Anonymous Hits Chinese Targets

Well, this is certainly inspiring.   Emil Protalinski, writing for ZDNet at
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/anonymous-hacks-hundreds-of-chinese-government-sites/11303  has a long summary of Anonymous hacking websites in China.  This must seem strange to the Chinese, since they are usually the ones doing the hacking and not being hacked.  It is good for them.

When Anonymous went after Syria, exposing a number of government documents, most of dubious value, I thought they might be experimenting with what they might be able to do to a government that was controlling its Internet and ruthless about going after people who intrude in their systems.  They are taking on a good bit more with this one.

I'm not sure what good will come of defacing websites and publishing telephone numbers of government officials.  It seems like they would be more interested in documents related to the Golden Shield Project that puts the clamps on information getting in an out of China.  It would tell them how and what information was being controlled and how that was being done.  There is some pointers on what to look for in Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman, Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China, Harvard Law School, March 2003.  Since that was quite awhile ago, it could use an update.

Most governments don't like Anonymous very much.  They are not under any government's control and do things that can prove embarrassing.  They sometimes work like the press, exposing wrongs that are done that can't be exposed any other way.  You have to decide for yourself if that is a good thing or a bad thing.  With the balkanization of the Internet preventing the flow of information around the world, I think they might be onto something.  Maybe they can work on Russia when they get done with the Chinese.