Cyber Attacks against Tibetan Communities

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.'"

Comments

govt-sponsored

[KiloByte]

And since guys doing such things for fun are nearly entirely pro-Tibet, who is left as the only interested party?

Re:govt-sponsored

[mrbluze]

And since guys doing such things for fun are nearly entirely pro-Tibet, who is left as the only interested party?

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

[KiloByte]

Possibly you're right. But I wouldn't be surprised if something much worse than [...] You have a strange way of saying "I could bet my life that".

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

[PopeRatzo]

I don't know why the international community isn't using the Olympics to put pressure on China regarding Tibet.

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:govt-sponsored

[Anonymous Coward]

This came up recently in German media, and the response of both government and NOC officials was that if we were to boycott olympics on political reasons, calling for a boycott *now* would be double-measured. A spokesman said (and I'm forced to agree, though I don't quite like it) that if one were to call for a boycott on the grounds of China violating human rights, one should consider that there have been thousands of the usual executions and imprisonments since the games were awarded to China, and no one called for a boycott then. So, doing it now would put the human rights of the Tibetans above those of native Chinese...

Really a difficult situation. Boycotts, just like strikes, are always unjust as they mostly hit the wrong guys. I do, however, hope that western athletes will use the olympics as a forum discussing this, e.g. publicly asking why there are no teams representing Tibet and Taiwan.

Re:govt-sponsored

[h4rm0ny]

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

[XchristX]

The Chinese government is red-faced on this and it hasn't even begun to wreak its vengeance. It's already well under way. Chinese communist sympathizers have been engaging in a fair bit of historical revisionism and propaganda on the internet about these incidents. Check out the wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_unrest_in_Tibet) , for instance, where CCP communist shills in the diaspora have been edit-warring in gangs to make the Tibetans look like the bad guys (compare that ridiculous piece of biased rubbish there with less unreliable sources(http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=19922&article='Beijing+orchestrating+Tibet+riots').

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:govt-sponsored

[smoker2]

Utter crap. Your claim that somehow the USAs decision not to go to the Moscow Olympics caused the fall of the USSR is rubbish, and even your weak disclaimer negates your statement. Even more amusing is the reason for that boycott - the USSR had invaded Afghanistan. Who is embroiled in Afghanistan now (and Iraq) ? And even your reasons are the same as theirs - to quash rebel forces opposed to your domination of the area. The USSR boycotted the 1984 LA Olympics, for political reasons, did that have any effect on world peace ? Even the 1976 boycott by the African Nations did nothing to directly influence the South African apartheid regime.
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.

They needn't be government sponsored...

[Digestromath]

They needn't be government sponsored merely idividuals and organizations who are ignored by the government as long as they stay on the "right" side of the law. Believe or not, extreme nationalists are willing to do the dirty work for free. It doesn't matter what country your in, you'll find some extreme patriots willing to go above and beyond to silence thier radical counterparts. Some governments do more to stop them, others do less... when it suits them.

falung gong is chines

[xkillkillx]

Slightly off-topic : i doubt those crazy Falun-Gong followers qualify as an "anti-Chinese group". They're just a sect/spiritual_practice/younameit which has no such goal as "being anti-Chinese". The Chinese goverment does qualify as "anti falun gong" though.

Rage Against the Chinese?

[SlashWombat]

Several replies and no-one has really been on topic. Doesn't anybody care about the plight of the Tibetans?

I know Americans are all "gung ho" when it comes to invading countries that are important to it AKA Iraq, Vietnam ... but surely this has not diminished your sense of pity for others. (Or, perhaps it does, seems that it might explain many mysterious things.)

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?

[mgabrys_sf]

Probably because the plight is still under wraps. The information we've gotten to date has really been pretty sparse and it seems to be harder to openly support actions that even the Dali Lama has been outspoken against. I sympathize with the fact that the people reacting today are young and have been detached from the Lama for several DECADES and are living in the thick of it and are not expatriates in another area, but I'm not one to say - "yea - go for it - stick it to the man" - because fuck-all good it did in 1989.

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:Rage Against the Chinese?

[h4rm0ny]

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.

Re:Rage Against the Chinese?

[CRCulver]

Yes, some parts of their "culture" have been systematically wiped, such as slavery, cruel torture, sexuality discrimination and much more (go to your library and check out more about this). If you think Chinese government should keep such "culture", you can suggest your government back to the medieval first.

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.

All the schools in Tibet are bilingual (plus English from the secondary school).

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.

I strongly suggest you travel to Tibet and use your own eyes to check.

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.

Mainstream coverage of the attacks

[Anonymous Bullard]

The Washington Post (article reprinted) has a more mainstream-orinted story on these attacks.

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

[asuffield]

I don't think the Chinese government thinks of Tibetans as automatic suspects, exactly. If there is anything that this whole affair reminds me of, it is the systematic extermination of the native Americans by the colonists. Han Chinese colonists move in and are supported by their government; natives can abandon their own culture and integrate into the Han nation (where they will be more or less accepted in time), or they can be shoved to one side and left to die out. Natives who oppose this get armies sent after them; those who don't oppose it get ignored. It's all stuff that we've seen before in history classes.

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

[Anonymous Bullard]

Interesting that you should bring up the comparison to the European colonists and native Americans. A couple of years back the Tibetan rights activists got hold of a Chinese Communist Party (Department of Propaganda) manual for their frontline workers involved in arguing the CCP's side online and in the western media. This Guilt Trip argument that the Western colonial powers had done similar things in their history was top of the list. However for some reason they completely refrain mentioning the last dictatorships that engaged in such genocidal expansionism: Stalin (who Mao got his ideas from) and Hitler.

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 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.

Re:They are terrorists!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi there,

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 ?)

"anti-chinese groups like Falun Gong."

[1u3hr]

WTF with: "anti-chinese groups like Falun Gong"??

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.)

sowing the seeds of conflict in their own lives

[microbox]

I think the grand-parent was being glib.

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.