DarkGovernment

China Pissed Over U.S. Congressional Report

China had a less than happy reaction to a US congressional report that accused Beijing of developing sophisticated cyber warfare and militarising its space program. The annual China report to Congress of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission was aimed at misleading the public and impeding bilateral cooperation, foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said.

“The commission has all along seen China through dark glasses and has deliberately attacked China with slanderous accusations aimed at misleading public opinion and obstructing the development of Sino-US relations,” Qin said.

“The report is unworthy of rebuttal and the aims of the commission are doomed to failure,” he said in a statement on his ministry’s website.

The report issued in Washington Thursday accused China of developing a sophisticated cyber warfare program aimed at penetrating US computer networks to extract sensitive information.

“China has an active cyber espionage program,” the report said.

“China is targeting US government and commercial computers.”

The panel also criticized Beijing of exercising “heavy handed government control” over its economy and “continuing arms sales and military support to rogue regimes” such as Sudan, Myanmar and Iran.

The commission also issued a warning about China’s space program. “China continues to make significant progress in developing space capabilities, many of which easily translate to enhanced military capacity,” it said.

Qin urged the commission to stop issuing such reports and refrain from interfering in China’s internal affairs.

Tags: beijing, china, cyber war, cyber warfare, cyberwar, qin, space weapons, weapon, Weapons

Congress Warns of China’s Cyber Pursuits

China has developed a sophisticated cyber warfare program and stepped up its capacity to penetrate US computer networks to extract sensitive information, a US congressional panel warned on Thursday.”China has an active cyber espionage program,” the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission said in its annual report to the US Congress. “China is targeting US government and commercial computers.”

In its 393-page report, the panel also criticized Beijing for exercising “heavy-handed government control” over its economy and “continuing arms sales and military support to rogue regimes” such as Sudan, Myanmar and Iran.

The commission also issued a warning about China’s space program. “China continues to make significant progress in developing space capabilities, many of which easily translate to enhanced military capacity,” it said.

“Although some Chinese space programs have no explicit military intent, many space systems — such as communications, navigation, meteorological, and imagery systems — are dual use in nature,” the commission said.

The commission, which was established by Congress in 2000 to analyze the economic and national security relationship between the two nations, said China was investing heavily in cyber warfare.

“Since China’s current cyber operations capability is so advanced, it can engage in forms of cyber warfare so sophisticated that the United States may be unable to counteract or even detect the efforts,” the commission said.

It said Chinese hacker groups may be operating with government support.

“By some estimates, there are 250 hacker groups in China that are tolerated and may even be encouraged by the government to enter and disrupt computer networks,” the commission said.

It quoted Colonel Gary McAlum, chief of staff for the US Strategic Command’s Joint Task Force for Global Network Operations, as saying China has recognized the importance of cyber operations as a tool of warfare and “has the intent and capability to conduct cyber operations anywhere in the world at any time.”

“China is aggressively pursuing cyber warfare capabilities that may provide it with an asymmetric advantage against the United States,” the commission said. “In a conflict situation, this advantage would reduce current US conventional military dominance.”

The commission recalled that unclassified US military, government and government contractor websites and computer systems were the victims of cyber intrusions in 2002 codenamed “Titan Rain” and attributed to China.

And earlier this month The Financial Times, citing an unnamed senior US official, reported that Chinese hackers — possibly with backing by the Beijing government — had penetrated the White House computer network and obtained emails between government officials.

The commission made 45 recommendations to Congress including possible “additional funding for military, intelligence and homeland security programs that monitor and protect critical American computer networks.”

On the economic front, the commission said “China relies on heavy-handed government control over its economy to maintain an export advantage over other countries.”

“The result: China has amassed nearly two trillion dollars in foreign exchange and has increasingly used its hoard to manipulate currency trading and diplomatic relations with other nations,” it said.

“Rather than use this money for the benefit of its citizens — by funding pensions and erecting hospitals and schools, for example — China has been using the funds to seek political and economic influence over other nations,” said Larry Wortzel, chairman of the commission.

