by Lady Michelle-Jennifer Santos, Chief Visionary Founder & Owner
May 21, 2014 (TSR) – The U.S. indictment of five members of People’s Liberation Army on Monday with “groundless” and “absurd” commercial cyber espionage against American companies are based on fabricated facts, grossly violates the basic norms governing international relations and has harmed China-U.S. ties, the Chinese government says.
“It is really amazing to see that the biggest cyber bully and the most notorious surveillance country, which has virtually no credibility left in the cyber world, could still stand at the moral high ground to accuse others.
“U.S. cyber hegemony is aggressive and dangerous in nature. The U.S. has repeatedly and arbitrarily made baseless accusations about China’s cyber espionage in recent years, reflecting its hypocrisy and hegemony.
“The Chinese military has never engaged in cyber theft of trade secrets. China is a solid defender of cyber security. The indictment of Chinese military officers is insolent in a world still reeling at the scope of the U.S. spy network.
“The unfounded charge against Chinese officers amounts to the same hypocrisy as a bandit calling for justice,” it added.
US is the Real Threat and Violator, not China
While the U.S. has touted threats to cyber security from abroad, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been one of the most active attackers of computer systems around the world, China says.
Allegations of rampant U.S. electronic espionage have unfolded on a global scale in the wake of damaging revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
“Everyone knows that the U.S. itself is the biggest cyber bully, conducting sweeping surveillance around the world. Documents leaked by former Central Intelligence Agency contractor Edward Snowden detailed the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance activities around the globe, from foreign leaders to ordinary citizens.
“Intelligence from Snowden showed that about 70 million French phone calls were collected by the NSA from December 2012 to January 2013. More than 120 world leaders have been under U.S. surveillance since 2009.
“After the PRISM program leaked by Edward Snowden, the United States was accused by the whole world. However, it has never made retrospection, instead, it accuses others”, the government added.
The Europeans were alerted to risks by a European Parliament report more than a decade ago that the U.S. uses sophisticated electronic spying techniques to gather economic intelligence, according to China’s state news agency, Xinhua.
The report put forward extensive claims that the U.S. NSA routinely tracks telephone, fax, and email transmissions from around the world and passes on useful corporate intelligence to American companies.
Among the allegations, the NSA fed information to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing, enabling the companies to beat out European Airbus for a multi-billion dollar contract.
U.S. intelligence, by virtue of data provided by nine Internet companies, including Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Yahoo, and other major telecom providers, tracked citizens’ private contacts and social activities recklessly, according to the Washington Post.
After it was exposed that Brazil’s state oil giant Petrobras was also targeted by U.S. surveillance, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said the U.S. spying was out of economic and strategic interests instead of concerns about terrorism as Washington had claimed.
“Instead of offering a sincere “sorry,” Washington has found that mudslinging at other countries is a way to remedy its image, which has been tarred by its global spy program”, China says.
China is one of Big Brother’s victims
“China is in fact a major victim of persistent and large-scale cyber attacks from the U.S. targeting China’s government institutions, enterprises schools, universities, companies, major telecom backbone networks, its leaders, ordinary citizens and anyone with a mobile phone. In the meantime, the U.S. repeatedly accuses China of spying and hacking,” the Chinese government says.
China’s State Internet Information Office also published on Monday the latest data of U.S. cyber attacks on the country to refute the accusations.
From March 19 to May 18, a total of 2,077 Trojan horse networks or botnet servers in the U.S. directly controlled 1.18 million host computers in China, according to the latest data from the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team Coordination Center of China (NCNERTTCC).
The NCNERTTCC found 135 host computers in the U.S. carrying 563 phishing pages targeting Chinese websites that led to 14,000 phishing operations. In the same period, the center found 2,016 IP addresses in the U.S. had implanted backdoors in 1,754 Chinese websites, involving 57,000 backdoor attacks.
“China has repeatedly asked the U.S. to stop, but it never makes any statement on its wiretaps, nor does it desist, not to mention make apology to the Chinese people”, the government stated.
In 2013 China sought talks with the U.S. on policing cyber space through a bilateral working group, despite the shadow cast over relations by Snowden’s disclosures of U.S. electronic surveillance in China.
The Pentagon is still beefing up its cyberspace force at the U.S. Cyber Command, doubling its budget to 447 million U.S. dollars this year, the Washington Post reported earlier this year.
Even as overall U.S. defense spending witnessed cuts, the American cyberspace force is also expected to be expanded from about 1,800 people today to more than 6,000 by the end of 2016, according to the plan.
The U.S. president has the power to order preemptive cyber strikes, the New York Times reported last year. And The Times reported that Barack Obama ordered an escalating series of cyber attacks against Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities.
“Unless the U.S. casts away the cyber hegemony mentality of turning the Internet into a tool to monitor the whole world and consolidate its own status, it will be impossible to build a just international order or avoid high-risk behavior online”, the statement says.
“The U.S. should clean its own house before pointing fingers at others,” the Chinese government added.
The U.S. intentionally jeopardized the trust between the world’s two biggest economies according to the government and as a result, China on Monday announced the suspension of the China-U.S. Cyber Working Group which was scheduled to meet in July in Beijing.
