, right, propaganda warfare.
If you want to freak out people in foreign country,
play your own music really loud, sounds very patriotic, and
(10:58):
then play it for hours like the Barney so has
often been used when law enforcement is making a siege
of some kind of compound or commune anyway. So now
we've got the basic logic, why bother to try to
build a battleship when you can build something that kills
a battleship, or you can build something that teaches you
(11:20):
how to kill a battleship, and you can do it
for a lot less money. This is why we get
this is how we get to information warfare. This is
why hacking is so important. Stealing information from another country
or from another business, you know what, forget about Uncle Sam.
Let's just say go to Northrop Grumming, figure out what
(11:41):
they've got going on, right, And there are a million
ways to do it.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
And I just would say hacking that that kind of
tactic really is an underdog tactic because it's it requires
that there is someone that has something that is worth stealing, right,
And I completely see that logic, I understand it's it's God,
I don't want to get into it too much, but
the psychology of a suicide bombing or a kamakaze, right
(12:10):
when you get into that idea of we do not
have the technology to meet this group in warfare. Like
you're saying, battleships and build battleships, but we can do
something that destroys a battleship.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Right, Yeah, I see what you're saying.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
And that's essentially what this is. We cannot build this thing,
but we can take the information, and we can know
what you're doing, and we can basically use some of
the other guerrilla tactics and things because now we know
what you're doing.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Yeah, that's absolutely correct. And the US in particular is
seen as very vulnerable to these sorts of hacking attempts
because operational security is such a tough thing for the
world's largest military to be. You know, it's it's like
you could get ninety here on something, but that other
(13:01):
ten percent is devilishly difficult. And this is where we
see the emergence of things that have been called, often
by various journalists pundits I think I even did it
a few years back, have been called hacking armies, state
sponsored well kind of kind of a state sponsored groups
(13:24):
used to compromise the security of rival governments, obtain intelligence,
and in a lot of cases target high value individuals
such as officials in the military, key industries, or officials
in political campaigns and so on. So for example, of
that super producer Casey Pegram is a general and he
(13:44):
has some kind of he has some kind of intimate
knowledge of something, then he would be he would be
a target worth looking as an individual. Good news is
most people are not most people. He just it doesn't matter.
The primary thing is where you work and what your
position is there, and maybe maybe maybe if you're related
(14:05):
to somebody really important. And the thing is, most of
these hacker armies operate in their home countries in a
way that their sponsors, their patrons can claim plausible deniability
if they're caught or suspected. So there was that Russian
botnet army that influenced Western social media. The story broke
(14:29):
in the wake of the previous presidential election. But this
botnet army was active on things, on a lot of
things for much longer, you know, like even on subreddits,
which is weird, and definitely on YouTube, which is weird.
And you have to wonder what their priorities are. But
according to Russia, the actual Federated States of Russia, their
(14:49):
official position is yet not with us. You know, if
they were doing some pro Russia only pro Russia is
personal feeling, not like we're not paying them to do it.
It's just they just like us so much, you know.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Yeah, they're doing it out of their own fields.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
And we have not paid it. And this is a
very familiar line from Russia. It's oddly enough, it's one
we don't see us too often on the US side,
because the US has a really bad time as a
really tough time getting the top notch hackers often.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Oh yeah, just.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
Because mainly because of the drug use policy for security clearance,
which I think they've walked back. So maybe it's I
don't know, maybe the really good US hackers are just
all completely secret and never commented on. Maybe the US
has a group of patriotic hackers, but Russia is clearly
playing paying these people, paying and playing paying to play
(15:50):
these people. So also, thank you man. So now we
have to ask about the other countries who has the
most effective hacker army. Most people, most of us in
the West, would just, like an a knee jerk reaction, say, well,
it's the USA. Obviously, it's the USA. Partner. You know,
we have the we've got the money, we've got the means,
(16:11):
we've got the motives, America bald eagles, rock flag and eagle.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
You know, yeah, but America hasn't been an underdog for
a long time.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
And I think you raised a very important point regarding
that perspective. So then maybe other people would say, oh,
it's it's Russia. Clearly it's Russia. They would say, look,
it's we know about the botnet. It's Russia. And then
other people would say, no, no, you guys are being ridiculous.
