WASHINGTON — Multiple congressional computers have been hacked by people working from inside China, lawmakers said Wednesday, suggesting the Chinese were seeking to identify 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’d been discouraged from disclosing the computer attacks by other U.S. officials.
Virginia Rep. Frank Wolf said four of his computers were compromised, beginning in 2006. New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith, a senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said two of his computers were attacked, in December 2006 and March 2007.
Wolf said that following one of the attacks, a car with license plates belonging to Chinese officials went to the home of a dissident in Fairfax County, Va., outside Washington and photographed it.
During the same time period, The House International Relations Committee — now known as the House Foreign Affairs Committee — was targeted at least once by someone working inside China, said committee spokeswoman Lynne Weil.
Wednesday’s disclosures came as 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 Gutierrez and used the information to try to hack into Commerce Department computers.
The Pentagon last month acknowledged 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 compromised by sources working from inside China. The Virginia 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 he refused to identify.
The Bush administration has been increasingly reluctant to publicly discuss or acknowledge cyber attacks, especially ones traced to China. The FBI and the White House declined to comment.
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