China’s nefarious internet trolling

By Eric Reeves, The New Republic on-line

March 26, 2008 — Ominous news from cyberspace: Darfur advocacy groups in the United
States–collectively without rival in shaping international efforts to
halt ethnically targeted violence in western Sudan and eastern
Chad–have been the target of cyber-espionage that most likely leads
back to the Chinese government. Beijing is angry because it is the focus
of a large and intense shaming campaign highlighting the fact that China
is both host of the 2008 Olympic Games–and thus custodian of the
Games’s various ideals–as well as complicit in the Darfur genocide by
way of its support for the brutal regime in Khartoum (see
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=1f4269dd-9d4f-4911-891f-57ae85d66b70)
. What was to have been Beijing’s post-Tiananmen Square coming out party
is rapidly becoming a public relations nightmare. And so the Chinese
government has sanctioned cyber-espionage against the advocacy
organizations most responsible for this shaming campaign (see
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/china-and-darfur-2/?ref=opinion).

The FBI is investigating these clandestine I.T. assaults on the basis
of evidence provided by the Save Darfur Coalition, the largest and
perhaps most influential of the advocacy organizations. Others working
on the campaign appear to have been similarly targeted (see
http://www.dreamfordarfur.org/index.php; my own website was
recently subject to a highly sophisticated cyber-assault traced back to
Iran, a close Islamic ally of the Khartoum regime). Such attacks are not
without precedent, and indeed form part of a dangerous pattern requiring
much greater scrutiny and protection. In reporting on the story, The
Washington Post (see
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/20/AR2008032003193.html)
found consensus among I.T. experts that the Save Darfur Coalition
allegation “fits a near decade-old pattern of cyber-espionage and
cyber-intimidation by the Chinese government against critics of its
human rights practices.”

What’s new here is that China is not simply tracking human rights
dissidents abroad, or researchers and advocates working on such highly
sensitive subjects as Tibet and Taiwan, regarded by Beijing as “domestic
affairs.” Rather the cyber-espionage extends to advocacy organizations
challenging China over its role in the broader international theater of
events and responsibilities. The thinking appears to be that if an issue
touches Chinese interests in a serious way, cyber-espionage is an
acceptable tactic. A recent news investigation in China found persuasive
evidence that hackers not directly associated with the Chinese
government were committing cyber-espionage on a freelance basis, and
were paid for it by Beijing later (see
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/03/07/china.hackers/). And yet
because of the difficulty in proving definitively just where an attack
or penetration originates, and if the government has a hand in it, both
the espionage subcontractors and the Chinese government “operate in a virtual world of deniability.”

This apparent meeting of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the sci-fi world of
“The Matrix” is no small concern. The intrusions that politically
active U.S. citizens face today are, despite the excesses of the Patriot
Act, most likely to come from abroad. And there is no legal or judicial
recourse. U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies have only begun
to move toward serious discussions of the problem. Actual adjudication
of “off-shore” espionage would seem to be many years off, especially if
one of the most egregious offenders is China. A treaty of any sort that
might weaken one of China’s intelligence and military advantages over
the West would appear doomed.

Americans should thus expect that Chinese abuses of cyber-technology
for espionage purposes, extending to the invasion and disruption of
domestic political discourse, to be around for a very long time.

Eric Reeves is author of “A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in
the Darfur Genocide”