“Chinese state media lashed out at Google Inc, Apple Inc and other U.S. technology companies on Wednesday, calling on Beijing ‘to punish severely the pawns’ of the U.S. government for monitoring China and stealing secrets,” Paul Carsten reports for Reuters. “U.S. companies such as Yahoo Inc, Cisco Systems Inc , Microsoft Corp and Facebook Inc threaten the cyber-security of China and its Internet users, said the People’s Daily on its microblog, in comments echoed on the front page of the English-language China Daily.”
“It is not clear what sparked this latest round of vitriol, nor what information the U.S. firms are alleged to have stolen. But Chinese media have repeatedly attacked American tech companies for aiding the U.S. government’s cyber espionage since U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden revealed widespread spying programmes including PRISM,” Carsten reports. “Under PRISM, the NSA seized data from companies such as Google and Apple, according to revelations made by Snowden a year ago.”
“Chinese state-owned firms have since begun dispensing with the services of U.S. companies such as IBM Corp, Oracle Corp and Cisco in favour of domestic technology. As a result, Snowden’s revelations may cost U.S. companies billions of dollars, analysts say,” Carsten reports. “‘U.S. companies including Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. are all coordinating with the PRISM programme to monitor China,’ the People’s Daily said on its official microblog. ‘To resist the naked Internet hegemony, we will draw up international regulations, and strengthen technology safeguards, but we will also severely punish the pawns of the villain. The priority is strengthening penalties and punishments, and for anyone who steals our information, even though they are far away, we shall punish them!’ it said.”
“In December, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo and other Internet companies issued an open letter to U.S. President Barack Obama and Congress to reform and introduce restrictions on surveillance activities,” Carsten reports. “In May, the U.S. Department of Justice charged five Chinese military officers with hacking U.S. companies to steal trade secrets. The indictment sparked outrage in China and added urgency to Beijing’s efforts to promote the development of local information technology companies.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Visit the Apple-backed reformgovernmentsurveillance.com today.
Related articles:
How the NSA tapped AT&T’s network – May 23, 2014
U.S. House passes bill to curb NSA data collection programs – May 23, 2014
Apple, others to defy U.S. government authorities, notify customers of secret data demands – May 1, 2014
US NSA used Facebook to hack into computers – March 12, 2014
Rand Paul: ‘What you do on your cellphone is none of their damned business!’ – March 8, 2014
U.S. NSA watching, tracking phone users with Google Maps – January 28, 2014
Apple issues update on U.S. NSA and law enforcement orders – January 27, 2014
Obama’s NSA proposals fall far short of real change – January 17, 2014
U.S. NSA devises radio pathway into computers to conduct surveillance, launch cyberattacks – January 15, 2014
The NSA, Apple’s iPhone and a whole lot of bad reporting – January 8, 2014
U.S. NSA seeks to build quantum computer to crack most types of encryption – January 3, 2014
Ex-NSA chief calls for Obama to reject commission’s recommendations to rein in NSA surveillance – December 30, 2013
How the U.S. NSA remotely bugs your Apple iPhone – December 30, 2013
Report: U.S. NSA intercepts computers during shipping to install surveillance malware – December 30, 2013
U.S. NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking – December 11, 2013
Apple, Google, others call for government surveillance reform – December 9, 2013
U.S. NSA secretly infiltrated Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say – October 30, 2013
Obama administration decides NSA spying is ‘essential,’ but oversight of NSA is not – October 8, 2013
Apple’s iPhone 5s with Touch ID seen as protection against U.S. NSA – September 16, 2013
German government: Windows 8 contains U.S. NSA snooping back doors; too dangerous to use – August 23, 2013
Report: NSA can see 75% of U.S. Web traffic, can snare emails – August 21, 2013
NSA can read email, online chats, track Web browsing without warrant, documents leaked by Edward Snowden show – July 31, 2013
Momentum builds against U.S. government surveillance – July 29, 2013
U.S. House rejects effort to curb NSA surveillance powers, 205-217 – July 24, 2013
Obama administration scrambles to shut down imminent U.S. House vote to defund NSA spying – July 24, 2013
Obama administration demands master encryption keys from firms in order to conduct electronic surveillance against Internet users – July 24, 2013
Apple, Google, dozens of others push Obama administration to disclose U.S. surveillance requests – July 19, 2013
Secret court agrees to allow Yahoo to reveal its fight against U.S. government PRISM requests – July 16, 2013
How Microsoft handed U.S. NSA, FBI, CIA access to users’ encrypted video, audio, and text communications – July 11, 2013
DuckDuckGo search engine surges 33% in wake of PRISM scandal – June 20, 2013
