Tue, Feb 23, 2010 page1

• PLA officer calls for new agency to control Internet

  DOMESTIC CONTENT An article in the latest edition of ‘Chinese Cadres Tribune’ magazine calls the Internet ‘a new battlefield without gunpower’

  • / REUTERS AND AFP
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  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.
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