China fury at new snooping claims

China yesterday attacked the United States as an espionage ‘villain’ after former spy Edward Snowden raised new allegations about the far-reaching extent of US cyber-snooping against Chinese targets.
The official Xinhua news agency noted that Washington was now pressing Hong Kong to extradite the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor after he fetched up in the Chinese territory last month.
But the US government first owes the world an explanation, it said, as a prominent Hong Kong lawmaker noted that the territory has the legal right to resist an extradition request made for political reasons.
In the latest revelations published by Hong Kong’s Sunday Morning Post, Snowden said the NSA was hacking Chinese mobile phone companies to gather data from millions of text messages.
He said US spies have also hacked the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing – home to one of six ‘network backbones’ that route all of mainland China’s Internet traffic – and the Hong Kong headquarters of Pacnet, which operates one of the Asia-Pacific region’s largest fibre-optic networks.
“These, along with previous allegations, are clearly troubling signs,” Xinhua said in a commentary.
“They demonstrate that the United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyber attacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age,” it said.
“The NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cell phone companies to steal all of your SMS data,” Snowden said in the Post interview, which the newspaper said was conducted on June 12 and released after it had scrutinised and clarified his claims.
His claims about Pacnet followed a report in the Guardian in which he claimed the British government’s electronic eavesdropping agency GCHQ had gained secret access to fibre-optic cables carrying global Internet traffic and telephone calls, and was sharing the information with the NSA.
Snowden said in the Post interview that Tsinghua University, which counts China’s President Xi Jinping and his predecessor Hu Jintao among its graduates, was the target of extensive NSA hacking.
The university, whose network backbone handles Internet data from millions of Chinese citizens, was breached as recently as January, he was quoted as saying.
According to the Post report, the NSA in 2009 also attacked Pacnet, whose fibre-optic network stretches across 46,000 kilometres in 13 countries ranging from Singapore to Japan via Hong Kong and China.