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Dissident warns of 'silent cyber war' Activist says Canadians are within China's reach

Written By CDP.ORG on 2011/04/24 | 4/24/2011

By Don Butler, Ottawa Citizen April 19, 2011

Are the Chinese spying on Ottawa resident Maggie Wenzhuo Hou?
Hou, a 41-year-old Chinese dissident who has lived in Ottawa since June 2009, is convinced that agents of the government of China are monitoring and blocking her e-mail and telephone communications.
While she can't prove her allegations, she can offer up a long list of circumstantial evidence to support her claims. Based on her dissident status and documented attacks by China-based hackers, security experts say hers is a credible story.
Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada, says Chinese monitoring of human rights activists in this country is a "well-known and notorious pattern."
Hou is a "high-profile, outspoken human rights activist who has some real credibility because she's freshly out of China, has first-hand experience with human rights violations and is quite well connected to a number of known human rights activists still inside China," Neve says.
"So it does not surprise me at all that she could be, would be or was targeted for some sort of hacking or computer surveillance by the Chinese authorities."
But Ron Deibert, the director of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which in 2009 uncovered GhostNet, a cyberspy ring based in China that was gathering intelligence in more than 100 countries, counsels caution when assessing cases such as Hou's.
"There are so many people who read about issues of espionage or information-based attacks and jump immediately to the extreme conclusion," Deibert says.
For her part, Hou says "Canadian authorities" are interested in her experiences, and have interviewed her three times about them. She decided to go public to warn Canadians about what she calls China's "silent cyber war."
"The Canadian public is just sleeping while, as we Chinese say, a tiger's sleeping next to you. People should wake up. This country is slipping into danger," she says. "When I came to Canada, I thought I'd be safe. I don't feel safe anymore. I feel like I'm in China."
Hou first got involved in human rights and political activism in China while attending Sichuan University in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre. In 2003, she founded and led a now-defunct human rights group in Beijing. She's now director of the human rights committee of the Democratic Party of China, an exiled opposition party.
While in China, she was arrested and detained many times, most recently at the time of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when she was imprisoned for 18 days for her involvement in human rights protests.
When she became pregnant late that year, she managed, with help from some Canadian friends, to leave China for a teaching job at the University of Ottawa. She gave birth a month later and taught courses in human rights and political activism in China at the university's graduate school of international and public affairs the during the 2009-10 academic year. She has had protected person status in Canada since last August.
She first started noticing some "funny things" going on around the time of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's visit to China in December 2009, when she was involved in demonstrations and an online petition. "My e-mails started to be irregular," she says. "There were lost e-mail messages." When people signed the online petition, their names didn't appear. Friends told her that when they opened her Gmail messages, their computers slowed down noticeably.
Google Inc., which owns Gmail, told Hou at the time that the problem was with her computer. But the company has since accused Chinese authorities of interfering with its Gmail, leading to access problems.
Last May, Hou travelled to Toronto to have her computer examined by Greg Walton, a computer security expert who worked for Citizen Lab on the GhostNet project. According to Hou, Walton told her the computer was heavily hacked and was communicating with dozens of IP addresses, including some in China.
Walton, now based in London, England, agrees there were "anomalies" in the network traffic. "However, the traffic was almost entirely consistent with common malware to which all Internet users are exposed, associated with cyber criminals motivated by profit rather than the targeting of political dissidents."
Despite his failure to find anything linked to Chinese spying on Hou's computer, Walton says "credible sources within the investigations community have repeatedly indicated that there has been growing unease about the surveillance of dissidents in Canada."
In an e-mail to the Citizen, an official at the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa said allegations that the Chinese government supports hacking are "groundless and with ulterior motives."
"The Chinese government has consistently been firmly opposing any illegal activities that sabotage the Internet and computer networks, including computer hacking," the official wrote, adding that China's government "is ready to work with countries to counter hacking and other forms of Internet crime."
But Rafal Rohozinski, chief executive of Ottawa-based SecDev Group, who worked with Citizen Lab on the GhostNet project, say Hou's allegations are credible.
"We've got plenty of precedent where these kinds of techniques have been used against inconvenient political actors," says Rohozinski, though whether the perpetrators are Chinese authorities or "patriotic hackers" is difficult to determine.
Whenever Hou communicates with people in China, "she has to work through services that invariably pick up her identifying IP address or the address of the e-mail she's using," Rohozinski says. "If someone's on a watch list, it's pretty simple to be able to identify that individual."
Wesley Wark, a security expert and visiting professor at the University of Ottawa, says there's lots of evidence that China is involved in state-sponsored efforts to "harass and survey" Chinese expatriates. "It's a big part of what the Chinese do, and they do it because they have global reach, because they are determined to monitor overseas dissident groups and individuals."
Deibert notes that Hou isn't an ordinary person. "She's someone who's connected politically to Chinese events. That puts her in a different category right off the bat."
Wark thinks the Canadian government should be meeting regularly with Chinese officials to emphasize that spying and hacking are not tolerated in Canada. "But that's not a message we've heard from recent governments. The big message is trade and better relations."
Hou acknowledges that speaking out carries risks. "I definitely am worried," she says. "I know their people are watching me. Their people maybe hate me. But I feel I have an obligation for myself, for Chinese people and for people at large, including Canadians."

dbutler@ottawacitizen.com
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