Behind The Mic With Joe Mathieu: Cracking Down On Chinese Cyber Crime

BOSTON (CBS) - It's been one of the worst kept secrets in business and politics.

China steals from us.

It pirates everything from high level corporate secrets to Hollywood movies and we've been talking about it for years.

Our reluctance to do anything about it was even part of the storyline on the Netflix show "House of Cards."

So a move to crackdown by the Justice Department is surprising to many critics of our China policy because they never thought it would happen.

But the White House says it's getting tough - indicting five members of the Chinese military for hacking into computers and stealing trade secrets from a number of American companies like U.S. Steel and Westinghouse.

The suspects reportedly used handles like "Ugly Gorilla" and "Kandy Goo" and prosecutors also took the rare step of releasing photos of them. One was even in uniform.

But it's highly unlikely anything will ever happen to them.

Attorney General Eric Holder says he hopes Beijing will "respect our criminal justice system," but China does not have an extradition treaty with the U.S. and few can imagine a world in which they turn members of their military over to us.

In fact, the official response from China was to call us liars and hypocrites. They accuse us of doing even more spying than them, pointing to Edward Snowden's leaked NSA documents.

Which probably means "Ugly Gorilla" and his buddies will continue their efforts to undermine corporate America for the foreseeable future.

Follow Joe on Twitter @joemathieuwbz

MORE LOCAL NEWS FROM CBS BOSTON