紐約時報昨天根據從WikiLeaks得到的美國國務院外交文件發表文章,認為文件顯示,2009年對穀歌的網絡攻擊可能來自政治局高層人物的指令.
下麵是該文章的摘錄(所加小標題為便於閱讀):
The May 18, 2009, cable, titled “Google China
Paying Price for Resisting Censorship,” quoted a well-placed source as saying
that Li Changchun, a member of China’s top ruling body, the Politburo Standing
Committee, and the country’s senior propaganda official, was taken aback to
discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google’s main
international Web site. When Mr. Li typed his name into the search engine at google.com, he found
“results critical of him.”
That cable from American diplomats was one of
many made public by WikiLeaks that portray China’s leadership as nearly obsessed with the threat
posed by the Internet to their grip on power — and, the reverse, by the opportunities
it offered them, through hacking, to obtain secrets stored in computers of its
rivals, especially the United States.
Extensive hacking operations suspected of
originating in China , including one leveled at Google, are a central theme in
the cables. The operations began earlier and were aimed at a wider array of
American government and military data than generally known, including on the
computers of United States diplomats involved in climate change talks with China .
關於穀歌受到的黑客攻擊
“One cable, dated early this year, quoted a
Chinese person with family connections to the elite as saying that Mr. Li
himself directed an attack on Google’s servers in the United States , though
that claim has been called into question. In an interview with The New York
Times, the person cited in the cable said that Mr. Li personally oversaw a campaign
against Google’s operations in China but the person did not know who directed
the hacking attack.
The cables catalog the heavy pressure that was
placed on Google to comply with local censorship laws, as well as Google’s
willingness to comply — up to a point. That coercion began building years
before the company finally decided to pull its search engine out of China last
spring in the wake of the successful hacking attack on its home servers, which
yielded Chinese dissidents’ e-mail accounts as well as Google’s proprietary
source code.
The demands on Google went well beyond removing
material on subjects like the Dalai Lama or the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Chinese officials also put
pressure on the United States government to censor the Google Earth satellite
imaging service by lowering the resolution of images of Chinese government
facilities, warning that Washington could be held responsible if terrorists
used that information to attack government or military facilities, the cables
show. An American diplomat replied that Google was a private company and that
he would report the request to Washington but that he had no sense about how
the government would act.
But the cables also appear to contain some
suppositions by Chinese and Americans passed along by diplomats. For example,
the cable dated earlier this year referring to the hacking attack on Google
said: “A well-placed contact claims that the Chinese government coordinated the
recent intrusions of Google systems. According to our contact, the closely held
operations were directed at the Politburo Standing Committee level.” ”
“The cable goes on to quote this person as
saying that the hacking of Google “had been coordinated out of the State
Council Information Office with the oversight” of Mr. Li and another Politburo
member, Zhou Yongkang.”Mr. Zhou is China ’s top security official.
But the person cited in the cable gave a
divergent account. He detailed a campaign to press Google coordinated by the
Propaganda Department’s director,Liu Yunshan. Mr. Li and Mr. Zhou
issued approvals in several instances, he said, but he had no direct knowledge
linking them to the hacking attack aimed at securing commercial secrets or
dissidents’ e-mail accounts — considered the purview of security officials.”
關於穀歌的反應
Even as such attacks were occurring, Google made
a corporate decision in 2006, controversial even within the company, to establish
a domestic Chinese version of its search engine, called google.cn. In doing
so, it agreed to comply with China ’s censorship laws.
But despite that concession, Chinese officials
were never comfortable with Google, the cables and interviews show.
The Chinese claimed that Google Earth, the
company’s satellite mapping software, offered detailed “images of China’s
military, nuclear, space, energy and other sensitive government agency
installations” that would be an asset to terrorists. A cable sent on Nov. 7,
2006, reported that Liu Jieyi, an assistant minister of foreign affairs, warned
the American Embassy in Beijing that there would be “grave consequences” if
terrorists exploited the imagery.
A year later, another cable pointed out that
Google searches for politically delicate terms would sometimes be automatically
redirected to Baidu, the Chinese
company that was Google’s main competitor in China . Baidu is known for
scrubbing its own search engine of results that might be unwelcome to
government censors.
Google conducted numerous negotiations with
officials in the State Council Information Office and other departments
involved in censorship, propaganda and media licensing, the cables show. The
May 18, 2009, cable that revealed pressure on the company by Mr. Li, the
propaganda chief, said Google had taken some measures “to try and placate the
government.” The cable also noted that Google had asked the American government
to intervene with China on its behalf.
