China behind online attacks on US. F-secure has smoking gun

[Patroklos]

It's not as if the debt is an IOU written to China. It's treasuries. If war broke out, China would liquidate their US treasuries and all the sudden America would be unable to do any borrowing whatsoever.

They are IOUs, and a country with legitimate gripe that leads to war would never be expected to honor those IOUs. Other creditors know that, they are unaffected unless they are planning a war in the near future.

In a war scenario the treasuries issue helps us. It has to be a seriously legitimate case of guilt on China's part though, this is nit enough.

 

[El_Machinae]

It would hurt the US worse than China.

When I was in gradeschool, and taught to fight back against the bullies, it always ended up hurting me more than them. But that was known, understood, and an accepted consequence. It was part of a larger scheme! (which was to redirect the bully onto someone even weaker)

 

[GinandTonic]

Everyone's attacking everyone online; the British MoD did an interview for the BBC a few weeks ago which quite casually said that they're literally under constant cyber-attack all day, every day. It's something of a gentleman's playground for now, since nothing serious has ever happened from it and nobody gets hurt, so let's not rush to talk of real war just yet.

Basically.

Didnt the NSA get caught out running industrial espionage against the French a couple of years ago. IIRC the fuss was that UK assets were being used and UK firms were partners of the French firms. Hacking even your allies is par for the course, but the misuse of assets was against the gentlemen's playground.