U.S. Surveillance: China Asks USA | ET | UK Spies Hacked Diplomats Phones & Emails

U.S. Surveillance: China Asks Washington To Explain Monitoring Programmes

BEIJING, June 17 (Reuters) - China made its first substantive comments on Monday to reports of U.S. surveillance of the Internet, demanding that Washington explain its monitoring programmes to the international community.
Several nations, including U.S. allies, have reacted angrily to revelations by an ex-CIA employee over a week ago that U.S. authorities had tapped the servers of internet companies for personal data.
"We believe the United States should pay attention to the international community's concerns and demands and give the international community the necessary explanation," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a daily briefing.
The Chinese government has previously not commented directly on the case, simply repeating the government's standard line that China is one of the world's biggest victims of hacking attacks.
A senior source with ties to the Communist Party leadership said Beijing was reluctant to jeopardise recently improved ties with Washington.

                                       EVEN THOUGH

UK Spies Hacked Diplomats' Phones, Emails, Guardian Report Claims

LONDON — A newspaper report that British eavesdropping agency GCHQ repeatedly hacked into foreign diplomats' phones and emails has prompted an angry response from traditional rival Russia and provoked demands for an investigation from Turkey and South Africa.

Although spying on diplomats is as old as diplomacy itself, the Guardian's report laid out in explicit detail steps taken by GCHQ to monitor foreign officials' conversations in real time, saying that British spies had hacked emails, stolen passwords and gone so far as to set up a bugged Internet cafe in an effort to get an edge in high-stakes negotiations.

The Guardian cited more than half a dozen internal government documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden as the basis for its reporting on GCHQ's intelligence operations, which it says involved, among other things, hacking into the South African foreign ministry's computer network, targeting the Turkish delegation at the 2009 Group of 20 summit in London and using the vast spying base at northern England's Menwith Hill to monitor the satellite communications of Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev.