Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom - World Press ...

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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An attack on the the Committee to Protect Journalists was traced to cvnxus.8800.org
It is interesting to note that this server has been used in past hacker intrusions traced by
US law enforcement to China.
Human Rights in China intercepted just two targeted e-mail attacks in 2006, and by the
end of last year that had grown to 40. In the first three months of 2008, the group
received more than 100 such targeted attacks.
Based on technical data such as this, it is not possible to say who is responsible for these
attacks, but if we take an inter-disciplinary approach and consider these incidents from a
social science as well as a computer security perspective, we can reach tentative
conclusions.
Let us now consider who is responsible for these ongoing attacks against non-state actors
that so effectively challenge the Chinese government’s legitimacy.
While the People’s Liberation Army established its first cyber-warfare units (zixunhua
budui) in 2003 - and we can assume the Chinese Ministry of State Security is also active in
this field - I will focus my comments on the what is called the “Red Hacker Alliance.”
One of the key questions in research by Scott Henderson is whether the groups that make
up the Red Hacker Alliance are officially exploited by the Chinese state. Henderson is a
former US Army intelligence officer who focuses a blog - www.thedarkvisitor.com/ - on
what Chinese hackers are up to. He asks, is tasking, oversight and control of the
organization in the hands of the central government? Henderson’s simple answer is that
the Red Hacker Alliance is not part of the government. He sees them as just who they
claim to be: an independent confederation of patriotic Chinese youth committed to
defending the motherland from what it sees as threats to national pride.
No one working with Open Source intelligence has been able to yet substantiate the claim
that there is direct government oversight of the Red Hacker Alliance. On the contrary,
there is a significant weight of evidence to suggest that the organization is a non-state
actor. However, it has been argued that the couching of the terms of this inquiry is flawed
- a simple negative answer is highly misleading.
The essential difficulty with the thought processes behind our inquiry is that we tend to
considering the issue from a Western, liberal, democratic conception of the nation-state -
leading to a position where we are susceptible to cultural bias. Many authors have made it
clear that in Chinese society acting independently of the government does not imply
disconnection from the State.
The Chinese government regards its people as an essential component of what it calls,
“comprehensive national power” and as critical to national security. The “masses” are
prominent in China's strategic thinking and will be aggressively deployed in both war and
peacetime. Therefore, to argue that the Red Hacker Alliance is a non-state actor is
basically true; it is also highly misleading. It would suggest that the hackers are not
working with the government’s intelligence bureaucracy. This would also be wrong. The