The Government has published today its response to Professor Hargreaves’ Review of Intellectual Property and Growth. The report is clear that intellectual property is of fundamental importance to economic growth, and that maximising its contribution relies on both enabling use of intellectual property and protecting it.

The Government’s response makes it clear that the UK copyright regime does need modernising to enable use of intellectual property rights to promote growth and innovation, and we will pursue the recommendations that Professor Hargreaves makes.

Protection and enforcement are other factors which need our attention. Alongside our response to Hargreaves, we have published the UK Intellectual Property Crime Strategy, which sets out how we will better co-ordinate action on intellectual property crime enforcement.

This paper sets out our plans to move forward with implementation of the enforcement measures in the Digital Economy Act (DEA) [...]

For the full article, see here [pdf].

Last week’s arrests of 21 hackers worldwide was supposed to sound like a warning shot over the bow of LulzSec and Anonymous. The arrest happened in the U.S., the U.K. and the Netherlands and came just two weeks after a series of 32 raids of hackers homes in Italy. The two groups denied that authorities had nabbed anybody significant. “To be honest I don’t see a single major Anon hacker (or at least any hacker that’s wrecked things for the entire year) come close to arrest,” the groups’ de facto spokesperson Topiary told The Atlantic Wire.

Indeed, this week, some relatively new Anonymous-affiliated groups launched fresh attacks on new turf. As an apparent retaliation to the recent crackdown, a group called themselves LOAD (Legion of Anonymous Doom) claims to have broken into Italy’s cyber crime unit, CNAIPIC, and stolen 8 gigabytes worth of data. They accused the Italian government of stealing evidence from “the seized property of suspected computer professional entertainers”–presumably the hackers arrest earlier this month–”to conduct illegal operations with foreign intelligence agencies and oligarchy to facilitate their lust for power and money.” The release preview included an assortment of files, including photos of the officers.

Meanwhile, another groups calling themselves AnonAustria broke into the site of GIS, the Austrian government’s television licensing agency, and stole the information for 96,000 accounts. The agency admitted to the breach Monday and said they would file a complaint against the unknown attackers. The same group also recently attacked the websites of Austria’s two major political parties. After those attacks a representative told the Kurier newspaper in Vienna, “We won’t stop in the foreseeable future. … Most of us are ready to risk getting punished for what they are doing. … Some of us may calm down if lawmakers show the will to allow more direct democracy.”

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For full original article, see here

A member of hacker group TeaMp0isoN (Team Poison) leaked personal information of U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, plus the phone numbers and addresses of dozens of members of the government who allegedly supported the war on Iraq, on Friday night.

Team Poison, described as “professional hackers” in an interview with FoxNews.com, said it had the information for a year now, according to the Twitter feed of TriCk, a member of the group.

TriCk posted the list on Friday night, which included the National Insurance number of Tony Blair, the phone number of 10 Downing Street, plus the alleged phone numbers and addresses of some of Blair’s contacts, including Lord and Lady Irvine and Denis MacShane, Baroness Thornton, the MP for Rotherham. MacShane’s name was misspelled “McShane,” however.
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For full original article, see here

The British Defense Ministry is engaged in a “continuous battle” with foreign intelligence agencies and criminal organizations bent on exploiting its users, corrupting its systems and stealing sensitive information, said British Defense Secretary Liam Fox, reports Agence France-Press.

The defense ministry blocked and investigated more than 1,000 potentially serious cyberattacks in 2010, Fox told a group of business leaders June 7 in London.

One of the major concerns is protecting intellectual property exchanged in the course of defense contracting, which is at risk from “systematic marauding” by those behind the cyberattacks, he said.

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For full original article, see here

This latest Internet black out is an example of just-in-time blocking—a phenomenon in which access to content and information communication technologies are blocked in response to sensitive political situations when the technology and content may have the greatest potential impact. It is suspected that the severing of Syria’s Internet is in direct response to the intensification of revolts this week, sparked in part by the death and torture of 13 year old Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, as well as in memory of at least 50 other children killed during the protests. This action follows other MENA states severing access in reaction to protest on ground with Egypt shutting down national connectivity on January 28, 2011 and access blockages in Libya and Bahrain in February. For further analysis, see today’s OpenNet Initiative blogpost.

Popular uprisings in Syria have ben mirrored by extensive activity across cyberspace. Since the protests began in January, the state—historically a pervasive censor of the Internet—opened up access to YouTube and Facebook. A few weeks ago, we blogged about how Facebook users in the country found themselves to be a target of an ongoing man-in-the-middle attack (some suspected that it was a ruse by authorities to spy on activists coordinating protests), while the Syrian Electronic Army was distributing DDoS software as to encourage followers to attack anti-regime Web sites. This week, we released an IWM report by Helmi Noman entitled, The Emergence of Open and Organized Pro-Government Cyber Attacks in the Middle East: The Case of the Syrian Electronic Army. In the report, Noman documents the activities of the Syrian Electronic Army. The Army appears to be a case of an open and organized pro-government computer attack group that targeting defacement attacks against Syrian opposition Web sites and using popular Facebook pages to propagate pro-regime comments.

This report is timely in the context of increased contestation in cyberspace amid the Arab Spring uprisings. As Noman notes, “one component of this contestation is the tendency among governments and networks of citizens supportive of the state to use offensive computer network attacks [as] supplements to legal, regulatory, and other controls, and technical forms of Internet censorship.” This trend can also be seen in the case of the Iranian Cyber Army in its defacements of Twitter and Iranian opposition Web sites, as well as in the reports of Tunisian and Yemini opposition Web site coming under cyber attacks. As in most cases however, attribution is difficult to determine, and although Noman describes connections between the Syrian government and the Syrian Electronic Army, he was unable to find evidence beyond tacit support to make direct linkages between the Army and authorities.

Across cyberspace however, the case of the Syrian Electronic Army is—as Ronald Deibert put it this week in an interview on CBC Dispatch—merely a small manifestation of a broader trend of the militarization of cyberspace. Governments around today are stepping up their capabilities to fight and win wars in this space.

This week, the Internet saw other instances of the assertion of power in this domain. Two weeks ago, the United States released its International Strategy for Cyberspace where the Obama administration announced that the US government would respond militarily to hostile acts in cyberspace. This week, the Washington Post reported that The Pentagon has developed a list of cyber weapons and tools, such as viruses, that can be used to sabotage adversaries as an effort to streamline how the country States engages in cyber warfare and approved weapons that can be deployed. The Pentagon is slated to release a document which will outline the country’s military cyber doctrine. The document is said to be partly a policy document, and partly a warning to potential adversaries and will potentially clearly define what the US considers to be “cyber attacks.” The British government has also begun developing its own toolbox of offensive cyber weapons. The Minister of the Armed Forces told The Guardian that “action in cyberspace will form part of the future battlefield,” and that cyber weapons were an “integral part of the country’s armoury.”

Meanwhile, the NATO alliance is working on a comprehensive cyber strategy which will be announced this month. In the meantime, a draft report entitled Information and National Security reveals that the strategy will address “three facets of the linkage between Information Age and national security”: 1) the changing notion of secrecy in international affairs, 2) digital hacktivism, and 3) direct cyber threats against states and NATO’s role in cyber defense. The draft report further states that groups such as Anonymous should be “infiltrated and perpetrators persecuted.”

This week, Anonymous declared action against the IMF, in protest against the austerity measures demanded by the country’s IMF bailout and amid call from within the country for protests and a general strike on June 15th against these austerity measures. Members of Anonymous have also attacked Iranian government servers and procured and published 10,000 e-mails from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In the meantime, contestation in the form of attacks continued this week. US military contractors Lockheed Martin, and L-3 saw targeted security breaches, while Northrop Grumman shut down remote access for a domain name and password reset—while many suspected this was due to a breach, it has not yet been confirmed. Over at Google, a spear-phishing campaign to gain access to users’ passwords was detected. The campaign was said to have targeted US government officials, and Chinese activists and journalists. China has since denied the allegations that this was a state-sponsored attack. For more on targeted attacks on popular web mail services, see this recent blogpost by Nart Villeneuve at TrendMicro.

The cyber-warfare operation was launched by MI6 and GCHQ in an attempt to disrupt efforts by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular to recruit “lone-wolf” terrorists with a new English-language magazine, the Daily Telegraph understands.

When followers tried to download the 67-page colour magazine, instead of instructions about how to “Make a bomb in the Kitchen of your Mom” by “The AQ Chef” they were greeted with garbled computer code.

The code, which had been inserted into the original magazine by the British intelligence hackers, was actually a web page of recipes for “The Best Cupcakes in America” published by the Ellen DeGeneres chat show.

Written by Dulcy Israel and produced by Main Street Cupcakes in Hudson, Ohio, it said “the little cupcake is big again” adding: “Self-contained and satisfying, it summons memories of childhood even as it’s updated for today’s sweet-toothed hipsters.”

It included a recipe for the Mojito Cupcake – “made of white rum cake and draped in vanilla buttercream”- and the Rocky Road Cupcake – “warning: sugar rush ahead!”

By contrast, the original magazine featured a recipe showing how to make a lethal pipe bomb using sugar, match heads and a miniature lightbulb, attached to a timer.
The cyber attack also removed articles by Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and a piece called “What to expect in Jihad.”

British and US intelligence planned separate attacks after learning that the magazine was about to be issued in June last year.

They have both developed a variety of cyber-weapons such as computer viruses, to use against both enemy states and terrorists.

A Pentagon operation, backed by Gen Keith Alexander, the head of US Cyber Command, was blocked by the CIA which argued that it would expose sources and methods and disrupt an important source of intelligence, according to a report in America.

However the Daily Telegraph understands an operation was launched from Britain instead.

Al-Qaeda was able to reissue the magazine two weeks later and has gone on to produce four further editions but one source said British intelligence was continuing to target online outlets publishing the magazine because it is viewed as such a powerful propaganda tool.

The magazine is produced by the radical preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, one of the leaders of AQAP who has lived in Britain and the US, and his associate Samir Khan from North Carolina.

Both men who are thought to be in Yemen, have associated with radicals connected to Rajib Karim, a British resident jailed for 30 years in March for plotting to smuggle a bomb onto a trans-Atlantic aircraft.

At the time Inspire was launched, US government officials said “the packaging of this magazine may be slick, but the contents are as vile as the authors.”

Bruce Reidel, a former CIA analyst said it was “clearly intended for the aspiring jihadist in the US or UK who may be the next Fort Hood murderer or Times Square bomber.”

In recent days AQAP fighters have capitalised on chaos in Yemen, as the country teeters on the brink of civil war.

Tribal forces marching towards the capital, Sana’a, clashed with troops loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh for a third day running yesterday.

The British government has openly suggested that the U.K is gearing up to bolster computer network defenses by initiating the development of new cyber offensive tools for their arsenal, according to a report in ITProUK.

“We need a toolbox of capabilities and that’s what we are currently developing. The circumstances and manner in which we would use them are broadly analogous to what we would do in any other domain,” said British armed forces minister Nick Harvey.

The acknowledgement comes on the heels of reports about a soon to be finalized Pentagon cyber strategy which outline the circumstances in which an attack against U.S. computer networks could be considered an act of war and potentially elicit an armed military response.

News of the Pentagon strategy itself closely follows the release of an Obama administration report on international cyber security coordination which provides the strongest indications to date that cyber attacks against a NATO member nation could invoke retaliatory actions under the treaty’s mutual defense doctrine.

Amid growing concerns over state-sponsored attacks reportedly emanating from China, Iran, Russia and other nations, western governments have begun to seriously step-up the cyber offensive rhetoric in recent months, with the U.K issuing some of the boldest assertions.

“Future conflict[s] will see cyber operations conducted in parallel with more conventional actions in the sea, land and air operations. Therefore we must plan, train, exercise and operate in a way which integrates our activities in both cyber and physical space. We will grow a cadre of dedicated cyber experts to support our own and allied cyber operations and secure our vital networks,” a British Ministry of Defense spokesperson said.

While publicly announcing key aspects of a security strategy may seem counter-productive to the enhancement of defense capabilities, experts contend that the tough talk is probably meant to act as a strong deterrence factor for would-be attackers.

“The announcement is partly a means of achieving deterrence, namely that the UK is willing to both defend its assets in kind and to possibly strike at others. The risk in this, of course, is if the deterrence is not credibly backed up. I expect this to play out for a few more years both in terms of demonstrating such capabilities against rivals and investments to increase their capabilities,” said Arbor Networks’ Jose Nazario.

Other security experts contend that the increased rhetoric is merely an exercise in “security theater”, and that any meaningful progress in cyber security initiatives will likely be stymied by the political process and election-geared grandstanding.

“Security and intelligence are difficult and wide-ranging areas, and sooner or later, political expediency will mean that mistakes will be made. Necessary measures will be dropped or skimped on because of economic pressures, inappropriate and/or inadequate measures will attract funding because it’s a way for elected officials to be seen to be doing something. The whole ‘security theatre’ problem is based on the political assumption that it’s better to do something visible but half-baked than to do something effective but invisible,” said ESET UK’s David Harley.

Western governments are not the only ones ready to ante-up in the high stakes game of cyber security. Chinese government officials recently acknowledged the existence of a military unit dedicated to cyber warfare activity, according to intelligence sources.

China has reportedly recruited thousands of hackers for a cyber force tasked with infiltrating a multitude of computers to establish a large botnet which can be utilized to conduct denial of service (DoS) campaigns to disrupt targeted websites as well as conducting cyber espionage activity to pilfer sensitive information.

Iran is also reported to be actively recruiting cyber soldiers in a effort to strengthen the nation’s cyber defensive and offensive capabilities. The initiative is largely thought to be in response to the Stuxnet virus attacks which caused severe damage to Iran’s nuclear enrichment operations, and reportedly set back the nation’s nuclear program by as much as several years.

According to Brigadier Gen. Gholamreza Jalali, leader of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization, the military is preparing “to fight our enemies with abundant power in cyberspace and Internet warfare.”

Government officials from around the world met on Wednesday to call for more global collaboration in the fight against cyber crime, as well as more co-ordination between governments and the private sector.

Heads of cyber security from the UK, US, China, India and France kicked off the
Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit in London with a high level discussion on how the world should work together to mitigate the threat of cyber terrorism.

Government officials from Germany and Russia were originally set to be included in the discussion but did not attend.

Themes included a need for more international collaboration to tackle cyber criminals, and what form this collaboration should take, as well how to get the balance right between online freedoms and regulation.

France and India debated whether the world needs more international regulation to provide a framework for states to effectively clamp down on cyber criminals, or whether national legislation is enough.

France said that national laws should suffice but that nation states should work together to combat cyber terrorists by quantifying the risk of cyber threats and setting international security standards for businesses.

“Can we still really say cyber space has no frontiers and the borders of cyber space do not follow political boundaries? Borders do exist and they are becoming stronger,” said Francis Delon, France’s secretary general for Defence and National Security Affairs.

“Work has to be done at an international level. This should consist of internationally agreeing an evaluation scale for cyber attacks, similar to the one being used for nuclear incidents. Secondly we need norms that the private sector should conform to, which will secure critical systems.”

India took a different view, arguing that cyber space is borderless in nature and that a global legal regime is needed to deal with the cyber terrorist threat.

“The nature of cyber space is that it is borderless and anonymous and it is not subject to government territories that have laws,” said Kapil Sibal, India’s minister for IT and communications.

“So there is a fundamental contradiction between government regulation and the nature of cyber space.

“It can be called a global problem more even than the environment because the threats can manifest themselves across the whole world. The threats require concerted action across governments. The question is what kind of action and co-ordination.”

Meanwhile, India’s deputy national security advisor, Latha Reddy, said that nations need to work together to create definitions relating to cyber security, best practice and a global
regime to protect the financial sector.

Reddy explained that international regulation is needed to define global rules that guide governments in what types of security and offensive strategies are acceptable and which are not.

“The challenge is how to create effective law enforcement across boundaries,” she said. “We need international agreements. We should go step by step, but we need to take immediate action.”

Tim Dowse, director of intelligence and national security for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, argued that the debate on whether more international regulation is needed in the internet age raises important questions.

“Are existing national laws adequate? Do they apply to cyber space?” he said. “We all agree on international collaboration, but what form of collaboration should it take?”
Shawn Henry, FBI assistant director, discussed how the US is tackling cyber crime by spreading FBI resources globally.

“The key to all this is partnership. We have talked about partnerships at a private level and partnerships at a corporate level, but we also need partnerships in international law enforcement,” he said.

“The FBI has representatives in 75 countries around the world. We have embedded agents in legal agencies across the world and given these agents the ability to immediately share information and act on that.

