10 ms·

Snowden: US hacks Chinese mobile phone companies, steals SMS data

286 points by teawithcarl 13y ago

johnrob 13y ago
The great firewall of China is seeming less totalitarian and more pragmatic. The US at least has to hack to get chinese SMS messages; allowing its users visit Facebook/Gmail/etc is like giving data away.
babesh 13y ago
Is it legal for a foreign government such as the UK to spy on Americans and then hand that data to the US and vice versa? I bet they are doing that.
- codygman 13y ago
  They are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement
general_failure 13y ago
Looks like he is bordering on treason. Be careful snowden.
- j546 13y ago
  Was thinking the same thing.
- bayesianhorse 13y ago
  I think he is well past that point. He might have done a big service to his constitution, but he certainly broke the laws and all sorts of oaths.
- dnautics 13y ago
  "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court." Not that the US follows the constitution, but you know, in theory nothing he's done is remotely close to treason, and even if what he did qualifies, it might be difficult to get two Witnesses.
cletus 13y ago
Snowden's choice of Hong Kong as a hiding spot becomes more and more interesting. I suspect the timing of this particular revelation is timed deliberately just after the US files charges against him seeking his arrest by Hong Kong authorities. A recent article suggested that China was already inclined to "solve" this problem (from a diplomatic and political standpoint) by doing what it does best: simply dragging its feet. This seems incredibly easy to do when the Hong Kong legal system is inclined to move slowly anyway, any extradition will go through a number of appeals and the process for applying for asylum is being revamped putting all such cases on hold (not that Snowden has applied for asylum yet). It is an somewhere between widely suspected and an open secret that China engages in concerted intelligence efforts against the US government and US corporations. Many cyberattacks originate in China (and there is strong evidence that at least some are state-sponsored). And China is widely believed to have stolen nuclear secrets [1]. But this revelation goes the other way. I really can't predict how China will take this. I suspect they'll be more disinclined to hand Snowden over (or at least do it in any kind of timely fashion). To paraphrase Ned Flanders "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!" Who knew in 2008 that during the Obama administration it may get to the point of people wishing for the good ol' days of George W. Bush? Well maybe not that far but it's really not that far off. The war for intellectual property, Federal prosecutorial overreach (eg the Y12 "terrorists", Aaron Swartz), the relentless pursuit of whistleblowers and the end-run around the Fourth Amendment are simply stunning, particularly from an allegedly Democratic administration. [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/06/world/breach-los-alamos-special-report-china-stole-nuclear-secrets-for-bombs-us-aides.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/06/world/breach-los-alamos-sp...
- downandout 13y ago
  >Who knew in 2008 that during the Obama administration it may get to the point of people wishing for the good ol' days of George W. Bush? I only wish that Snowden would have been in a position to leak this stuff about a week before Obama was reelected. At least then voters would have been able to make an informed decision. Romney may have been equally as evil as Obama in terms of surveillance ambitions and disregard for the constitution, but the difference is that part of Obama's election pitch was that he was going to get rid of these types of programs, while Romney never said anything of the sort. I don't like the fact that a man who clearly lied about his fundamental political views just to get elected is sitting in the Oval Office right now. Bush, and all Presidents before him, may have lied about many things, but at least you knew where most of them stood politically.
skwirl 13y ago
"And the former National Security Agency contractor claims he has the evidence to prove it." Well... where is it?
- mortehu 13y ago
  If your evidence is weak, I think it's better to leak a potentially controversial allegation well in advance of the evidence. Maybe it's conjecture from a bullet point in a PowerPoint slide?
untog 13y ago
Excuse me if I am a little dubious of the South China Morning Post. According to the article, he gave them an exclusive interview 10 days ago that they are finally publishing now. Interesting that Snowden chose to completely ignore his contacts at the Guardian etc. for this. Are there any other sources to back this up? Or evidence?
- thenewkid 13y ago
  The SCMP is the main English language newspaper in HK. It's been around for years and has reporters on the ground. So what's a more "reliable" source? CNN? HuffingtonPost? Buzzfeed? The Guardian is focusing on stories related to the UK, while the SCMP is focusing on stories related to HK and China.
  - untog 13y ago
    If Snowden granted them an interview ten days ago they've done a pretty bad job handling an internationally significant story. The one sole piece of evidence is this quote attributed to Snowden: “The NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cell phone companies to steal all of your SMS data.” No actual evidence this time. Just a quote from a guy no one can call to verify.
    - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
      Which is why we should mostly ignore it. He's using the press to curry favor with HK residents. Nothing shocking about that.
    - takluyver 13y ago
      I wonder if he has given various journalists pieces of information to release at set times or in response to particular events. This one could have been triggered by the charges being brought against him. I seem to remember one of the Guardian journalists mentioning that there was more information to come.
- forgottenpass 13y ago
  >According to the article, he gave them an exclusive interview 10 days ago that they are finally publishing now. A lot of wild interferences can be drawn from that fact, but isn't it just a common courtesy for a journalist or reporter to afford some control to a source providing information that can't be obtained elsewhere? "Off the record" and embargoed information are two widely accepted practices that exemplify giving publishing discretion to a source.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
contingencies 13y ago
As someone who, five years ago, tried to get commercial bulk SMS connectivity out of these same main Chinese mobile carriers (China Mobile and China Unicom), and watched them largely quash spammy SMS broadcasting with automatic SMSC service suspension after a certain threshold outbound rate, this is interesting. The guys I talked to inside of these carriers led me to believe their SMSCs were just a Linux box. Also, SMSCs appear to be provincial entities rather than national ones, so these compromises are likely only in a subset of cities. (Further evidenced online, eg. http://www.smsclist.com/downloads/default.txt http://www.smsclist.com/downloads/default.txt) Note also that this article is poorly concluded: US President Barack Obama says the NSA is not listening in on phone calls or reading emails unless legal requirements have been satisfied. That's apparently only for US citizens inside the US, IIRC.
- XorNot 13y ago
  And the NSA's explicit mission is the surveillance of foreign powers to the benefit of the US. This is where Snowden is sinking his message because literally nothing they do in this arena is illegal in the US, and confirming it or giving out details definitely is undermining US interests by the trust placed in him by the NSA to start with.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    Making that Espionage Act criminal complaint a little more valid as well.
  - contingencies 13y ago
    Well, that's one view. Another view might be that he's not sinking his message since it's illustrative of what goes on that the majority of the world's public are unaware of (ie. constant electronic attacks mounted against other countries, constant surveillance of large numbers of global citizens). In addition, he covers his bases if he needs Chinese support to escape to a third country for the purposes of political asylum. At the end of the saga, and in the history books, Snowden will not be judged by his own government but by the court of public opinion... and unlike its bloated bureaucratic overseers, that jury has already passed the verdict.
jusben1369 13y ago
Now he's just becoming a tool.
- trumpcard 13y ago
  Like all those egyptian,iranian,chinese,russian,syrian ones?
teawithcarl 13y ago
This story was published in HK only 5 minutes before this posting onto HN, by the only other journalist in direct contact with Snowden himself - Lana Lam. SCMP is a top HK newspaper, and along with the Guardian, the primary publishing source for direct news from Snowden himself.
- ryanhuff 13y ago
  The only mention of SCMP being a "top newspaper" that I could find is in reference to it being the most profitable newspaper (per reader) in the world. However, according to Wikipedia, its independence from the Chinese government influence is suspect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_China_Morning_Post#Editorial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_China_Morning_Post#Editor...
  - teawithcarl 13y ago
    Quite the opposite - SCMP is renowned for publishing freedom articles against the CCP party line, which is one of the reason Snowden chose SCMP to publish to.
    - ryanhuff 13y ago
      Interesting. I won't pretend to understand Snowden's motives, but the SCMP Wikipedia page does bring into question SCMP's independence from China, so I would appreciate it if you could comment on the issues noted on the wikipedia page.
  - nmcfarl 13y ago
    teawithcarl did just call SCMP "a top HK newspaper" which is a much lower bar, than a global "top newspaper". And frankly one I agree with from just wandering around HK for a few days (spread out over many years). And one I suspect you’d agree with if you did the same. Their market share is large, and their reporting is way better than most local, city newspapers in America.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
scarmig 13y ago