Pay attention. Look past the illusion of the single nation state.
(16:42):
Look at international surveillance. These cooperatives like five Eyes, which
is terrifying.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Yeah, because that's that's a bunch of countries working together,
combining forces and then saying, hey, we got all this land,
and we got all this sea around the land. Let's
just monitor.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Everything, and let's do it in such a way that
we're never actually technically breaking our own domestic laws.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yeah, we just happened to share some information.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
It's brilliant. It is so immoral and brilliant.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
We've all got Gmail drafts open in accounts that we
share right.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Right, oh for portray us. So with all this stuff,
the problem is people tend to overlook the role of
China's digital superspies. And we want to be really careful
in this episode because there's so much when the nationalism
stuff comes into play, there's so many people fall in
(17:39):
this slippery slope of racism, you know, and jingoism. And
it's important to note that even the smallest countries are
full of people with different viewpoints. Very very very rarely
does an entire country move in lockstep and agree on something.
You know, is there are a ton of people here
(18:00):
in the US that completely don't think China is a threat,
don't want some sort of war, and that problem that
that variety of views is even larger in China. But
they're also probably they're also probably the biggest culprit or
(18:25):
biggest propagator of digital warfare today.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
And we've seen that already in when we were talking
about infiltration and corporate infiltration and the use of getting
into systems, taking intellectual property from other countries and then
kind of building your own version of it. China. Again,
(18:50):
it's hard to even speak about it, but groups in
China have a very long history of doing.
Speaker 4 (18:55):
This that's almost like on the level of corporate Esponi and.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Is corporate, but then if you imagine it we're just
kind of moving it over a couple of steps to
military espionage in this way.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
Especially since because, like you said at the top of
the show, so much of the technology is created at
the military level before it, you know, ends up in
the public sphere.
Speaker 4 (19:17):
So it's just a way of like getting proprietary technology early.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
And one of the main factors here is that China
is home to one point four billion people. It's the
most populous country, and they've been doing this for a long,
long long time. They see it's right, and it's hard
to even speak about it.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Well, China is that they and the stuff they don't
want you to know of this episode.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
It is China's government.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
We could call it the PRC if that.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Yeah, that's that is that is good? The People's Republic
of China. Yeah. Yes. And they also made something. They
created a program, a group of networks and a network
of people that is doing something and it's called.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Ghost Net. Oh, GhostNet pretty good? Huh yeah, great, Dame.
Speaker 4 (20:14):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
At least that's what it's called.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
Isn't that the the name of a Mission Impossible movie?
Or is that that Ghost Nation?
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Ghost It's something?
Speaker 4 (20:22):
Rogue Nation?
Speaker 3 (20:23):
What was it called I thought ghost protocol, ghost protocol maybe,
and there was also like a Tom Clancy video game
called ghost Recon I believe nice.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
So we we have to we have to figure out
what that is. Hey, god, it's impossible. Okay, it's ghost protocol,
ghost protocol.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
I'm a fan of that. Are you a fan of that?
Speaker 2 (20:44):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (20:44):
They're fun so much running, a lot of running and jumping,
and you know, you can really tell that Cruz takes
doing his own stunts very seriously. There's a lot of
one takes, you know, not a lot of cutting, slicing
and dicing.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
That's good stuff.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
And it's still not as dangerous as again, to return
to our original tone, ghost net. But what is it?
We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor. Here's
where it gets crazy. So commercial fisher fishing people, members
(21:21):
of the commercial fishing industry who listen to the show.
It's a shout out to a very specific part of
the demographic here.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Deadly as catch.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Yes, yes, you all will be familiar with ghost net.
