Full Text: The United States' Global Surveillance Record
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E-mail Xinhua, May 27, 2014
II. The United States sets China as the main target of its secret surveillance
Evidence provided by Snowden shows that China is one of the major targets of the United States' illegal spying operations. The United States has eavesdropped on Chinese state leaders, scientific institutes, universities and enterprises.
Documents revealed by Snowden to Der Spiegel prove that the United States has conducted mass cyber-attacks on China, targeting Chinese state leaders and the giant high-tech company Huawei. Attacks were also aimed at the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as Chinese banks and telecommunication companies. According to Der Spiegel, the spying operations also covered several former Chinese state leaders, and government departments and banks.
Chinese government offices are a particular target of U.S. spy operations. A White House foreign policy aide revealed that the United States planted optical fiber bugs in the walls of the offices of the Chinese Embassy in Australia when it was built in 1990. The bugs were not deactivated until the story was broken by the Sydney Morning Herald.
According to a report by Foreign Policy magazine, the United States has stolen a huge amount of important intelligence information from China and other countries via cyber-attacks carried out by the NSA's Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), which was established in 1997.
A report by Der Spiegel cited a leaked map dating from 2010 that shows U.S. global spy operations have penetrated 90 countries, among which China is the chief target in East Asia. Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Hong Kong and Taipei, are on the priority target list of the NSA. The agency hacked hundreds of computers and Internet servers on the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong since 2009. Targets in Hong Kong included universities, government officials, business people and students.
According to an interview with Snowden by the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the NSA uses numerous methods to hack Chinese telecommunication companies in order to steal messages of their users.
Snowden also told the SCMP that the NSA had hacked the servers of Tsinghua University, China's most prestigious university. At least 63 computers and servers were attacked in January, 2013. The SCMP report noted that the attack on Tsinghua University, home to one of six main network backbones -- the China Education and Research Network -- means that data from millions of Chinese citizens may have been stolen.
The SCMP, quoting Snowden, made it clear that the U.S. government has been hacking extensively into China's major telecommunication companies and mobile phone operators to steal millions of private text messages.
According to Reuters, the NSA reached a US$10-million deal with RSA, an encryption technology and security service provider, to insert a deliberate flaw or "backdoor" in its cryptography system to make it easier for the NSA to launch mass spying programs. Chinese clients of RSA include three major Chinese telecommunication operators -- China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom, as well as the Bank of China, The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, telecommunications provider Huawei, and home appliances group Haier Electronics.
Based on confidential documents provided by Snowden, the Washington Post reported that, during the year before May, 2012, the NSA had collected, stored, obtained or distributed legally protected communications for 2,776 times without authorization. These illegal operations were especially frequent during the first quarter of 2012. The report suggested that this was probably because of NSA eavesdropping on Chinese citizens who visited the U.S. during Chinese Spring Festival at the beginning of the year.
The United States even retrieves information from computer games. Both the Guardian and the New York Times published a file from investigative news organization Propublica that revealed how intelligence agents from Britain and the United States used games such as, "World of Warcraft" and "Second Life" to spy on the players. It is well known that the majority of players of these two online games are Chinese.
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