I don't understand why everyone thinks it's terrible if a government surveils its own citizens but it's totally a-ok if it does foreigners. Because if you think about the reflexivity of it all, that means that it's a-ok if China surveils all American citizens and America all Chinese citizens. The only way that makes sense is if you think one government (America or China, depending on who you are) is privileged to violate the privacy rights of citizens of the other. I would hope that Hacker News would be more cosmopolitan. So much of our work, especially, involves interacting with foreigners. If our government thinks that their communications with us deserve no protections because they're some suspicious other, and their government thinks that our communications with them deserve no protections because we're some suspicious other... then no one ends up with anything. ETA: And when you think about it, that principle creates a giant loophole: country X surveils country Y's populace, country Y surveils country X's populace, and they have a mutual agreement to share data about each other's dissidents. Just goes to show that if you undermine a universal right for even one person, that right disappears.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side. -- George Orwell ( http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat )
  - mpyne 13y ago
    It's ironic that I've been complaining about this exact same thing. It's a more specific instance of tribalism.
    - Andrew_Quentin 13y ago
mtgx 13y ago
Not saying China is innocent, but this is why stuff like this needs to be transparent and the public needs to know about it, and if the government isn't willing to make it public, then whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden need to make the public aware of it, no matter what "laws" they have to break to do it. But then it's the public's responsibility to protect them against the government, for doing them that service. Because you have no idea what the government is doing in your name, and what kind of conflicts they are creating, and then "all of the sudden" you end up with another war on your hands, and the US government propaganda machine tells you it's their fault and they are the aggressor against US, when in fact it could be the opposite, and the attack may simply be retaliation for USA's own actions.
- CatMtKing 13y ago
  I agree. Even if this sort of thing happens behind the scenes, there are repercussions that will come back to affect people and businesses, even those without direct ties to China.
deleted 13y ago
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deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
bayesianhorse 13y ago
Accusing China of human rights violations and large scale cyber warfare is going to get more difficult in the future...
- mpyne 13y ago
  Why? Those accusations would be dependent on whether they were doing them or not. China has been "accusing" the U.S. of cyber warfare activities as well, and anyone who knew what the NSA was before 2013 knew that China was probably being truthful about that in general.
thezach 13y ago
The USA use electrnoic surveilance on China... China uses electronic surveilance on the USA... its the nature of things. Seriously, countries spy on countries and China sure is not innocent in hacking foreign countries.
Aloisius 13y ago
Oof. We're moving quickly out of whistleblower territory and into actual espionage.
microb 13y ago
Because of all this bad press, the US will rally around a fake-libertarian or Republican in 2016. Rinse, wash and repeat.
- mark_l_watson 13y ago
  I agree. It is always (somewhat) interesting to see who the elites place in the oval office every four years via near absolute control of the news media and a corporate owned congress, full of people who can switch talking points on demand.
marcamillion 13y ago
ARGHHH....WHY WOULD HE DO THIS? All he is doing is muddying the waters. How can I claim to defend what he has done, if he is giving sensitive intelligence data to the CHINESE!!!! He shouldn't muddy the waters. Just keep it focused on how the USGov't is taking away US civil liberties and privacy. I mean...I understand why he is doing this - self preservation - but now he is looking more like a "spy" than a "whistleblower".
HarryHirsch 13y ago
This is all a bit reminiscent of Frederick Forsyth's "Fourth Protocol". A few words about the plot: the book is set in the early years of Margaret Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister, in the time of the Reagan Rearmament. Elements in the Politburo devise a secret plan to explode an atomic bomb near RAF Bentwaters, blame this on a malfunction of American nuclear ordnance and cause a leftist government to be elected and Britain to fall into the USSR's sphere of influence. This plan was to be kept secret even from the KGB. Both MI5 and KGB get wind of this, and they work in concert to stop it while they remain enemies, because either side feels that if it succeeded they would open Pandora's box and have no institutional knowledge to deal with this new world. It is my sincere hope that the world's intelligence agencies have the institutional knowledge to deal with the widespread knowledge on spying on its own citizens.
powertower 13y ago
What a disgusting circle-jerk of comments. So far we have - 1. Only China should be able to hack and spy on other nations. 2. The USA should just leave everyone alone! 3. Ohh, and this guy is not committing treason and espionage by releasing things like this, he's a freedom fighter. No more secrets! Anyone else stopped reading HN these last couple of weeks? I stopped right around when people were beginning to suggest that random government employees should be shot in protest, and as I looked as some of the posters names, I recognized a bunch of them.