From a different perspective, ghost net can mean one of
two things in the world of commercial fishing. Ghost nets
or ghost gear are lost or discarded fishing nets that
float through the ocean, and every year they trap and
kill millions and millions and millions of marine animals. It's
(21:53):
a tragedy. The ocean ecosystem is collapsing. Your grandchildren may
not be able to eat fish. But that's the story
for another day.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Which what are you gonna do? Go out there and
capture all the nets?
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Yeah, good luck, good luck. You try to capture the net,
but the net will capture you. Did it without making
it a Soviet Russia joke, at least in the world
of hacking, however. The ghost Net no Spaces is a
sophisticated program operating in China designed to capture information from
Ministries of Foreign Affairs, embassies, international organizations, high value target
(22:32):
type individuals, news media institutions and NGOs non government organizations.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Basically high value everything.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
So how do we find out about this?
Speaker 3 (22:43):
So ghost net was discovered when the office of Get This,
the Dali Lama in Darmasala, India, contacted experts to investigate
if this facility was being bugged, and a researcher at Cambridge,
a guy named Ross Anderson and also Shashir not Garaga
at the University of Illinois wrote this about this event.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
The Office of the Dalai Lama started to suspect it
was under surveillance while setting up meetings between his Holiness.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
I wish people will call me his Holiness. That'd be awesome.
What do you have to do to get that title?
Speaker 5 (23:13):
You have to be the Dali Lama or maybe a
pope their holiness. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, his Holiness and
foreign dignitaries. They were looking to surveil these meetings between
His Holiness, the Dalai Lama and foreign dignitaries, so they
sent an email invitation on behalf of the Dalai Lama
to a foreign diplomat, but before anyone was able to
follow up with a phone call, the diplomat's office was
(23:35):
contacted by the Chinese government and Warren not to go
ahead with the meeting.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
So this is important because it means one of two
things happened. Either when the Office of the Dalai Lama
sent that email, the government of China knew what was happening, right, yes, somehow,
or when the embassy received the email, the government of
(24:02):
China found it and knew what was happening.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
So yeah, they had one side of it. At least one.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Side right, and so mister Nagaraja travels to Dharamsala. Then
September of two thousand and eight, I believe and discovers
that the Tibetan computer system had been breached from inside China.
These computers contained details about the locations of refugees, Tibetan
(24:32):
refugees and the location of schools that were possible targets
for the Chinese. Assimilation is one way to say it,
assimilation tactics, but also the repression of Tibetan culture. So
they got hacked and then they launched into an investigation
(24:53):
that took almost a year before they reached their conclusions.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Yes, in two thousand and nine, it was a ten
month investigation by the Monk Center for International Studies in Toronto,
and they revealed that this thing, ghost net, not only
taps into their emails, but it also turns them into
giant listening devices.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Like a like an Amazon Alexa, right.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yes, oh my god, or a Google Home or whatever
else you've just got sitting in your living room like me.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Wait, wait to like but like a reverse that thing, right,
because it's not it's not assisting you, it's not personally
assisting you. It's more personally helping itself to your information
and passing it on to whoever has.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Control, which which Alexa is doing as well.
Speaker 4 (25:32):
Right, we just have the illusion that we control it.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Just don't get intimate around it. And here's a fun
one for the one who has one of these devices
in your house as you're listening to this podcast. Uh,
I'll do the one for Alexis someone do the one
for Google. Don't know what happens, hey, Alexa, tell us
Amazon's official privacy policy. It's not gonna do it. No,
(25:55):
there's no way to make it happen.
Speaker 4 (25:56):
Hey Google, when's Lady Gaga's birthday?
Speaker 1 (26:00):
I feel like that's way less important.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
That's you, Hey Google, erase all of your records? There
you go.
Speaker 4 (26:11):
I just can't do that, you know, I can't do that?
Speaker 2 (26:16):
All right? Whatever?
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Google, Hey Alexa, play desposito.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
No, do you realize we've alienated literally everyone that's listening
to us on any of the devices right now?