“This has allowed us to have a positive impact. In 2010, we were able to arrest 200 cyber criminals tied to organised crime groups.”

Officials from China also spoke of the need for international collaboration when it comes to cyber security, even though the country has often appeared opposed to collaborating with the rest of the world when it comes to the internet. China’s ‘Great Firewall’ shuts out many web sites from the international community.

Liu Xiaoming, ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to the UK and Northern Ireland, did not join the panel discussion with the other speakers at the event but gave a speech by himself afterwards.

“The Chinese government has always supported international collaboration in cyber security,” he said.

“We are now in an era where the whole world is linked by the internet which means cyber security is a vital global issue that calls for international collaboration.”

The Cybersecurity Summit was held the day after the UK government revealed that it is working on a cyber offensive strategy to protect the nation from online threats.

Egyptian anti-regime activists found a startling document last month during a raid inside the headquarters of the country’s state security service: A British company offered to sell a program that security experts say could infect dissidents’ computers and gain access to their email and other communications.

The discovery highlights the emerging market of Western companies that sell software to security services from the Middle East to China to spy on the kinds of social media activists who recently toppled regimes in Egypt and Tunisia.

Amid the scattered papers, interrogation devices and random furniture found during the raid, the activists uncovered a proposed contract dated June 29 from the British company Gamma International that promised to provide access to Gmail, Skype, Hotmail and Yahoo conversations and exchanges on computers targeted by the Interior Ministry of ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

The proposal from Gamma International was posted online by Cairo physician Mostafa Hussein, a blogger who was among the activists who seized the ministry’s documents.

“It is important evidence of the intent of the state security and investigation division not to respect our privacy,” Mr. Hussein said.

“This proposal was sent to a notorious department known for torture, spying on citizens to help Mubarak’s regime,” Mr. Hussein said, referring to the State Security Investigations Service. “The company Gamma, I consider them to be partners in the crime of trying to invade our privacy and arrest activists.”

The document was then noticed by a top cybersecurity company called F:Secure, which placed on its website the scanned proposal for the software, called FinFisher.

The Gamma document exemplifies a new commercial market involving private companies who sell malicious software or malware that provides “back door” or remote access to computers without being detected by the machine’s user.

Sometimes called worms, this kind of computer software-based attacker had been used mainly by government intelligence agencies and organized crime groups as well as private hackers.

Today, malware increasingly is sold by security firms to governments and law enforcement agencies seeking to track not just criminals but also political dissidents.

“No longer do activists against repressive regimes have to only worry about Web censorship. Today they must worry about something far more insidious and hard to detect, malware that is coming from Western companies in countries that promote freedom and democracy,” said Robert Guerra, project director of Freedom House’s Internet freedom program.

According to Gamma’s promotional literature, the FinFisher software is capable of “remote monitoring and infection solutions” that can provide “full access to stored information with the ability to take control of” the targeted computer, including the ability to “captur[e] encrypted data and communication.”

The worm attack entices the targeted computer user, such as an Egyptian blogger, to unwittingly download the malware through a thumb drive, or another seemingly harmless download such as a video game or piece of digital music.

Then, without the user knowing, the software sets up a hidden remote access point that would let the attacker — in this case, Egypt’s security services — to acquire information including the user’s social media passwords and the files stored on a hard drive.

Peter Lloyd, an attorney for Gamma International, told The Washington Times that the company never sold the FinFisher software to the Egyptian security ministry.

But the lawyer declined to answer questions about the company’s malware division, or the detailed proposal found in the Egyptian ministry.

“Gamma complies in all its dealings with all applicable U.K. laws and regulations,” Mr. Lloyd said. “Gamma did not supply to Egypt but in any event it would not be appropriate for Gamma to make public details of its transactions with any customer.”

The Egyptian activists that found the FinFisher proposal also found transcripts of encrypted Skype chats between dissidents in the abandoned security ministry. Skype is a video telephone system.

“I have seen my Gmails and Skype chats printed out in transcripts from the headquarters the day we went into those offices,” said Sherif Mansour, senior program officer for Freedom House who worked on the organization’s Egypt program.

The malware industry is big business. The proposed contract offered Egypt’s State Security Investigations Service a suite of software products, along with training in its use, for more than $525,000.

