Hong Kong

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.

The Hong Kong government has thrown HK$9 million (£730,000) at a new Cyber Security Centre in a bid to tackle the growing threat to critical infrastructure in the Special Administrative Region of China.

Police commissioner Tsang Wai-hung said at the opening ceremony last Friday that the 27-man centre would be staffed by officers from the small Technology Crime Division and heralded it as the first step towards working more closely with public and private sector organisations.

A Hong Kong IT business owner has been banged up for nine months after launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on a Hong Kong Stock Exchange web site in a botched attempt to market his firm’s anti-DDoS service.

Tse Man-lai, the 28-year-old owner of local web hoster Pacswitch Globe Telecom, was found guilty of launching the attacks on the HKExnews site on August 12 and 13 last year, according to South China Morning Post.