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发帖数: 7918 | 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/world/asia/05wikileaks-china.html?_r=1&hp
December 4, 2010
Cables Discuss Vast Hacking by a China That Fears the Web
By JAMES GLANZ and JOHN MARKOFF
As China ratcheted up the pressure on Google to censor its Internet searches
last year, the American Embassy sent a secret cable to Washington detailing
one reason top Chinese leaders had become so obsessed with the Internet
search company: they were Googling themselves.
The May 18, 2009, cable, titled “Google China Paying Price for Resisting
Censorship,” quoted a well-placed source as saying that Li Changchun, a
member of China’s top ruling body, the Politburo Standing Committee, and
the country’s senior propaganda official, was taken aback to discover that
he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google’s main international
Web site. When Mr. Li typed his name into the search engine at google.com,
he found “results critical of him.”
That cable from American diplomats was one of many made public by WikiLeaks
that portray China’s leadership as nearly obsessed with the threat posed by
the Internet to their grip on power — and, the reverse, by the
opportunities it offered them, through hacking, to obtain secrets stored in
computers of its rivals, especially the United States.
Extensive hacking operations suspected of originating in China, including
one leveled at Google, are a central theme in the cables. The operations
began earlier and were aimed at a wider array of American government and
military data than generally known, including on the computers of United
States diplomats involved in climate change talks with China.
One cable, dated early this year, quoted a Chinese person with family
connections to the elite as saying that Mr. Li himself directed an attack on
Google’s servers in the United States, though that claim has been called
into question. In an interview with The New York Times, the person cited in
the cable said that Mr. Li personally oversaw a campaign against Google’s
operations in China but the person did not know who directed the hacking
attack.
The cables catalog the heavy pressure that was placed on Google to comply
with local censorship laws, as well as Google’s willingness to comply — up
to a point. That coercion began building years before the company finally
decided to pull its search engine out of China last spring in the wake of
the successful hacking attack on its home servers, which yielded Chinese
dissidents’ e-mail accounts as well as Google’s proprietary source code.
The demands on Google went well beyond removing material on subjects like
the Dalai Lama or the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Chinese officials also
put pressure on the United States government to censor the Google Earth
satellite imaging service by lowering the resolution of images of Chinese
government facilities, warning that Washington could be held responsible if
terrorists used that information to attack government or military facilities
, the cables show. An American diplomat replied that Google was a private
company and that he would report the request to Washington but that he had
no sense about how the government would act.
Yet despite the hints of paranoia that appear in some cables, there are also
clear signs that Chinese leaders do not consider the Internet an
unstoppable force for openness and democracy, as some Americans believe.
In fact, this spring, around the time of the Google pullout, China’s State
Council Information Office delivered a triumphant report to the leadership
on its work to regulate traffic online, according to a crucial Chinese
contact cited by the State Department in a cable in early 2010, when
contacted directly by The Times.
The message delivered by the office, the person said, was that “in the past
, a lot of officials worried that the Web could not be controlled.”
“But through the Google incident and other increased controls and
surveillance, like real-name registration, they reached a conclusion: the
Web is fundamentally controllable,” the person said.
That confidence may also reflect what the cables show are repeated and often
successful hacking attacks from China on the United States government,
private enterprises and Western allies that began by 2002, several years
before such intrusions were widely reported in the United States.
At least one previously unreported attack in 2008, code-named Byzantine
Candor by American investigators, yielded more than 50 megabytes of e-mails
and a complete list of user names and passwords from an American government
agency, a Nov. 3, 2008, cable revealed for the first time.
Precisely how these hacking attacks are coordinated is not clear. Many
appear to rely on Chinese freelancers and an irregular army of “patriotic
hackers” who operate with the support of civilian or military authorities,
but not directly under their day-to-day control, the cables and interviews
suggest.
But the cables also appear to contain some suppositions by Chinese and
Americans passed along by diplomats. For example, the cable dated earlier
this year referring to the hacking attack on Google said: “A well-placed
contact claims that the Chinese government coordinated the recent intrusions
of Google systems. According to our contact, the closely held operations
were directed at the Politburo Standing Committee level.”
The cable goes on to quote this person as saying that the hacking of Google
“had been coordinated out of the State Council Information Office with the
oversight” of Mr. Li and another Politburo member, Zhou Yongkang.” Mr.
Zhou is China’s top security official.
But the person cited in the cable gave a divergent account. He detailed a
campaign to press Google coordinated by the Propaganda Department’s
director, Liu Yunshan. Mr. Li and Mr. Zhou issued approvals in several
instances, he said, but he had no direct knowledge linking them to the
hacking attack aimed at securing commercial secrets or dissidents’ e-mail
accounts — considered the purview of security officials.
Still, the cables provide a patchwork of detail about cyberattacks that
American officials believe originated in China with either the assistance or
knowledge of the Chinese military.
For example, in 2008 Chinese intruders based in Shanghai and linked to the
People’s Liberation Army used a computer document labeled “salary increase
— survey and forecast” as bait as part of the sophisticated intrusion
scheme that yielded more than 50 megabytes of e-mails and a complete list of
user names and passwords from a United States government agency that was
not identified.