Yahoo: Since December 2012, we have received up to 13,000 U.S. gov’t requests for customer data – June 18, 2013
Apple: Since December 2012, we have received U.S. gov’t requests for customer data for up to 10,000 accounts – June 17, 2013
Nine companies, including Apple, tied to PRISM, Obama to be smacked with class-action lawsuit – June 12, 2013
U.S. lawmakers urge review of ‘Prism’ domestic spying, Patriot Act – June 10, 2013
PRISM: Do Apple, Google, Facebook have an ethical obligation not to spy on users? – June 8, 2013
Plausible deniability: The strange and unbelievable similarities in the Apple, Google, and Facebook PRISM denials – June 7, 2013
Google’s Larry Page on government eavesdropping: ‘We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday’ – June 7, 2013
Seecrypt app lets iPhone, Android users keep voice calls, text messages away from carriers, government eyes and ears – June 7, 2013
Obama administration defends PRISM data-collection as legal anti-terrorism tool – June 7, 2013
Facebook, Google, Yahoo join Apple in sort-of denying PRISM involvement – June 7, 2013
Report: Intelligence program gives U.S. government direct access to customer data on Apple servers; Apple denies – June 6, 2013
For decades US tech companies have been stealing the secrets for gross overpopulation and environment crippling pollution…busted!
Hang on China has long introduced population growth limiting policies (like them or not) and its religious motivated American politicians and others who have condemned them for it. As for pollution the US is still by far the biggest poluter per population size. So I am not sure you could be more hypocritical in that comment.
Some people have condemn China for their One Child Policy and they were not “religious motivated American politicians” or anyone religious. Many saw that this policy would not help them in the long run due to the disportanent rise in elderly and many young couples not having children until later or not all. Now about the US being a biggest polluter, where do you get that idea? If the US uses quite a bit of the earth’s resources it does not necessarily mean they are a polluter.
“Snowden’s revelations may cost U.S. companies billions of dollars”
Correction: The U.S. government’s corruption of U.S. companies’ products _will_ code U.S. companies billions of dollars. It is not Snowden’s fault the government was doing something immoral and illegal. And the spying will hurt our economy without actually making us safer. A government that has that kind of power becomes more dangerous to its citizens than the threats it is supposedly protecting them from.
Liberty IS security, not an enemy of security.
It should be the US that should be suing Korea for stealing secrets from our American companies. But our government is too busy messing around with things we shouldn’t be doing.
Also: Spying on Americans is up 1000% under Obama
The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.
In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years — and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
What had not been previously acknowledged is that the court in 2008 [DURING THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION] imposed an explicit ban — at the government’s request — on those kinds of searches, that officials in 2011 [DURING THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION] got the court to lift the bar and that the search authority has been used.
Together the permission to search and to keep data longer expanded the NSA’s authority in significant ways without public debate or any specific authority from Congress. The administration’s assurances rely on legalistic definitions of the term “target” that can be at odds with ordinary English usage. The enlarged authority is part of a fundamental shift in the government’s approach to surveillance: collecting first, and protecting Americans’ privacy later.
“The government says, ‘We’re not targeting U.S. persons,’ ” said Gregory T. Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “But then they never say, ‘We turn around and deliberately search for Americans’ records in what we took from the wire.’ That, to me, is not so different from targeting Americans at the outset.”
The court decision allowed the NSA “to query the vast majority” of its e-mail and phone call databases using the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of Americans and legal residents without a warrant, according to Bates’s opinion.
The queries must be “reasonably likely to yield foreign intelligence information.” And the results are subject to the NSA’s privacy rules.
The court in 2008 imposed a wholesale ban on such searches at the government’s request, said Alex Joel, civil liberties protection officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The government included this restriction “to remain consistent with NSA policies and procedures that NSA applied to other authorized collection activities,” he said.
But in 2011, to more rapidly and effectively identify relevant foreign intelligence communications, “we did ask the court” to lift the ban, ODNI general counsel Robert S. Litt said in an interview. “We wanted to be able to do it,” he said, referring to the searching of Americans’ communications without a warrant.
