Cyberwarfare Against China

In late 2007 the director-general of UK's MI5 sent a letter to 300 British CEOs and security chiefs warning them to be on the lookout for "state-sponsored Chinese hackers carrying out electronic surveillance attacks." This month Google Inc, following "close consultation with the US State Department",

threw down the gauntlet to China by saying it is no longer willing to censor search results on its Chinese service.

The world's leading search engine said the decision followed a cyber-attack that it believes was aimed at gathering information on Chinese human rights activists.

© Budi PutraScreenshot of Baidu (China's most popular internet search engine) after it was hacked by ... ahem, "Iranian Cyber Terrorists"

Led by a US media chorus, commentators lauded Google's noble decision to make a stand for individuals' privacy rights when the corporate behemoth this month accused the Chinese government of launching a cyber-attack that enabled it to hack into the Gmail accounts of "dozens of human rights activists" in China, Europe and the US. The devil in the details was that there were not "dozens", but just two Gmail accounts breached "most likely as a result of phishing or malware attacks" which were limited to acquiring basic account information, such as the date the Gmail account was created, rather than the content of emails themselves. Furthermore these two accounts were actually breached in December, yet Google chose to publicize this January 13, on the very same day that its competitor Baidu, the most popular search engine in China, suffered a real and crippling cyber-attack that knocked it offline for 4 hours. The Baidu homepage was redirected to the "Iranian Cyber Army", which claimed responsibility for the attack!

It seems that [Baidu] has had its DNS hacked by the "Iranian cyber Army", the same guys that hacked Twitter a few weeks ago. The process, called DNS cache poisoning, is the corruption of an Internet server's domain name system (DNS) table by replacing an Internet address with that of another, rogue address, in this case what the Iranian Cyber Army want you to see.

The obvious(ly ridiculous) implication was that the attack came from Iran. Following an investigation, Baidu filed a lawsuit for damages in a court in New York against its domain name registration service provider, Register.com Inc, which it accused of "unlawfully and maliciously altering" software behind its domain, resulting in the DNS cache poisoning that corrupted Baidu's domain name system. Incidentally, Larry Kutscher, CEO of Register.com, once served as Managing Director of Wealth Management at Goldman Sachs.

Of course, this was completely ignored by the western media which praised Google's stand against the evil commie Chinese privacy-hating state censors. Yes, China does not allow Twitter into its networks, but who can blame them given its trojan capabilities on display in CIA "soft revolutions" in Moldova and Iran? China knows that certain governments' concept of "freedom of speech" amounts to a cover for bombarding targeted countries with carefully crafted propaganda intended to sow discord and unhinge populations. What Google, the US government and the western media condemn as "increasing censorship", the Chinese government says is its right to protect its networks from malevolent influence. Let's hear the Chinese side of the story:

China on Friday firmly dismissed accusations by the United States that Beijing restricts Internet freedom and warned such claims were damaging to relations between the two nations.

"The US has criticized China's policies to administer the Internet and insinuated China restricts Internet freedom," said Ma Zhaoxu, spokesman for the Foreign Ministry. "China's Internet is open and managed in accordance with law."
[...]
Fu Mengzi, a researcher for the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said sovereign nations must supervise Internet content to maintain social security.

"Every country has rights to protect its national security and the US is no exception," he said, adding that Chinese netizens have sufficient access to the information they need in line with laws.

What China did is to safeguard the security of information flow on the Internet, he said.

"It's wrong to set up a false dichotomy between Internet freedom and supervision," he said.

Fu also pointed out that Google has broken Chinese laws by providing links to pornographic sites and infringing intellectual property rights.

© Unknown

The Chinese government, like all centers of power, is no doubt ponerised, but most everything we hear about it is US-centric propaganda filtered through compliant tools like Google. The psychopathic US establishment accusing China of doing what it is in fact engaged in clearly demonstrates this dissonance. Google further accused "Chinese hackers" of cyber attacks against 20 other major companies, yet strangely, none of them chose to step forward and confirm this. Next the Washington Post heightened hysteria by claiming 34 companies had come under attack, including death merchants Northrop Gruman, and that this was all part of a vast Chinese espionage campaign. All of it was fiction of course, supplied by "industry and congressional sources," a modern Red Scare generated to justify attacking "the enemy."

By the time Hilary Clinton graced the stage to publicly support Google's specious accusations, the stench of hypocrisy reached unbearable levels. The US National Security State apparatus routinely monitors all electronic communications, not just in the US, but wherever its global surveillance tentacles reach. We have direct experience of Google's censorship, whereby search results from Sott.net being consistently omitted from Google listings. And what about Google StreetCam, anyone? Google doesn't give a damn about "removing censorship restrictions"; all it cares about is removing impediments to ownership of all information, while serving its masters along the way. This is what Google CEO Eric Schmidt, upstanding patriot that he is, really thinks of your privacy:

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. [...]If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."

Google's quest for world domination goes unimpeded within the US Empire's sphere of influence (demonstrated just recently by a proposed ammendment in the UK that would essentially grant Google copyright immunity under English law) but struggles to make inroads into Baidu's 77% market share in China. And this is where Google's interests and the US government's interests dovetail.

The last time a "wave of cyber-attacks" against US targets was attributed to an east Asian country, it soon emerged that the source of the attacks was traced to servers in the UK. The Pentagon's new cross-agency cyber-army, "CyberCommand", had gone online just prior to the attacks, so it seems reasonable to suggest that it was testing its capabilities. We submit that Google's flare-up with the Chinese government this month was synchronized as a decoy while CyberCommand launched its real-time attack against Baidu using the "Iranian Cyber Army" as a false-flag proxy.

© scroogle.orgNSA and Google blend into one... or were they on the same team all along?

Was this American vengeance for being completely upstaged by the Chinese at the Nopenhagen conference in December, perhaps? Or a show of strength in the face of Chinese reluctance to endorse sanctions against Iran? Regardless, China responded to the relentless provocation in the best way possible; with the truth:

"Behind what America calls free speech is naked political scheming. How did the unrest after the Iranian elections come about? [...] It was because online warfare launched by America, via Youtube video and Twitter microblogging, spread rumors, created splits, stirred up, and sowed discord between the followers of conservative reformist factions."
[...]
"We're afraid that in the eyes of American politicians, only information controlled by America is free information, only news acknowledged by America is free news, only speech approved by America is free speech, and only information flow that suits American interests is free information flow."

The naked political scheming came full circle with the news that Google, the world's largest Internet search company, is to form an unholy alliance with the NSA, the world's most powerful electronic surveillance organization, in the name of cybersecurity against the cyberwar they have just covertly unleashed.