The flood of lobbying dollars spent by tech companies has increased with market concentration, according to a new study that cites similar patterns in the pharmaceutical and oil industries. Bloomberg: The report suggests that entrenched firms face less competition and don’t have to invest as much in innovation, giving them more resources to spend influencing the democratic process. Reed Showalter, an attorney with the anti-monopolist group American Economic Liberties Project who wrote the study, said policy makers and antitrust enforcers should look beyond the impact that mergers have on consumers and consider how market concentration affects the democratic process. “We need to more closely scrutinize various elements of competition policy that have allowed industries to become more concentrated over the last 30 to 40 years,” Showalter said in a phone interview Tuesday. “Allowing unchecked concentration is the cause for a lot of the democratic harms that we’re also seeing people complain about as big money enters politics. There’s no coincidence there.”

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Source: Slashdot – Tech’s Lobbying Push Follows Market Consolidation, Study Shows

The state security ministry is recruiting from a vast pool of private-sector hackers who often have their own agendas and sometimes use their access for commercial cybercrime, experts say. From a report: China’s buzzy high-tech companies don’t usually recruit Cambodian speakers, so the job ads for three well-paid positions with those language skills stood out. The ad, seeking writers of research reports, was placed by an internet security start-up in China’s tropical island-province of Hainan. That start-up was more than it seemed, according to American law enforcement. Hainan Xiandun Technology was part of a web of front companies controlled by China’s secretive state security ministry, according to a federal indictment from May. They hacked computers from the United States to Cambodia to Saudi Arabia, seeking sensitive government data as well as less-obvious spy stuff, like details of a New Jersey company’s fire-suppression system, according to prosecutors. The accusations appear to reflect an increasingly aggressive campaign by Chinese government hackers and a pronounced shift in their tactics: China’s premier spy agency is increasingly reaching beyond its own ranks to recruit from a vast pool of private-sector talent.

This new group of hackers has made China’s state cyberspying machine stronger, more sophisticated and — for its growing array of government and private-sector targets — more dangerously unpredictable. Sponsored but not necessarily micromanaged by Beijing, this new breed of hacker attacks government targets and private companies alike, mixing traditional espionage with outright fraud and other crimes for profit. China’s new approach borrows from the tactics of Russia and Iran, which have tormented public and commercial targets for years. Chinese hackers with links to state security demanded ransom in return for not releasing a company’s computer source code, according to an indictment released by the U.S. Department of Justice last year. Another group of hackers in southwest China mixed cyber raids on Hong Kong democracy activists with fraud on gaming websites, another indictment asserted. One member of the group boasted about having official protection, provided that they avoid targets in China.

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Source: Slashdot – Spies for Hire: China’s New Breed of Hackers Blends Espionage and Entrepreneurship