World: Budget bill surprise: The U.S., China can’t collaborate on science
- We don’t want to give them the opportunity to take advantage of our technology, and we have nothing to gain from dealing with them. China is spying against us, and every U.S. government agency has been hit by cyber-attacks. They are stealing technology from every major U.S. company. They have taken technology from NASA, and they have hit the NSF computers … You name the company, and the Chinese are trying to get its secrets.
- Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) • Describing the reasoning behind his addition to the recent spending bill that blocks two key U.S. government scientific groups — NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology — from collaborating jointly with China on any scientific projects. (Wolf has his reasons — his office was attacked in 2006 by Chinese hackers, so he’s been there.) While the White House is pulling the “foreign policy is OK!” card to work around this, it still sets a strange precedent that rolls back decades of collaboration. Now that Osama bin Laden is gone, is China the new boogeyman? Or do we need to keep our neighbor to the East out of the cookie jar? source