For those who may have missed it, Jim Sciutto wrote an
interesting opinion piece for the Washington Post on paying attention to what
the Chinese do to control their outlets to the Internet. [see China’s blackout of U.S. media can
no longer be ignored - http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/chinas-blackout-of-us-media-can-no-longer-be-ignored/2013/07/10/2bdea62e-e7f5-11e2-a301-ea5a8116d211_story.html]
These are his main points:
1.
The Chinese censor their Internet. They have their own versions of
Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
They ban certain outlets like the New York Times and Bloomburg News and
target specific stories on The Wall Street Journal and U.S. news services.
2.
They block sites as a punitive or policy matter
– sometimes both.
3.
We have granted 700 visas to Chinese
journalists, but they will block our journalists for stories that they don’t
like. He votes for a more
reciprocal policy for visas.
4.
We need to more aggressively deal with China on
these matters, rather than accept them as acceptable internal policies.
He certainly has good points and more detailed discussion in
his full article, but he may have overlooked some important points, perhaps for
lack of space. The Chinese, as
they demonstrated with Google and the New York Times/Wall Street Journal cases
do not just try to govern their own Internet; they want to govern the whole Internet, including the part
owned, and operated, by the United States.
The Chinese approach to Google asked them to restrict the
flow of pornography, as they defined it, to China – and to Google users in the
United States. It sounds like the
height of arrogance, but to them, it is just regulating the flow of information
to their own population, by any means possible.
In both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal cases,
the Chinese hacked to get the sources of stories published about their
leaders. They can’t stop the
stories directly, so they go after the sources, wherever they are. As Jim points out in this article, they
control the press of other countries by controlling their visas.
They do the same with dissidents anywhere they can find
them. As The Shadows In the Cloud series of reports done by Shadowserver
Foundation, et al, shows the
information being stolen was coming from Indian embassies in Belgium, Serbia,
Germany, Italy, Kuwait, the United States, Zimbabwe, and the High Commissions
of India in Cyprus and the U.S. A
massive effort to find out what one person, the Dalai Lama, was going to be
doing. They have the resources and
time to focus on disruptions in their movement forward.
The Chinese pretend
that they just enforce their internal policies and have every right to do what
they do, but we find out more and more that it is not just at home that they
attempt to enforce their internal policies. They reach into the borders of many countries.
I agree that more
has to be done, but I’m not sure diplomacy is the best course here. We have played a very passive role in
our response to hacking by the Chinese, while they use every excuse and
side-track of Edward Snowden, to try to diffuse their fault. We need more than treaties and
agreements to stop this kind of attack.
There is no such thing as deterrence in the hacking world, and we need
to bring back that concept. They
need some painful reminders that attacking another country has
consequences. So far, they are the
only ones handing those out.
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