HONG KONG, China (AFP) — The United States government is hacking Chinese mobile phone companies to gather data from millions of text messages, former intelligence technician Edward Snowden told the South China Morning Post in a report published yesterday.

US spies have also hacked China’s prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing and Asia Pacific fibre-optic network operator Pacnet, the Post quoted Snowden as saying.

Snowden, who worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), has been charged with espionage by the US after revealing a massive spying programme and has gone to ground after fleeing to Hong Kong.

“The NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cellphone companies to steal all of your SMS data,” Snowden said in the interview conducted on June 12.

Government data shows almost 900 billion text messages were exchanged in China in 2012.

The claims followed soon after a report in the Guardian in which he claimed the British government’s electronic eavesdropping agency had gained secret access to fibre-optic cables carrying global Internet traffic and telephone calls.

Britain’s Guardian said that Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had started processing vast amounts of personal information — including Facebook posts, emails, Internet histories and phonecalls — and is sharing it with the NSA.

The Post has previously quoted Snowden saying there have been more than 61,000 NSA hacking operations globally, targeting powerful “network backbones” that can yield access to hundreds of thousands of individual computers.

He said these included hundreds of targets in mainland China and Hong Kong.

Snowden told the Post in the report published yesterday that Tsinghua University, which counts China’s President Xi Jinping and previous President Hu Jintao among its graduates, was the target of extensive hacking by the US.

The university, which is home to the mainland’s six major backbone networks from where Internet data from millions of Chinese citizens can be gathered, was breached as recently as January, he said.