US conducts unscrupulous secret surveillance across world: report

A Chinese Internet information body on Monday said the US is taking advantage of its political, economic, military and technological hegemony to spy without restraint on other countries, including its allies, provoking shock and outrage worldwide.

The report by China's Internet Media Research Center said Washington conducts widespread secret surveillance across the globe, and the operations have gone "far beyond the legal rationale of 'anti-terrorism' and have exposed the ugly face of its pursuit of self-interest in complete disregard for moral integrity."

"The revelations about PRISM and other programs demonstrate that the US has mounted the most wide-ranging, costly, long-term surveillance operation in the history of the Internet," the report said.

At the end of 2013, The Guardian reported that as many as 35 leaders were on the NSA surveillance list, including United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

On March 29 this year, the German news magazine Der Spiegel, citing a secret document from Snowden, revealed that 122 world leaders were under NSA surveillance in 2009, and the agency maintained a secret database on world leaders which included 300 files on Merkel.

The US secret surveillance programs also target ordinary citizens worldwide, as documents leaked by Snowden suggested that the NSA collects data on nearly 5 billion mobile telephone calls across the globe and 2 billion cell phone text messages each day.

The Washington Post also reported that the NSA secretly broke into the main communication links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world. By tapping these links, the agency positioned itself to collect data at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts.

Meanwhile, the country monitored mobile phone apps for years to grab personal data, and waged large-scale cyber-attacks against China, the report said.

The NSA has planted backdoor software in around 100,000 computers worldwide since 2008, giving it the capability to monitor them around the clock, as well as launch attacks. The agency can access and control these computers using radio waves even if they are not connected to a network.

The report said the US government does not just target the Internet, but also key industries such as finance, transport, electricity and education, and the NSA's eavesdropping target not only overseas government leaders but also international organizations and business leaders.

The Der Spiegel reported in December last year that the NSA had broken almost all the security architectures designed by major companies, including those of Cisco, Huawei, Juniper and Dell.

Monday's report noted that the exposure of the PRISM program prompted worldwide criticism of the US, and called for an immediate cessation of the practice.

"America must provide explanations for its surveillance activities, cease spying operations that seriously infringe upon human rights, and refrain from causing stress and antagonism in global cyber space," the report read.