Not long ago, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army routinely waged war by stealing the emails of lawyers engaged in trade litigation between the U.S. and Chinese solar and steel industries. When
the U.S. Department of Justice indicted five Chinese army hackers for such conduct in May 2014—and slapped their faces on a “Wanted” poster—most commentators, including me, dismissed their indictment as symbolic. A year later, The New York Times magnanimously called it “largely symbolic” in a story titled “New U.S. Strategies Fail to Thwart Hackers.”
