14 DAY TRIAL // The US and the NSA sure do love getting their hands on as much data as possible, about everything and everyone. How they get it and whether it's legal or not, are secondary questions. But the same country has been very critical of others doing basically the same, granted, via alternative methods.
The US has long had a problem with China allegedly hacking into American companies, organizations and government agencies. In fact, just before the NSA leaks exploded, Barack Obama was headed to China to discuss the very topic.
Still, you'd imagine that a country as powerful as the US which owns the biggest spy apparatus in the world would be able to protect itself from these kinds of attacks and that its methods would be quite advanced.
But if the NSA leaks showed anything is that the US doesn't want or is able to create high tech spying methods preferring to rely instead on brute force and scale. Why develop ways to target actual terrorists and only the terrorists when you can spy on everyone instead, seems to be the guideline at the NSA.
So it shouldn't surprise anyone that, when it found out where many of a the attacks on the country came from, from a private security company mind you, not the NSA or any other official spy agency, it simply ordered ISPs to block those IPs.
Back in February, a report showed that many of the attacks on US infrastructure and companies originated from a building in China and a few IPs.
So US officials "asked" ISPs to block those IPs to counter the problem. It even worked, shortly after the request, the amount of attacks dropped. But the volume soon came back to normal. If there's something the blocks on The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent sites proved it's that IP blocks can't even stop regular people from pirating the movies they like, let alone stop China's expert hackers.