The U.S. spying operations penetrate every corner of China. Snowden also revealed a series of confidential documents which show that QQ, the chat software of Internet giant Tencent, and Fetion, the instant messaging service of China Mobile, were targeted by the NSA.
According to Foreign Policy magazine, when the United States was putting pressure on China over the issue of cyber-attacks, it failed to mention its own mass cyber espionage on Chinese Internet. U.S. officials had always declined to comment on the issue when questioned by journalists after China had accused America of secret snooping operations.
The websites of Der Spiegel and the New York Times have also reported how the NSA has made huge efforts to spy on Huawei Technologies, the second largest telecom solutions provider in the world. It began activities against Huawei in 2009, because it is the biggest competitor to U.S. telecoms giant Cisco. A specially designated NSA team penetrated Huawei's network and copied the details of 1,400 of its customers as well as training manuals for the company's engineers.
According to the report, the NSA also stole the company's email files as well as the source code of some products. The NSA penetrated into Huawei's headquarters in Shenzhen where the staff emails are handled. American spying operations have gathered a huge number of internal emails of staff members, including senior executives, since January, 2009.
According to U.S. intelligence agencies, gaining an understanding of how the company operates will pay off in the future. So far, according to their narrative, cyber space has been effectively controlled by the West, but Chinese companies are challenging Western dominance. If the U.S. monopoly of technological standards is broken, China will gradually take control of information flow on the Internet.
A report on the website of the New York Times on March 22 this year said that U.S. officials have always considered Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei as a security threat, and blocked business deals in the United States for fear that Huawei might create "backdoors" in its equipment to allow the Chinese military or Beijing-backed hackers to steal corporate and government secrets. But leaked classified documents reveal that it is the NSA that is creating its own "backdoors" into Huawei's networks.
According to the New York Times report, the intelligence operation against China by the NSA is not limited to Huawei. Documents leaked by Snowden in April 2013 revealed that the NSA infiltrated two major Chinese mobile network companies in order to track strategically important Chinese military units.
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