Beijing’s “continuing arms sales and military support to rogue regimes, namely Sudan, Burma, and Iran, threaten the stability of fragile regions and hinder US and international efforts to address international crises, such as the genocide in Darfur,” the commission added.

The commission acknowledged some progress by China, specifically its adherence to non-proliferation agreements and involvement in the six-party talks to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear weapons production capacity.

But it criticized China’s use of prison labor to produce goods for export and an “information control regime” that it said regulates the print and broadcast media, Internet, entertainment and education.

Full Report: 2008-annual-report-to-congress-concerning-china (PDF)

Tags: annual report, china, congress, cyber attack

Chinese Government Tortures Activists

A Human Rights Group Candidly accuses the Chinese Government of torturing certain political and activist prisoners in a lecture to the United Nations.

Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a coalition of lawyers, academics and activists from round the country, has grown in the shadows of state suppression in the last two years.

Its survival is a token of the courage of its members, who have been harassed, imprisoned and beaten as they take up difficult cases and attempt to promote legal reform.

“Twenty years after China ratified the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in 1988, all are routinely practiced by government personnel,” said the submission. It was just one of a number being put before a two-day hearing by the United Nations Committee Against Torture in Geneva.

It remains unclear whether the group’s survival so far is in spite of government attempts to target individual members, or because Beijing is bowing to international pressure to allow more space for home-grown activism.

Members are also careful to work within the letter of the Chinese law and constitution when promoting their causes.

A number of activists were arrested and jailed in advance of the Olympic Games, including some with links to the group such as Hu Jia, who was awarded the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought last month.

But some concessions made during the Games, such as the lifting of internet blocks on the websites of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in Beijing, have remained in place.

The submission by the Chinese Human Rights Defenders contradicts in numerous places the Chinese government’s own report to the UN committee. This denies allegations that there is widespread use of torture and illegal detention, saying occasional cases of ill-treatment are the work of individual “bad apples” who are rooted out and punished.

“The extremely few cases of torture found in detention facilities are personal law-breaking acts towards detainees by a few keepers who failed to perform their duties properly,” the government’s version said.

The human rights group said: “Except for some progress in the promulgation of legislation and administrative documents, China has made no clear and discernible improvement in prohibiting the use of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”

It went on to give detailed case studies of abuses including beatings, forced labour, detention in psychiatric hospitals and forced abortions.

Among the causes taken up by lawyers and others who are associated with the group are those of petitioners complaining to the government about forced eviction from their homes and land to make way for development.

Many of these have been detained in so-called “black jails” - hostels used as illegal detention centres in Beijing for those who stage anti-government protests, while officials and police from their homes provinces arrive to return them home.

The government also denied the existence of such jails in their submission to the UN committee, despite widespread documentation of their use.

The UN committee is also considering evidence of the treatment of those detained during and after the protests and violence that broke out across Tibet in March this year.

Tibet support groups have supplied evidence of shootings of protesters and deaths in custody of Tibetans. The Chinese government response makes no reference to such claims, and refers only to deaths during the violence of March 14, when 18 people were killed by Tibetan rioters in the capital, Lhasa.

The incidents were not “parades and demonstrations”, it said.

Tags: activists, china, human rights, prison, prisoners, torture

China Gets First Space Walk

The launch of China’s third manned space flight, the Shenzhou VII, with a crew of three “taikonauts” has been set for October, state media reported on Thursday.A short-list of six “taikonauts” or astronauts had already been selected for the flight and would be whittled down to a crew of three before the October launch, Xinhua news agency said, citing a spokesman for the mission.

“One member of the flight crew will undergo a space walk and undertake relevant scientific experiments,” the spokesman said.

The names of the taikonauts were not given, but Yang Liwei, China’s first man in space, had previously been reported to be a candidate for the flight.

No precise dates of the launch were given, but officials earlier had said it would take place in September or early October, following the August Beijing Olympic Games.

China successfully launched Yang into orbit in 2003, making it the third country after the former Soviet Union and the United States to put a man in space.

It sent two more astronauts into orbit in 2005 on a five-day mission.

