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Cyber Attacks against Tibetan Communities
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Saturday March 22, @05:22AM
from the that's-right-all-the-tea dept.
from the that's-right-all-the-tea dept.
UnderAttack writes "The SANS Internet Storm Center reports about an increasing number of sophisticated and targeted cyber attacks against Tibetan NGOs. These attacks appear to be related to attacks against other anti-chinese groups like Falun Gong. 'There is lots of media coverage on the protests in Tibet. Something that lies under the surface, and rarely gets a blip in the press, are the various targeted cyber attacks that have been taking place against these various communities recently. These attacks are not limited to various Tibetan NGOs and support groups. They have been reported dating back to 2002, and even somewhat before that, and have affected several other communities, including Falun Gong and the Uyghurs.'"
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FBI Looks Into Chinese Role in Darfur Site Hack 56 comments
Amy Bennett writes "This past weekend we discussed an increasing level of attacks online, targeting Tibetan-based NGOs. Now the BBC is reporting that the Save Darfur Coalition has called in the FBI on what appears to be a similar matter. Allyn Brooks-LaSure, a spokesman with the group, doesn't know who is behind the attacks, but he said the IP addresses of the computers that had hacked his organization were from China. Save Darfur has been trying to get China, one of Sudan's largest trading partners, to pressure Sudan's government into stopping the mass killings in Darfur's ongoing civil war. 'Someone in Beijing is trying to send us a message,' Brooks-LaSure said. Probably the same message they're sending by continuing to shut down video sites covering the Tibetan unrest."
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govt-sponsored (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:govt-sponsored (Score:5, Insightful)
Possibly you're right. But I wouldn't be surprised if something much worse than cyber-attacks is awaiting the freedom-seeking Tibetans.. err, 'Terrorists', after the Olympic Games are finished.
The Chinese government is red-faced on this and it hasn't even begun to wreak its vengeance.
Re:govt-sponsored (Score:5, Informative)
In my dad's school, one of the kids started laughing when the grave news of Stalin's death were announced. The next day, his whole family went missing.
The China is still in the phase of jailing folks over what their kid said...
Re:govt-sponsored (Score:5, Insightful)
A threat of a boycott would do wonders for China's behavior. We dropped out of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow for the same reasons, and the Soviet Union fell in the next decade (not that they were directly related).
But it seems most of the world's leaders are so busy sucking at the teat of China's huge market and cheap labor and doesn't want to scotch a sweet economic deal. Or I guess I should say the people the world's leaders work for are the ones who won't allow a boycott.
I know I won't watch the Olympics this year. Not One Bit.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:govt-sponsored (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a terrible excuse from the German official. It's exactly saying "I didn't speak out about one thing someone did wrong, so I'm not going to speak out about something else." And if somehow people did say "why didn't you protest against native chinese human rights violations" (not that anyone who cares about this actually would object to at least doing something rather than nothing), it would at least be someone asking about native chinese rights violations which is more publicity than they normally get in the West.
Even as ways of rationalising a lack of conscience for the sake of self-interest, it's got to be one of the worst I've ever heard.
Re:govt-sponsored (Score:4, Insightful)
The Olympics should not be about politics, and refusing to play nicely is what causes and prolongs arguments. By dealing with the Chinese, we get to understand them, and more importantly, they get to be exposed to, and start to understand and relate to us. These things take time, but by working together, I'm sure we'll find that as the Chinese govt. evolves (as it must due to death of current officials and leaders) the next generation will not be so hostile to the west, and even embrace more of our values. Once they are working on the same set of values then our arguments will make more sense to them.
Just telling them to fuck off and not engaging will just reinforce the separation of our cultures. And seeing as how the Chinese pretty much own your asses, financially speaking, you shouldn't be picking a fight you haven't got the capability to win.
Re:govt-sponsored (Score:5, Informative)
It continues to amaze me that a free and proletarian medium like the internet can be abused by a sufficiently determined group like the Chinese CCP and their global network of apologists and propagandists to spread misinformation and whitewash their atrocities. It's sickening.
Re:They are terrorists! (Score:4, Funny)
Do you have sources for this 'information' ?
Completely unrelated : is your paycheck in Chinese currency ?
(Also, you sound like that guy that keeps sending me emails from Nigeria. Where are my 149.000.000.000 dollars ?)
They needn't be government sponsored... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
falung gong is chines (Score:3, Insightful)
Rage Against the Chinese? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know Americans are all "gung ho" when it comes to invading countries that are important to it AKA Iraq, Vietnam
China forced its way into Tibet quit some time ago, and now seem to be systematically destroying the Tibetan culture. Yet the Chinese shit in the face of anything that might detract from their own cultural identity.
Aren't you guys ashamed? Or have all your high falutin morals gone down the drain!
Re:Rage Against the Chinese? (Score:4, Informative)
It can be best summed up in the famous tank photo. That photo of a man standing in front of the tanks heading to Tiananmen Square has been oft-touted as a photo that "changed the world". But that's always been bullshit. It didn't change a damn thing and was a harbinger of what was about to happen which was total suppression and annihilation. When the tanks moved against their own people in Russia - THAT was a game-changer. In China - it's business as usual and whether you position yourself in front of tanks or type in blogs and forums - it's not going to change anything. Sorry - but it's not.
Now, it's fun to embarrass them on the world stage, and watch them lose face. Probably why I'm going to watch the protesters in San Francisco when that stupid torch comes through with more than a little glee. It's also fun to bait them online for being such idiots because they have been utterly removed from any and all historical data on their govt on the various forums they have been spamming recently. But I don't think for a minute that it's going to change dick.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Rage Against the Chinese? (Score:4, Interesting)
I was not defending all facets of Tibetan culture at the time of the occupation, but rather the mere right of the Tibetans to preserve their own conception of a culture distinct from that of neighbouring peoples.
