Source:: Ian Munroe, CTV.ca News Staff
Date: Sunday Mar. 7, 2010 7:43 AM ET
For nearly two months, Internet users in China have been waiting anxiously to find out whether the world’s largest online search engine will close in their country.
As ecologist Xiong Zhenqin told the journal Nature recently: “Research without Google would be like life without electricity.”
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The U.S. National Security Agency probed where the hackers were based, tracing the attacks to servers in Taiwan, then reportedly to a pair of Chinese schools. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also demanded that Chinese authorities conduct a thorough and transparent investigation.
“The Google attacks were taken extremely seriously — more than just an incident of potential industrial espionage but a major body blow to the American political system,” said Ronald Deibert, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Toronto.
Deibert is one of the people Google has been soliciting advice from in its dealings with China. He delivered a presentation about the rise of cyberspace control at Google’s headquarters a week before the company uncovered the hack. And officials informed him of their discovery before they went public.
Deibert told CTV.ca the hackers went one step further than was widely reported, ostensibly trying to access directories of data that Google collects, as required by U.S. national security laws.
The company tapped Deibert’s expertise after he co-wrote a 2009 study into cyber attacks against the office of the Dalai Lama. Researchers uncovered an extensive online spy network dubbed GhostNet that they traced back to China. It had compromised 1,295 computers across 103 countries — including some in Canada.
Domestic appeal
Deibert says Canada needs to confront the issues of censorship and government intrigue on the Web that incidents like the Google hack raise.
In a paper published on Feb. 22 by the Canadian International Council think-tank, he called on Ottawa to develop a cyberspace strategy that includes:
- Fixing Canadian laws that foreign governments could use to justify controlling the Web, such as with content filtering or online surveillance
- Scrutinizing whether Canadian technology exports are being used by foreign governments to restrict Internet access
- Encouraging “arms control in cyberspace” by, for example, proposing a UN treaty to make the Web more open and peaceful
The idea of “arms control” may seem extreme, but governments have started using the Internet to help them wage war.
During the 2008 conflict in Georgia, hackers took down key government websites in the capital of Tbilisi while Russian tanks rolled across the border. Military powers including France, Israel and the U.S. have adopted such cyberwar tactics as part of their defence policies.
The Internet is “entering a dangerous and chaotic phase, essentially a cyber-arms race,” Deibert said, and that’s led to spiralling computer espionage and computer network attacks.
“We need at least some government to stand up and say ‘how are we going to restrain this?’”
Policy ‘vacuum’
Stephen Harper’s Conservative government pledged, in this week’s throne speech, to create a cybersecurity strategy that would protect Canada’s “digital infrastructure.”
So far, however, there has been a “surprising vacuum in Canadian policy around cyberspace generally,” Deibert says.