It was not immediately clear how long the Shenzhou VII mission would last.

China’s manned space programme operates on a shoestring budget compared with the the United States and Russia.

But the government seeks to maximise the value of each new step into space, hailing it as proof of the nation’s emergence as a power in science and technology.

Tags: china, chinese, space walk

Huge Chinese Missile Base Discovered

A U.S.-based civilian researcher has uncovered a massive new Chinese missile base using commercial satellite images available over the Internet.

The missile base is located in Delingha in central China. Analysis of the GoogleEarth images show that the Chinese army Second Artillery Corps 812 Brigade has deployed nuclear tipped DF-4 and DF-21 missiles at the base.

“The region has long been rumored to house nuclear missiles and some details have emerged in recent years, but the new analysis reveals a significantly larger deployment area than previously known to the public, different types of launch pads, command and control facilities, and missile deployment equipment at a large facility in downtown Delingha,” stated Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists.

The missiles and the widely scattered 58 launch sites indicate that the main target of the nuclear force at Delingha is either Russia or India. The DF-4 and DF-21 missiles deployed at the base do not have the range to attack American targets in the pacific, Japan, or Taiwan.

The Chinese have set up missile launching sites along a 200 mile stretch of highway. The launching sites are to be used by the mobile DF-21 missiles. The DF-21 is a solid fuel, two stage missile based on the Chinese navy JL-1. The DF-21 has a range of 1,200 miles and carries a one megaton nuclear warhead.

Much like the SCUD missiles of the former Iraq, the DF-21 is a mobile system that is hard to track. The 15-ton, 35-foot-long DF-21s are delivered to each launch site on wheeled carriers called TELs — transporter-erector-launcher.

U.S. officials are concerned that the new launch sites could also be used by China to shoot down American satellites. China demonstrated its capability to shoot down satellites in 2007, destroying a former weather satellite using modified DF-21 missiles.

Indian officials expressed concern but noted that they have been monitoring the construction at the missile base for a number of years.

News of the new missile base comes only days after the discovery of a second Chinese underground sub base near Sanya, on Hainan Island off its southern coast. In December 2007 the Chinese navy moved its first Type 094 second-generation nuclear ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) to Sanya.

The new underground submarine base and the positioning of China’s most advanced sub at Sanya shows that China intends to control the South China Sea and the strategically vital straits in the area. Most of the oil for Taiwan, Japan and South Korea pass through the waters near the new base.

The Chinese military has also added a new capability to its missile forces, this time thanks to the U.S. government. A U.S. supercomputer like those used at research facilities such as Los Alamos National Laboratory will be used by the Chinese to operate a new generation of weather satellites.

There are military implications, however, for China’s use of this powerful Silicon Graphics Inc. computing capability. The advanced weather satellite system will be used heavily by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In particular, the Chinese missile force run by the Second Artillery will use the weather information to assist in firing their nuclear tipped weapons.

The new Chinese supercomputer is powered by 1,280 Intel Itanium 2 processor cores with 4 terabytes of shared memory. The U.S. made supercomputer ranks as the largest shared-memory computer in China and the fourth fastest in the country. The computing complex is based at the Chinese National Satellite Meteorological Center (NSMC) in Beijing.

The supercomputer, combined with the latest Chinese weather satellite, the Fengyun-3, will provide the Chinese military with accurate data to launch missiles. The lack of accurate weather data, in particular, predictions of high-altitude winds, has plagued the Chinese military missile forces for decades, forcing delays and in some cases, major failures due to wind sheers encountered by missile tests.

“China continues a systematic effort to obtain . . . through legal transactions dual-use and military technologies,” states the Pentagon’s 2008 report on China’s military power.

“Many dual-use technologies such as software, integrated circuits, computers, electronics and [security-related] information systems are vital for the PLA’s transformation into an information-based network-centric force,” noted the Pentagon report.

“The inherent dual-use nature of space technologies means that China’s improving space capabilities could be used against the U.S. military,” noted another 2008 report filed by the U.S. Army on Chinese space technology.

Tags: china, df-21, missile, nuclear, nuke, weapon, Weapons