The widespread use of propaganda at home and abroad, and espionage and cyber-espionage against the United States by the People’s Republic of China are increasingly becoming issues of grave concern by China experts. Chinese espionage, cyber terrorism, and propaganda were the subjects of a hearing April 30 on Capitol Hill.

The United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) heard testimony from expert witnesses on what China is doing, its intentions, how it targets U.S. public opinion, while engaging in large-scale espionage and cyber terrorism.

This article will describe the testimony on Chinese espionage and cyber terrorism. Part II will consider China’s propaganda system and the recent expansion of its state-controlled media.

China wants to present itself as having no malicious intentions and that its rise as a great power is benign. Hard evidence, however, indicates the opposite. Most of the hacking going on against U.S. government and businesses comes from mainland China. Commissioner Peter Brookes in his opening statement said that computer systems involved with the development of the F-35 fighter aircraft were penetrated by some alleged hackers traced back to mainland China. Similarly, there have been probes of the computer networks that control electric grids in the United States, again, traced back to China.

“Perhaps the recent discovery of a vast Chinese cyber espionage network [code named GhostNet] that penetrated 103 countries, infected nearly 1,300 computers and continued to infect at least a dozen new computers every week, will provide the wake-up call,” said Kevin G. Coleman, Senior Fellow at Technolytics.

Sitting next to Mr. Coleman was Mr. Rafal A. Rohozinski, who led the team at Citizen Lab, which uncovered an international network of cyber espionage. Their March 2009 report, “Tracking ‘GhostNet,’” found hundreds of government and private offices around the world had been infiltrated. The focus of the work was the Tibetan community in India, whose computers were “maliciously infected.” The office of the Dalai Lama had private and sensitive files removed; one file that was accessed contained confidential negotiating positions with China.

The source of these deeds came from the China mainland based on the IP addresses. Whether it was the Chinese regime, it is impossible to say with certainty. But the operation required a great deal of linguistic ability in order to break in to such diverse places as the embassy of India, government offices in Laos, the Israeli consulate in Hong Kong, and the Russian embassy in Beijing—to name the few examples mentioned by Mr. Rohozinski at the hearing.

At the hearing, Mr. Rohozinski, who is with the SecDev Group, Munk Center for International Studies in Ontario, Canada, announced the stunning fact that GhostNet was just one of seven global espionage networks his organization uncovered.

How does China compare to other nations with regard to this kind of espionage? Mr. Coleman said at the hearing that his studies found that China had 4.6 times as many acts of cyber aggression as the nearest competitor. Mr. Rohozinski said at the hearing that 51 percent of malware originates in China; 49 percent elsewhere.

Last March, Coleman’s managed security services provider “identified 128 acts of cyber aggression against their clients every minute that were tracked back to IP addresses in China,” said Mr. Coleman.

The Global Internet Freedom Consortium in the United States, a not-for-profit organization that gives away free anti-censoring programs, said on an average day its tools are used more than 194 million times, or “hits,” from China (testimony of by Dr. Shiyu Zhou before the Senate Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, May 20, 2008).
 
However, the two cyber experts admitted they could not at this time break down these cyber acts of aggression into the source type: organized crime, state sponsored, or terrorist sponsored. Much of the discussion dwelt on the extensive Russian-Chinese cooperation in cyber spying and the links between Russian organized crime and China.

“For over two decades, China has been attempting to do what the Soviet Union never accomplished: covertly acquire Western technology, then use it to move ahead of the west,” said Mr. Coleman in his opening statement.

“There is a massive attempt to obtain, by any means, this nation’s technology,” said a retired FBI agent, I. C. Smith. As an experienced man in counter-intelligence, Mr. Smith was baffled at the lack of PRC intelligence service behind the acquisition of highly classified technologies, but rather a reliance on amateurish Chinese-Americans, especially students, to do the job. He brought laughter to the hearing when he described Chinese Americans going to flea markets and the like, buying junk and sending it back to the PRC where it is sorted out later.

Mr. Smith apparently is saying that their methods are inefficient and that they rely on overseas Chinese, who will aid their effort—maybe not realizing they are being used as spies—and assuming “all ethnic Chinese will be of service to mother China.” The PRC approach in using Chinese-Americans for spying, like Wen Ho Lee, Peter Lee, and Min Guo Bao, whom he named at the hearing, has been largely unsuccessful in recruiting the second generation Chinese-Americans, who “are more interested in becoming fully Americanized without divided loyalties,” said Mr. Smith.

Mr. Smith said that while he thought in the past that the Chinese were much better “at collecting information than putting it to use,” he now has the “impression that they have improved considerably in their ability to implement their ill-gotten technology into weapon systems.”

Mr. Smith shared his observation at the hearing that when Chinese students came over here, the use of Xerox paper went dramatically up.

Mr. Smith noted the status and prestige given to its intelligence agencies, such as the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and Ministry of Public Security (MPS) far exceeds their counterparts in the West. They are very selective in filling its ranks. The reason for this arrangement is that their purpose “is to ensure the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] remains in power,” said Mr. Smith.

By Gary Feuerberg - Epoch Times