Speaker 2 (26:25):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (26:25):
No, absolutely, that's part of the show. And I don't
think it'll work if you're listening to it all one
of those devices already.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
I don't. Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Write in and let us know and we hope that
that harmless prank hasn't done anything. The only reason I
bring it up is because those listening devices themselves are
notoriously imperfect at answering questions. There's a wealth of research
going on now to make these devices better at answering questions.
(27:00):
But I maintained that there's some questions they are simply
refusing to answer. Oh yes, such as privacy questions. What
happens to those recordings if you do think you have
erased them?
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Yeah, the built in answers to a lot of those
questions have changed, especially as they get as they become
memes online. By the way, we just forgot to mention Siri,
the one that's like sitting on the desk and looking
at Siri right there, there's one in my pocket. Yeah,
Casey's got one out there, pretty sure. Oh lord, yep.
(27:32):
They're just in everybody's pocket now.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
So it's true we have become the eyes and ears
that we feared our parents did. But the thing about
this program, ghost Net, is that it did not even
have the It did not even have the the pretense
of control or privacy concerns. It didn't even have the
(27:54):
theater of that that we see in Amazon and Google
because there was there was that no need. People weren't
supposed to know about this. The report stopped short of
outright accusing the government of the PRC for creating this network,
and instead they said everything, but they said the vast
(28:16):
majority of these attacks originate from inside China. What they
meant was, all of these attacks originate from inside China.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
But they could be independently operating. They just happened to
be in China.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Right right, right. Someone is very patriotic, and they say,
you know what, not only am I a supremely talented
computer whiz, but I'm also not just patriotic, but I'm
plugged into the internal, often unstated policy goals of the
(28:49):
Chinese military and government just because I like the country
so much. So I'm just going to do this even
though the government has come forward and said that it's
a crime to go to jail due to breaking the
laws of the country I love, and the country I
love is going to put me into You know what
I mean is it's a lot of that's a lot
(29:13):
of It's just a lot in general to try to digest. Right,
So again, we have to be fair. It's unclear whether
they're independent or state sponsored. But that goes back to
the idea of plausible deniability. And another thing that's important
here too is that it's a little bit of a
lower simmer because a lot of other countries like Russia,
(29:35):
the US, Israel, or whatever, will have cyber attacks or
digital attacks that are blatantly violent, targeting things and in
many cases have a little bit of a little bit
of a style on them, a little bit of swag,
so that despite official deniability, it can be an open
secret about who did this. Like stuck'snet, clearly Israel US
(29:59):
right to cripple or at least mitigate the progress of
the Iranian nuclear program, Russia taking out various power grids
and then saying, oh, no, it's very sad.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
That's weird. Well, yeah, a lot of times what at
least I'm seeing, And please write in and correct me
if I'm incorrect about this, Oh I will, Because with
these kinds of cyber attacks and security threats, where the
or originating or the area where an attack originates physically
is harder. It's becoming harder and harder to understand or
(30:37):
to verify, I guess, so you really have to look
at motive, like you're saying, ben like who what power
would want this to happen or want this area to
be infected or you know, this sector in this military
or something.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
And then is this some weird star trek four D
level chess. It's interesting because one researcher said, this could
be happening in China without the knowledge of any Chinese nationals.
We can't forget that there are no clean nor ethical
intelligence agencies. That's not how intelligence works. Instead, Okay, so
(31:12):
Ronald Dibart, one of the researchers said, and I quote here,
we were a bit careful about it, knowing the nuance
of what happens in subterranean realms. Whoa you could tell
this guys, yeah whatever. This could also well be the
CIA or the Russians. It's a murky realm. We're lifting
the lid on, right, And at first I was very
(31:34):
skeptical about that, but it's a really good point, yes,
because if you wanted to make the government of China
look bad, dysreputable, or terrible, then just send some of
your own dirty boys in there to do an operation.
Speaker 4 (31:49):
Gotta get them dirty boys on the scene.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
I know, I like that phrase. So The US has
also repeatedly warned about China's increasing capabilities in the realm
of electronic warfare. But we're I don't know, we're setting
the context. We should probably walk everyone through how this happens,
(32:12):
because right now, the way it happens might surprise you.
