NSA chief says leaks about US cyber spying on China, and techniques for doing it, will impair intelligence-gathering. Others play that down, saying the more significant hit will be to relations with China and to US global work on behalf of a free and open Internet.?
Demonstrators hold signs and a picture of Edward Snowden outside the Consulate General of the United States in Hong Kong Thursday, as they urge the US government to pardon the 29-year-old former contractor and to apologize for their use of surveillance programs.
Kin Cheung/AP
EnlargeInternational relations and leadership on global Internet policy, not US cyberespionage capability, are what will be compromised most as a result of revelations that the United States spies on computers used by civilians in Hong Kong and China.?
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That's the bottom line of several cyberespionage experts asked to assess the damage from Edward Snowden's most recent disclosures about the secret activities of the US government's National Security Agency (NSA). Mr. Snowden, a former NSA contractor and a self-described whistleblower, outlined for a Hong Kong newspaper this week how the NSA hacks into the Internet's "backbone" routers ? the data traffic cops of the information superhighway ? to spy on nonmilitary computer users in China.?
Few seemed surprised by the allegations (probably not even the Chinese), but the NSA chief insisted that the leak caused "great harm" and will in fact impair the agency's cyberintelligence-gathering ability.
That's not, however, what tops the list of concerns for many experts on global spying. The long-term and more serious impact, they say, could be to weaken the US position in ongoing global talks on the future of the Internet, including free speech, taxation, privacy, and cybersecurity policies. The US hopes to gain international support for its stance that nation states should not spy on their citizens ? a position that China, Russia, and some other nations oppose.
?The US wants to rally the rest of world behind it for a free and open Internet ? and it could have pointed the finger at China and Russia,? says Jonathan Logan, an independent network security consultant in Europe who has written extensively on global cyberspying. ?But this has fundamentally changed now because we now can see that the US doesn?t have clean hands on cyberespionage.?
Snowden leaked what appear to be top-secret NSA documents that show the agency targets China for cybersurveillance, including monitoring data streams flowing through Hong Kong.?
?We [the NSA] hack network backbones ? like huge Internet routers, basically ? that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one,? Snowden told the South China Morning Post, according to the newspaper's story published Wednesday. Snowden is in Hong Kong, awaiting expected US criminal charges for leaking classified documents.
Among those targeted, Snowden said, is The Chinese University of Hong Kong, along with Hong Kong businesses, public officials, and students. Documents purport to show, too, that NSA hacking is directed at targets in mainland China, although the newspaper said it could not confirm their authenticity.
Snowden said the documents reveal the agency has been hacking computers in mainland China and Hong Kong since 2009. They show, he said, specific dates and IP addresses of computers in Hong Kong and on mainland China hacked by the NSA over a four-year period ? all civilian computers that show no sign of being affiliated with Chinese military systems.
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