There are a lot of columnists who get out and opine.
Bloggers are not reporters.
Never mention a web site is coming until it's already there.
The United States lost a bit of the moral high ground when it comes to warning the world of the danger of cyberattacks.
The government does not deny it routinely spies to advance American economic advantage, which is part of its broad definition of how it protects American national security.
In the Chinese view, the United States has designed its own system of rules about what constitutes 'legal' spying and what is illegal.
Once cyber crosses into the realm of the physical, then it's a physical attack, but it starts with cyber. And the idea of a cyber attack being able to take control of machines - that becomes a scary process.
Cyberattacks have long been hard to stop because determining where they come from takes time - and sometimes the mystery is never solved.
We have spent so much time worrying about a 'cyber Pearl Harbor,'' the attack that takes out the power grid, that we have focused far too little on the subtle manipulation of data that can mean that no election, medical record, or self-driving car can be truly trusted.
Until Japan's economy drove off a cliff, there was a running argument in Asia about whether it would be wiser to follow the 'Japan model' - with its megacorporations, jobs for life, state control of strategic industries - or the 'American model' of largely unfettered markets.
There is no single 'China model' to running a mega-economy. Instead, it is a blend. From the Europeans and the Japanese, the Chinese have borrowed the concept of protecting essential industries.
I did think that it'd be truly cool to be a foreign correspondent, and it was. There is a degree of freedom - and the right to roam the earth on somebody else's nickel.
The United States Cyber Command was created partly in response to a Russian hacking attack that long predated the 2016 election.
The remarkable thing about the Chinese is that they've operated differently than the Russians, the Iranians, and the North Koreans. By and large, they have not done destructive hacks.
I've been covering North Korea nuclear issues since I was a young reporter in the Tokyo bureau of 'The Times' and wrote some of the first pieces about the existence of the program at Yongbyon.
What the Russians did in the election in 2016 was clearly short of war, yet it was a pretty aggressive act to go into another country's voting system.
There are certainly some secrets the government needs to protect, but many of the most important clues about revolutions, nuclear transfers, and new military sites can be found online, in open chat rooms and commercial satellite photos.
Back channels themselves are as old as American diplomacy. Thomas Jefferson was an early enthusiast - he often routed around his secretary of state, once sending a secret letter to the American envoy in France, Robert Livingston, that contained a coded message.
After more than two decades of traveling with American presidents and chief diplomats - on visits to places that have included some of the world's most repressive nations - I am used to watching leaders disappear behind closed doors.
Even China's leaders routinely let the news media pool in, though they do their best to ignore them.
