Master of all It Surveys

"Here's the basic problem.  Whenever anyone says that they know who did an attack, it's all circumstantial.  The very design of the Internet makes it hard to attribute because it makes it easy to forge things.  Western governments are doing this as well.  In this world, it's not clear who is doing what.
"It is an issue.  It's real.  I think it's entirely rational to be aware of cyber-security risks and the means of dealing with those risks.  Given ... the across-the-board mandate of Chinese companies, it does raise the concerns up a notch."
Joseph Caron, former Canadian ambassador to China

As experts on the Internet and the technologies that support the system point out, there is so much interconnection now with the various manufacturers of equipment like switches and routers all vying with one another for markets, there really is no way of knowing where compromised equipment could show up.  It could be anywhere and everywhere, the country of origin selecting the time when it orders up sabotage or espionage activities to commence.

China is generally regarded as the source of much of the spying - industrial, military, technical, scientific, political - that occurs throughout the Internet.  There are certain indicators that seem, most often, to finger that country.  China is known for many things, including improvising upon others' technical blueprints rather than creating their own; innovation, and tampering is their forte, not the authenticity of invention genius.

"You have to count on some part of your infrastructure being compromised", cautioned Anil Somayaji, associate director of the Carleton University Computer Security Laboratory in Ottawa.  "You're in very shaky territory if you buy a switch from any company.  The vulnerability potential is huge.  You don't have to have a tremendously high probability of it before you get worried", said David Skillicorn, a cyber-security expert from Queen's University.

And there is the little matter of customarily staffing state-backed industries in China with senior party members, answerable to the state.  And that each such company must have a communist party secretary.  Traditionally, Chinese companies release little information, preferring to act in an opaque capacity.

Huawei has installed itself quite well within Canada, doing business with he country's largest telecommunications companies. The industry itself is aware that Huawei had a long history of hacking Nortel's systems, and of purloining corporate secrets from Cisco Systems. 

The company, along with another large Chinese producer of telecommunications technology was expressly cited by a U.S. congressional intelligence committee as comprising a security risk to the United States.  A charge that the companies and China refute with outrage, calling it a trade issue sneaking in the back door, posing as an espionage issue.

Last year foreign hackers targeted Treasury Board and the Department of Finance systems from computers based in China.  That China represents a cyber-security threat is well enough acknowledged by academics, industry and government.  "We have to find ways of building trust ... so that there can be conversation about espionage and cyber threats, that, by the way, would affect China as much as western countries.

"We have to be careful not to be caught in either a political or strategic competition between the United States and China", said Yuen Pau Woo, CEO of the Asia Pacific Foundation.  "There's a strategic mistrust for China that comes from an economic and political system that is unfamiliar to Canadians and is, in some sense, undesirable.  We don't understand the opacity and we resist the opacity of the Chinese System."

All of which could be solved by reasonable means.  If it were not the fact that China seeks to dominate any market it becomes part of.  And China has fingers in all the markets of importance in today's world.  Its appetite is unwholesomely rapacious.  It causes disruption and wrecks the industrial advantages of any countries that attempt to retain their own industries and find themselves unable to compete with China.

And China will use any means at its disposal to succeed in whatever goals it sets for itself.  Those goals may be territorial, marketing, political, social engineering, manufacturing, medical care; whatever.  But whatever it zeroes in on it means to own, to brook no interference or competition from any source.  China's ruthless ambition is aided by the world dazzled by the marketing potential in its huge population and infrastructure.

China is preparing to swallow the world whole; natural resources, combing the bottom of the oceans, technological advances, agriculture, venturing into space, all of it.