It feels relatively simplistic.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Yeah, so you know what, let's take a word from
our sponsor and then we'll go through the what an
attack looks like. Okay, so the GhostNet is attempting to
infect you. Here's what's going to happen.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
First, you get an email, Casey, can we get an
email cube? But it's an email from someone you know.
It's not like, what's a made up name?
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Uh, Lauren vogelbamb.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
That's a great example. Actually, Okay, let's say it is
Lauren Vogela is someone you know. So you get this
email from someone you know, maybe someone you work with,
maybe a family member, but it's someone you trust, and
most importantly, it's someone that you have had a previous,
ongoing conversation with via these email addresses. And the email
itself is not going to be something blatantly like a scam.
(33:21):
It's actually going to be pretty pretty nuanced and sophisticated,
so it wouldn't be an email from Lauren. By the way,
for longtime listeners, you all you all know her from
our previous episode on Diamonds. We'll probably have her on
the show a little bit later as well. Longtime friend
of our show, personal friend of all of us, host
of Savor correct brain stuff. So maybe we receive an
(33:43):
email from her and it says instead of like, hey, omg,
lull click this crazy link, it says something like.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Because that's pretty blatant.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
We've all seen those nouns, right, kitty emoji, right right,
it says something like it says, suddenly, hey, Ben. Earlier
last week, we were talking about, uh, you know, we
were talking about the differences between types of camels, or
between lamas and al pockets. And I'll think, oh, yeah,
(34:13):
I talked about that. I found this great interviewer. I
found this great article about this, and I thought you
would like to read it, like, oh man, yeah, okay,
I want to learn more about lamas a pacas. I'm in, yeah,
I'll pacas whatever. I need to know these things. And
then you click on a word documentary PDF that's there,
and when it opens up, it is actually about the
(34:34):
difference between lamas and our pockets.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
Ye, And it actually opens up with word or whatever
in Adobe.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
And it looks legit and you read it and you
think like, oh, what a great friend. Following up on that.
Speaker 4 (34:43):
This operates as expected. Nothing amiss here.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Not at all. But if we could get a sound
cue that indicates a pivotal shift in tone here.
Speaker 4 (34:53):
But that was good man.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
What's actually happening as you're reading this is that a
virus is downloading very quickly into your computer. This virus,
a trojan, often a trojan called ghost rats, will allow
the hackers based in China, access to your camera, your microphone,
access to screenshots, access to your files, and it will
(35:18):
also be able to log keystrokes. That last part is
incredibly important.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
Yeah, key logging. Let's just I think we glossed over
it a little bit. Ben Ghost Rat G H zero
S T R A T.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
I love that Forrest Whitaker movie Ghost Rat in the
Way of the Samurai.
Speaker 4 (35:38):
Oh yeah, Jim Jarmush directed number.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
It was a little slow for me, but overall I
enjoyed it.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
It's gonna say ghost Dog, Okay, I think there is
a did the soundtrack though, and stuff that I want
you to know.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
And yeah, so this this thing happens. You're learning about
Loma's alpacas and then you are unwittingly becoming a an
alexa for these people. You're like a node a serie. Yeah,
you're a node. And ghost Rat itself is interesting because
(36:12):
it was very, very successful. We also should mention, Noel,
I think you alluded to this a little bit earlier,
that this occurs in the civilian world as well. Numerous voyeurs, hackers,
people with a crush or something. We'll hack into a
victim's webcam just to watch them, you know what I mean.
(36:33):
I can't remember. We're talking about this on air off air,
but not to steal nuclear secrets or something. What's different
here with ghost Rat and with ghost net is a
their names are way cooler and b Civilian webcams are
not typically going to give away things like troop movement
or the new design for a jet engine, or nuclear
(36:54):
payloads and their locations.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
Yeah, we'll just call those ghost creeps.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
Those are just ghost creeps. The Chinese government again officially
denies any involvement with cyber Spine. Spokesman for the Chinese
embassy in London in two thousand and nine, when this
was first breaking news, said Beijing had also fallen victim
to hackers and dismissed this report as part of the
(37:18):
Dali Lama's media and propaganda campaign. So it was just
a it was a frame job by the Dali Lama himself. Wow,
But yeah, that's that's how he It wasn't the numerous
allegations and proven instances of human rights abuses by the PRC.
