China accuses NSA of Hacking Northwestern Polytechnical University

China on Monday accused the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) of carrying out a cyber attack and stealing data from China’s Northwestern Polytechnical University. Northwestern Polytechnical University has close ties to the Chinese military; The N.S.A. has not commented on the Chinese allegations. Intelligence experts point out that the key difference between U.S. and Chinese intelligence efforts is that U.S. intelligence agencies do not turn over the information they collect to private companies.

China national computer virus emergency response center and network security services company qihoo 360 (September 5) said in a report published on Monday, the office of the specific invasion NSA (TAO) in China’s domestic network targets tens of thousands of times of “malicious attack,” control “tens of thousands of network devices,” And stealing “more than 140GB of high-value data”.

The report said Northwestern Polytechnical University issued a statement in June saying it had been attacked from abroad. The report says researchers have tentatively identified TAO, a unit of the U.S. National Security Agency, as the perpetrator of the attack on Northwestern Polytechnical University. The report also ostentatiously revealed the location and set-up of TAO’s global cryptographic centre, and pointed the finger at Robert Edward Joyce, currently the NSA’s director of cyber security, for directing the NPU breach. She added that the United States has been “conducting indiscriminate voice surveillance, illegally stealing text messages from mobile phone users, and wirelessly locating them” on Chinese mobile phone users for a long time, but gave no specific basis.

The U.S. and China are engaged in an increasingly heated war of words over cyberespionage. There have been recent signs that China has begun to directly name specific US government agencies it says are conducting cyber intrusions against the Chinese government. The United States, for its part, has accused China of going beyond its usual practice of stealing other countries’ commercial secrets to benefit Chinese companies.

Thomas Parker, a lecturer at George Washington University who spent decades in the Defense Department and intelligence community, said the U.S. and China are both seeking information from each other that is relevant to national security.

“From my understanding of international law and practice, it is not illegal.” He spoke to VOA via email.

But Mr. Parker noted that the key difference between the two countries’ intelligence efforts is that while the U.S. government does not steal information about intellectual property in the commercial sector, China does.

Most countries conduct espionage to ensure national security. By contrast, the Communist Party also uses a ‘whole-of-society’ approach to steal foreign technology, intellectual property, trade secrets and economic wealth.