The Chinese Politburo--a committee of 24 officials overseeing the Chinese Communist Party--directed a hack attack into Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) computer systems, according to an informant discussed in a January 2010 cable from the U.S. embassy in Beijing, reports The New York Times.

The State Department cable is one of 251,287 obtained by Wikileaks and sent to the newspaper, as well as to the United Kingdom's The Guardian, Germany's Der Spiegel, France's Le Monde and Spain's El País. Wikileaks itself is also slowly posting the cables online.

According to the Times's Nov. 28 summary of that cable and others, the Chinese government supported "a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws." None of the cables discussing Chinese hackers are yet online.

Apparently Chinese-government supported hackers have also broken into the Dali Lama's computers and those of U.S. businesses since 2002, the Times states.

News of the hacks themselves are hardly new, and neither is suspicion that the Chinese government had a hand in them. A Defense Department report from earlier this year, for example, described a direct link between civilian information technology professionals and the Chinese military through a paramilitary unit dedicated to developing and unleashing viruses.

News of the cables themselves has created quite a stir, however; they mark Wikileaks' fourth major disclosure of U.S. sensitive and classified information likely originating from former Army intelligence Private First Class Bradley Manning. According to the Times, 11,000 of the cables are marked "secret," another 9,000 or so carry a "noforn" label, and 4,000 are marked "secret/noforn."

In a note to readers, the Times said it has not reported on cables "that would endanger confidential informants or compromise national security," basing its decisions in part on Obama administration input.

The Defense Department announced on Sunday, the day news of the leaks broke, that it undertook two reviews of information and intelligence sharing in August. The reviews called on the DoD to disable all "write" capability for removable media on classified computers and to limit the number of systems authorized to move data from classified to unclassified systems.

Defense organizations are implementing new two-person handling rules for moving data from classified to unclassified systems and monitoring unusual data access or usage via a host-based security system, said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman.  

For more:
- go to the NYT's leak coverage
- go to the Wikileaks embassy cables page
- read a DoD article on leak prevention efforts
- track world reaction through Google News

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