New York, January 19,
2010—Foreign correspondents in Beijing
told the Committee to Protect Journalists that they are aware of recent hacker
attacks on colleagues’ Gmail accounts, and said they have long assumed that
their e-mail is monitored and vulnerable to attack.
According to a Monday posting on the Foreign
Correspondents Club of China Web site, “Foreign correspondents in a few
bureaus in Beijing
have recently discovered that their Gmail accounts had been hijacked.” In its
posting, the FCCC said e-mails in the affected accounts were being forwarded to
strangers’ addresses. Google
spokesman Scott Rubin told CPJ
today he had no comment on the FCCC posting.
On January 13, CPJ
expressed concern
after Google, which owns Gmail, said it had uncovered evidence of cyber attacks
from China targeting
its own and other companies’ infrastructures, as well as individual Gmail
accounts. CPJ welcomed Google’s statement that it was no longer willing to
censor its Chinese search engine, google.cn,
in light of the discovery.
“E-mail security is a major concern in China. Although
attacks like these have not been directly linked to the government, the timing of
these new assaults is worrisome given the dispute surrounding Google in China,” said Bob Dietz,
CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “During the
run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, for example, many journalists and
media support groups, including CPJ, were subject to attempts by hackers to
break into computers.”
David Bandurski, a researcher at
Hong
Kong University’s
China Media Center, said
some bloggers in China are
talking openly about increasing controls on digital communications. Blogger Tan
Yifei called it
“a bitter
winter” for China’s Internet.
Several foreign reporters told CPJ they have long assumed
that their e-mail and telephone communications are vulnerable to government monitoring,
and that pro-government hackers are continuing to target reporters. None of the
journalists with whom CPJ spoke to wanted to be identified for fear of
attracting the government’s attention.
“E-mail security is always a problem in China. There
was surveillance around the Olympics; we assume that during times like the Tibet riots [in 2008] or during big party
conferences that we’ll be more closely watched,” a longtime correspondent for a
large U.S.
news organization told CPJ. “Surveillance and attacks like this are part of the
reality when you work in China,”
a freelance reporter told CPJ.
At
least one journalist, Shi
Tao, was imprisoned in 2005 after Yahoo
provided information to Chinese authorities about the personal e-mail account
he used to send an internal propaganda department memo overseas.
CPJ has reported extensively on both hacker attacks and
government surveillance. In May 2006, CPJ reported that hackers obtained journalists’ e-mail exchanges. In a pre-Olympics report, “Falling Short,” CPJ took an in-depth look at the government’s
surveillance of the Internet and e-mail.
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