If you're at all concerned about privacy in this day and age, take a look at this report "The snooping dragon: social-malware surveillance of the Tibetan movement."

While malware attacks are not new, the abstract says there are two reasons to pay attention to the new tactics.

"First, it was a targeted surveillance attack designed to collect actionable intelligence for use by the police and security services of a repressive state, with potentially fatal consequences for those exposed. Second, the modus operandi combined social phishing with high-grade malware... As social-malware attacks spread, they are bound to target people such as accounts-payable and payroll staff who use computers to make payments. Prevention will be hard."

Also check out or this article in the New York Times.

It outlines how computers based in China have compromised nearly 1300 computers in 103 countries, including government offices.

Over the past year I've been sending samples of suspected viruses to one of the researchers who helped investigate the snooping, Greg Walton. He said some of the attachments contained wicked viruses, and he suspects my communications are of interest to the Chinese government.

This is nothing new for foreign correspondents in China. We assume our phone calls may be monitored, as well as our computers. We are occasionally followed by flesh-and-blood umans.

What is new is the personalized e-touch.

I appear to have my own cyber-spy. Let me give you a recent example.

Not to long ago I received an email from someone who declared in the subject line he was a friend of a journalist friend of mine.

It read. "Hello. I am a Journalist in ghana. I get a fccc agenda,can you help me,check it.I am afraid is a worm."

The sender was referring to the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China. I head the FCCC's media freedoms committee.

I advised the sender not to open the agenda.

Then he went through an elaborate game of trying to lure me to open what appeared to be a word document. He wrote:

"I just open it. not virus :)
ok. because file is "txt". txt very safe. :)

He copied part of an agenda which I had authored, so I knew that part was authentic. Then, he followed up with this message.

"Sorry.I send an error.Not send you.Sorry.
Don't open that file.Please Delete mail.
It's private. Secret"

After that, he gave the name of another journalist I know.

Meanwhile, I asked the first friend he named, and she said she didn't know any African journalists.

Actually, I would be delighted if such snooping were a fast-track to people in the Chinese government who the FCCC would like to alert about our many concerns about media freedoms.

I doubt that's the case. But for the record, the FCCC's agenda is to push for the free flow of information. We have nothing to hide.