A Chinese major general has called for a new national body to enforce Internet controls, while China faced fresh claims yesterday about the source of hacking attacks that hit search giant Google.
People’s Liberation Army Major General Huang Yongyin 黃永垠 said China needed to keep pace with the efforts of other big powers to fight online infiltration and attacks.
“For national security, the Internet has already become a new battlefield without gunpowder,” Huang wrote in this month’s issue of Chinese Cadres Tribune, a magazine published by the Chinese Communist Party’s influential Central Party School.
Google threatened to pull out of China last month over complaints of censorship and sophisticated hacking from within China.
Huang’s comments appeared after Western media reports said a vocational school whose graduates include military recruits was one source of the hacker attack on Google. The reports said the author of spyware used in the assault had government ties.
US government analysts believe the program’s creator is a Chinese security consultant in his 30s who posted parts of the code on a hacker forum and described it as something he was “working on,” the Financial Times reported yesterday.
He works as a freelancer and did not launch the attack, but Chinese officials had “special access” to his programming, the paper said, quoting a single, unnamed government researcher.
“If he wants to do the research he’s good at, he has to toe the line now and again,” the researcher was quoted as saying.
Huang’s comments underscore the influential currents within the Chinese government that see the Internet as a key security concern.
“Lawless elements and hostile forces at home and abroad have increasingly turned to the Internet to engage in crime, disruption, infiltration, reactionary propaganda and other sabotage activities,” wrote Huang, who appears to play no direct role in China’s online policy.
The magazine was dated Feb. 6, but was delivered to subscribers yesterday.
The government needs to surmount the fragmented control of the Internet to confront these problems, preferably with a national administrative system, Huang said.
His concerns are matched by worries overseas about attacks from within China.
The Financial Times report quoted unidentified sources backing an earlier claim in the New York Times (NYT) that analysts had traced the online attacks to two Chinese colleges, Jiaotong University in Shanghai and the Lanxiang Vocational School.
The two schools have denied the reports. However, since the NYT report the Lanxiang school in Shandong Province has reported a spike in enrolment inquiries.
“We have been receiving phone calls from all over the country asking about our computer science program, which is one of the most popular programs in our school,” an unnamed recruitment teacher told the state-run Global Times.
A woman in the school’s enrolment office, when asked by reporters whether the number of inquiries had spiked in recent days since the report, said “yes,” but declined further comment.
In other Internet news, Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) has set up a microblogging account that has drawn thousands of followers as of yesterday.
The account was set up on a microblogging platform operated by the People’s Daily.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS