We Didn’t Drive Our Ship Into Your Reef … We Didn’t Hack You…..

My e-mail program began crashing almost daily. But only when all my contacts disappeared for the second time did suspicion push me to act.

I dug deep inside my Yahoo settings, and I shuddered. Incoming messages had been forwarding to an unfamiliar e-mail address, one presumably typed in by intruders who had gained access to my account.

I?d been hacked.

That phrase has been popping up a lot lately on Web chats and at dinner parties in China, where scores of foreign reporters have discovered intrusions into their e-mail accounts.

But unlike malware that trawls for bank account passwords or phishing gambits that peddle lonely and sexually adventurous Russian women, these cyberattacks appear inspired by good old-fashioned espionage.

Recent probes by cyber-countersleuths at the University of Toronto have unmasked electronic spy rings that have been pilfering documents and correspondence from computers in 100 countries. A few patterns have been noted: many of the attacks originated on computers located in China and the spymasters seemed to have a fondness for the Indian Defense Ministry, Tibetan human rights advocates, the Dalai Lama and foreign journalists who cover China and Taiwan.

Although the authors of the reports were careful not to blame the Chinese, a subtext in their findings was not hard to discern: Someone in China ? maybe a rogue individual or perhaps a government agency ? has been engaged in high-tech surveillance and thievery against perceived enemies of the state.

If that is indeed happening, it would represent a new chapter in the long history of Chinese attempts to manage the foreign journalists who live and work here, who now number more than 400.

The monitoring and manipulation of foreign reporters ? the ability to keep them and their sources on edge ? would have come a long way since the days when thick-set men in ill-fitting blazers would trail correspondents to interviews, and when unmistakable clicking noises during phone calls gave new meaning to the expression ?party line.?

Perhaps most disturbing would be the anonymity of the attacks ? the prospect that we and our sources will never know just what we are facing or whom to blame.

Nart Villeneuve, a Canadian researcher who helped analyze the attacks, including an infectious e-mail message designed to dupe the assistants of foreign reporters in Beijing, cautioned there was not enough hard evidence to blame the Chinese, or at least the Chinese government.

?The attackers tend to mask their location,? said Mr. Villeneuve, who is the chief researcher at SecDev.cyber, an Internet security company. ?On the other hand, you have to wonder who has the time and interest to produce these kinds of targeted attacks.?

Those of us who live and work in China might be forgiven for suspicions that focus on our hosts, or at least on the legion of so-called patriotic hackers who take umbrage at our coverage and use their computer skills accordingly. While impossible to know for sure, it may have been these nationalistic lone wolves who last week shut down the Web site of the Foreign Correspondents? Club of China, the association that represents overseas journalists in China.

To be clear, the lot of the foreign journalist has greatly improved in recent years. But there is an undeniably contentious edge to our relationship with China, one rooted in history and a stubborn conviction held by many Chinese that reporters here are spies with an ability to turn a phrase. (This point was driven home recently by a friend?s mother, who warned him to stay away from me lest he be ensnared by my subterfuge.)

Even if we have scant evidence, most foreign journalists have come to assume our phone conversations are monitored. We have learned to remove our cellphone SIM cards when meeting dissidents. At the office, we often reflexively lower our voices when discussing ?politically sensitive? topics.

Is that just paranoia? Perhaps. But recent history provides plenty of examples of government intrusion into the affairs of overseas journalists and their employees. It was only in 2007 that Zhao Yan, a researcher in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times, emerged from three years of detention after he was convicted of fraud. The unrelated accusations that led to his arrest ? that he had revealed state secrets ? were based on a Times article that correctly predicted the impending retirement of a senior Chinese leader. The state secrets charge, which was far more serious than fraud, eventually was dismissed, but not before the prosecutors introduced documents that had come from a desk in the Times office ? an indication that we were never truly alone.