Russian hacking is “admired” and masculinized in relation to Chinese hacking which justifies privileging whiteness while demonizing the oriental other

THE MASCULINE WHITENESS OF RUSSIAN HACKING In 2020, CNN published an article with the headline “37 Times Trump Was Soft on Russia.”68 According to the article, Trump not only urged Russia to hack more, stating: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he also proposed cybercrime cooperation with Putin.69 The NCSC, in contrast to its assessments of China’s economic espionage, describes Russia as a “sophisticated adversary,” focused on military and economic domination.70 While the Chinese threat originates in “persistence,” a trope of mechanistic overrun, the Russian threat originates in “[sophistication],” a trope of elegant wrongdoing. If US policy toward China with respect to intellectual property and economic espionage can be characterized as condescending managerialism, its Russia policy can be described as begrudging acceptance. This hands-off approach has persisted for many years in the face of egregious violations of geopolitical norms, such as invasions of sovereign nations and interference in national elections, as well as a litany of intellectual property and economic espionage transgressions. This is curious given that cybersecurity experts consistently rank Russia in the top cybercrime threats to the US, alongside China. Russian hackers are described as “sowing chaos.”71 China’s mechanistic precision is contrasted with Russia’s thuggish coldbloodedness.72 Yet the consequences for the two nations are very different. Barron’s reports that there are two primary reasons for US nonintervention in the latter issues: that Russia is careful to stay within applicable legal boundaries, here of infringement and cybercrime, and that the United States lacks the political will to enforce its policies. Vladimir Putin himself is aware that “there is little Western countries have been willing to do to stop them . . . If there was little incentive in Russia to stop cybercrime before Ukraine, there is no incentive now.73 Indeed, even when Putin declared, in March 2022, that Russian nationals would no longer be required to pay patent owners in “unfriendly countries,” the US barely responded.74 One of the few comparative studies of US treatment of Chinese and Russian infringement, a decades old essay, states what is now obvious: “In general, the United States has appeared to pursue different political, economic, and military goals in its relationships with Russia and China.”75 In practice, this means that the US has punished China for even those infractions that may fall under the gray areas of international law while permitting Russia to engage in similar acts with little more than a slap on the wrist.76 The carte blanche that the United States has offered to Russia is entangled with white supremacy. While the end of the Cold War produced détente with the US in the 1990s and 2000s, Putin’s rise to power shifted the dynamic of the bilateral relationship.77 The latter has been described as a “strongman,” a term “historically deployed to describe autocrats who rule by violence and see themselves, or want to be seen, as worthy of fear.”78 Over the past twenty years, Putin has led an increasingly aggressive Russia, invested in transnational white supremacy. Indeed, multiple white nationalist leaders, including David Duke and Richard Spencer, have identified Putin’s Russia as central to maintaining the global authority of whiteness.79 Yet despite warnings about the destabilizing effects of Russia’s white nationalism, the United States has declined to consistently condemn it.80 I posit that this is largely because Russia, a “contingently white” country, has strategically exploited its whiteness in its geopolitical dealings.81 The concept of contingent whiteness presupposes that race is produced through racialization, a process of constant change that explains “why certain groups become accepted as ‘white,’ how and why they adopt white identity claims, and what consequences those identity claims have for social relations.”82 Russia has endeavored to become whiter over time and Euroamerican nations have largely accepted this. Ian Law writes that “there have been striking changes in racial ideas, practices, exclusions and violence in Russia since the 1990s . . . the notion of a ‘civilised country’ has become a synonym for racial whiteness and Russianness a form of privileged whiteness.”83 Marina Levina observes that Russian investments in whiteness are used to reinforce what Jasbir Puar calls a “politics of debilitation”84 on racially othered peoples such as Syrians and Ukrainians.85 Russians choose whiteness because they benefit from its privileges, including relative impunity. The United States allows this because it benefits from Russia’s whiteness, including regional counterbalancing. Despite its chosen and bestowed whiteness, Russia has retained its long-standing identity as a political foil and imperial actor that requires