China

US whistle-blower Edward Snowden yesterday emerged from hiding in Hong Kong and revealed to the South China Morning Post that he will stay in the city to fight likely attempts by his government to have him extradited for leaking state secrets.

In an exclusive interview carried out from a secret location in the city, the former Central Intelligence Agency analyst also made explosive claims that the US government had been hacking into computers in Hong Kong and on the mainland for years.

On Tuesday, a Chinese national was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and criminal copyright infringement. The sentencing is part of a plea deal with federal prosecutors over a massive software piracy ring. Once the prison term is complete, Xiang Li will be deported back to China.

Over the past year, reports have circulated of widespread cyberattacks, based in China, against American corporate, media, and infrastructure targets. Now it’s being learned that cyberespionage efforts extended to the 2008 US presidential election, and appear to have been backed by the Chinese government, according to former Obama national intelligence chief Dennis Blair.

Hackers of the China Blue Army, a collective associated with Group Hp-Hack, claim to have breached the official website of Turkey’s Parliament, or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (global.tbmm.gov.tr).

The hackers leaked a document containing the email addresses, names and passwords of around 45 individuals.

President Barack Obama will tell Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping that he must deal with cyber spying and hacking of US targets that originate inside his country when they meet for talks this week.

Recent official and commercial reports and studies alleging flagrant and sometimes state-sponsored theft of US military and commercial secrets have put cyber security at the top of the agenda of the talks on Friday and Saturday.

Hackers have accessed design plans for more than two dozen U.S. weapons systems, according to a confidential report by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board (DSB) that was leaked to The Washington Post.

Name a target anywhere in China, an official at a state-owned company boasted recently, and his crack staff will break into that person’s computer, download the contents of the hard drive, record the keystrokes and monitor cellphone communications, too.

Pitches like that, from a salesman for Nanjing Xhunter Software, were not uncommon at a crowded trade show this month that brought together Chinese law enforcement officials and entrepreneurs eager to win government contracts for police equipment and services.

In January 2010, Google shocked the cyber world by confessing it had been the target of an advanced persistent threat lasting months and mounted by hackers connected to China's People Liberation Army.

"[We] have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists," Google Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond wrote in blog post at the time.

The Chinese hackers who breached Google's corporate servers 41 months ago gained access to a database containing classified information about suspected spies, agents, and terrorists under surveillance by the US government, according to a published report.

Try as it might, Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei Technologies just can’t shake perceptions that its equipment may serve as a virtual Trojan horse for Chinese electronic intelligence gathering.

For the last two years, Huawei’s defining challenge in the United States has not been tough competition from worldwide giants such as Cisco Systems but rather roadblocks set up by US lawmakers, suspicious of the company’s alleged connections to the People’s Liberation Army. Doubts linger despite no definitive public evidence that Huawei could be complicit in hacking.