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Pedro Gonçalves

France24 - Dalai Lama in US for meeting with Obama, angering China - 0 views

  • Defying anger from China, US President Barack Obama on Thursday meets Tibet's exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama who plans to seek his assistance in finding a solution in his homeland.
  • Beijing has opposed any meeting with the Dalai Lama, demanding that the United States reverse its "wrong decision" to "avoid any more damage to Sino-US relations."
  • The Obama administration not only refused to call off the meeting, but  announced that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would also see the Dalai Lama on Thursday at the State Department.
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  • Fending off domestic criticism, Obama did not meet with the Dalai Lama when he was in Washington last year in an apparent bid to set relations off on a good foot with China.     But Obama has since the start of the year gone ahead with decisions opposed by Beijing -- including approving a 6.4-billion-dollar arms package to Taiwan, which China regards as its territory awaiting reunification.
  • Many observers believe the Chinese are simply stringing the Tibetan exiles along until the Dalai Lama dies, on the assumption that the Tibetan movement will wither without him.
Pedro Gonçalves

2 Chinese Schools Said to Be Linked to Online Attacks - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • A series of online attacks on Google and dozens of other American corporations have been traced to computers at two educational institutions in China, including one with close ties to the Chinese military, say people involved in the investigation.
  • the attacks, aimed at stealing trade secrets and computer codes and capturing e-mail of Chinese human rights activists, may have begun as early as April, months earlier than previously believed.
  • Computer security experts, including investigators from the National Security Agency, have been working since then to pinpoint the source of the attacks. Until recently, the trail had led only to servers in Taiwan.
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  • The Chinese schools involved are Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School
  • Lanxiang, in east China’s Shandong Province, is a huge vocational school that was established with military support and trains some computer scientists for the military. The school’s computer network is operated by a company with close ties to Baidu, the dominant search engine in China and a competitor of Google.
  • Within the computer security industry and the Obama administration, analysts differ over how to interpret the finding that the intrusions appear to come from schools instead of Chinese military installations or government agencies. Some analysts have privately circulated a document asserting that the vocational school is being used as camouflage for government operations. But other computer industry executives and former government officials said it was possible that the schools were cover for a “false flag” intelligence operation being run by a third country. Some have also speculated that the hacking could be a giant example of criminal industrial espionage, aimed at stealing intellectual property from American technology firms.
  • Independent researchers who monitor Chinese information warfare caution that the Chinese have adopted a highly distributed approach to online espionage, making it almost impossible to prove where an attack originated. “We have to understand that they have a different model for computer network exploit operations,” said James C. Mulvenon, a Chinese military specialist and a director at the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis in Washington. Rather than tightly compartmentalizing online espionage within agencies as the United States does, he said, the Chinese government often involves volunteer “patriotic hackers” to support its policies.
  • Google’s decision to step forward and challenge China over the intrusions has created a highly sensitive issue for the United States government. Shortly after the company went public with its accusations, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton challenged the Chinese in a speech on Internet censors, suggesting that the country’s efforts to control open access to the Internet were in effect an information-age Berlin Wall.
  • A report on Chinese online warfare prepared for the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission in October 2009 by Northrop Grumman identified six regions in China with military efforts to engage in such attacks. Jinan, site of the vocational school, was one of the regions.
Pedro Gonçalves

BBC News - China anger at Dalai Lama-Obama meeting - 0 views

  • A visit by the Dalai Lama to Washington has "seriously undermined" relations between the US and China, Beijing says.
  • China had earlier expressed "strong dissatisfaction and resolute opposition" to the meeting with a man they see as a separatist. It said the US should "take effective steps to eradicate the malign effects".
  • China's Vice-Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai summoned ambassador Jon Huntsman to lodge a "solemn representation".
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  • "The behaviour of the US side seriously interferes in China's internal politics and seriously hurts the national feelings of the Chinese people," a ministry statement said.
  • The White House meeting was held amid recent tensions, mainly over a US arms sale to Taiwan and allegations of Chinese cyber-spying.
  • Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in a statement that the meeting between President Obama and the exiled Tibetan leader "violated the US government's repeated acceptance that Tibet is a part of China and it does not support Tibetan independence".
  • The closed talks were held at the White House's Map Room instead of the more official Oval Office, in an attempt to signal to China that it was a private, not a political meeting.
Pedro Gonçalves

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Palau to take Guantanamo Uighurs - 0 views

  • The Pacific nation of Palau says it has agreed to a US request to temporarily resettle up to 17 Chinese Muslims.The 17 men are ethnic Uighurs, now being held at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre on Cuba,
  • Palau, a former US trust territory, grants diplomatic recognition to Taiwan, not China.
  • Palau, with a population of about 20,000, is an archipelago of eight main islands plus more than 250 islets that is best known for diving and tourism and is located some 800 km (500 miles) east of the Philippines in the Pacific Ocean.
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  • Australia has already twice rejected US appeals to resettle the Uighurs.
  • Palau has retained close ties with the United States since independence in 1994 when it signed a Free Compact of Association with the US. It relies heavily on the US for aid and defence.
Argos Media

China accused over global computer spy ring | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • An enormous electronic espionage programme run from servers in China has been used to spy on computers in more than 100 countries, according to two reports published at the weekend.
  • The reports name the system GhostNet, and claim that it has been used to attack governments in south and south-east Asia as well as the offices of the Dalai Lama. In two years, the reports suggest, the operation infiltrated 1,295 computers in 103 countries.
  • While one of the reports remains mute on the identity of the perpetrators, the other has no such qualms, warning that the Chinese government ran a series of cyber attacks on Tibetan exile groups.
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  • But the authors of Tracking GhostNet argue that things may not be as they seem in the world of electronic espionage. "We're a bit more careful about it, knowing the nuance of what happens in the subterranean realms," said Ronald Deibert from the University of Toronto. "This could well be the CIA or the Russians.
  • The 10-month investigation also detected bugged computers in the foreign ministries of several countries, including Iran and Indonesia, and in the embassies of India, South Korea, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan
Argos Media

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | China fury at US military report - 0 views

  • Beijing has reacted angrily to a Pentagon report on China's military power, which claimed it was altering the military balance in Asia. A foreign ministry spokesman called it a "gross distortion of the facts", urged an end to "Cold War thinking". In its annual report to Congress, the Pentagon said China was developing "disruptive" technologies for nuclear, space and cyber warfare. It could be used to enforce claims over disputed territories, the report said.
  • The Pentagon reported that China was successfully managing to expand its arsenal of sophisticated weaponry, even though Beijing's ability to sustain military power at a distance remains limited. Chinese "armed forces continue to develop and field disruptive military technologies", including "nuclear, space, and cyber warfare".
  • The Pentagon analysis said China was developing weapons that would disable its enemies' space technology such as satellites, boosting its electromagnetic warfare and cyber-warfare capabilities and continuing to modernise its nuclear arsenal. It also noted a build-up of short-range missiles opposite Taiwan, despite a significant reduction in tension between the two in recent months.
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  • The report estimated China's military spending in 2008 was roughly double that of a decade ago.
  • China's armed forces are undoubtedly undergoing a dramatic transformation from a poorly-equipped peasant army to an increasingly sophisticated modern military, the BBC's defence and security correspondent Rob Watson says. But its level of training and co-ordination as well as actual war fighting capability is still in doubt, he adds.
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