they're out-clevering us

Congressional computers are said to have been hacked from China

The Associated Press
Wednesday, June 11, 2008

WASHINGTON: Multiple congressional computers have been hacked by people working from inside China, lawmakers said Wednesday. They suggested the Chinese were seeking lists of dissidents.

Two congressmen, both longtime critics of Beijing's record on human rights, said the compromised computers contained information about political dissidents from around the world. One of the lawmakers said he had been discouraged from disclosing the computer attacks by other U.S. officials.

Republican Rep. Frank Wolf said four of his computers were compromised, beginning in 2006. Rep. Chris Smith, a senior Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, said two of his computers were attacked, in December 2006 and March 2007.

Wolf said that after one of the attacks, a car with license plates belonging to Chinese officials went to the home of a dissident in Fairfax County, Virginia, outside Washington and photographed it.

During the same time period, the House International Relations Committee, as Foreign Affairs then was known, was targeted at least once by someone working inside China, said committee spokeswoman Lynne Weil.

U.S. authorities continued to investigate whether Chinese officials secretly copied the contents of a government laptop computer during a visit to China by Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez and used the information to try to hack into Commerce Department computers.

The U.S. Defense Department acknowledged last month at a closed House intelligence committee meeting that its vast computer network is scanned or attacked by outsiders more than 300 million times each day.

Wolf said the FBI had told him that computers of other House members and at least one House committee had been accessed by sources working from inside China. The Republican suggested that Senate computers could have been attacked as well...

China denies hacking U.S. lawmakers' computers

BEIJING (Reuters) - China on Thursday dismissed accusations from two United States lawmakers that it had hacked their office computers as alarmist and unfounded.
.....

"Is there any evidence? Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said at a regular news conference in Beijing. "... China is still a developing country. Does that mean we have already mastered such high-end technology? Personally I don't believe that."