Is Someone in China Reading Your E-mails?

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

Chinese hackers have made numerous incursions into classified U.S. networks. In November 2006, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard Goetze, a Naval War College professor, said the Chinese "took down" the entire Naval War College computer network -- an operation that prompted the U.S. Strategic Command to raise the security alert level for the Pentagon's 12,000 computer networks and 5 million computers. In June 2007, 150 computers in the $1.75 billion computer network at the Department of Homeland Security was quietly at work with programs that sent an unknown quantity of information to a Chinese-language Web site. Unisys Corp., the manager of the DHS computers, allegedly covered up the penetration for three months.

Do a brief Web search, and you will find a long list of U.S.-educated, high-level, Chinese-born agents serving time in U.S. prisons for spying and stealing military secrets for their homeland.  Last fall, FBI agents warned the Barack Obama and John McCain campaigns that Chinese networks were monitoring their computers. In June 2008, Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., revealed that computers in the House International Relations Committee had been hacked by Chinese agents. 

"These cyber attacks permitted the source to probe our computers to evaluate our system's defenses, and to view and copy information," said Wolf. "My suspicion is that I was targeted by Chinese sources because of my long history of speaking out about China's abysmal human rights record."

On Feb. 15, 2006, representatives of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco Systems were summoned before the House International Relations Committee to defend what Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., called a "sickening collaboration" with the Chinese government that was "decapitating the voice of the dissidents." The Web executives defended their dealings with the Chinese government on the grounds that China is a global market.

The global market provides endless opportunities for cyberespionage. A February 2005 report from the Defense Science Board states "a significant migration of critical microelectronics manufacturing from the United States to other foreign countries has [occurred] and will continue to occur." America's defense systems are based on "trusted and classified" microchips. "Trust cannot be added to integrated circuits after fabrication; electrical testing and reverse engineering cannot be relied upon to detect undesired alterations in military integrated circuits."

After Deng Xiaopeng took Chairman Mao Zedong to the shopping mall, Wall Street analysts proclaimed that China's Maoists were different from Stalin's Bolsheviks, and that Coca-Cola would magically engender democracy within a totalitarian state. China's Maoists were supposedly different, making the economy work without dismantling state surveillance and control.

The financial tsunami that gushed out of Wall Street this fall forced the closure of over 30 Chinese factories, the ones that make the plastic Santas, socks and other such junk available at Wal-mart. But plenty more Chinese factories are churning out computers, digital chips, satellites and rockets for the high-tech universe that China has staked out as the next frontier of world war. Let's hope that the only thing “Made in China” next Christmas is a plastic Santa -- not spyware in our computers, where Big Brother, speaking Mandarin, is shifting through our cyberprofiles.

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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