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Claims About China's April Internet Hijack Are Overblown
sturgeon writes "Yesterday, we discussed what most of the world's major media outlets were reporting on China's April 2010 hijack of '15% of Internet traffic,' including sensitive US government and defense sites. The alarm came following a US Government report (see page 244) on China / US economic and security relations released on Tuesday. Unfortunately, few bothered with fact checking or actually reading the report. The actual study never makes any estimate of Internet traffic diverted during the hijack — it only cites a blog post to suggest large volumes of traffic were involved. And curiously, the cited blog at the heart of the report never mentions traffic at all — only routes. You have to go to an interview with a third-party security researcher in a minor trade magazine to first come up with the 15% number (and this article never explains where the number came from). In a review of real data and actual facts, Arbor Nework's Craig Labovitz has a blog post looking at the traffic volumes involved in the incident (only a couple of Gigabits per second, or a 'statistically insignificant' percentage of Internet traffic)."
As with most reports, there's often more to it than is reported and often less. I don't think this gets China "off the hook," though. I'm not a fan of our open relations with China going back years. It's one of the inconsistencies in U.S. foreign policy that irks me. OTOH, I'm not one who thinks "live and let live" extends to governments who have serious human rights concerns. But I digress.
I would be surprised that the government was letting sensitive data from military branches route out unencrypted. Let me quantify. Do I think that it's incompetent enough to let data get rerouted? Yes. But the report cites the major military branches. This makes me wonder if there isn't some propaganda at work. It could have been information but it could have been misinformation. Lay the dollar on the table and you find out how honest your friends are while you're in the bathroom.
What I'm very curious about is the claim that "the Chinese government holds a copy of an encryption master key" that a few of these "old media" made:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8142267/China-hijacks-15-per-cent-of-worlds-internet-traffic.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/world/asia/18intel.html