BBC “strongly condemned” China’s “deliberate” Blocking of Shortwave Service Broadcasts

The BBC has “strongly condemned” the “deliberate and co-ordinated” jamming of the BBC World Service by authorities in China.

On Monday the corporation issued a statement after receiving reports that its shortwave frequencies were being blocked in China.

Taiwan satellite carrier agrees to renew independent TV station’s contract

Without fuss or ceremony representatives of New Tang Dynasty Asia Pacific and Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom (CHT) inked a new contract on June 27, assuring that NTD AP will continue broadcasting via satellite to Asia, including mainland China. Backers of the station say the new deal closes one chapter on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ongoing attempts to cut off NTD AP’s influence on the Chinese people.

The contract signing ended a controversy that began in early April when CHT abruptly informed NTD AP it would not renew the station’s contract to broadcast on CHT’s satellite—a refusal that NTD AP characterized as illegal under Taiwan telecommunications law. NTD, the global network to which NTD AP belongs, is a media partner of The Epoch Times.

Beijing’s Plan to Track 17 Million People’s Cell Phones Raises Concerns

Authorities in Beijing are planning to track more than 17 million people in the city via their cell phones, according to state-run media reports last week. The proposed plan is supposedly aimed at improving traffic management. But it’s also sparking concerns over privacy issues.

Beijing is notorious for traffic congestion. An unnamed employee from Beijing’s Municipal Science and Technology Commission told state-run China Daily the tracking plan would provide real-time traffic and population data—to help citizens plan better travel routes.

All internet phone will be banned in China except two state-owned networks, Skype illegal

– Malcolm Moore in Shanghai, telegraph.co.uk –

China on Thursday announced that it had made illegal the use of Skype, the popular internet telephony service, as the country continues to shut itself off from the rest of the world.

In the latest move dashing Western internet company hopes of breaking into China, it was announced that all internet phone calls were to be banned apart from those made over two state-owned networks, China Unicom and China Telecom.

“[This] is expected to make services like Skype unavailable in the country,” reported the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist party.

‘Most Sophisticated’ Android Trojan Surfaces in China

pcmag.com, Dec. 30, 2010 –

Geinimi, a highly sophisticated Trojan, has been detected in Android devices in China.

However, it appears to be more of a sign of things to come rather than a serious threat to U.S. Android users.

Dubbed Geinimi (a scrambulation of Gemini) by Lookout Mobile Security, a startup based in San Francisco, the botnet-like Trojan sends location information, device identity and even stored contacts to an unknown server.

According to Lookout co-founder Kevin MaHaffe, the most significant feature of Geinimi is its sophisticated command-and-control mechanism.

China demands ID from all buyers of mobile phone numbers

The Guardian, 1 September 2010 –

China began requiring identification from anyone buying a new mobile phone number today in what it says is a bid to stamp out junk messages.

But critics say the move gives the government a new tool for monitoring its citizens.

The rules apply to everyone, including foreigners visiting the country for a short stay, the China Daily newspaper reported.

The paper said the regulation was “the latest campaign by the government to curb the global scourge of spam, pornographic messages and fraud on cellular phones”.

Low-cost mobile phone sim cards are readily available in China, at convenience stores, newspaper stands and airport kiosks.

Until now, they could be bought anonymously with cash and used straight away, as in the UK. But such a system makes it difficult to track down spammers.

The China Daily said Chinese mobile users receive an average of 43 text messages a week, 12 of which are spam.

The ID requirement is raising new privacy concerns and is likely to upset some customers unwilling to give out personal information for fear it will be resold, said Duncan Clark, managing director of BDA China, a technology market research firm.

Wang Songlian, research co-ordinator with the Hong Kong-based Chinese Human Rights Defenders, said the requirement fits a pattern of tightening government control over new communication technologies.

China censors internet content it deems politically sensitive and blocks many websites, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

Following ethnic riots in western China’s Xinjiang, international phone and internet links to the region were suspended for months.

The new regulation will probably not affect Chinese dissidents, many of whom already have their phones closely monitored.

But it could help police track down ordinary people who take part in spontaneous protests, Wang said.

China has seen a growing number of protests sparked by labour disagreements, anger over pollution and other issues.

“I think the government has an eye on Iran where protests were fuelled by text messages and Twitter and they are doing this for social stability reasons,” Wang said.

China has more than 800m mobile phone numbers already in use. The Global Times newspaper reported today that 320m of those were bought without real-name registration. The numbers will have to be reregistered by 2013 or could be suspended, the newspaper said…….(More details from The Guardian)

Motorola sues China’s Huawei for trade secret theft

By Phil Wahba and Melanie Lee, NEW YORK/SHANGHAI, Reuters,Thu Jul 22, 2010 –

NEW YORK/SHANGHAI (Reuters) – U.S. mobile phone maker Motorola Inc (MOT.N) has sued China’s Huawei Technologies Co HWT.UL for alleged theft of trade secrets, highlighting the fast-growing Chinese firm’s difficulty in shaking the nation’s reputation for piracy.