(37:39):
Note he said that he thought the best way to
go at them would be a hacking accusation. Interesting, so
they said, this is smoke and mirrors, this is nothing,
pay no mind. But the problem is that a long
long time before that, the Chinese government decided to make
control of information one of them the main parts of
(38:01):
the country's policy. In two thousand and three, at the
tenth National People's Congress, the Chinese Army, which is controlled
by the Party. Very important difference here, the Chinese Army
announced the creation of information warfare units and a general
at the time, Dai ching Ming, said internet attacks would
always run in advance of any military operation to cripple enemies.
(38:26):
Said that in two thousand and three, and then in
two thousand and nine they're saying, we would never do
anything like that. The Dali Lama is trying to get
in your head. Yeah, Westerners.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
Well it's really interesting in two thousand and three that's announced.
I'm trying to imagine how many full scale military conflicts
China has engaged in up into this time, and really
all I can think of is the South China Sea stuff,
but it's not really full military engagements. No, where they've
performed into internet attack in front of an actual military advance.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
Well, they just said military operation, and a military operation
can also be a domestic operation or an operation on
the border.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
So largely intelligency, it could be as well.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Yeah, sure, so it doesn't have to be an out
and out war, but it could easily be just like
you're saying, a series of small conflicts in the South
China Sea as they attempt to enlarge their maritime border
or excuse me, get everybody else to agree with what
they feel like their maritime border is that government feels.
(39:36):
So it's strange because we're hearing conflicting reports from government
officials depending on the situation. The Pentagon has been obsessed
with this and quite uncomfortable with it. They conducted a
number of investigations and one of the reports that they
issued said that Chinese progress in this sphere is pretty impressive.
(40:01):
They're scared, but they were impressed.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
And I said, China has made steady progress in recent
years and developing offensive, nuclear, space, and cyber warfare capabilities,
the only aspects of China's armed forces that today have
the potential to be truly global.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
So what they're saying there is that right now the
Chinese government, the Chinese military, the capacities that they have
in terms of military hardware are are making them a
regional power. Right in the economic sphere. They are truly
a global power, but if it comes down to you know,
(40:40):
guns and bombs and explosions, they can control a region,
but they can't lock down a globe.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
Yeah, but they're focusing on nuclear, space and cyber which
are the three things that can reach pretty much anywhere
in the world.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
They also are are building out a bluewater navy, yeah,
which is I think we talked about this in the past.
So there are not to get two in the weeds
with it, but there are three ways to rate the
navy of a country. The first is brownwater. Brownwater navy
is mainly at the coast. The second is greenwater. The
(41:18):
greenwater Navy can project force to other closer areas in
the region. It can go across a sea or something
like that. Right. A bluewater navy, which there are very few,
is able to project force anywhere across the globe. The
US is the biggest bluewater navy, which is why you
hear about the US being involved in all sorts of
(41:40):
maritime conflicts around the world. It's kind of where Britain
was during its days of naval glories.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yeah, chances are chances and days of naval Yeah.
Speaker 4 (41:51):
No ideas of naval glory and naval gazing.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yeah, that's what it feels like, just.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
The idea that there could be numerous, let's call them,
naval units deployed in anywhere in the world at any time,
and there probably are because there are bases. There are
naval bases throughout the world.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
We've got our stuff just parked and we've got the
supercarriers essentially that are out there that can just be
a base wherever you want it to be.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Yes, the US has eleven supercarriers, which are exactly if
you describe matt they're moving naval bases and now I
think because of twenty eighteen, officially China only has one
overseas logistics base. I think it's in Africa, and it
does have an aircraft carrier, or it's building one. It's
(42:46):
either building it or it's just built it. The point
is that stuff takes a much longer time ye become
to reach fruition. But this hacking stuff where all you
need or all you need are a few vulnerabilities in
one in one place and a few very very smart
(43:07):
people within internet connection in another. So everybody else's research,
all other government's research indicates this is the goal of China.
