China: US waging global Internet war
The Chinese military has accused the US of waging a global Internet war against multiple nations in an effort to bring down governments, citing the Arab Spring revolutions as an example.
The accusations made by scholars at the Chinese military academy follow accusations by Google that Chinese offices attempted to hack Google accounts related to US government offices, officials, journalists, activists and politicians. Google traced the attacks to the city of Jinan known for hosting the military’s vocational school which focuses on computers and technology. The same location was also linked to an assault on Google's systems over a year ago. China has denied responsibility for both attacks.China is now asserting however that the US is using computer tactics via the Internet to promote regime change in the Arab world and claimed to have evidence that cyber attacks originated within the United States. "Of late, an Internet tornado has swept across the world … massively impacting and shocking the globe. Behind all this lies the shadow of America," said an article by Ye Zheng and Zhao Baoxian, scholars from the Academy of Military Sciences. “Faced with this warm up for an Internet war, every nation and military can't be passive but is making preparations to fight the Internet war.”The article by the scholars argued that the nuclear threat of the industrial age has been replaced by the notion of an Internet war and that like nuclear threats; an Internet war could be massively destructive to the national security of a nation. The article said China should "express to the world its principled stance of maintaining an 'Internet border' and protecting its 'Internet sovereignty,' unite all advanced forces to dive into the raging torrent of the age of peaceful use of the Internet, and return to the Internet world a healthy, orderly environment."The ‘Great Firewall of China’ already massively regulates and filters Internet content by internal viewers and employs a great deal of security code to prevent outside users from interfering with web content behind the wall. Although China has come out strong accusing the US of waging an Internet war, China itself has been accused of the same thing on a number of occasions. Multiple countries have argued their networks were hacked and the origins of the threat were traced back to China. Chine routinely denies such allegations.
