Yorick Wilks

From Slashdot today:

+——————————————————————–+
| Hundreds of Thousands of Chinese Black-Hats                        |
|   from the defending-against-gnats dept.                           |
|   posted by kdawson on Friday April 24, @09:33 (Security)          |
|   http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/24/1311216           |
+——————————————————————–+

An anonymous reader sends us to Popular Science for a long article on the
[0]loose, uncoordinated bands of patriotic Chinese hackers that seem to
be responsible for much of the cyber-trouble emerging from that nation.
QUoting: “For years, the U.S. intelligence community worried that China’s
government was attacking our cyber-infrastructure. Now one man has
discovered it’s more than that: it’s hundreds of thousands of everyday
Chinese civilians. … Jack Linchuan Qiu, a communications professor at
the Chinese University of Hong Kong [says:] ‘Chinese hackerism is not the
American “hacktivism” that wants social change. It’s actually very close
to the state. The Chinese distinction between the private and public
domains is very small.’ … According to [James Andrew Lewis, a senior
fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies], ‘The
government at a minimum tolerates them. Sometimes it encourages them. And
sometimes it tasks them and controls them.’ In the end, he says, ‘it’s
easy for the government to turn on and hard to turn off.’”

Discuss this story at:
   http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/04/24/1311216

Links:
   0. http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-04/hackers-china-syndrome

Assuming this story is true, does it make this “patriotic activity” harder to condemn since it is not government originated? Given, too, that (a) the US invented hackers, (b) is a wildly patriotic country with many perceived enemies and (c) admires private enterprise, is it not odd that we have not seen, or had reported, much private international hackerdom from the US so far—Harrison Fords at the keyboard?