There is also an increasingly blurred line between what action the state sponsors (which would qualify as full-blown international conflict) and what is being done in the name of the state — a sort of guerrilla warfare played out on virtual battlefields. With China’s growing power leading to widespread suspicion and criticism in the Western media, these groups — a mixture of roguish hackers, disaffected teens and intellectuals frustrated by stereotypes about their culture — see part of their job as defending the homeland, even while they reserve the right to criticize it from the inside.
Rebecca MacKinnon, a Hong Kong-based journalist and academic, has identified this burgeoning ideology as “cyber-tarianism” — where highly connected citizens are critical of government repression but fiercely nationalistic at the same time.
“A lot of people don’t want a Western-style democracy,” she told a conference in California last month. “Before the Olympics last year, Chinese students protested all over the world at what they saw as biased Western media accounts.”
These protests included a series of large-scale hacking attacks — on large targets such as the news channel CNN, and small ones such as pro-Tibet Web sites, which temporarily disabled them.
In China and Russia, this cyberforce is reckoned to be becoming more powerful — and more destructive. Dissident Russian nationalists have also been blamed for the Estonia attacks, while similar groups are appearing in other countries around the globe as Internet connectivity spreads. Armed with technical know-how and a passionate cause, these ad hoc groups of individuals would seem increasingly important in the way these conflicts are playing out.
But it’s still difficult to imagine what would actually happen if a full-blown cyberwar ever did take place. After all, movies like WarGames — stuffed with Hollywood exaggerations — surely stretch the limits of what can happen. Don’t they?
RSS