Whistleblower Edward Snowden exits Hong Kong for Ecuador, Getting help from Wikileaks, claims the US hacks Chinese operators

Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who exposed PRISM, has left Hong Kong  and is en-route to Ecuador. He is now receiving aid from WikiLeaks

The WikiLeaks team released a statement which said Snowden is bound for a democratic nation via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks.

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This follows the US government’s decision to charge Snowden with espionage, and theUS officials asked Hong Kong to detain him on a provisional arrest warrant. Hong Kong, clearly, did not follow through with this request.

Snowden also revealed that the US hacks into China’s mobile operators to steal “millions” of text messages. He says he has evidence to back his allegations that the US has its hands on a sizeable portion of the near-900 billion text messages sent by mobile phone owners of all types in China in 2012 — but apparent proof comes from inside China itself.

Fang Binxing, a President at Beijing University who is considered the chief pioneer of China’s Great Firewall Internet filtering system, has warned in the past that telecom equipment from international companies like Cisco is a threat to China’s national security. That’s in the same way that the US has held Chinese telecoms equipment makers Huawei and ZTE at arms’ length out of fear that they could enable spying.

Indeed, reports in October 2012 claimed China Unicom replaced its Cisco routers due to security concerns that the foreign-made telecoms gear “could paralyze China’s information network”. SCMP cites industry insiders who claim that others firms are making similar changes, which are “being kept quiet to avoid panic and embarrassment to the government”.

Snowden claims that the US had been hacking China and Hong Kong “for years”. The list of targets is said to have included businesses, universities and civilian computers, as well as more expected operations like government offices and bureaus.

Source: TNW