Joel gave hypothetical examples of why the authority was needed, such as when the NSA learns of a rapidly developing terrorist plot and suspects that a U.S. person may be a conspirator. Searching for communications to, from or about that person can help assess that person’s involvement and whether he is in touch with terrorists who are surveillance targets, he said. Officials would not say how many searches have been conducted.
The court’s expansion of authority went largely unnoticed when the opinion was released, but it formed the basis for cryptic warnings last year by a pair of Democratic senators, Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Mark Udall (Colo.), that the administration had a “back-door search loophole” that enabled the NSA to scour intercepted communications for those of Americans. They introduced legislation to require a warrant, but they were barred by classification rules from disclosing the court’s authorization or whether the NSA was already conducting such searches.
“The [surveillance] Court documents declassified recently show that in late 2011 the court authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless searches of individual Americans’ communications using an authority intended to target only foreigners,” Wyden said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Our intelligence agencies need the authority to target the communications of foreigners, but for government agencies to deliberately read the e-mails or listen to the phone calls of individual Americans, the Constitution requires a warrant.”
Source: The Washington Post, September 07, 2013
And, by the way, in case anybody doesn’t already know, the straw man argument that “both parties are the same” is an old-time political play that attempts to tar the opposition with the mistakes and sins of the party in power.
Both parties most certainly are not the same, not at all. Conservatism is quite distinct from the failed policies of the progressives. Even a RINO is significantly different from a Blue Dog Democrat.
Conservatives believe in limited government and personal responsibility – which also means personal freedom. Conservatives also do not trade five murderous Al-Qaeda prisoners for one traitorous deserter. This is becasue Democrat presidents are uniformly (Carter (lost fool), Clinton (horny loose cannon), Obama (LOL!)) inexperienced neophytes who are out of their league. Two small-state governors and a “community organizer” do not add up to one real U.S President.
Progressives (Liberals, Democrat party) believe that government, in all of its corrupted, bloated, bureaucratic majesty can actually solve more problems that it creates despite reams of historical (and current) evidence to the contrary. (The Progs will now contemplate coming out of the woodwork with their shopworn tales of federal highway systems and national parks as if this justifies placing federal bureaucrats between you and your doctor with the IRS forcing you to pay up or else).
Remember this post when you vote. It matters.
Remember also: Experience matters. Character matters.
Be sure to thank your buddy George W Bush for putting it into law.
Spying on Americans is up 1000% under Obama
For it to have increase by a percentage surely that means it happened before? It may have gone up, but don’t pretend that it was solely because Obama alone wanted to spy on everyone and that it would have probably happened regardless of who was in office. I’m not giving him a free pass, but just yelling his name seems pointless.
Non-partisan scholars all agree that the erosion of privacy in this country was massively increased under Bush following 9-11. All western governments now spy on the entire world, including on their own people. To suggest that US domestic programs have increased “1000% under Obama” is hyperbole at best or a downright lie at worst. But what do you expect from F2014?
Spying on Americans is NOT up 1000% under Obama. Requests for business records under ONE single aspect of the Patriot Act is up 1000% from four years ago (up to 212 requests made to the court). That is nowhere near the same as your global statement that spying on Americans is up 1000% under Obama.
Try looking at what happened under Bush: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/politics/20fbi.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
With Ashcroft as AG, the FBI spied on such dangerous organizations as Vegan Community projects, Catholic workers, and a group planning a protest against the use of Llama fur.
From 2002: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB102278543587978080
In other words, just more FUD from the wild eyed and delusional First 2014.
Left and Right wingers are tearing our country apart! The media, and the left and right hard liners have succeeded in creating government stagnation and paralysis. Instead of both sides working together to fix our problems, both sides are only interested in their team (party) winning.
Every time I hear one of you radicals from ether the right or left spout your decisive comments regarding Obama or Bush or the other side I hear someone who is clearly an enemy of the United States, a turn coat against our country.
Our only hope is to work together, and get back to work!
Bergdahl.
Baloney. There have ALWAYS been those on the far left and those on the far right, and they have ALWAYS clashed, and the rhetoric was much more personal and attacking than it is today.
Bush put laws like the Patriot Act in place, but Obama has renewed and expanded them. Both are to blame for enabling our government to spy on us almost without limits.
