DCAWD.com

For a short time on Tuesday, internet traffic sent between Facebook and subscribers to AT&T's internet service passed through hardware belonging to the state-owned China Telecom before reaching its final destination, a security researcher said.

An innocent routing error is the most likely explanation for the highly circuitous route, but it's troubling nonetheless, said Barrett Lyon, the independent researcher who helped discover the anomaly and later blogged about it. Human rights groups have long accused China's government of snooping on the internet communications of dissidents, and last year Google claimed it and dozens of other companies were on the receiving end of a sophisticated hacking campaign carried out by the Chinese.

During a window that lasted 30 minutes to an hour Tuesday morning, all unencrypted traffic passing between AT&T customers and Facebook might have been open to similar monitoring. Lyon said he has no evidence any data was in fact snarfed, but he said the potential for that is certainly there because the hardware belonged to China Telecom, which in turn is owned by the Chinese government.

“This kind of thing happens all the time, sometimes on accident and sometimes on purpose,” he told The Reg. “I think people should talk about it at the very least.”

Google has accused the Chinese government of interfering with its popular Gmail email system. The move follows extensive attempts by the Chinese authorities to crack down on the "jasmine revolution" – an online dissident movement inspired by events in the Middle East.

According to the search giant, Chinese customers and advertisers have increasingly been complaining about their Gmail service in the past month. Attempts by users to send messages, mark messages as unread and use other services have generated problems for Gmail customers.

In the wake of the catastrophic earthquake in Japan, Google set up an application to help people find relatives and friends lost in the disaster. This service too seems to have been blocked.

"Relating to Google there is no issue on our side. We have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail," said a Google spokesman. China's embassy in Washington was not immediately available for comment.

In a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, the Chinese government has released a report accusing the US government of human rights double standards where the Internet is concerned.

In spite of the obvious comedic element here, they might be onto something.

The US really does seem to take directly opposing views on Internet freedom for others versus when it directly affects US policy.

According to the Guardian report on the matter, the Chinese made a big deal out of the fact they don't normally stick their noses in the business of other governments, but apparently they couldn't resist in this instance, given all the flak they've taken regarding jailed dissidents, hacking Google's servers, openly censoring the Internet, and in general trampling on human rights.

The country making the most noise about all that has been the US, which you may recall -- and the Chinese gleefully point out in their report -- went after WikiLeaks with both guns blazing when its own internal security seemed threatened.