Regime Watch: Beijing

I’ve posted on several fine reports concerning China’s cyber attacks against U.S. government and private sector information systems. One from National Journal here, and another from the Heritage Foundation here.

Now comes this article on some members of the U.S. Congress claiming their office computers were hacked from within China. From the Asociated Press:

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.

Sounds pretty outrageous. But the really strange part of the story is this:

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.

He said the hacking of computers in his Capitol Hill office began in August 2006, that he had known about it for a long time and that he had been discouraged from disclosing it by people in the U.S. government whom he refused to identify.

“The problem has been that no one wants to talk about this issue,” he said. “Every time I’ve started to do something I’ve been told ‘You can’t do this.’ A lot of people have made it very, very difficult.”

I hate to be the one to have to break the news to you Representative Wolf, but you are a member of the U.S. Congress, not some functionary in the bowels of a Washington D.C. Beijing appeasment bueracracy. If you haven’t been willing to “do something” about a communist regime hacking your taxpayer owned computers and making off with sensitive information because someone in the U.S. government said “You can’t do this” then you really should go sit in the dugout and let someone with a bigger bat step up to the plate.