U.S. Is a ‘Hacker Empire,\' Says Chinese Military Analyst

BEIJING - For more than an hour Wednesday morning, a Chinese military analyst excoriated the United States over what state-run media here calls “Prismgate”  - the revelations of National Security Agency surveillance by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A contractor.

Speaking in a Q&A with Xinhua, the state-run news agency, Wang Changqin, whom Xinhua described only as a “military expert” but elsewhere is identified as a professor at the Academy of Military Science of the People's Liberation Army of China, called the U.S. a “hacker empire.”

America stole people's secrets, including economic secrets, he said.

“America has many faces,” Mr. Wang said, in comments that were often colorful and colloquial, perhaps reflecting the fact they were likely aimed for consumption by millions of ordinary Chinese.

< p>It played many roles, including as protector of Internet freedoms and symbol of online morality and security, he said. But, “as common folk here say, no matter how often you ‘play a role,' eventually the stuffing comes out,” he said. “Prismgate has shown us America's stuffing.”

“Before, for a variety of reasons, we never had sufficient evidence. But now we have the evidence and everyone knows more than ever: it's not that other people are ‘harming' it,” the U.S., “but that it is ‘harming other people. Especially China,” said Mr. Wang.

He accused U.S. companies of using the fruits of the surveillance to make economic profit, and said, in a speech laced with moral admonition: “Persisting in evil brings about one's own destruction.”

“This hegemony clearly violates human fairness, justice and the innate sense of right and wrong,” he said. “If America doesn't learn lessons from this, stop its hegemonic behavior and truly return to a harmonious way of dealing with the people of the world, get onto the path of cooperation and win-win, in the end it will ‘drop a rock on its own feet,'” he said, using a proverb. “When you fall on the road of no return that is ‘becoming an empire,' you can't get up again.”

Mr. Wang said there were about 1,000 military and civilian online hackers mining China's secrets at the N.S.A's secretive eavesdropping organization, the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. Earlier this month, Foreign Policy magazine reported the office had “successfully penetrated Chinese computer and telecommunications systems for almost 15 years, generating some of the best and most reliable intelligence information about what is going on inside the People's Republic of China.”

Mr. Wang is not a ranking state official, but his workplace â€" th e country's top military academy in Beijing â€" and the venue of the comments made them noteworthy.

A drumbeat of criticism had been growing earlier this year in the U.S. that China was hacking its military and commercial secrets, including this one in the New York Times that cited three authors of a new book, who do research for the U.S. government, saying it amounted to a campaign of industrial espionage aimed at leapfrogging development and overtaking the West with legally or illegally procured technology.

It was notable that Mr. Wang hit back at the allegations very early in the session, which lasted a little over one hour and was posted live on Xinhua.

“Under the influence of its propaganda, a lot of people believed: China's development wasn't just reliant on ‘hard work,' ‘resourcefulness' and ‘doing one's utmost'†, he said. “Envious and jealous, they inferred that China must have used many ‘crooked roads and paths', the so-called ‘original sin' theory.”

“So ‘framing' China had the biggest audience. As for the complaints, they used their technology and superior media to cause a bit of noise from time to time: hey my Web site has been attacked, hey that Website has been attacked. Yelling around in that way, yelling that it was a lot, going on a long time, turning up the volume, people who didn't know easily believed it. Not long ago they shouted: the People's Liberation Army hacked us. And that time it wasn't just subordinates who yelled it but the ‘big boss,' Obama, who yelled along, even said, this is ‘stealing America's property',” he said.

“This time, everyone understands: in the end they were yelling themselves hoarse to cover their own thievery!” By tapping in to China's text message networks and the systems backbone at Tsinghua University, one of the country's biggest, as Mr. Snowden alleged in his leaks, “how much Chinese property did they steal!” “America is slipping from being a ‘hacker empire' to being a stealing money empire,” he said.

China had to protect itself by strengthening its own online security, he said.

Earlier in June, not long after Mr. Snowden's allegations became public, James Mulvenon, a vice president at Defense Group Inc., a technology company in the Washington D.C. area, said U.S. firms did not use information gleaned from surveillance operations against terrorist threats for their commercial advantage, because, among other reasons, and speaking only on a practical level, “they would not know how to distribute the spoils fairly.”

In an email, Mr. Mulvenon said, “most of the countries we deal with have single, state-affiliated ‘national champions' in each sector, so it is easy for their intel services to provide commercial secrets to them.”

“By co ntrast, the USG faces the prospect of anti-trust lawsuits from the private sector companies that did NOT receive the goods. For example, if the USG stole Huawei's LTE technology, who would they give it to? Cisco? Juniper? Both? What about startups in the 4G sector? Because of this problem, they don't steal commercial secrets for anyone. Of course, the Chinese do not believe us when we tell them this, since the U.S. is the only country in the world with these kind of scruples, but there it is,” said Mr. Mulvenon.