Is Someone in China Reading Your E-mails?

By Maura Moynihan, AlterNet. Posted January 12, 2009.

On Dec. 16, 2008, Time magazine announced the annual People of the Year list. Barack Obama topped the list, and one runner-up was China's Zhang Yimou, the epic filmmaker and Olympic impresario, for creating "arguably the grandest spectacle of the new millennium," the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, which "showcased the rise of China as a world power."

The bland celebration of China’s version of Leni Riefenstahl dodged the uncomfortable truth that the Olympics enabled the Chinese Communist Party to expand its intelligence operations within the corporations and governments that flew to Beijing for a sports party.

China is now flexing its post-Olympic power with an aggressive new cyberespionage campaign, targeting government, military and civilians with equal force. If you use Windows, the Chinese Communist Party to knows how to hack into your laptop. If you have friends and associates in China, they're reading your e-mails.

The Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. Congress have been monitoring China’s cyberintelligence campaigns for years. The Congressional Record has a long list of hearings on the matter. In 2008 press statements, the Pentagon report that Chinese cyberespionage has “increased dramatically” before and after the Olympic Games.

During preparations for the Olympics, China installed massive new surveillance and security systems with the generous assist of U.S. corporations Honeywell, General Electric, United Technologies and IBM. Throughout the Olympic gold rush, the Bush administration routinely sidestepped the 1990 law stipulating that high-tech must not benefit the Chinese military. After all, the People's Republic of China was a paying customer and owns a majority share of U.S. Treasury Bills.

The craven posturing of the International Olympic Committee and its corporate sponsors allowed Beijing party bosses to break every pledge to improve human rights, duly sworn when they lobbied for the contract. And what has the result been of this blind quest for corporate profit? On Nov. 20, 2008, the bipartisan U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission sent its annual report to Congress. It states:

"China is targeting U.S. government and commercial computers for espionage (and) is stealing vast amounts of sensitive information from U.S. computer networks."

The Web site of the independent research consortium infowar-monitor.net provides updates on China's Web-infiltration methods. One alarming new report describes tracking devices carefully affixed into computers manufactured in China that route information to the Chinese Communist Party's Public Security Bureau. Cyberintelligence is linked into a vast intelligence-gathering operation of Chinese citizens recruited to spy for the Motherland known as "a thousand grains of sand." This network involves tourists, businessmen and some of the more than 100,000 Chinese students who study overseas each year. Every one is questioned by intelligence officers before and after their foreign tour and offered lucrative rewards for valued intelligence.

China's military academies are also diligently training thousands of young workers in computer hacking. Larry M. Wortzel, the author of a 2007 U.S. Army War College report on China's cybercampaigns said: "The thing that should give us pause is that in many Chinese military manuals, they identify the U.S. as the country they are most likely to go to war with. They are moving very rapidly to master this new form of warfare." Two Chinese army hackers produced a "virtual guidebook for electronic warfare and jamming" after studying dozens of U.S. and NATO manuals on military tactics.

See more stories tagged with: technology, china, cyber spying

Maura Moynihan is the founding director of Friends of Moynihan Station. She lives in New York City.

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