This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text, while the remaining parts are likely unreadable without MIME-aware tools. Send mail to mimeat_private for more info. --------------15C403B3EE1 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=us-ascii Content-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.96.981207061934.28562Uat_private> http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/980928/28chin.htm World Report 9/28/98 Chinese 'hacktivists' spin a Web of trouble The regime is unable to control the Internet BY BAY FANG BEIJING--In the university district of Beijing, a bunch of 20-year-olds calling themselves the Web Worms slouch around in an apartment stacked with old issues of PC Magazine. "Chinese computer networks are so easy to break into," brags Xiao Zhang, a 25-year-old who manages a computer network for an American company by day and hacks into others by night. "I'd say 90 percent of them are not secure." To back up his claim, he describes in detail how he wandered at will through the computer network of China's postal service that day. >From the moment in 1995 that a commercial Internet provider first gave Chinese citizens access to the Web, the government has tried to maintain what some cyber surfers derisively call "the Great Firewall of China." This elaborate control system is supposed to block sites that the Communist Party considers morally or politically degenerate, from Penthouse to Amnesty International and CNN. But with a few simple tricks, ordinary Internet users are now making a mockery of the Great Firewall, tapping easily into forbidden foreign sites. Sabotage. Sophisticated hackers, meanwhile, are breaking into sensitive Chinese computers. Members of the Hong Kong Blondes, a covert group, claim to have gotten into Chinese military computers and to have temporarily shut down a communications satellite last year in a "hacktivist" protest. "The ultimate aim is to use hacktivism to ameliorate human rights conditions," says Oxblood Ruffin, a member of the Toronto-based Cult of the Dead Cow ( www.cultdeadcow.com), one of the oldest hacker groups in North America, who serves as unofficial spokesman for the having-more-fun Blondes. Free speech also is proliferating. A political journal called Tunnel ( www.geocities.com/Silicon Valley/Bay/5598) is said to be edited secretly in China and sent by E-mail each week to an address in the United States, where it is then E-mailed anonymously back to thousands of Chinese readers. Big Reference ( www.ifcss.org) is another online challenge to the authorities. One recent issue extolled individualism and paid tribute to the mother of a student killed when troops crushed the pro-democracy protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The Internet provides not only speed and efficiency but also cover. "If you tried to do a traditional newsletter promoting democracy in China, you'd surely get arrested," says Eddie Leung, editor of Hong Kong Voice of Democracy ( www.freeway.org.hk/democracy), an E-mail magazine that tracks the Chinese democratic movement. If only the authorities were smart enough to realize what's going on, "all the political activities on the Internet would really have them scared," adds Guo Liang, a computer expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Perhaps they are smart enough. New regulations introduced at the end of last year imposed stiff penalties--including jail sentences--for using the Internet to "damage state interests," "spread rumors," or "publicly insult others." Nonetheless, China's wired population has grown to 1.175 million, according to government figures. While that is a tiny portion of an overall population approaching 2 billion, China's Internet users are virtually by definition the country's most educated and modern elite. To watch over them, a new force of more than 200 "Internet security guards" has been assigned to patrol computer networks at state companies and ministries. "What we're really afraid of is political infiltration," admits Qin Guang, head of the Computer Department for the Shanghai Public Security Bureau, which is pioneering this nationwide effort. "Our goal is to have a security guard in every work unit." Perhaps most worrisome to the authorities, young Chinese are using the Net to coordinate political campaigns. On August 17, Indonesia's independence day, hackers in China broke into Indonesian government Web sites and posted messages protesting violence against ethnic Chinese there. Chinese security officials ignored the demonstration until it reached the streets. That day, about 100 students rallied outside the Indonesian Embassy, carrying photographs of rape and murder victims that they had downloaded from the Web. "The incidents weren't written up in the Chinese news, but I read about them on the Web and had to do something," said one Beijing University student as he faced busloads of police. In recent months, the government has taken even more drastic action. In Shanghai, a computer engineer named Lin Hai faces charges of "inciting the overthrow of state power" by providing 30,000 E-mail addresses to Big Reference. And at the end of July, the publishers of Tunnel went into hiding. --------------15C403B3EE1-- -o- Subscribe: mail majordomoat_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: Repent Security Incorporated [www.repsec.com]
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