286 points by teawithcarl 13y ago

The great firewall of China is seeming less totalitarian and more pragmatic. The US at least has to hack to get chinese SMS messages; allowing its users visit Facebook/Gmail/etc is like giving data away.

babesh 13y ago

Is it legal for a foreign government such as the UK to spy on Americans and then hand that data to the US and vice versa? I bet they are doing that.

codygman 13y ago
They are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement

general_failure 13y ago

Looks like he is bordering on treason. Be careful snowden.

j546 13y ago
Was thinking the same thing.
bayesianhorse 13y ago
I think he is well past that point. He might have done a big service to his constitution, but he certainly broke the laws and all sorts of oaths.
dnautics 13y ago
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court." Not that the US follows the constitution, but you know, in theory nothing he's done is remotely close to treason, and even if what he did qualifies, it might be difficult to get two Witnesses.

cletus 13y ago

Snowden's choice of Hong Kong as a hiding spot becomes more and more interesting. I suspect the timing of this particular revelation is timed deliberately just after the US files charges against him seeking his arrest by Hong Kong authorities. A recent article suggested that China was already inclined to "solve" this problem (from a diplomatic and political standpoint) by doing what it does best: simply dragging its feet. This seems incredibly easy to do when the Hong Kong legal system is inclined to move slowly anyway, any extradition will go through a number of appeals and the process for applying for asylum is being revamped putting all such cases on hold (not that Snowden has applied for asylum yet). It is an somewhere between widely suspected and an open secret that China engages in concerted intelligence efforts against the US government and US corporations. Many cyberattacks originate in China (and there is strong evidence that at least some are state-sponsored). And China is widely believed to have stolen nuclear secrets [1]. But this revelation goes the other way. I really can't predict how China will take this. I suspect they'll be more disinclined to hand Snowden over (or at least do it in any kind of timely fashion). To paraphrase Ned Flanders "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!" Who knew in 2008 that during the Obama administration it may get to the point of people wishing for the good ol' days of George W. Bush? Well maybe not that far but it's really not that far off. The war for intellectual property, Federal prosecutorial overreach (eg the Y12 "terrorists", Aaron Swartz), the relentless pursuit of whistleblowers and the end-run around the Fourth Amendment are simply stunning, particularly from an allegedly Democratic administration. [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/06/world/breach-los-alamos-special-report-china-stole-nuclear-secrets-for-bombs-us-aides.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/06/world/breach-los-alamos-sp...

downandout 13y ago
>Who knew in 2008 that during the Obama administration it may get to the point of people wishing for the good ol' days of George W. Bush? I only wish that Snowden would have been in a position to leak this stuff about a week before Obama was reelected. At least then voters would have been able to make an informed decision. Romney may have been equally as evil as Obama in terms of surveillance ambitions and disregard for the constitution, but the difference is that part of Obama's election pitch was that he was going to get rid of these types of programs, while Romney never said anything of the sort. I don't like the fact that a man who clearly lied about his fundamental political views just to get elected is sitting in the Oval Office right now. Bush, and all Presidents before him, may have lied about many things, but at least you knew where most of them stood politically.

skwirl 13y ago

"And the former National Security Agency contractor claims he has the evidence to prove it." Well... where is it?

mortehu 13y ago
If your evidence is weak, I think it's better to leak a potentially controversial allegation well in advance of the evidence. Maybe it's conjecture from a bullet point in a PowerPoint slide?

untog 13y ago

Excuse me if I am a little dubious of the South China Morning Post. According to the article, he gave them an exclusive interview 10 days ago that they are finally publishing now. Interesting that Snowden chose to completely ignore his contacts at the Guardian etc. for this. Are there any other sources to back this up? Or evidence?

