International Law

China Laptop Espionage?

By Stan

This story was all over the Intertubes and Twitterverse today.

U.S. officials are trying to determine of Chinese agents copied the contents of a Commerce Department laptop computer during a visit to Beijing by Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez.

The Associated Press said the government is concerned China may have tried to use the contents of the laptop to hack into Commerce Department computers.

People familiar with the incident say the copying may have occurred when Gutierrez left the laptop unattended during a visit to China in December.

On Thursday the Commerce chief told AP he couldn’t discuss whether or how the contents of his computer may have been copied.

"Because there is an investigation going on, I would rather not comment on that," he told AP. "To the extent that there is an investigation going on, those are the things being looked at, those are the questions being asked. I don’t think I should provide any speculative answers."

Other officials said it would be very unusual for any U.S. official to travel overseas with classified information on a laptop computer.

I love that last line. In other words, there probably wasn’t anything too exciting on that laptop anyway, and if there was, it was the owner’s fault! Ha ha. Whether there is anything valuable at all on Commerce Dept. servers in D.C., I have no idea.

Now would be an appropriate time to make a joke about the Commerce Department, but I will refrain from doing so. There are a lot of talented people there (a lot of hacks too).

Full post as published by China Hearsay on May 30, 2008 (boomark / email).