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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 19-Nov-2010
19-Nov-10 News -- China accused of hijacking internet data

Web Log - November, 2010

19-Nov-10 News -- China accused of hijacking internet data

Obama's offer to Israel may have been a hoax

China accused of hijacking internet data

China is blasting a report to the US Congress accusing China of hijacking massive amounts of internet traffic for a brief period earlier this year, including traffic to and from US military and government sites.

The Chinese government publication Global Times quotes experts as calling the accusation "ridiculous and unreasonable," pointing out that the United States, with the world's most advanced technology, controls the majority of the digital information flow.

The 316 page report on the national security implications of the trade and economic relationships between the U.S. and China was written by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and transmitted to Congress on Thursday. Topics include economics and trade, national defense and cyberwar, energy and environment, and censorship.

The report lists two major incidents where it appears that China hijacked a large part of the internet:

"In March 2010, reports surfaced that China’s Internet censorship regime (known colloquially as 'the Great Firewall') temporarily affected Internet users outside of China. Specifically, certain users in Chile and the United States who tried to access popular social media sites, including Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, were denied access by being redirected to incorrect or nonexistent servers."
When you type a name like "GenerationalDynamics.com" into a web browser, the browser contacts a "Domain Name Server" that translates the name into a web server location (IP address). Sometimes the Name Server is located in another country. In March, a Domain Name Server in China translated names into incorrect addresses. The problem continued for several days.

"For a brief period in April 2010, a state-owned Chinese telecommunications firm ‘‘hijacked’’ massive volumes of Internet traffic."
When data is transmitted between your browser and a web server, the data travels in several steps, or "hops," from one server to another along the way. Each server consults a "routing table" to determine the shortest path. China Telecom controls some of those routing tables, and was able to change them to fool servers in other countries into assuming that the shortest path between almost any two servers in the world was through China.
The result was that some 15% of all internet traffic was routed through these servers in China. This lasted for about 18 minutes on April 8, 2010. Nobody outside of China knows what happened to the data, but it's possible that the Chinese were performing espionage on certain types of e-mail messages or other data, and was capturing it as it went through their servers.

If we now go back to China's statement in Global Times, it looks very flimsy and defensive. It points out that "the United States, with the world's most advanced technology, controls the majority of the digital information flow." Well, what does that have to do with? They're not denying that the data was hijacked, they're not saying it was an accident, and they're not saying that they didn't capture some of it for espionage or other purposes.

As we've said before, cyber warfare is becoming increasingly prevalent. The military is now treating cyber as the "fifth domain," after the other domains -- land, sea, air and space. The bad news is that very few people in the U.S. military are trained to deal with this kind of warfare, and the other bad news is that the Chinese appear to be developing and testing out techniques to win with it.

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Irish Daily Star

Irish Daily Star

Ireland is finally playing the game. In attempt to calm investor fears and reassure the public, Irish officials are saying that all Irish bank deposits are safe, and that Ireland can expect to receive "tens of billions" in bailout loans when bitter negotiations over Ireland's sovereignty are completed. A particular issue will be Ireland's low 12.5% corporate income tax, which the country has used to lure many American companies to build plants there. This upset other EU nations, because it put them at a competitive disadvantage. Now they're going to insist that Ireland raise the corporate income tax and give up that advantage. Bloomberg

According to the Debka subscriber-only newsletter, forwarded to me by a subscriber, the recent deal that the Obama administration offered to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a hoax. (See "15-Nov-10 News -- Mideast peace talks take on a comic flavor.") Under this deal, the US would give Israel a free squadron of 20 F-35 stealth fighter jets in exchange for a moratorium on settlements in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem. Well, it seems that no such offer was made by the Obama administration, and Netanyahu presented it to his cabinet anyway, in the hope that if they accepted it, then he could convince Obama to go along with it. Debka

Phrases like "We have the very best auditors" and "our team" are signs that a CEO is lying. NPR. But why just CEOs? Just listen to Obama or any other politician in Washington and you can tell they're always lying as well.

There are signs that India's Maoist terrorists, known as Naxalites, are linking up with Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and other Pakistani jihadi terrorist groups, but evidence to support the linkup is hard to find. Stratfor (Paragraph updated - 19-Nov)

Terrorism expert Bruce Riedel says that a jihadist coup in Pakistan is a real possibility. The most likely scenario is a coup from inside the military by jihadist sympathizers. Spiegel

Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi may be gaining support among the younger generation of soldiers in Burma's army. Several hundred lower-ranked soldiers from two Burmese army divisions traveled to Rangoon last week to witness the release of Suu Kyi from her decades of house arrest. BBC

An analysis of the geopolitics of northern Mexico shows major differences between the three northern provinces -- Baja California, Sierra Madres, and Rio Grande Basin. Foreign Policy Research Institute

(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 19-Nov-10 News -- China accused of hijacking internet data thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be posted anonymously.) (19-Nov-2010) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 19-Nov-2010 19-Nov-10 News -- China accused of hijacking internet data

China accused of hijacking internet data

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 19-Nov-2010
19-Nov-10 News -- China accused of hijacking internet data