If so, this is the stuff that the Chinese government
doesn't want you to know because they maintain that this
is not happening, depending on who they talk to. Because
(43:29):
as we know, if you're a politician, you're making a
speech to a domestic audience, it's very different from what
you'll say to the United Nations most times, well.
Speaker 3 (43:40):
Totally, I mean, like a good example is with Donald Trump,
who recently did a speech for the United Nations and
caught some flak in the form of a little bit
of a laughing at a statement that he made. That
is not the kind of reception he would be even
as like a kind of controversial president. Any president would
be used to speaking in front of a more friendly
(44:01):
domestic audience, let alone an audience of their base.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Yeah, and that's usually why. One thing unusual about that
speech I was alluding to is that he was he
was speaking with the same talking points he would use
for his domestic base. Yeah doesn't fly right, Yeah, which
other which other presidents usually wouldn't do, regardless of what
country they are representing. But this means that right now, technically,
(44:32):
officially on the record is isually we cannot say the
government of China is currently sponsoring a ton of ongoing
attacks to compromise various businesses and countries.
Speaker 2 (44:48):
We can't even say that they did it in two
thousand and nine.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
But here's the thing, right, multiple attacks. Most of these attacks,
especially ghost NETT, but also with these other the programs
have been traced to an island in China called Hainan,
and this island is home to a signals intelligence facility
run by the government. Is also home to the third
(45:11):
Technical Department of the People's Liberation Army. Which is their
cyber one of their cyber warfare places. So it may
not be sponsored by them. May maybe yeah, I mean
you could tell that. I don't believe it, that's my opinion.
But it's certainly in the same neighborhood, so maybe it's
someone who works there and is so patriotic that they're
(45:33):
doing this on their free time somehow. And keep in
mind that ghost Net happened ten years ago, has discovered
ten years ago, So whatever is out there now is
whatever the successors are, they're far beyond that, and they're
probably far beyond most of the technology available to citizens
here in the West. One of the servers was verified
(45:54):
to be a Chinese government server, So for people who
believe this PRC, that's a smoking gun. Wow.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Okay, let's just for a little bit of perspective. This
is two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine when
this is occurring, when computers across the globe and sensitive
areas were turned into Amazon alexis. That occurred five years
before the Amazon Alexa premiered. So so whoever is doing
(46:22):
this was way ahead of the game, way way ahead
of the game, and they.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
Figured out you think maybe some of the technology that
goes into like these lists, these Alexas and these personal
assistants may have had its origin and military technology.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
I didn't say that. I don't think like a bugging
device was the reason companies wanted you to have a
bugging device in your home. I don't think military applications
of bugging devices had anything to do with voluntary bugging devices.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
Just so we're on the same page, I mean, it
is just an extension of like stuff like Facebook, where
we just you know, no one even needs to surveil
us anymore because it is dumping all our information out
into the interwebs, right, So why would it not be
a logical next step that we would just actively and
voluntarily install bugging devices in our own homes, you know,
using our ingenious powers of free will, right right.
Speaker 1 (47:18):
And the spookiest thing of it all is, you know,
to the point we just made, we don't know whatever's
happening now, technologically speaking, in terms of surveillance, we might
not know about it for another ten five ten years.
And ghost Neet, as far as we know, has been
(47:39):
responsible for a minimum of one two hundred and ninety
five computer system attacks on embassies for ministries, government offices
pretty much every exile center for the Dalai Lama in London, India,
and New York City. It's only one of multiple similar
operations running out of China. There are tons, and they
(48:00):
all have really cool names.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
Just on the side take away from today's episode Ghost
Neet just kind of spooky.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
Unlike other nations which tend to practice overt attacks, you know,
crippling power grids, China's programs seem much more focused on
just collecting sensitive information so that other parts of the
military can act on that. That's so far at least,
and odd mixed signals are coming. In twenty fifteen, then
(48:29):
President Obama with President Xi Jinping, who will be president
of China for a long long time now, to address
a range of issues. And they talked about economic espionage.