thenewkid 13y ago
The SCMP is the main English language newspaper in HK. It's been around for years and has reporters on the ground. So what's a more "reliable" source? CNN? HuffingtonPost? Buzzfeed? The Guardian is focusing on stories related to the UK, while the SCMP is focusing on stories related to HK and China.
- untog 13y ago
  If Snowden granted them an interview ten days ago they've done a pretty bad job handling an internationally significant story. The one sole piece of evidence is this quote attributed to Snowden: “The NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cell phone companies to steal all of your SMS data.” No actual evidence this time. Just a quote from a guy no one can call to verify.
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    Which is why we should mostly ignore it. He's using the press to curry favor with HK residents. Nothing shocking about that.
  - takluyver 13y ago
    I wonder if he has given various journalists pieces of information to release at set times or in response to particular events. This one could have been triggered by the charges being brought against him. I seem to remember one of the Guardian journalists mentioning that there was more information to come.
forgottenpass 13y ago
>According to the article, he gave them an exclusive interview 10 days ago that they are finally publishing now. A lot of wild interferences can be drawn from that fact, but isn't it just a common courtesy for a journalist or reporter to afford some control to a source providing information that can't be obtained elsewhere? "Off the record" and embargoed information are two widely accepted practices that exemplify giving publishing discretion to a source.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

contingencies 13y ago

As someone who, five years ago, tried to get commercial bulk SMS connectivity out of these same main Chinese mobile carriers (China Mobile and China Unicom), and watched them largely quash spammy SMS broadcasting with automatic SMSC service suspension after a certain threshold outbound rate, this is interesting. The guys I talked to inside of these carriers led me to believe their SMSCs were just a Linux box. Also, SMSCs appear to be provincial entities rather than national ones, so these compromises are likely only in a subset of cities. (Further evidenced online, eg. http://www.smsclist.com/downloads/default.txt http://www.smsclist.com/downloads/default.txt) Note also that this article is poorly concluded: US President Barack Obama says the NSA is not listening in on phone calls or reading emails unless legal requirements have been satisfied. That's apparently only for US citizens inside the US, IIRC.

XorNot 13y ago
And the NSA's explicit mission is the surveillance of foreign powers to the benefit of the US. This is where Snowden is sinking his message because literally nothing they do in this arena is illegal in the US, and confirming it or giving out details definitely is undermining US interests by the trust placed in him by the NSA to start with.
- mpyne 13y ago
  Making that Espionage Act criminal complaint a little more valid as well.
- contingencies 13y ago
  Well, that's one view. Another view might be that he's not sinking his message since it's illustrative of what goes on that the majority of the world's public are unaware of (ie. constant electronic attacks mounted against other countries, constant surveillance of large numbers of global citizens). In addition, he covers his bases if he needs Chinese support to escape to a third country for the purposes of political asylum. At the end of the saga, and in the history books, Snowden will not be judged by his own government but by the court of public opinion... and unlike its bloated bureaucratic overseers, that jury has already passed the verdict.

jusben1369 13y ago

Now he's just becoming a tool.

trumpcard 13y ago
Like all those egyptian,iranian,chinese,russian,syrian ones?

teawithcarl 13y ago

This story was published in HK only 5 minutes before this posting onto HN, by the only other journalist in direct contact with Snowden himself - Lana Lam. SCMP is a top HK newspaper, and along with the Guardian, the primary publishing source for direct news from Snowden himself.

ryanhuff 13y ago
The only mention of SCMP being a "top newspaper" that I could find is in reference to it being the most profitable newspaper (per reader) in the world. However, according to Wikipedia, its independence from the Chinese government influence is suspect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_China_Morning_Post#Editorial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_China_Morning_Post#Editor...
- teawithcarl 13y ago
  Quite the opposite - SCMP is renowned for publishing freedom articles against the CCP party line, which is one of the reason Snowden chose SCMP to publish to.
  - ryanhuff 13y ago
    Interesting. I won't pretend to understand Snowden's motives, but the SCMP Wikipedia page does bring into question SCMP's independence from China, so I would appreciate it if you could comment on the issues noted on the wikipedia page.
- nmcfarl 13y ago
  teawithcarl did just call SCMP "a top HK newspaper" which is a much lower bar, than a global "top newspaper". And frankly one I agree with from just wandering around HK for a few days (spread out over many years). And one I suspect you’d agree with if you did the same. Their market share is large, and their reporting is way better than most local, city newspapers in America.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

scarmig 13y ago

I don't understand why everyone thinks it's terrible if a government surveils its own citizens but it's totally a-ok if it does foreigners. Because if you think about the reflexivity of it all, that means that it's a-ok if China surveils all American citizens and America all Chinese citizens. The only way that makes sense is if you think one government (America or China, depending on who you are) is privileged to violate the privacy rights of citizens of the other. I would hope that Hacker News would be more cosmopolitan. So much of our work, especially, involves interacting with foreigners. If our government thinks that their communications with us deserve no protections because they're some suspicious other, and their government thinks that our communications with them deserve no protections because we're some suspicious other... then no one ends up with anything. ETA: And when you think about it, that principle creates a giant loophole: country X surveils country Y's populace, country Y surveils country X's populace, and they have a mutual agreement to share data about each other's dissidents. Just goes to show that if you undermine a universal right for even one person, that right disappears.