Chinese claims of bilingual education are regularly criticized by linguists worldwide. Chinese schooling in practice pushes Putonghua on the local population to the detriment of their own language.
While I have not been to Tibet, I have traveled in Eastern Turkestan a.k.a. Xinjiang. It is obvious that the influx of Han people as it is currently managed is not compatible with the preservation of the indigenous language.
Re:Rage Against the Chinese? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know enough about Tibetan history to say if you're right or wrong about past rulers of Tibet. But if you care about the Tibetan people today, you should be against the forces that threaten them today. It is useful to have the historical perspective in order to prevent a return to another bad system, but it doesn't alter the need to change the current one.
sowing the seeds of conflict in their own lives (Score:4, Insightful)
Buddhists believe in karma, which is why they are against violence. Destroying people and taking their land is not a sane way of seeking happiness and stability. Your children will grow up thinking that they can solve problems by destroying others. The chinese people are sowing the seeds of conflict in their own lives. There is a tragic quality to all of this.
Mainstream coverage of the attacks (Score:5, Informative)
It should be emphasized that the exiled Tibetan groups based in India are extremely vulnerable to China's attacks and snooping since they often operate on aging hardware running obsolete and unpatched Windows software, partly out of necessity since some Tibetan-language word-processing tools that they're familiar with only run on obsolete MS platforms and partly because they're only now beginning to realize that Linux can also be made to work for them both on the servers and desktops. In fact the government in neighboring Bhutan has already created a comprehensive Dzongkha (a Tibetan-like language using the same script) version of Linux.
Equally huge problem is that most Tibetans in exile will naturally try to communicate with their family and friends back in the Chinese-occupied Tibet, but they don't realize that their unencrypted emails, "yahoo chats" and mobile text messages are all being monitored and logged by the Chinese authorities. Even if they don't exchange any sensitive information, simply receiving messages from outside China's control makes any Tibetan a suspect. Actually just being a Tibetan makes one a suspect under the eyes of the Chinese colonial masters...
Re:Mainstream coverage of the attacks (Score:5, Insightful)
The Chinese government has been doing this to Tibet for a period of centuries now (with varying degrees of enthusiasm depending on what else was going on at the time), and their reaction to people who say that Tibet is an independent nation is very similar to the reactions of US colonists to people who said the same things about the natives there (it basically amounts to "We're taking it, so this land is ours, and all those squatters can just go die in a hole"). The colonists do of course blame the natives for clinging to their culture instead of adopting the new, obviously superior one that is taking over.
Re:Mainstream coverage of the attacks (Score:4, Informative)
Also, the "West" (i.e. the western countries that engaged in colonialism; most did not and many were victims of their neighbours in Europe, too) has long ago seen the criminality of the old ways and has since sought to undo past damages. The fact that some colonial powers wiped out indigenous cultures, just like China has been doing to its past near-neighbours for centuries and millenia (check sometimes where the Han-chinese actually originate from), but later saw the error of their own ways should in fact give them some authority to speak from experience. If my great-great-great-.....great-grandparents were sent overseas by their unelected masters to do what we now know to be crimes against humanity, should I not be able to condemn those acts??
Do you think it is reasonable or even understandable for China to be committing such genocidal colonialism today (since the 1950 invasion), all the while keeping their own population in complete darkness over what really is happening and what the Tibetans really want in their own country?
And therein lies another massive difference between the tribal native cultures of the "new continents" and the Tibetans. The Tibetans were not only China's historical neighbours, with wars and peace treaties of their own (including an eternal peace treaty with the Chinese after the Tibetans had invaded the capital of China in the first century B.C.), their own army, central government, currency, postal system etc. The Chinese claims over Tibet are all the more ridiculous when they start referring to the Yuan dynasty... Those were the Mongol descendants of Genghis Khan who had invaded China too, and who agreed to a priest-patron relationship (without de facto control over governance) as protectors of Tibet after converting from Islam to Buddhism!
When the Mongol empire broke up, the remaining Chinese quarter continued the Buddhist relationship with Tibet (i.e. the "primitive" Tibet was trusted to provide spiritual services to the Chinese courts for centuries...), but nominally claimed Tibet as part of the known Chinese empire (just like they did with all their other neighbours), still without de facto rule over its affairs. And somehow that spiritual relationship was carried into the 20th century by the newly-crowned communist emperor "religion is poison" Mao whose first task after coronation was to send his communist army to invade (the CCP term is "peaceful liberation") Tibet for real.
Who told you that "the Chinese government has been doing this (genocidal subjugation) to Tibet for a period of centuries now"??
But nice going, the Guilt Trip argument again succeeded in deflecting some of the spotlight off the current and ongoing crimes by the Chinese regime against the Tibetan nation.
Now go and watch a documentary [google.com] about the Tibetans living and dying under the Chinese occupation today, not in the 15th or 18th century when people still had no say in their own affairs anywhere. The events in that documentary, which includes footage and interviews from the last major uprising in Lhasa and its aftermath twenty years ago, resembles eerily the current crackdown being executed by the Chinese military and paramilitary since last week.
Falun Gong Is Chinese (Score:3, Informative)
Falun Gong [wikipedia.org] is Chinese. That sentence should say "Chinese rebel groups like Falun Gong".
"anti-chinese groups like Falun Gong." (Score:5, Insightful)
Most Falun Gong ARE Chinese. The government does not like them, fearing an organised group, though religious, could turn political, but to identify this as "anti-Chinese" is really nonsensical. (Americans might like to compare with the "Why do you hate America?" jibes made to demonise political opponents.)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)