Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Just four days after warning all and sundry to “crack their heads and spill blood” if they tried to bully it, President-for-Life Xi Jinping’s China tried to tar its chief rival America with what other countries have been painting Beijing with: cybersecurity threat.
Amid strained ties between Washington and Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin on Monday said that the US is “the top threat to global cybersecurity,” media reported.
“As facts have proven time and again, it is the US that has been forcing companies to install backdoors and obtaining user data in violation of relevant rules. The US itself is the top threat to global cybersecurity,” Wenbin told journalists.
The US has long been taking advantage of its advanced technological heft and capacity to run invasive surveillance on people at home and abroad, steal various types of data and violate all kinds of privacy, he claimed.
To support his bizarre claim, Wenbin referred to a 2001 US law formulated to contain terrorism after the 9/11 attacks, and the subsequent steps taken by other countries.
“The Patriot Act adopted after 9/11 requires cyber companies to offer regular updates on user information. This move has drawn much attention from around the world. France’s CNIL decided in December last year that the French websites of Google and Amazon breached relevant French law by placing cookies on the computers of users without obtaining prior consent and without providing adequate information. Earlier, Ireland asked Facebook to suspend the transmission of EU user data to the US,” he said.
Globally cornered on key issues like the pandemic, debt-trapping, expansionism, etc., China also attempted to enlist the support of other countries to paint itself in white. “We call on the international community to jointly expose and reject US practices that endanger global cybersecurity and undermine global rules,” he added.
The ties between Washington and Beijing had deteriorated after the US took sharply opposing positions against China on various issues, including the trace of the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the human rights exploitations of Uyghur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang province.