Breaking news | In the fall of 2020, the National Security Agency made an alarming discovery: Chinese military hackers had compromised classified defense networks of the United States’ most important strategic ally in East Asia.
, the U.S. ambassador to China and other senior diplomats — even amid an effort by the Biden administration to thaw frosty relations with Beijing.
“We see tremendous investment and effort from the Japanese in this area,” said a senior U.S. defense official. But work remains to be done. “The department feels strongly about the importance of cybersecurity to our ability to conduct combined military operations, which are at the core of the U.S.-Japan alliance.”As the Biden administration took office, it faced a maelstrom of cybersecurity crises.
The two sides came up with a compromise approach: The Japanese would use domestic commercial firms to assess vulnerabilities, and a joint NSA/Cyber Command team would review the results and provide guidance on how to seal gaps.Meanwhile, White House national security staff and Tokyo’s National Security Council set up regular technical exchanges and video conference calls to keep on top of the issue. Defense officials in both capitals did the same.
In 2015, the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks revealed that the NSA had spied on 35 targets in Japan, including cabinet members and the corporation Mitsubishi. Biden, then vice president, called then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to apologize for the trouble caused. Neuberger found a partner in Japan’s newly appointed national security adviser, Takeo Akiba, who zeroed in on an entrenched bureaucracy. They were helped by the fact that Kishida was keen on advancing a campaign launched by Abe to bolster Japan’s defense capabilities. Tokyo set to work on a new cyber strategy, which sought to beef up spending and personnel and align cybersecurity standards with U.S. and international benchmarks.
“They bragged to themselves that Japan was ‘spy heaven,’” said Richard Samuels, a political scientist at MIT, whose history of Japan’s intelligence community was published last year. “The Americans weren’t happy with how porous the Japanese intelligence community was,” said Samuels. “They did what you would expect, which was to share less. At a time when Japan needed more and better intelligence from its powerful ally, it wasn’t getting everything it needed, and it was told it’s because your intelligence community leaks. If you tighten it up, we can have a fuller and more robust exchange.
But by 2013, when the law was passed, the geopolitical landscape had shifted. The public had come to see that decades of a nominal commitment to self-defense had only emboldened a rising Beijing.
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