The cables indicate that the American government has been fighting a pitched
battle with intruders who have been clearly identified as using Chinese-
language keyboards and physically located in China. In most cases the
intruders took great pains to conceal their identities, but occasionally
they let their guard down. In one case described in the documents,
investigators tracked one of the intruders who was surfing the Web in Taiwan
“for personal use.”
In June 2009 during climate change talks between the United States and China
, the secretary of state’s office sent a secret cable warning about e-mail
“spear phishing” attacks directed at five State Department employees in
the Division of Ocean Affairs of the Office of the Special Envoy for Climate
Change.
The messages, which purport to come from a National Journal columnist, had
the subject line “China and Climate Change.” The e-mail contained a PDF
file that was intended to install a malicious software program known as
Poison Ivy, which was meant to give an intruder complete control of the
victim’s computer. That attack failed.
The cables also reveal that a surveillance system dubbed Ghostnet that stole
information from the computers used by the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader,
the Dalai Lama, and South Asian governments and was uncovered in 2009 was
linked to a second broad series of break-ins into American government
computers code-named Byzantine Hades. Government investigators were able to
make a “tenuous connection” between those break-ins and the People’s
Liberation Army.
The documents also reveal that in 2008 German intelligence briefed American
officials on similar attacks beginning in 2006 against the German government
, including military, economic, science and technology, commercial,
diplomatic, and research and development targets. The Germans described the
attacks as preceding events like the German government’s meetings with the
Chinese government.
Even as such attacks were occurring, Google made a corporate decision in
2006, controversial even within the company, to establish a domestic Chinese
version of its search engine, called google.cn. In doing so, it agreed to
comply with China’s censorship laws.
But despite that concession, Chinese officials were never comfortable with
Google, the cables and interviews show.
The Chinese claimed that Google Earth, the company’s satellite mapping
software, offered detailed “images of China’s military, nuclear, space,
energy and other sensitive government agency installations” that would be
an asset to terrorists. A cable sent on Nov. 7, 2006, reported that Liu
Jieyi, an assistant minister of foreign affairs, warned the American Embassy
in Beijing that there would be “grave consequences” if terrorists
exploited the imagery.
A year later, another cable pointed out that Google searches for politically
delicate terms would sometimes be automatically redirected to Baidu, the
Chinese company that was Google’s main competitor in China. Baidu is known
for scrubbing its own search engine of results that might be unwelcome to
government censors.
Google conducted numerous negotiations with officials in the State Council
Information Office and other departments involved in censorship, propaganda
and media licensing, the cables show. The May 18, 2009, cable that revealed
pressure on the company by Mr. Li, the propaganda chief, said Google had
taken some measures “to try and placate the government.” The cable also
noted that Google had asked the American government to intervene with China
on its behalf.
But Chinese officials became alarmed that Google still did less than its
Chinese rivals to remove material Chinese officials considered offensive.
Such material included information about Chinese dissidents and human rights
issues, but also about central and provincial Chinese leaders and their
children — considered an especially taboo topic, interviews with people
quoted in the cables reveal.
Mr. Li, after apparently searching for information online on himself and his
children, was reported to have stepped up pressure on Google. He also took
steps to punish Google commercially, according to the May 18 cable.
The propaganda chief ordered three big state-owned Chinese
telecommunications companies to stop doing business with Google. Mr. Li also
demanded that Google executives remove any link between its sanitized
Chinese Web site and its main international one, which he deemed “an
illegal site,” the cable said.
Google ultimately stopped complying with repeated censorship requests. It
stopped offering a censored version of its search engine in China earlier
this year, citing both the hacking attacks and its unwillingness to continue
obeying censorship orders.
James Glanz reported from New York, and John Markoff from San Francisco.
Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York. | a********e
发帖数: 5251 | 2 Li and Zhou ....not surprised.
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detailing
【在 p**********d 的大作中提到】
: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/world/asia/05wikileaks-china.html?_r=1&hp
: December 4, 2010
: Cables Discuss Vast Hacking by a China That Fears the Web
: By JAMES GLANZ and JOHN MARKOFF
: As China ratcheted up the pressure on Google to censor its Internet searches
: last year, the American Embassy sent a secret cable to Washington detailing
: one reason top Chinese leaders had become so obsessed with the Internet
: search company: they were Googling themselves.
: The May 18, 2009, cable, titled “Google China Paying Price for Resisting
: Censorship,” quoted a well-placed source as saying that Li Changchun, a
| j**n
发帖数: 13789 | 3 李长春和周永康？
【在 a********e 的大作中提到】
: Li and Zhou ....not surprised.
:
: searches
: detailing
| j**n
发帖数: 13789 | 4 我估计李长春秘密下令干的一些坏事连胡锦涛知道了以后都会很shock | t***o
发帖数: 4265 | 5 wikileaks link?
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detailing
【在 p**********d 的大作中提到】
: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/world/asia/05wikileaks-china.html?_r=1&hp
: December 4, 2010
: Cables Discuss Vast Hacking by a China That Fears the Web
: By JAMES GLANZ and JOHN MARKOFF
: As China ratcheted up the pressure on Google to censor its Internet searches
: last year, the American Embassy sent a secret cable to Washington detailing
: one reason top Chinese leaders had become so obsessed with the Internet
: search company: they were Googling themselves.
: The May 18, 2009, cable, titled “Google China Paying Price for Resisting
: Censorship,” quoted a well-placed source as saying that Li Changchun, a
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