China continues to raise the heat in its dispute with the Philippines over the sovereignty of Scarborough Shoal/Huangyan Island. On Monday, He Jia, an anchor on China’s state-run CCTV, mistakenly declared that “China has unquestionable sovereignty over the Philippines” rather than just over the disputed island. On Tuesday, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying warned a Philippine diplomat that China was fully prepared to do anything to respond to escalation. Deep-water drilling has begun near islands in the South China Sea and Chinese travel agencies have reportedly suspended tours to the Philippines. Chinese netizens are fully in support of the claims, and have in many instances criticized the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for not taking more assertive action. Read more »

Joseph Nye has an interesting article in the Winter 2011 issue of Strategic Studies Quarterly that applies some of the lessons of the nuclear age to cybersecurity. It is well worth the read, and I thought I might try the same, using what we know about the study of Chinese technology policy to shed some light on China and cyber.

Linking cyber and technology policy is a form of techno nationalism that is widely and deeply held by Chinese policymakers. The objectives are clear: China does not want to depend on other countries for critical technologies, the United States and Japan in particular. Read more »

Over the last week, supporters of Tibet, and the merely curious, have seen information warfare up close. On Twitter, several hundred bots (automated programs that generate content) flooded discussions using the hashtags #Tibet and #Freetibet with meaningless tweets and spam. If you were someone trying to learn more about Tibet, you kept bumping up against these threads, and eventually you may have given up and moved on to some other subject. This is cyber as a weapon of mass distraction. Twitter eventually began to filter out the bots, and the spam was cut off to a trickle. Read more »

Yesterday the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) released the second report prepared for it by Northrop Grumman on Chinese cyber capabilities. As numerous press reports noted, Occupying the Information High Ground  argues that China’s improving cyber capabilities pose a threat to the United States military, that China could target U.S. logistic and transport networks in the case of a regional conflict, and that Chinese IT companies ZTE, Datang, and Huawei all have close collaborative ties with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
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When people warn of growing cyber insecurity they are often referring to the threat of an arms race, countries trying to outdo each other in the development of offensive weapons and defensive technologies. This is certainly a real risk, but the greater threat to Asian regional stability may not be from technology, but the spread of an organizational framework.

Keio professor Motohiro Tsuchiya has written a commentary (h/t David Wolf) suggesting that Japan needs to establish a cyber militia in order to defend itself from attacks. Read more »

Two recent studies of national cyber power have placed China near the bottom of the table. China is number 13 on the EUI-Booz Allen Hamilton Cyber Power Index, behind Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil but better off than Russia, Turkey, South Africa, and India (the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia are the top three). The Brussels-based Security & Defence Agenda groups China with Italy, Russia, and Poland in the fifth tier (the U.S. and the UK are in the third tier, below Finland, Sweden, and Israel; the top group is empty). Read more »

This week the China-watching twitterverse was surprised to discover that Hu Xijin, the editor of the Global Times, was now tweeting. That the editor of the Global Times, an “angry government mouthpiece”  that supports China’s policy of Internet censorship, was accessing a site blocked in China raised a few eyebrows and provoked several people to ask what VPN (a Virtual Private Network) he was using to evade the controls. Somewhat defensively, Hu responded to a characterization of him Read more »

There has been a great deal of thinking and writing about why deterrence is difficult in cyberspace. Attacks can be masked, or routed through another country’s networks. Even if you know for sure the attack came from a computer in country X, you cannot be sure the government was behind it. All of this creates the attribution problem: It is hard to deter if you cannot punish, and you cannot punish without knowing who is behind an attack. Moreover, much of the cyber activity is espionage and it is hard to imagine a government threatening military action for the theft of data. Read more »