The US government has “conducted large-scale, organized and indiscriminate cyber theft, tapping and surveillance on foreign governments, businesses and individuals, a fact already well-known to all,” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Geng Shuang said at a daily briefing in Beijing.

These spying activities, which violate international law and undermine trust between the US and other nations, had been unmasked by whistleblower Edward Snowden and by WikiLeaks – a fact Geng was also keen to remind the audience of. Among other things, the Americans have been collecting billions of phone calls around the globe on a daily basis and were even revealed to be spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone.

The Chinese official pointed out that Washington never explained itself over those leaks and “now the Crypto AG incident adds… one more thing for the US to clarify to the world.”

During the briefing, Geng provided his own list of Washington’s aggressive actions targeting China in cyberspace, including “controlling over three million Chinese computers and implanting Trojan Horse in more than 3,600 Chinese websites on an annual basis.”

Last week, the Washington Post revealed that the US had been using a Swiss encryption company, Crypto AG, to monitor “secure” communications between as many as 120 countries since the 1970s and well into 2000s. The firm sold “encrypted” devices to government agencies worldwide but was secretly owned by the CIA and then-West German intelligence. The Americans hailed the operation as the “intelligence coup of the century.”