The article, Report Sounds Alarm On China’s Rerouting Of U.S. Internet Traffic, discusses  a report submitted to Congress on Wednesday by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

The report points to two specific incidents earlier this year where actions taken inside China had a direct impact on Internet traffic in the U.S. and other regions of the world.

In one of the incidents, traffic to and from about 15% of all Internet destinations was routed through servers belonging to China Telecom, a state-owned telecommunications company.

In an e-mailed statement Wednesday, China Telecom rejected the claims, but offered no further comment.

The rerouting happened on April 8 and lasted for about 18 minutes. The traffic hijacking affected U.S. government and military networks, including those belonging to the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Department of Commerce, NASA and the U.S. Senate.

Commercial sites including those belonging to Microsoft, Dell and Yahoo were also affected.
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“The takeaway here is that the foundation on which the Internet is built is insecure,” Alperovitch said. “It is based on trust. We trust ISPs to tell us which networks they own. There is no validation [of the information.]”

“Not only can this problem happen again, but it probably will,” he said.

Maybe there are just not enough crooked engineers in the profession so that, when these things are designed, the possibility of dishonesty is taken into account.  If this post weren’t inherently political enough, I’ll connect it to the Friedmanian/Feldsteinian radical free-market economists who don’t factor  dishonesty into their idealistic description about how world economies ought to work.  With the way they fudge the data to prove their points, they should have been aware of the possibility of dishonesty.