PavlovsCat 13y ago
All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side. -- George Orwell ( http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat )
- mpyne 13y ago
  It's ironic that I've been complaining about this exact same thing. It's a more specific instance of tribalism.
  - Andrew_Quentin 13y ago

mtgx 13y ago

Not saying China is innocent, but this is why stuff like this needs to be transparent and the public needs to know about it, and if the government isn't willing to make it public, then whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden need to make the public aware of it, no matter what "laws" they have to break to do it. But then it's the public's responsibility to protect them against the government, for doing them that service. Because you have no idea what the government is doing in your name, and what kind of conflicts they are creating, and then "all of the sudden" you end up with another war on your hands, and the US government propaganda machine tells you it's their fault and they are the aggressor against US, when in fact it could be the opposite, and the attack may simply be retaliation for USA's own actions.

CatMtKing 13y ago
I agree. Even if this sort of thing happens behind the scenes, there are repercussions that will come back to affect people and businesses, even those without direct ties to China.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

bayesianhorse 13y ago

Accusing China of human rights violations and large scale cyber warfare is going to get more difficult in the future...

mpyne 13y ago
Why? Those accusations would be dependent on whether they were doing them or not. China has been "accusing" the U.S. of cyber warfare activities as well, and anyone who knew what the NSA was before 2013 knew that China was probably being truthful about that in general.

thezach 13y ago

The USA use electrnoic surveilance on China... China uses electronic surveilance on the USA... its the nature of things. Seriously, countries spy on countries and China sure is not innocent in hacking foreign countries.

Aloisius 13y ago

Oof. We're moving quickly out of whistleblower territory and into actual espionage.

microb 13y ago

Because of all this bad press, the US will rally around a fake-libertarian or Republican in 2016. Rinse, wash and repeat.

mark_l_watson 13y ago
I agree. It is always (somewhat) interesting to see who the elites place in the oval office every four years via near absolute control of the news media and a corporate owned congress, full of people who can switch talking points on demand.

marcamillion 13y ago

ARGHHH....WHY WOULD HE DO THIS? All he is doing is muddying the waters. How can I claim to defend what he has done, if he is giving sensitive intelligence data to the CHINESE!!!! He shouldn't muddy the waters. Just keep it focused on how the USGov't is taking away US civil liberties and privacy. I mean...I understand why he is doing this - self preservation - but now he is looking more like a "spy" than a "whistleblower".

HarryHirsch 13y ago

This is all a bit reminiscent of Frederick Forsyth's "Fourth Protocol". A few words about the plot: the book is set in the early years of Margaret Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister, in the time of the Reagan Rearmament. Elements in the Politburo devise a secret plan to explode an atomic bomb near RAF Bentwaters, blame this on a malfunction of American nuclear ordnance and cause a leftist government to be elected and Britain to fall into the USSR's sphere of influence. This plan was to be kept secret even from the KGB. Both MI5 and KGB get wind of this, and they work in concert to stop it while they remain enemies, because either side feels that if it succeeded they would open Pandora's box and have no institutional knowledge to deal with this new world. It is my sincere hope that the world's intelligence agencies have the institutional knowledge to deal with the widespread knowledge on spying on its own citizens.

powertower 13y ago

What a disgusting circle-jerk of comments. So far we have - 1. Only China should be able to hack and spy on other nations. 2. The USA should just leave everyone alone! 3. Ohh, and this guy is not committing treason and espionage by releasing things like this, he's a freedom fighter. No more secrets! Anyone else stopped reading HN these last couple of weeks? I stopped right around when people were beginning to suggest that random government employees should be shot in protest, and as I looked as some of the posters names, I recognized a bunch of them.