In an initial suit, filed in 2008, Motorola sued five of its former workers for allegedly sharing trade secrets with Lemko, which was also named in the suit and has a reseller agreement with Huawei.

In the amended complaint, filed on July 16 in a federal court in Chicago, Motorola claimed an engineer shared information about a Motorola transceiver and other technology with Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, a former officer in China’s People’s Liberation Army.

Motorola claimed a string of emails tagged “Motorola Confidential Proprietary” showed that “Huawei and its officers knew they were receiving stolen Motorola proprietary trade secrets and confidential information without Motorola’s authorization and consent,” according to the suit.

Huawei said the lawsuit was groundless.

“Huawei has no relationship with Lemko, other than a reseller agreement. Huawei will vigorously defend itself against baseless allegations,” the company said in an emailed statement.

Cases like these are hard to prove from an evidence point of view, said Connie Carnabuci, a technology, intellectual property expert and partner at Freshfields in Hong Kong.

“Cases involving misappropriation of proprietary information are usually very difficult cases to run,” Carnabuci said.

“This case is being brought in the courts of the United States, one thing interesting is that decisions of the U.S. courts are not enforceable in China,” she added.

Schaumburg, Illinois-based Motorola accused Huawei of various violations including threatened or actual misappropriation of trade secrets, breach of fiduciary duty and usurpation of corporate opportunity…..(more details from Reuters)

Google Says Mobile Service in China Partially Blocked

By Brian Womack, Bloomberg, Via The Business Week, Mar. 29, 2010-

March 29 (Bloomberg) — Google Inc., after shutting its Internet search engine in China last week, said its mobile services in the country are being partially blocked.

The services delivered to wireless phones were operating normally until becoming partly shut down yesterday, Google said on its Web site that tracks service availability in mainland China.

“Service availability fluctuates regularly, and it is too early to tell if this blockage will be persistent,” Google said in an e-mailed statement. “There is no specific indication that the change is related to our recent announcement.”

Google is keeping close tabs on its various Web-delivered services in China after a standoff with authorities led the company to start redirecting users of its Chinese search engine to its Hong Kong site. Google pledged in January to stop censoring results in mainland China after hackers stole data and targeted e-mail accounts of human-rights activists.

Mobile is the first service in China to have a change in status since Google unveiled the feature-tracking site on March 22.

Google’s Web, images and news-search services continue to have “no issues” while video-sharing site YouTube and Blogger remain blocked, according to the feature tracker.

The Mountain View, California-based company said last week it would no longer offer its mobile applications on Android phones in China “until further notice.” Chinese companies can still sell phones that use Android, an operating system backed by Google.

Google fell 80 cents to $561.89 at 2:50 p.m. New York time on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares had dropped 9.2 percent this year before today.

– The Business Week

Nortel’s China Syndrome

Andy Greenberg, The  Forbes, 01.12.09 –

Concerns over Chinese cyber-spying may have stalled a deal with Huawei that Nortel needs.

Since the beginning of this decade, worries about Chinese cyber-spying have reverberated through the media, rocked the security industry and added billions to the U.S. government’s cybersecurity budget. Now, for Nortel Networks, those concerns may also have frozen a deal the struggling networking vendor badly needs.

Toronto-based Nortel, whose stock has lost 96% of its value last year, announced in September that it would sell its metro Ethernet business, an Internet-focused piece of the company that generates about $1.5 billion a year in revenue.

The most interested potential acquirer of that division of Nortel may be Huawei, which bid $400 million for Nortel’s offering in September, according to Avian Securities–a generous offer considering that the company’s current market capitalization, hammered by debt and missed earnings projections, languishes at less than half that value. More recent rumors suggest Israeli networking company Radware may be bidding as little as $50 million for the same division, according to the Israel news site Globes.

Huawei’s higher bid, however, came with a caveat: The Shenzhen, China-based networking giant has a murky history of cooperation with its homeland’s authoritarian regime. And concerns over Huawei’s government ties, according to some industry-watchers and security analysts, may have spooked Nortel’s customers that carry sensitive U.S. government data and scuttled the Chinese company’s offer.

Huawei, which didn’t respond to requests for comment, has good reason to want a chunk of Nortel’s business. It’s likely most interested in Nortel’s market share in fiberoptic equipment–8.5% of the world market according to Synergy Research, behind only Alcatel-Lucent (nyse: ALU – news – people ) and Huawei itself. Nortel’s 100-gigabyte-per-second fiberoptic switches are also significantly faster than the 40-GB-per-second switches that Huawei currently offers.