But Chinese officials became alarmed that Google
still did less than its Chinese rivals to remove material Chinese officials
considered offensive. Such material included information about Chinese
dissidents and human rights issues, but also about central and provincial
Chinese leaders and their children — considered an especially taboo topic,
interviews with people quoted in the cables reveal.
Mr. Li, after apparently searching for
information online on himself and his children, was reported to have stepped up
pressure on Google. He also took steps to punish Google commercially, according
to the May 18 cable.
The propaganda chief ordered three big
state-owned Chinese telecommunications companies to stop doing business with
Google. Mr. Li also demanded that Google executives remove any link between its
sanitized Chinese Web site and its main international one, which he deemed “an
illegal site,” the cable said.
Google ultimately stopped complying with
repeated censorship requests. It stopped offering a censored version of its
search engine in China earlier this year, citing both the hacking attacks and
its unwillingness to continue obeying censorship orders.
中國官方對網絡控製的看法
Yet despite the hints of paranoia that appear in
some cables, there are also clear signs that Chinese leaders do not consider
the Internet an unstoppable force for openness and democracy, as some Americans
believe.
In fact, this spring, around the time of the
Google pullout, China ’s State Council Information Office delivered a
triumphant report to the leadership on its work to regulate traffic online,
according to a crucial Chinese contact cited by the State Department in a cable
in early 2010, when contacted directly by The Times.
The message delivered by the office, the person
said, was that “in the past, a lot of officials worried that the Web could not
be controlled.”
“But through the Google incident and other
increased controls and surveillance, like real-name registration, they reached
a conclusion: the Web is fundamentally controllable,” the person said.
That confidence may also reflect what the cables
show are repeated and often successful hacking attacks from China on the United
States government, private enterprises and Western allies that began by 2002,
several years before such intrusions were widely reported in the United States
.
涉及西藏及南亞的國家的網絡攻擊
The cables also reveal that a surveillance
system dubbed Ghostnet that stole information from the computers used by the
exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and South Asian governments
and was uncovered in 2009 was linked to a second broad series of break-ins into
American government computers code-named Byzantine Hades. Government
investigators were able to make a “tenuous connection” between those break-ins
and the People’s Liberation Army.
涉及德國政府的網絡攻擊
The documents also reveal that in 2008 German
intelligence briefed American officials on similar attacks beginning in 2006
against the German government, including military, economic, science and
technology, commercial, diplomatic, and research and development targets. The
Germans described the attacks as preceding events like the German government’s
meetings with the Chinese government.
涉嫌網絡攻擊的起源-軍方背景?
“At least one previously unreported attack in
2008, code-named Byzantine Candor by American investigators, yielded more than
50 megabytes of e-mails and a complete list of user names and passwords from an
American government agency, a Nov. 3, 2008, cable revealed for the first time.
Precisely how these hacking attacks are
coordinated is not clear. Many appear to rely on Chinese freelancers and an
irregular army of “patriotic hackers” who operate with the support of civilian
or military authorities, but not directly under their day-to-day control, the
cables and interviews suggest.”
“Still, the cables provide a patchwork of detail
about cyberattacks that American officials believe originated in China with
either the assistance or knowledge of the Chinese military.
For example, in 2008 Chinese intruders based in
Shanghai and linked to the People’s Liberation Army used a computer document
labeled “salary increase — survey and forecast” as bait as part of the
sophisticated intrusion scheme that yielded more than 50 megabytes of e-mails
and a complete list of user names and passwords from a United States government
agency that was not identified.
The cables indicate that the American government
has been fighting a pitched battle with intruders who have been clearly
identified as using Chinese-language keyboards and physically located in China
. In most cases the intruders took great pains to conceal their identities, but
occasionally they let their guard down. In one case described in the documents,
investigators tracked one of the intruders who was surfing the Web in Taiwan
“for personal use.”
In June 2009 during climate change talks between
the United States and China , the secretary of state’s office sent a secret
cable warning about e-mail “spear phishing” attacks directed at five State
Department employees in the Division of Ocean Affairs of the Office of the
Special Envoy for Climate Change.
The messages, which purport to come from a
National Journal columnist, had the subject line “ China and Climate Change.” The
e-mail contained a PDF file that was intended to install a malicious software
program known as Poison Ivy, which was meant to give an intruder complete
control of the victim’s computer. That attack failed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/world/asia/05wikileaks-china.html?hp=&pagewanted=all
|