A Hong Kong activist who has organized several mass marches for more democracy since the 1997 handover to China, says hackers from within mainland China have tampered with his e-mail account, raising fears that Beijing’s Internet police are extending their reach to the former British colony.
Chong Yiu-kwong, a key figure in the Civil Human Rights Front, said problems had begun with his private University of Hong Kong e-mail account in around April last year, when Beijing made a controversial ruling against full and direct elections for the territory in 2007 and 2008.
“I didn’t know that my computer had been monitored ever since, until I found that all my e-mails from the account registered to the University of Hong Kong disappeared all of a sudden,” Chong told RFA’s Cantonese service.
“I approached the computer center of Hong Kong University. They told me that my account had been monitored by three different IP addresses from China and that information from the account had been downloaded every few minutes,” he said.