The Chinese company has long been searching for an opportunity to expand to North America. It tried a joint venture with Nortel in 2005. And though that deal was scrapped in 2006, it means the two companies may have closer ties than other potential bidders.

In an informal poll of 44 fiberoptics and Ethernet industry executives at the Carrier Ethernet World Congress last September, the telecom trade blog Light Reading found that 18 respondents named Huawei as the most likely buyer for Nortel’s metro Ethernet business, far more than other candidates like Cisco Systems (nasdaq: CSCO – news – people ) or Ericsson (nasdaq: ERIC – news – people ). The second most popular response in the poll was “no one.”

But a deal between Huawei and Nortel would have raised security hackles: The company sells telecom equipment to major Internet carriers like Verizon  (nyse: VZ –  news  –  people ), AT&T  (nyse: T –  news  –  people ), Sprint  (nyse: S –  news  –  people ) and Qwest, which in turn carry data for practically every government agency from the National Security Agency to the Pentagon. And given Huawei’s history, a tieup with the company would raise the specter of a hidden back door in a router or switch, siphoning that data to foreign spies.

A January 2007 report for the U.S. Air Force written by the RAND research group highlighted the military background of Huawei chief executive Ren Zhengfei: Before he founded Huawei in 1988, Ren was an engineering director for the Chinese military’s telecom research department. Today, “Huawei maintains deep ties with the Chinese military, which serves a multifaceted role as an important customer, as well as Huawei’s political patron and research and development partner,” according to the report.

A month later, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation issued its own report, citing Huawei as a security threat and arguing that “if a PLA protégé firm acquired an American firm that provided computer network equipment, software and services to the U.S. government, the possibilities for cyber-espionage would be virtually unlimited.”…… (more details from The Forbes)

China spy fears on Australia’s $15 billion broadband network

Cameron Stewart, The Australian, Australia, December 18, 2008 –

NATIONAL security concerns about Chinese espionage could threaten the new frontrunner for Australia’s $15 billion publicly backed national broadband network.

Security agencies will closely examine the bid lodged by Singtel Optus, which is believed to propose the involvement of Chinese telecommunications equipment-maker Huawei Technologies to help build its network. Huawei was the subject of a US congressional investigation on national security grounds this year after legislators expressed concern about its links to the Chinese military and intelligence apparatus. The concerns led Huawei to withdraw from its joint $US2.2billion ($3.3billion) bid to buy a stake in US internet router and networking giant 3Com.

Optus emerged this week as the surprise frontrunner for the national broadband network tender when the Government excluded Telstra from the tender process after its bid failed to meet some of the project’s stated requirements.

Huawei, the shadowy company based in Shenzen and founded by former People’s Liberation Army officer and Communist Party member Ren Zhengfei, has triggered debate in the US, Britain and India about whether it is a legitimate international telecom player or a company bent on doing Beijing’s bidding.

Intelligence agency concerns about Chinese cyber-espionage prompted India to scrap a planned $US60 million Huawei investment in its telco in 2005.

Britain granted the company a $US140 million contract in that same year to build part of British Telecom’s 21st Century Network.

Many mainstream global telecommunications companies, including Singtel Optus, already have close links with Huawei. Optus last month gave the Government its 900-page bid for the new national broadband network, which is understood to propose Huawei as one of several vendors to set up the network.

A spokeswoman for Optus confirmed the company had been working with Huawei as part of trials for the network, but would neither confirm nor deny Huawei was part of last month’s final bid.

“We are not releasing the names of any potential vendors we may be working with on NBN,” she said. “Huawei is a significant vendor partner of Optus and we are working with them in our test lab.”

A spokesman for Huawei Australia did not return The Australian’s calls but the company, the largest networking and telecommunications equipment supplier in China, has previously denied links with the Chinese Government or with the PLA.

The national security statement released by Kevin Rudd this month warned of the growing danger of cyber-espionage by foreign countries, saying Australia would take new measures to protect against hackers. The federal Government has said it will investigate the national security implications of the remaining bids from Optus, Acacia and Axia.

“The Attorney-General’s Department will co-ordinate an assessment of the national security implications of the proposals in consultation with national security and law enforcement agencies,” the Government’s Request for Proposals states.

An eight-person expert panel is assessing the bids and will recommend a winner late next month.

However, a study by global think tank the Rand Corporation states: “Huawei maintains deep ties with the Chinese military, which serves as a multi-faceted role as an important customer, as well as Huawei’s political patron and research and development partner.”

The conservative US think tank the Heritage Foundation claimed in a paper this year that the PLA had direct access to Huawei’s training and technology infrastructure.

