The United States is doing so poorly on cybersecurity that it should just subcontract it to China, a tech expert wrote on Wednesday.
“China has already stolen top secret information of everyone who worked for the U.S. Government for the past 50 years,” John McAfee wrote for Business Insider. McAfee founded the first commercial cybersecurity company, which bore his name for years and was later sold to Intel.
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He added that China also “accessed critical information from the Pentagon, Homeland Security and the [Federal Bureau of Investigation], has everyone’s phone number, address and habits.”
Though the country denies responsibility, American officials last year blamed China for the largest cybersecurity breach in history after files on more than 22 million individuals were stolen in a hack of the Office of Personnel Management. Experts have said the country is likely using that and other stolen files to build a database on tens of millions of Americans.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as we know. China has done the same thing to nearly every nation on earth,” McAfee wrote. “China by any cybersecurity measures is 20 years ahead of the U.S. So advanced that the White House voiced open frustration at our inability to stop or even slow down China’s increasing invasion of our cyberspace.”
McAfee attributes Chinese superiority to a couple of factors. One, he says, is the country’s ability to surveil its citizens before they have the opportunity to input information into an encrypted medium, an ability that he believes the U.S. has simply failed to adopt.
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The second factor is China’s greater reliance on underused fields of mathematics, namely “point-set topology” and Boolean Algebra. The topics are “so simple that you could get [a] PhD in the field by sleeping through every class and shooting up heroin every night,” McAfee laments.
“If a terrorist leader makes a decision or gives an order, only a few people will be called — those closest to him. Within a matter of minutes those that he called will call a subset of others and likewise on down the chain of command,” McAfee explains. “Boolean analysis would identify this as anomaly and report it.
“If this were to happen, the Chinese would immediately download more sophisticated software onto only those phones in the chain of command that would collect keystrokes and screenshots and send them home to China,” he adds. “What is fascinating about this technique is that if any one person, or more, throws away their phone and gets a new one, the new phone will be identified with minutes of the first few calls sent or received.”
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The U.S., on the other hand, “is trying to find out what is happening after the impetus for what is happening has been activated,” McAfee said. “It would be better to subcontract our security to the Chinese, eat crow and swallow our pride, until we can stand on our own as a nation in this sea of cybersecurity chaos which we are clearly incapable of navigating.”