The problem is NOT the people on the far right or the far left, it is the fact that rich people of all political persuasions have used their money to dupe Americans into only voting for the “centrists” who actually serve the oligarchy. We don’t have a representative government anymore. Both parties have sold out the people to benefit their plutocratic paymasters.
WASHINGTON — Minutes before a midnight deadline, President Barack Obama signed into law a four-year extension of post-Sept. 11 powers to search records and conduct roving wiretaps in pursuit of terrorists.
“It’s an important tool for us to continue dealing with an ongoing terrorist threat,” Obama said Friday after a meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Congress bumped up against the deadline mainly because of the stubborn resistance from a single senator, Republican freshman Rand Paul of Kentucky, who saw the terrorist-hunting powers as an abuse of privacy rights. Paul held up the final vote for several days while he demanded a chance to change the bill to diminish the government’s ability to monitor individual actions.
Are you forgetting about 2003’s Patriot Act? This has been going on for more than a decade…maybe even longer. I’m no fan of Chairman Maobama (Jesse Ventura 2016!) but this is ridiculous! Give credit where credit is due! This all began as early as the late 80s, and has gotten more stronger under Clinton. Remember that “New World Order” speech from the early 90s? Look at the bigger picture!
Spying on Americans is up 1000% under Obama
Are wild-eyed Libs so delusional that they cannot even read and comprehend simple sentences, much less read the NBC News article to which they are linked?
Where were you when the Patriot Act was passed? You seem so angry about this when it began a decade ago? Are you seriously just seeing this happen now? I’m no fan of Obama either, but at least I am open-minded enough to know the TRUTH when it stares me in the face. Patriot Act. 2003. A decade long. Think about it.
I opposed the Patriot Act as an overreactive overreach then, as now.
Again: Spying on Americans is up 1000% under your beloved savior (LOL!) Obama
Obama isn’t my beloved anything. All you had to say was “I opposed the Patriot Act.” That’s all. Besides, I don’t like either party, I identify as an Independent. Thanks for the show of faith, though. It’s nice to see that anyone who isn’t a Republican is automatically a Democrat. Nice way to divide up the “United” States.
What is the context for this 1000%? You’ve already admitted it started before him, do you honestly think they wouldn’t have tried to push the boundaries and increase it regardless of who was in office?
Both democrats and republicans clearly and evidently worked to build a spy state. And your response is to this injustice is completely, 1000% partisan, and blame everything on just democrats? Surely, you must be smart enough to realize how incredibly stupid that is. They are both to blame, it’s obvious, and you know it.
Your type of partisan bickering is a distraction – correction, it’s THE distraction – both of these political parties use to get away with their crimes. You are playing their game by their rules when you blame everything on one party and not the other, perpetuating the status quo that led to this secret spy state.
Bergdahl.
I assume you are writing just the name, and not stating any opinions, facts, or even complete sentences, because we can infer exactly what your thoughts are on this controversial figure by referring to this week’s republican talking points.
I think he was probably a traitor, but I wasn’t there and don’t really know what went on, much less what I would have done in his place in Afghanistan. Glad he finally made it out of there.
In 2010 Obama and the Democrats OWNED the US Government. . . and had sufficient votes in BOTH the House of Representatives and Senate to pass anything they desired. The Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act, also called Obamacare, without a single Republican’s input or vote. They despised the Patriot Act then as well as now. The Democrats could have repealed it then. Take a look at the list of Democrats who voted FOR it in 2003. . . then review their speeches on the floor demanding its passage.
You blame Obama, but this is not an Obama or Presidential problem. This is a problem that is akin to cancer, and at the moment there’s nothing we can do about it.
Just like Putin and Russia’s army, the NSA can indicate they are stepping back, but in reality they are doing the same thing, from one government to the next.
They can’t stop, because information is addictive.
Just you wait, when we hit the digital singularity, where all these systems are automated, and we can’t turn them off.
China pretends to be indignant over alleged spying on their data, and yet (as the last sentence of the MDN synopsis shows), China has been spying on and blatantly committing egregious theft of IP, blatant theft and disregard for copyrights and patents for DECADES.
Snowden is an idealist idiot that has done more harm to the US than any other traitor in our history.
Is anyone actually naive enough to believe that the US was the only “first world” country doing that sort of surveillance? No, we’re just the only one with a traitor who released the data.
