Rep. Mike Rogers called China's aggression on line "intolerable"
A computer forensic examiner looks for evidence on hard drives at the U.S. Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center / AP
The United States and its allies in Europe and Asia need to band together and confront China's campaign of cyber espionage, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said on Tuesday.
Although governments have long spied on each other, China has gone beyond that by engaging in "brazen and wide-scale theft" of intellectual property from commercial competitors around the world, Rogers said.
"I don't believe that there is precedent in history for such a massive and sustained intelligence effort by a government to blatantly steal commercial data and intellectual property," Rogers said at a House Intelligence Committee hearing on cybersecurity.
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This economic espionage, which is disputed by China, has reached an "intolerable" level, Rogers said. "Beijing is waging a massive trade war on us all, and we should band together to pressure them to stop," he said.
In August, the Web security firm McAfee reported that it had traced cyber intrusions of more than 70 companies and government organizations to a single nation state, which many analysts concluded was likely China.