You realize that there is effectively no difference between a government-denied chinese hacker and a "non official cover" spy right?
And if they aren't government-employed then this is the completely appropriate action.
In either case, I 'd say its better to get this out in the open where the justice system can work it through rather than just finger pointing. If they're not government-sponsored (as the Chinese claim) then the Chinese should be willing to pony up and extradite them! (The fundamental issue here is really that the line between government and non-government is defined in a very different way in the US and China, both in law and in practice. China is still a single-party rule, which makes it often a matter of semantics what is government and what is not.)
The root problem here is the companies that make the drugs that have known properties are refusing to sell them to the state for use in executions. How it is legal for the companies who sell the drugs to discriminate in this way I don't understand. I know WHY they are doing it... due to pressure from anti-death penalty activists. But how it is legal?
And just to be up-front, I'm actually anti-death-penalty. But forcing state officials to euthanize people in inhumane ways in order to make headlines does not seem... humane.
I think the basic problem is that we are not at war with country X.
I actually believe the basic bill of rights applies to the agents of government, not the people. i.e. it does not just protect these special people called "citizens", it restrains the government from certain actions, such as denial of due process of law, against any person. However, the general "rule of law" does not apply in a war zone. The problem is that we have become stupendously lax about exactly where the wars the US is currently fighting actually are. Are we at war with Pakistan? No, but we perform military strikes inside Pakistan without their consent. Are we a warlord or a modern country?
Do you have references for that with real re-analysis of the radar data? Ones that aren't confused reporters citing "anonymous sources" that they might be misquoting. Reporters are really bad about leaving out little things like "maybe" or "under the assumption that..." which are night and day when eliminating possible options.
It seems more likely that the earlier analysis of the radar data mixed up the plane with another one after it got across the penisula. Also it has been said that there is quite a bit of uncertainty in the radar altitude measurements during the airplane's supposed altitude changes. Do you have a reference that actually discusses what the radar data can and cannot exclude in a technical way? The search is sure acting consistent with a plane that just flew on to the southwest unpiloted. Surely they have made some assumption about the behavior during this time in computing the current search area. What were those assumptions? I haven't seen any technical discussion of this, and would really like to.
I believe the problem is that the interface for this and the way warnings are handled is just horrible and inconsistent between clients.
For example, android requires yout to set a passcode in order to store the public certificate. That's right you need to lock your device so nobody can get access to that PUBLIC key. duh. Clearly you should have a passcode for a private key, but not a public one. I"m not sure if this has been straitened out or not. Also it's often not clear if you can say the equivalent of "trust the current certificate, and warn me if the network tries to give a different one". It typically asks you to manually load the certificate that the server can easily send to the client.
This doesn't even mention that generally the cert will be signed in a way that it can be verified through the same trust chain the web browser uses. While this isn't optimal, it's pretty decent in practice and could easily be implemented as an option.
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.