On September 27, the joint technical team of China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center and internet security company 360 published their second report on the cyberattack launched by the US National Security Agency (NSA) against Northwestern Polytechnical University in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province.
According to the report, the cyberattack aimed at infiltrating and controlling core equipment in China's infrastructure and stealing private data of Chinese people with sensitive identities.
The US has long been hyping China’s so-called cyber threat, while itself engaging in large-scale, organized and indiscriminate cyber theft, surveillance and attacks inside the US and abroad.
The pervasive government surveillance in the US
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the G. W. Bush administration secretly authorized the NSA to monitor Americans’ communications to search for evidence of terrorist activity without court-approved warrants. Since then, the NSA has carried out massive activities and woven a surveillance web infiltrated into US citizens’ life in every detail.
In 2013, former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden exposed the top-secret Prism program to the public. According to the files he leaked, US intelligence agencies had a "black budget" for secret operations of almost $53 billion in 2013. Supported by the funding, NSA willfully infringed on US citizens’ privacy and broke US privacy laws at least hundreds of times every year.
Excerpt of the document Snowden leaked to the Guardian.
Under the Prism program, the US government secretly ordered telecommunications company Verizon to hand over all its daily telephone data to the NSA. Meanwhile, the NSA tapped directly into the servers of nine internet firms, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, to track online communication.
The Prism program is just the tip of the iceberg of US’ huge network for surveillance and cyber theft. There are also Stellar Wind, Irritant Horn and countless other surveillance plans and programs that together form an invisible web encompassing every aspect of American citizens’ life.
The massive US surveillance practices across the world
Besides domestic surveillance, the US also spares no effort on cyberattacks and wiretapping around the world, trampling on international law and the basic norms of international relations.
The documents leaked by Snowden show that the NSA program codenamed Stateroom installed eavesdropping devices in around 100 US embassies and monitored the phone conversations of 35 world leaders, including UN Secretary General, German Chancellor as well as Japanese Prime Minister. The US spying practices had infuriated Germans, its trans-Atlantic ally.
In addition, the US created the MYSTIC program in 2009 to build a surveillance system, under the guise of “legal” commercial services, which was capable of recording “100 percent” of the telephone calls from foreign countries such as Bahamas, Mexico, Kenya and the Philippines.
Tapping undersea cables, selling "encryption devices" and stealing secrets through cyberattacks are also the usual means for US spying purpose. For example, during the first half of 2011, NSA acquired about 13.25 million Internet transactions through its Upstream collection system, which collected emails and other Internet messages as they crossed network switches. Another case is that Crypto AG, a Swiss encryption equipment company, was proven to be working for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and its devices were ironically spying equipment.
Despite such frequent exposure of its surveillance programs, the US has never restrained its monitoring practices around the world. In 2020, both Ireland’s Data Protection Commission and the French data protection authority CNIL publicly accused US Internet companies of leaking user data; and in 2021, Danish media exposed that NSA used Internet facilities in Denmark to spy on European senior officials and entrepreneurs.
The vast arsenal of US cyberattacks
In August, a group of journalists and lawyers sued the CIA, alleging it illegally recorded their conversations and copied data from their phones and computers when they visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during his stay in Ecuador's embassy in London. Since 2017, the CIA has been deliberately targeting Assange and charging him with various crimes.
In 2017, WikiLeaks released a data trove called “Vault 7”, which contained details of spying operations and hacking tools of the CIA. The leak of 8,761 sensitive documents disclosed 19 batches of CIA’s cyberattack weapons, revealing iOS and Android vulnerabilities, bugs in Windows and the ability to turn some smart TVs into listening devices. “Vault 7” has demonstrated USA's vast array of cyber weapons and its hackers’ cyberattack capability to the world.
Excerpt of the "Vault 7" files published by WikiLeaks
This year, China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center and other information security agencies have confirmed that the NSA has been conducting covert cyberattacks against China for a long time, and have uncovered several major US cyberattack weapons, such as Bvp47, QUANTUM system and Hive.
Application scenarios of US’ QUANTUM system. (Photo/EFF)
According to the President’s Fiscal Year 2022 Defense Budget released by the US Department of Defense, the budget for cyberspace activities has increased to $10.4 billion, including $4.3 billion for Cyber Operations to fund programs and activities such as Cyber Collection, Defensive Cyber Effects Operations (DCEO) and Offensive Cyber Effects Operations (OCEO).
In fact, the US has never stopped applying its advanced Internet and telecommunication technologies to weave a global web of surveillance. It is building up an “empire of hacking, surveillance and theft of secrets”.
Co-presented by GDToday and School of Journalism and Communication, Jinan University
English authors | Joshua (intern), Lydia Liu
Investigators | Sun Yongle (intern), Chen Mingyi (intern)
Poster designer | Mia
Editors | Wing, Steven, Jerry