containment. This is evident in multiple areas of friction with the United States, including discussions over NATO expansion. Conflict over intellectual property and economic espionage extends at least as far back to the Soviet Era when, as Debora Halbert observes, national intellectual, political, and economic investments functioned as tools for proving cultural and artistic superiority.86 Yet the contemporary American refusal to hold Russia accountable for its misdeeds suggests that the ideological dispute is embedded within a larger context. I propose that, while Russians continue to operate as “bad whites”87 against whom Americans can demonstrate their global moral authority via soft power, it is also beneficial for the United States to engage in performative admonishments instead of meaningful consequences. Three racial outcomes flow from the toothless US response to Russia: (1) it normalizes the US position as the heroic “good white”88 who appears to seek justice in the global arena; (2) it allows the United States to chastise Russia while also simultaneously colluding with Putin; and (3) it positions China below Russia in a divide-and-conquer style intellectual property and economic espionage racial order. US intellectual property rights talk with Russia thus supports larger architectures of white supremacy by letting the former off the hook while simultaneously deriding China for its illegal and illicit acts. It also exemplifies how realpolitik itself is constituted relationally, through categories of race and gender. Returning to EEA data with this context around Russia illustrates how the United States uses intellectual property rights talk to reinforce Sinophobic racial hierarchies through relational racialization. The Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions notes that “Chinese-named defendants were 13.2% more likely to have their [EEA] cases dismissed or acquitted compared to other defendants, and 13.5% less likely to be found guilty of EEA-related charges than defendants with nonChinese names.”89 In terms of sentencing, “Chinese-named defendants on average received 12.5 months longer jail terms compared to all other defendants and 12.4 months longer jail terms compared to defendants with Western names.90 The targeting of Chinese defendants relative to other defendants is even more stark when considered over time. The number of Western defendants has declined from 59 percent of the total of all defendants in 1996–2008 to 28 percent of the total defendants in 2016–2020.91 In comparison, approximately 50 percent of the total defendants prosecuted since 2009 have been Chinese.92 These numbers are particularly notable given that Russian actors are growing increasingly bold. “US intelligence officials do not . . . rate China as the biggest threat to the US in cyberspace. The Russians are definitely better, almost as good as we are,’ said one,” Richard Clarke and Robert Knake reported in 2010.93 The Obama Administration and Biden Administration both imposed sanctions against Russia for engaging in economic espionage via cybercrime.94 However, those sanctions were narrow and limited, especially compared to those imposed upon China.95 The racialized rhetorics that American policymakers use to talk about Russia provide some insight about why the US shows this geopolitical rival such deference. A 2009 report released by the Rand Corporation describes Russia as a literal host and harbor for cybercrime, emphasizing that infringers use Russian websites to sell pirated and counterfeited goods because they operate as “protected spaces for crime to arise.”96 Instead of being intertwined with narratives of threatening criminality like Black mafia rhetorics,97 or narratives of devious yellow perils like Asian mafia rhetorics,98 Russian mafia rhetorics suggest a worthy, masculine, strongman foe. Russian hackers are managers of the infringement world, whose ingenuity and infrastructure helps exceptional fakes to circulate. In 2008, Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey declared: “A Russian mobster selling fake handbags through a middleman in New York may also be selling pirated DVDs in London, counterfeit AIDS medication in Africa, and child pornography over the internet.”99 The “Russian mobster” is the protagonist of the story, here because he manages the sale of multiple goods. In 2006, the Los Angeles Times proclaimed, in an article entitled “Russians Able to Fake It Like No One Else,” that “if there is a world capital of audacious fabrication, it must be Moscow, where fake is never a four-letter word.”100 It went on to describe Russian copies through “the French notion of faire montrer [sic],” noting “it’s better to look like something than to be something. It’s a very Eastern way of thinking.”101 Fakes may be Eastern, but Russian fakes are exceptional, certainly better than those Made in China. This racialized rhetoric of expertise positions Russia as strong and China as weak. Invoking France moves Russia closer to Europe—and whiteness.102