Surveillance programs reveal US hypocrisy(3)

While the US government is defending its own surveillance programs, it keeps accusing other countries including China of launching cyber attacks.

For months now, the US government has implicated Beijing in state-sponsored hacking. China has denied such attacks while defending itself as a victim of cyber crimes. Snowden's testimony now certainly adds a dose of conviction to the Chinese government's statements.

According to the whistleblower, among some 61,000 reported targets of the NSA are thousands of computers in China -- which US officials have increasingly criticized as the source of thousands of attacks on US military and commercial networks.

China's cyber security has come under increasingly severe threats amid a variety of safety risks, according to a report released in March by the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team Coordination Center (CNCERT).

Hackers have tampered with 16,388 web pages in China -- including 1,802 government websites -- in the past year, up 6.1 percent and 21.4 percent year on year respectively, the report said.

In 2012, around 73,000 overseas Internet Protocol addresses were involved in hijacking nearly 14.2 million mainframes in China via Trojan or Botnet, with the United States being the largest source of such hacking activities.

As the birthplace of the World Wide Web, the United States already has a matchless superiority and ability to launch cyber attacks around the globe.

Currently, the US military has established a significant cyber force, including the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade, which is a regular military unit tasked with carrying out cyber missions.

Earlier media reports said Iran was once attacked by US military intelligence agencies via the Internet, while, according to China's foreign ministry, a majority of the cyber attacks against China comes from the United States.

As the aftershocks of NSA surveillance programs continue, it's time for the US government to make more self-examination instead of pointing fingers at other nations.