Hactivism: China's real digital war is within

By Rajas Kelkar and Shruti Dhapola

In a pre-Internet era, it was relatively easy for authoritarian governments to impose censorship rules and not let the world know what horrors were being perpetrated within their borders. For a regime to impose its political will on the people was also relatively a breeze when information flows could be controlled.

But the wired world we now live in has changed all that.

The Internet today is catalysing revolutions, as the Arab Spring uprising in the Middle East and North Africa has shown. With smartphones and always-on Internet, images of atrocities get beamed around the world in a trice, providing more fuel to revolutionary passions.

And as the WikiLeaks cables have demonstrated, even open, democratic political systems find themselves unable to keep pace with what technology can do to unlock governmental vaults to reveal embarrasing diplomatic secrets that they would have preferred locked away for eternity.

In that context, China, with its unique developmental model of an open economy and a closed political system, now finds itself in a tricky situation.

The recent hacking of Gmail and Google’s subsequent claims that hacks originated from Jinan, the capital of China’s eastern Shandong province, is a case in point. Jinan is home to one of six technical reconnaissance bureaus belonging to the People’s Liberation Army and a technical college that US investigators last year linked to a previous attack on Google, Reuters reported on Thursday.

China was quick to deny these allegations. In an official statement China’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday said it “cannot accept” accusations that hackers likely based in China tried to break into hundreds of Google mail accounts.

“Blaming these misdeeds on China is unacceptable,” the Chinese spokesman told a regular news briefing.

China recently acknowledged the presence of an “online army” - a cyber warfare unit - although it claimed that it would only serve a “defensive” role and protect Chinese cyberassets from hack attacks.

Chinese hackers have earned international notoriety in recent years with the ridiculous ease with which they have been able to wage cyberwar on overseas targets. There have been long-lingering suspicions that the Chinese state was an active player in these cyberoffensives.

But from all accounts, there are also non-state hacker activists in China, and perhaps even “dissident hackers”: in fact, the Chinese state itself is being hurt by such dissident hackers.

“The biggest war that China faces in terms of digital and online technologies is with itself,” says Nishant Shah, Director of Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. In his estimation, the focus should be as much on the cyberwars that China has to engage within its own domains - as about the cyberwars it wages with the world.The contradiction in China is accentuated by a closed socialist political system that emphasises censorship, which is diametrically opposite to the openness in the economic space.

The Internet is now an increasingly politicised space, and nothing illustrates this better than the recent China vs Google spat. China is now seen to be on the “other side” when it comes to Internet freedom. When any cyberattack is traced to China, it is commonly considered a show of Chinese cyber strength by the West.

But perhaps hacking in China could also be seen in a different light. The Internet is also a platform to voice one’s dissent, and a cyberattack with its roots in China could be a way of expressing one’s disapproval of a world order that is dominated by the US.

The full political implications of the growing China vs US cyberspat are hard to fathom, but much of the attention appears to be focussed on what’s called ‘hactivism’. What exactly does hactivism mean?

According to a paper in the April 2011 issue of the Online Journal of Media and Communication Technology, ‘hactivists’ try to convey beliefs on politics to the world on issues like human rights, global justice, freedom on internet, free flow of information and free speech.The Chinese hackers appear to be doing exactly that. They are letting the world know their views on the world.

Hactivism is even being likened to a form of ’electronic civil disobedience’. There are glaring similarities in the two forms of ‘protest’ (see table below).

As Shah further states,“Hacking is contextual and defined by the immediate environments within which the hacker is located.”

Other factors include the intentions of the hacker, the desired results of the action, and the processes of subversion and resistance. “It would be impossible to think of a universal hacker, or indeed unfair to compare hackers from two different locations, because they operate with different registers and in different conditions,” Shah added.

Types of Hactivism and what they mean:

Site defacements: This consists of hacking into the webserver and replacing a web page with a new page bearing some sort of a message

Site redirects involve hacking into a webserver and changing its address so that visitors are instead redirected to an alternative site, usually the one that is critical of the hacked site.

Denial of service (DoS) attacks are a powerful way to wreak online havoc but have been rarely used by hactivists. These are attacks on a computer system or network that causes a loss of services to users.

Information theft consists of hacking into a private network and stealing information.

Virtual sit-ins get hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of protesters to rapidly reload web pages on targeted servers, overloading them with traffic until they slow down or crash.

Site parodies spoof target organisation often by imitating the appearance and by locating the spoof at a website address or URL that is likely to be confused with the address of the original (spoofed site).

Software development can constitute hacktivism if the software tools serve specific political purposes. These tools are usually to create and distributed as open source software which anyone can modify or improvise.