Beware the era of the Netizen spy

A screen grab of CCTV News reports on Thursday showing Gao Yu being escorted by Beijing police.

A female suspect named Gao Yu was detained for leaking "state secrets" to foreign contacts, said Beijing police on Thursday. Gao, 70, a Beijing resident and a former journalist, was suspected of illegally obtaining a highly confidential document of Chinese central government and sending it to an overseas website in June last year, which later became widely circulated on foreign websites.

This is a third case reported this week linked with overseas espionage, which highlights the grave challenge of national security. It's high time the related authorities tightened regulations on classified documents and raised all people's awareness of protecting state secrets.

Early this week, the existence of an Internet-based espionage ring in Guangdong province has once again underscored the need to safeguard military secrets in the Internet era. The spy network came to light when provincial security agency discovered that a foreign intelligence agency was using the Internet to "recruit" Chinese nationals to steal China's military secrets.

A suspect surnamed Li has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for leaking to a foreign spy 13 highly classified documents and 10 classified military secrets, which he obtained by subscribing to some internally circulated military publications and monitoring important military bases in Guangdong. Li has passed on a large number of photographs of these bases and other crucial military facilities to the foreign intelligence agency.

According to information given by the provincial authorities, a foreign spy known as "Feige" recruited 12 Chinese nationals in the province and 40 others in other parts of the country to collect valuable information on China's military. Reports suggest that "Feige" targeted youths interested in military matters and unsuspecting students through some Internet chatrooms, communities, campus forums and job-seeking websites.

Security officials have also detected about 30 cases of Chinese students being "recruited" or targeted through the Internet by another foreign spy called "Li Hua" since 2012. National security agencies have confirmed the findings on the basis of sound evidence, saying most of the students were "approached" on online chatrooms or job-seeking websites.

China is not the only country to be targeted by "Internet spies". The United States, known for its highly developed intelligence infrastructure and for spying on other countries, has also fallen victim to Internet spying. The personal information on 100,000 US Navy and Marine officers and soldiers was leaked in 2006 creating shockwaves in the American intelligence set-up. The leakage turned out to be the result of a casual disclosure of their personal information, including their names, social security numbers, service units and some work photographs on the US' Marine safety website a few months earlier.