How does the saying go? For Russia and China…
IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE. All they are doing is calling out “farts” – a very childish thing…
What Chinese secrets are worth stealing?!? The ones where they produced products amazingly similar to Apple and others after the Chinese stole their IP and RnD?
http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/chinas-copycat-culture/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
http://www.economicespionage.com/WSJ.htm
http://chipdesignmag.com/display.php?articleId=1447
http://www.techinasia.com/tag/ip-theft/
http://www.chinalawblog.com/2011/08/china_ip_fakes_and_innovation_is_it_really_this_bad.html
These are not relevant. This is just a reaction of US high profile criticism of China activities in the South China Sea.
Nice job China, trying to distract the world from the 25th anniversary of the Tiannanmen Square massacres.
Pretty stupid to go after Apple here. Their government will lose credibility even among their own population for this.
“…Snowden’s revelations may cost U.S. companies billions of dollars…”
To be accurate, it’s the NSA’s illegal mass surveilence programs that are to blame — not the revelation of the programs by Snowden.
Absolute crap! Snowden opened up a floodgate of information that never should have been open to the public that had nothing to do with the NSA’s controversial phone data collection activities.
It’s not just what Snowden did but how he did it that makes his leaks so incredibly damaging to the US. It just gives the bullshit Chinese Communist party an excuse to divert attention away things they don’t want their ignorant public to know or remember.
Completely agree. And not just damaging to the US but to all western democratic allies of the US. Snowden is a treasonous SOB and I hope he gets what treason deserves.
As mossman said, today is the 25th anniversary of the big massacre of Chinese student protesters by the military in Beijing’s Tiannanmen Square. The whole world knows very well about this, except for the Chinese. The vigorous suppression of any information related to it has resulted in people younger than 30 being completely oblivious to those events, as well as imagery from it (students standing in front of rolling tanks in the main square).
Confused the masses by diverting the blame on the incident away from the root cause. Snowden only highlighted the rot (messenger) created by individuals (anti-american) in the government and have forgotten what it means to be free in America the land of the free or supposed to be the land of the free.
Only idiots would argue around political lines. The root cause is by unelected individuals in power no matter who is the president or which party is in control.
Snowden – Is a pawn… The CIA is using Snowden to attack the NSA, the NSA is overreaching, spying on “EVERYONE,” including our own government.
However, I believe information release by Snowden is both factual and false. Why? because he did not collect it himself. He had help and was given the information, so it’s peppered.
Does the NSA have fiber taps at our phone companies? I believe it’s true. Does the NSA have unfettered access to Apple, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc? No I don’t believe this to be true. However I do believe they are watching the global backbone – So is Russia, China, Israel, Germany, UK (Canada, Australia, USA – are working together)
The poor ISP that shuttered it’s doors to protect Snowden is a casualty of both global digital warfare, and US interagency infighting.
China – for it’s part is spewing panty wad rhetoric for it’s own internal political reasons.
China sees the world through its own rules, because it controls the game even if its companies are technically privately owned it believes that the West is no better and snow den just backs up that perception. Fact is though this is retaliation to the Wests claims of Chinese technological spying and the accusations after the long phoney war against its citizens. It will as it (and Communist regimes generally) always has done and mirror similar accusations back. A certain irony that it copies in this regard just as it does in the technology itself.
One also have to accept that the US technological revolution after the war heavily resulted from confiscated German and freely given British technology taken under lend lease agreements which combined with the parlous state of previously competing countries formed the core of the massive US advance this past 70 years.
That said I think it very short sighted to have encouraged China to increasingly take over the mantle of technology manufacturer to the World. But then thats the nature of unfettered Capitalism and we will really reap the whirlwind when they no longer need our markets and don’t even have to give lip service to legality.
Obomber had best fix this and do the right thing by US firms else face a trade war.
Yeah, Massa Oblahblah gonna fix it real good, yessir!
Obama is America’s just punishment for “Affirmative Action.”
Like they needed an excuse to ban American companies now that they have already robbed them through their own cyber attacks.
Should be fun watching their economy collapse when people stop buying from them.
All these US companies spent millions building, outsourcing, hiring in China. The are now getting what they deserve.
Uh… Chinese know about Tienanmen square, what kind of propaganda are they feeding you in the US?
Funny how a country that is know for copying, stealling, and pretty much making fakes is accusing software companies of stealing secrets. Kettle calling the pot black