And when they talked about that, they said they reached
an agreement. They said neither government, the PRC, nor the
US will conduct or support cyber enabled theft of business
(48:51):
secrets that would provide competitive advantage to their commercial sectors. Importantly, disturbingly,
they did not agree to restrict government espionage because most
countries are cool with that, or most countries won't come
out against it. Because they all do it exactly.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
You can't be against something that you that everybody knows
you're doing.
Speaker 1 (49:13):
Sure, you can against all kinds of stuff. And that's
the thing, of course I would I would propose to
you all and everyone listening, that all countries also support
theft of business secrets.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
Yeah, I think so. It's just you can't. You're not
going to put the rubber stamp of your country on it.
You can. You've got a million different ways to obfuscate
who's actually doing that.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
That's true. And I don't know this is more of
a socio philosophical perspective here. But the reason I think
all countries will also support or attempt to commit industrial
LESBIONA is because I think it's increasingly misleading and a
(50:04):
myth to pretend that business and government are separate. In
many cases, it just doesn't make sense. I mean, look
at Russian oligarchs for the most part, and the function
of Russian governance. Look at the largest companies in the
largest countries, and many times there's just so much bleedover
(50:26):
from who controls what that While it's comforting to say
that businesses and governments may be separate, while it's technically
supposed to be the case in practice, it really isn't.
Speaker 2 (50:40):
Yeah. I mean you can donate as unlimited funds to
a campaign, when you can get government contracts for just
a number of military applications and other applications, when there's
a revolving door between business and government, I totally feel you.
Speaker 1 (50:57):
And I'm saying it's I think you. I'm not even
I'm not even specifically talking about the US so talking
about well, I know global phenomenon, And.
Speaker 2 (51:06):
I guess what I'm just saying is when you can
use the United States as an example like the one
for in a lot of ways, is the leader or
at least the main bully when we're doing it, then
it seems like you probably do it, or it's happening
everywhere else.
Speaker 1 (51:23):
And then the question is what to do next? Do
you want to fight against it? Do you want to
do you want to fight against it? Do you want
to join the empire right? Or do we just think
about changing your password? Run in a couple of virus checks.
You'll probably be able to catch anything from two thousand
(51:44):
and nine. You know, even even something like Norton Anti
virus can find that. But what about the twenty eighteen stuff.
Speaker 2 (51:54):
You just gotta kind of hope, cover up your cover
up your cameras. Yeah, as much as you can take
out the mics, because there's really no way to stop
that mic from getting turned on.
Speaker 1 (52:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (52:07):
In case, yeah, you just have a white noise generator.
It's like shitting on your monitor where the mic is.
Speaker 1 (52:15):
Well, we want to we want to hear what you think, folks. No,
obviously we are not ourselves professional black nor white hat hackers,
but we want to know if you believe there's propaganda
involved here? Is the government of China really sponsoring these things?
Are they just patriotic hackers? Is the West making it
(52:35):
look worse than it is to justify future military action?
Speaker 2 (52:39):
What kind of programs is the West doing right now
to places like China? Do you have any info on that?
Tell us and not? You can tell us anonymously, Yeah
you can, you can.
Speaker 1 (52:52):
You cannot tell us anonymously Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. Yeah,
we'd love to. We'd love to hear from you. You can
find us on Here's where it gets crazy, But you
can contact us anonymously, at least anonymously to us are
our long serving the hapless intern at the NSA we'll
probably know everything about you.
Speaker 2 (53:12):
Shout out to you, Matt. Hopefully you've made it that far,
and that's the end of this classic episode. If you
have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can
get into contact with us in a number of different ways.
One of the best is to give us a call.
Our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. If you
don't want to do that, you can send us a
(53:33):
good old fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (53:34):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (53:38):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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