Web attacks are not "free speech"

Apparently Chinese hackers believed that the best way to protest U.S Media coverage of the Chinese crackdown in Tibet was to conduct a cyber attack on the CNN.com Web site.

The attack was planned by hackers online, at a forum Web site called hackcnn.com for April 19th. However, Yahoo news reported that one of the main organizers of the attack backed down at the last minute. Still, according to the article, many other hacker went ahead anyway.

Unidentified hackers used botnet style attacks to attack the CNN Web site, Yahoo News said. A botnet attack utilizes a network of computers to run various Trojan horses, malware and spyware programs. Computer users are generally unaware that bots are running on their computers because the bots are usually well hidden.

According to the Shadowserver Foundation, a non-profit website that tracks botnet activity on the web, educational networks, corporate networks and even military networks have been used to run botnets. Botnets can be used by hackers to attack websites by overloading them with alot of data packets and requests. This simulates Web site traffic and can overload the servers running a Web site. This is called a blunt force attack and is common on the internet. One of the most notorious examples of this was last summers cyber attack on the Estonian internet.

In the case of CNN, Yahoo News reported that hackers managed to slow down CNN's Web site by two tenths of a second. According to the article CNN's network management team responded to the attack by temporarily blocking off some site traffic from Asia-Pacific region from reaching their website.

The interesting part of all this is that the Chinese hackers were doing this as a form of political protest. In the United States political protests are legally covered under the 1st amendment and the right to free speech. However, hacking and taking down a website violates several major international laws, and in and of itself is far more of an impediment to free speech than it is a political protest because it disables the internet, which is a forum for free speech.

While internet regulation laws and rules are still being written and debated worldwide a good way to view this attack is through the lens of how radio first began in the United States. At the turn of the 20th century as radio expanded, it was an unregulated bonaza of sorts. The FCC did not exist and neither did the idea of spectrum scarcity, which is the basic legal concept for why the government can regulate the airwaves. Spectrum scarcity means that there is a limited, finite, amount of airwave space over which radio transmission can occur, thus it has to be regulated so it is audible for the public.

In 1920's America when anyone could set up a radio station, there were many instances where mom and pop radio stations overlapped and caused most radios, especially in cities, to just pick up static--rendering the airwaves useless. The U.S. government stepped in and formed the FCC, which leases portions of the spectrum.

Today, the internet is growing in a similar, albeit different way. This attack on CNN represents a parrallel to the early days of radio in that if in 1920 you didn't like what someone was broadcasting you simply could boost signal power and mess with their station. Similarly hackers did this to CNN.

With any regulation of the internet and further policing by the government would come concerns for media outlets, like CNN, that operate large internet sites. It is an interesting and facsinating problem that is going to be battled out in court rooms around the world during the next few decades.


As for the Chinese hackers, trying writing some blogposts next time--that's how we do things in America, the capital of the freeworld. Last time I checked China was, and still is, a country run by an authoritarian government. Maybe you should be hacking your governments servers as a protest as opposed to those of the free world--it might be a wiser use of your time and a more effective protest.