Chinese hacked Capitol Hill computers, lawmakers say

Possibly sought data on dissidents

WASHINGTON - Multiple congressional computers have been hacked by people working from inside China, lawmakers said yesterday, suggesting the Chinese were seeking lists of dissidents.

Two congressmen, both longtime critics of Beijing's record on human rights, said the compromised computers contained information about political dissidents from around the world.

One of the lawmakers said he had been discouraged from disclosing the computer attacks by other US officials.

Representative Frank Wolf of Virginia said four of his computers were compromised, beginning in 2006. Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, a senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said two of his computers were attacked, in December 2006 and March 2007.

Wolf said that after one of the attacks, a car with license plates belonging to Chinese officials went to the home of a dissident in Fairfax County, Va., and photographed it.

During the same time period, The House International Relations Committee - now known as the House Foreign Affairs Committee - was targeted at least once by someone working inside China, committee spokeswoman Lynne Weil said.

The disclosures yesterday came as US authorities continued to investigate whether Chinese officials secretly copied the contents of a government laptop computer during a visit to China by Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez, then used the information to try to hack into Commerce Department computers.

The Pentagon last month acknowledged at a House Intelligence Committee meeting that its vast computer network is scanned or attacked by outsiders more than 300 million times each day.

Wolf said the FBI had told him that computers of other House members and at least one House committee had been accessed by sources working from inside China. The Virginia Republican suggested that Senate computers could have been attacked as well.

Wolf said the hacking of computers in his office began in August 2006, that he had known about it for a long time, and that he had been discouraged from disclosing it by people in the US government he refused to identify.

"The problem has been that no one wants to talk about this issue," he said. "Every time I've started to do something I've been told, 'You can't do this.' A lot of people have made it very, very difficult."

The FBI and the White House declined to comment.