US government officials and America’s European allies need to put more pressure on their Chinese counterparts to stop a “pervasive” cyber-espionage campaign and cybercrime targeting American companies, US Republican Mike Rogers said yesterday.
And Rogers, chairman of the US House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence also inisted “our allies in Europe and Asia have an obligation to confront Beijing.”
Espionage sponsored by the Chinese government has resulted in “brazen and wide-scale theft of intellectual property of foreign commercial competitors,” continued the Michigan Republican.
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Who’s reading your email, besides you? If you send it from work, it’s probably your boss or some rogue tech admin. If you send it from home, it may be your spouse, your kids, or your nosy neighbors. (I told you not to write your password on a Post-it note and leave your Wi-Fi router open.) From an Internet café? Probably some slacker with a goatee, unless you remembered to log out first and/or encrypt your connection.
And if you send or receive email from any of those places, your Uncle may also be reading it — you know, the guy with the top hat, the snowy beard, and the fondness for red-white-and-blue ensembles? Him.
That goes double if you work for companies the U.S. government has a keen interest in, such as Wikipedia or the Tor Project. Jacob Applebaum works for both — as a volunteer for the notorious whistle-blowing operation and as a developer for Tor, a technology that anonymizes communications across the Web and is used by WikiLeaks leakers, as well as dissidents in repressive regimes around the globe.
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THE Victorian Ombudsman has admitted he is unable to determine whether the Office of Police Integrity was justified in bugging the phones of former police deputy commissioner Ken Jones, concluding that no agency has the power to properly scrutinise its use of telephone intercepts.
Ombudsman George Brouwer yesterday confirmed that the OPI investigated an allegation of serious misconduct against Sir Ken and placed him under surveillance.
Mr Brouwer, who was the inaugural director of the OPI before his appointment as Ombudsman, said all details of the surveillance, including use of any telephone intercepts, were “blacked out” from documents passed to his office by the OPI, and that he had to rely on media reports to conduct his investigation.
He said he was informed by the OPI that the heavy redaction of surveillance documents was required by federal law.
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The Victorian government has backtracked on claims it would directly brief the new phone bugging and surveillance watchdog.
The minister responsible for the establishment of an anti-corruption commission, Andrew McIntosh, introduced a bill into parliament on Thursday to establish a body called the Public Interest Monitor (PIM).
The PIM will be made up of lawyers registered to appear in courts and tribunals to test the merits of applications from Victoria Police, the Office of Police Integrity (OPI) and the yet to be established Independent Broadbased Anti-Corruption Commission for permission use phone bugging and surveillance devices during investigations.
Mr McIntosh told reporters it would be the state government, probably himself, who would brief the PIMs.
“It will probably be, no doubt, the minister responsible for the establishment of the anti-corruption commission or it may be the department,” he told reporters.
“But the reality is, you know, it will be the government that will do the briefing of the person to appear on behalf of the public interest.”
Later, after the opposition accused him of politicising the new body, Mr McIntosh told parliament he had made a mistake during the heated press conference.
“The Public Interest Monitor will be completely independent of government,” he said.
“The fact is there will be no briefing … there will be absolutely no input from the government agency, minister or department whatsoever.”
Opposition anti-corruption commission spokeswoman Jill Hennessy seized on Mr McIntosh’s gaffe.
“We have to remember so-called independent bodies may indeed have to investigate their masters, that is the government,” she told reporters.
“It’s quite extraordinary for a minister to suggest that it would be he who would be issuing the instructions to a so-called independent body.”
A spokesman for Mr McIntosh said PIMs would have access to documents presented to the court or tribunal by the police or integrity body in their application.
They will be bound by confidentiality rules and could be jailed for a year for breaching those obligations.
Mr McIntosh rejected suggestions the government did not trust judges to properly take into account the public interest when deciding whether or not to grant phone tap and surveillance device warrant applications.
But he said none of the 424 applications made by Victoria Police and the OPI for telephone intercept warrants were rejected in 2009-10, and only two of 141 applications for surveillance device warrants were knocked back.
Mr McIntosh continued to refuse to reveal when he expected the IBAC would be operational, only saying the legislation would be introduced into parliament before Christmas.
Before winning office, the Baillieu government promised the IBAC would be operational by July this year.
A day after a top American lawmaker accused China of exercising “an intolerable level” of espionage in the U.S., Russia’s spy service announced it has detained a Chinese national for allegedly attempting to steal secrets about a Russian missile system.
While the accusations out of the U.S. primarily refer to cyber intrusions of American corporations, the Russian government is accusing China of an old standby in the tradecraft playbook: outright bribery.
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