Berlin, March 23 (QNA) – The US National Security Agency spied on the leaders of China as well as Chinese banks and the telecommunications giant Huawei, German news magazine (Spiegel) reported Saturday in its online edition.
Former Chinese president Hu Jintao was among those targeted, according to Spiegel Online, which said its source for the information was documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The foreign and trade ministries in Beijing also were spied on by the NSA, according to Spiegel.
German news agency (DPA) said that the documents show that the NSA put an especially large amount effort into an operation that started in 2009 targeting Huawei, the world’s second-largest supplier of telecommunications networking equipment and a major competitor to the US company Cisco.
A special unit of the NSA managed to infiltrate about 100 locations on Huawei’s network and copy internal documents, the report said.
This included a list of more than 1,400 customers and documents outlining training procedures for engineers who use Huawei products.
This gave the NSA access not only to an email archive, but also to individual products’ secret source code – the most closely guarded intellectual property computer companies hold.
One of the internal documents quoted in the report indicated that NSA had so much data it didn’t know what to do with all of it.
In an email response, the NSA said it doesn’t comment on specific, alleged foreign intelligence activities, but reiterated that NSA’s activities are focused and deployed against "valid foreign intelligence targets."
The email also said the NSA doesn’t use foreign intelligence capabilities to steal trade secrets from foreign companies on behalf of US companies.
Spiegel said the NSA justified its probing of Huawei by saying many of its targets communicate over Huawei products and this meant it had to keep up with the latest technology. In addition there has been concern that China could use widely distributed networking infrastructure products made by Huawei for espionage purposes.
Whether the NSA found proof of that hypothesis was unclear. The NSA mission is part of a digital offensive the United States has mounted against China, the magazine said. The two countries increasingly have been wrangling over dominance of the internet. In the past the US repeatedly branded China as the source of hacker attacks and espionage activity.
In its email response, the NSA further said it used an "overlay of law, regulation, policy, procedure, technical safeguards, training, culture and ethos" in governing how NSA deploys foreign intelligence techniques to help defend the nation.
Without naming Snowden, it said revealing specific techniques and tools used by NSA to pursue legitimate foreign intelligence targets is detrimental to the security of the United States and its allies and places at risk the people the NSA is sworn to protect. (QNA)
AMA,LY
QNA 0526 GMT 2014/03/23
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.