U.S. hacking makes it hard to stop others

Created in 1952 to intercept radio and other electronic transmissions - known as signals intelligence - the NSA now focuses much of its espionage resources on stealing what spies euphemistically call "electronic data at rest." The key role NSA hackers play in intelligence gathering makes it difficult for Washington to pressure other nations - China in particular - to stop hacking U.S. companies to mine their databanks for product details and trade secrets. In recent months, the Obama administration has tried to shame China by publicly calling attention to its cyberespionage program, which has targeted numerous companies, including Google, Yahoo and Intel, to steal source code and other secrets. The tension between the two nations escalated this month when a Pentagon report to Congress for the first time officially linked China's government directly to the hacking of U.S. defense contractors. A Pentagon official who also asked not to be named confirmed that TAO conducts cyberespionage, or what the Department of Defense calls "computer network exploitation," but emphasized that it doesn't target technology, trade or financial secrets. According to the former officials, U.S. cyberspies, most from military units who've received specialized training, sit at consoles running sophisticated hacking software, which funnels information stolen from computers around the world into a "fusion center," where intelligence analysts try to make sense of it all. According to one of the former officials, the amount of data the unit harvests from overseas computer networks, or as it travels across the Internet, has grown to an astonishing 2 petabytes an hour - that's nearly 2.1 million gigabytes, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of pages of text. Specialized units of big defense contractors, and boutique firms that create hacking tools, look for security flaws in popular software programs that allow government hackers to take over computers. Intelligence officials say one way to exert pressure on China is to change the subject from spying to trade - threatening restrictions on imports of goods made using stolen technology, or withholding visas for employees of companies that make such products.