Page 31 - CDM-Cyber-Warnings-January-2014

does point out that foreign surveillance is not used for IP to give U.S. companies a competitive advantage. Rather, we are just trying to keep our nation safe from terrorist activity. But when did it start and who snooped who first, and how much are we spending each year on foreign government surveillance? At this writing, the 2015 defense budget had yet to be published, so I went to several government websites to review the 2013-14 budget. My first stop was obviously Google and I was directed to the DoD website. There I submitted the search term “budget” and found the “Fiscal Year 2014 Budget Request” which had a number of documents affixed to it, several of them spreadsheets. I’m no military budget expert, but I can work my way around a spreadsheet and as best I can tell – at least from these five spreadsheets – the U.S. DoD allocated just under $450 million in budget to cyber defense. Now, I’m quite sure my InfoSec colleague is correct when he says the U.S. Government is spending out the wazoo for foreign cyber-crime intel and that amount is more than what China spends, but I can’t find this in the 2013-14 DoD budget numbers. From that proposed budget of $500+ billion, the U.S. is allocating less than 9 percent ($450 million) to cyber defense? Surely the Chinese are throwing more greenbacks at the initiative than this??? Or are they? As Mr. Obama pointed out in his January 17 speech, China and Russia aren’t opening the kimono anytime soon on their surveillance budgets so, the answer is not coming from them. I’m sure it takes greenbacks to recruit cyber-terrorists, even if they are just college students. From research I conducted a few months ago for a white paper, I know that China’s cyber-army has recently passed the 2,000 number mark. I have no idea how much it costs to train a cyber- terrorist but I suspect it can’t be less expensive than the liberal arts college my daughter attends in which a four-year degree will cost about $150,000. It has to cost more by the mere technical learning required! So, just for this exercise let’s say that China’s cyber “education” will run about $75,000 for each of this year’s class of 1,000 recruits; China’s budget is at least $75 million on this lone initiative. It should be noted that Taiwan claims the Chinese cyber-terrorist army is 100,000 in number but this is likely a number borne of propaganda. I don’t believe cyber-terrorism can be quantified like ground troops. By this I mean that cyber-terrorism is fairly specialized; you can’t just get any student to build you a cyber “bomb.” And when you consider that in 2012, U.S. institutions gave out only 146,000 computer science/engineering degrees, it’s hard to imagine China has an army of 100,000 cyber-terrorists, though it is not entirely impossible. So what is the budget number for China for cyber-terrorism? What is the number for the U.S.? Is China’s expense higher than the U.S.’s? Fact is, we will never know, for why would these superpowers reveal that information for the black eye it would cause? One thing is for certain, the numbers are big. The cyber-problem is real and a lot of time, money and human capital are invested by superpowers across the globe to one-up the other in the cyber-arms race. + % %! ! & , ! . !( %+ ' "! "#+% ' - + % !& , ! % '& % & %) *"% *