The Telegraph
China “hijacked” 15 per cent of the world’s internet traffic earlier this year, according to a report to the US Congress, in what could be a new form of cyber-terrorism.
A state-run telecoms firm is accused of diverting traffic including data from US military and government websites, and some in Britain, via Chinese servers.
Experts fear that the authorities could have carried out “severe malicious activities” as a result of the 18-minute operation, even harvesting sensitive data such as the contents of email messages or implanting viruses in computers worldwide.
The report by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission says it raises the prospect that China might use its powers to “assert some level of control over the internet”.
Tried to find an apt Mao Marxist quotation to lift this but can’t. It’s all obedience and hard work, isolationist dogma and hatred of liberalism (pretty much all that the TP espouse, which is concerning). Control is everything to the Chinese government, it reassures them. Like owning a handgun, which doesn’t mean you’re ever going to use it.
I call bullshit on this. No country apart from the US can “control” the net and “divert” traffic except for packets that are already passing through their routers. Any packets that disappear are resent automatically, and they’ll get routed around any black hole and make it through eventually.
Sniffing, yes, but control? Nope. The US is the exception, simply because so many backbones connect through and so many domain name authorities are housed there. Take the US off-line and it would indeed damage a huge portion of the Internet.
At some point cyber war is going to get hot.
At that point US servers need to be able to at least control traffic inside the US to the point of keeping it from being redirected outside the US and cut off traffic from other sources if they absolutely have to.