Huawei set up a regional head office in Sydney in June 2004. Its Australian division employs 100 staff and reported a 66.5 per cent rise in revenue to $70 million last year.

It is a key vendor in constructing Optus’s 3G mobile network in rural areas, and is supplying hardware to Queensland electricity utility Powerlink for a network launch.

– The Australian: Chinese spy fears on broadband frontrunner

300 Million China Mobile Phone Users’ Data Would Handed Over To Government When Demanded: CEO Revealed

AFP, 26 Jan 2008-

DAVOS, Switzerland (AFP) — Serious concerns were raised in Davos last week about the ability of the Chinese government to spy on the country’s 500 million mobile phone users.

The head of China’s biggest mobile phone company, which has more than 300 million subscribers, stunned delegates by revealing that the company had unlimited access to the personal data of its customers and handed it over to Chinese security officials when demanded.

The admission, described as “bone-chilling” by US Congressman Ed Markey, sent shivers through an audience of telecom experts at the World Economic Forum who immediately saw the potential for misuse and surveillance.

“We know who you are, but also where you are,” said the CEO of China Mobile Communications Corporation, Wang Jianzhou, whose company adds six million new customers to its network each month and is already the biggest mobile group in the world by users.

He was explaining how the company could use the personal data of its customers to sell advertising and services to them based on knowledge of where they were and what they were doing.

When pressed about the privacy and security implications of this, he added: “We can access the information and see where someone is, but we never give this information away … only if the security authorities ask for it.”

The movement of mobile phone users can be tracked because they connect to local base stations, giving a trail that can only be accessed in most democratic countries by security officials under strict conditions.

Mobile phones can also be easily tapped.

Markey, who is chairman of the US House of Representatives subcommittee on telecommunications, contrasted the situation with the checks and controls in place in the United States, where a court order is required for the government to check phone records.

“I have my eyebrows arched so high they’re hitting the ceiling,” he told AFP after listening to Wang.

“I have many, many more questions about what the relationship is with the government and moreover how the company can use that information.”

US Internet company Yahoo was widely pilloried and faced a congressional hearing after the group divulged information to Beijing police that landed a Chinese journalist in jail.

Shi Tao was convicted in 2005 of divulging state secrets after he posted a Chinese government order forbidding media organisations from marking the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising on the Internet.

He was identified with information provided by Yahoo and was sentenced to 10 years in jail.

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University in Britain, stressed how the mobile phone had become a serious threat to privacy in all countries.

“It’s amazing to see how such a comprehensive surveillance network has been set up through the market force of consumer demand,” he told AFP.

“With CCTV (closed circuit television), the government sets it up and you have nothing to say about it. With this (mobile phones), you’re paying for your own monitoring device.”

He said governments in democratic countries were “just waking up to the need for regulation.”

The remarks by Wang came in the context of a discussion about how mobile phone operators could generate additional revenues by increasing targeted advertising and other services.

The idea of location-based advertising, in which advertisers use the location of mobile phone user to send targeted advertising, also won support from Google chairman Eric Schmidt.

He used the example of how an advertiser of fast-food could target a user with advertising when he or she was near a restaurant.

Wang said his company was able to estimate the number of people at last year’s Shanghai Formula One grand prix by counting subscribers in the area.

When enough people had phones in China, the data could be used to estimate the number of people on roads at a particular time as a proxy for the level of congestion, he said.

The number of mobile phone users in China was 523.3 million at the end of September, up 13.5 percent from the end of 2006, according to official data.

The discussion took place in a session titled: “The Future of Mobile Technology.”

– Original report from AFP : China’s mobile network: a big brother surveillance tool?

China: No Mass Cell Phone Text Message Without Government Approval in Shanxi

ChinaScope, 07/25/2007-

Shanxi Provincial Communication Administration recently issued a new regulation restricting mass text messaging (Short Message Service) over cell phones. The regulation mandates self-censorship by information services providers and requires government approval for dissemination of content pertaining to national security and social unrests.

The regulation titled “Opinion on Further Strengthening the Control of Text Messaging Dissemination” that was issued on July 18, 2007 by Shanxi Provincial Communication Administration. Information services businesses must review the content in the acquisition, development, processing and dissemination of information and shall not provide any information, the dissemination of which is prohibited by the state, reported Xinhua News Agency.

“The Opinion provides that the dissemination of certain important content must be pre-approved by relevant government department before such dissemination. For content pertaining to national security, social stability, people’s livelihood, personal safety, major natural disasters, public emergencies, if the dissemination thereof is to be province-wide, the content provider must present the written opinion of the provincial government or provincial leaders. If such content is to be disseminated citywide, the content provider must present the written opinion of local government or local government leaders.”

– Original report from ChinaScope.org : Shanxi New Regulation: No Mass Text Messaging (SMS) Without Government Approval