Snowden Claims US Has Been Hacking China, Hong Kong For Years

Edward Snowden, the man credited with the recent leaks about NSA‘s PRISM program, is currently in Hong Kong. In a recent interview given to a Chinese paper, he has claimed that US government and its agencies have been hacking into computers in Hong Kong and China for many years.


Edward Snowden

Currently, Snowden is in Hong Kong. The US government is extremely trying to take him to its custody from Hong Kong as soon as possible. On the other side, China also holds some authority over Hong Kong. So taking Snowden in its custody would not be that much simple for the US.

Elaborating on the hacking attempts by US, Snowden stated that NSA has been targeting the systems of Chinese University, its students and the businesses located in the country. According to him, NSA currently operates more than 61,000 hacking programs worldwide and of these, hundreds are geared towards Hong Kong and China.

In his own words, “We hack network backbones – like huge internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one.”

Whereas these revelations may seem shocking at first sight, the fact remains that both US and China have been indulging in sophisticated cyber-espionage attempts against each other since years. While Chinese hackers are often able to steal industrial and military designs from US-based organizations, Snowden’s claims show that US intelligence agencies are equally proactive in hacking Chinese computers.

Snowden also talked about his decision to stay at Hong Kong, citing that he didn’t come to Hong Kong to hide and knew that he will have to face persecution from the US government over his decision to state the truth.

Source: SCMP

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Salman

Salman Latif is a software engineer with a specific interest in social media, big data and real-world solutions using the two.Other than that, he is a bit of a gypsy. He also writes in his own blog. You can find him on Google+ and Twitter .

This Post Has One Comment

  1. Tsais

    You don’t need to have worked for the NSA or any other group of spooks to know they’ve been hacking China, Russia, Iran and just about everybody else.

    The U.S. government is on a full blown economic and electronic war agenda against the rest of the world.

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