Sounds like China practices standard counterintelligence work that every national security service uses against domestic dissidents. I don’t think there is anything new here new here. The State Dept.’s $1.5 million is small enough to not cause any alarm in Beijing but large enough to keep right-wingers from claiming we have abandoned Falun Gong.

I think JPWREL may be understating what the Chinese have accomplished. This is pretty impressive work. I knew their cyber capabilites were good, but not this good. I have new found respect for their security services accomplishments, if not their aims.

I also have new found respect for Google for leaving China. Perhaps they could give Cisco some pointers on the whole "Don't Do Evil" thing.

Yes Tom, I read the article; as a matter of fact I went back and reread it to insure that I did not miss some key points after reading your reply. My brief comment was not meant to imply that I condoned Chinese security practices nor accepted their view of the supremacy of the Party versus human rights – I don’t. My point was merely that China does nothing unusual for a Party apparatus that is paranoid about threats to its central authority. The inherent openness created by the global Internet revolution has caused tremendous angst, and indeed, confusion among Party leadership and their reactions have been clumsy and provoking. If true freedom of expression does come to China it will likely be agonizingly deliberate and in such a way that the Party feels its status is secure and without American pressure. Personally, I have mixed feeling about Cisco (and other American firms) relationship with the Chinese security services. I understand why they do it, but it is still uncomfortable and I have no good answer given that China is the key marginal global demand for our exports and debt. In fact our State Dept. likely finds this whole balancing act between trade and human rights as perplexing as I do.

Obviously, Cisco Systems caved in to a customer's request. The reason Cisco had to be involved is because the way traffic is sniffed on a network. A sniffer will only see the switch or gateway router's IP address on the user's network, not the user's IP address. This is by design since gateway devices such as routers route packets to another destination network, and the gateway device's IP address replaces the user's computer's IP address as the source address in the packets. To get an IP address, one has to interrogate the switch or router, or have access to a system that is in communication with the user's computer. A similar situation exists for email since email uses a connectionless best effort protocol. The user's email server's IP address can be tracked, but not the IP address that the email originally came from. Since the Chinese are sniffing other people's communications, it's not likely that they have direct access to user's IP addresses, so they arm twisted Cisco into likely providing them with backdoors into routers and switches, or Cisco added some sort of logging function where the routing tables of the routers themselves are sent to a central government server. Alternatively, the routers could have a third interface built in that routes all or only specific traffic to a Chinese government server. The Chinese could have crafted email proxies that have to be installed on all email servers for them to track individual emails. That would be one solution to monitoring emails. Another would be to tap the gateways that users must use to access their ISPs which kills two birds with one stone (you get their emails and you get their IP addresses). This is just speculation on my part as to what was done. Sniffing network traffic is not easy. The taps have to be installed properly and a large quantity of data must be stored and analyzed. Most of the analysis has to be automated since there is too much information there for a human brain to absorb. But once you have everything set up properly, and the bugs worked out, eavesdropping on individuals is not difficult, sessions can be recreated, evidence gathered, etc.

Tom -- Would love it if you or FP set up a Twitter account for this blog. I find myself never using my RSS reader these days, opting instead to monitor great blogs and reporters via Twitter.

Keep up the great work!

rw

While most people who follow national security are somewhat familiar with accusations about Chinese security apparatus hacking operations, this article includes some stunning accounts of violent, crimminal acts by Chinese government agents carried out in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Just how well-documented are these accusations? Do you know this author well enough to accept these stories at face value?

Don't get me wrong, I believe China fully capable of such acts. And if true, this was the most important thing I've read not just today, but in quite a while. But I would just like a bit more proof for some of these stories. A quick Google search on the Atlanta assault only pulls up similarly worded versions and an account on a Falun Gong site, nothing that I can find in the mainstream media.

Because of own history, we find to this sort of intrusion into individual lives viscerally rebarbative (unless of course we're talking about the muslims), but the CCP's paranoid prying is undergirded by Chinese historical precedent. For the mandarins cowering behind the walls of Zhongnanhai, a proselytizing movement led a single man (Li Hongzhi) with absolute doctrinal prerogative understandably conjures memories of the Taiping Rebellion . If you're looking to curry favor with the CCP, reminding the apparatchiks of the most horrifically murderous, socially and culturally jarring war of the pre-1900 period might cause SLIGHT discomfort. I have to wonder--had the US undergone such an ordeal would we be so tolerant of popular, upstart religious movements? We like to talk about our civil war was bloody. A little relativism is in order. Had it happened to us, I have a feeling Tom Cruise would've been detained and tortured the minute he jumped on Oprah's couch--and framed like that, the sounds appealing. All joking aside, the CCP's paranoia obviously stunts positive adaptation.

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When the Republic's gov't is in debt to a fascist super-state, and playing wink-nod with mega-banks in a way that would make Al Hamilton blush in shame, it's torn up our democratic contract, hasn't it? Before worrying about Falong Gong, we need to react to the fact that we're the ones that have been hacked, and the virus has spread. We're at war, and we can't see the weapon, or hear our death-rattle inside the wooden horse?

To arms!

Since Cisco is buried so deep in the matrix, I would suggest a boycot of WallMart's Chinese-made inventory, as a direct-action step.

A virtual Boston protest tactic would be to buy C-labelled stuff, then return it a week later as poor quality, for a cash refund, and buy more; The restock labor will protect those neighborhood jobs, and raise the cost of dead inventory. Wally World's excellent DP code-heads will be public media sifting mentions of their name, and detect a drop in retail profit very quickly.

This is an election year. Whack the donkey with a 2x4, and the incumbant elephant too. Then we have a conversation. Tea Party, it not about the flag pin on the lapel.
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