“FinFisher is a company that is producing the malware for money and that is the innovation,” said Mikko Hypponen, the chief research officer for F:Secure. “We have enough headaches just fighting the criminals.”

Gamma International and FinFisher are not alone.

In February, internal emails between cybersecurity company HBGary and law firm Hunton and Williams, representing Bank of America, discussed the prospect of infecting computers affiliated with Anonymous, the hacker group affiliated with WikiLeaks.

Anonymous claimed credit for disclosing those emails. WikiLeaks has threatened to disclose internal documents of Bank of America that it says would be damaging.

The bank-related email exchanges mentioned a Georgia-based company called Endgames Solutions and included promotional materials advertising Computer Network Attack or Computer Network Exploitation as part of its Maui suite of software. A public relations specialist hired by Endgames Solutions declined to discuss the matter.

Endgame is known within computer security circles as being on the cutting edge of so-called “offensive” security efforts, mainly for corporate customers.

Rafal Rohozinski, the CEO of the SecDev Group, a cybersecurity consulting firm, said the new malware industry is troubling.

“In North America, you are starting to see an industry in the cybersecurity [field] which is offering ethically questionable product and service offerings,” he said. “HBGary is a good example of this. There are others who do this at a technical level.”

“Malware is a growing industry,” said Noah Shachtman, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and editor of Wired’s Danger Room. “The cliche that this was a couple of kids doing this in their parents’ basement was never true in the first place. Now it’s totally wrong, now the suits and the MBAs are peddling this stuff both to crooks and to wannabe Big Brothers.”

One example of this kind of systematic attack was called Ghostnet, a cyberoperation connected to servers in China and Taiwan that was discovered in 2009 by security specialists with the private Infowar Group.

The discovery of Ghostnet found that a number of opponents of the Chinese government, such as the Dalai Lama’s network, had been infected for at least five years.

Mr. Hypponen said, “Ghostnet is the first case of this kind of thing on a broad scale.” He added that “Ghostnet and similar related attacks are probably not done in practice by the government, but they work through independent hackers.”

Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said computer-based technology that used to be in the hands of the government have quickly made their way into the commercial sector.

“The most sophisticated tools at the very, very leading edge are still, I think, in the hands of the government,” he said in an interview last week after a panel appearance at the National Press Club. “But I think there is a lot of stuff out there. Look at the capability that private people have to get commercial encryption products which are pretty robust. This issue of trickling down from the very high-end technology down into the commercial space, I think that is a very fast process these days.”

The United Kingdom government has announced that the GBP 650 million delegated to the National Cyber Security Programme will be used to prop up four pillars of the programme: national cybersecurity, cyberdefense of critical infrastructure, countering cybercrime, and improving education and skills. 65 per cent of the funds will be allocated to increasing capabilities. Meanwhile, in the United States, defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. was granted a USD 71.5 million cybersecurity contract with the US Navy. This is the company’s second contract of the year with the Navy—the first was awarded in late January, also worth USD 71.5 million—and is contributing to the emergence of the cyber-military industrial complex.

In Russia—following cyber attacks on LiveJournal and opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta (as we documented here two weeks ago)—authorities are expressing concern over the lack of Internet regulation in the country. As a result, a state tender released this week is calling for researchers to look at “foreign experience in regulating” the Internet. A spokesperson for Prime Minister Putin followed up by stating that state researchers would begin studying best practices in online regulation from countries such as China.

Meanwhile, Iran has announced that it will assert its sovereignty over cyberspace via the creation of a nationalized cyberspace—a “halal Internet”—to combat Western influence of the space and to potentially decouple from the open Internet. The head of economic affairs in Iran announced to the state run news agency, IRNA, that Iran “will soon create an internet that conforms to Islamic principles, to improve its communication and trade links with the world.” This new network may eventually replace the open Internet. It has been reported that authorities have praised China’s Internet policy—an indication that the government, like its Russian counterpart, is lesson drawing from the country.

Increasingly, like-minded countries sharing similar concerns appear to be turning towards one another to seek out best practices, policy innovations, and solutions as pertaining to cyberspace (for instance, the Iranian and Chinese state have both expressed concern about Western hegemony over the space). The emergence of online controls as a “norm” has given rise to a contestation of norms in cyberspace. In what appears to be a promotion of normative change, the United States announced just this week that it is set to dedicate USD 28 million in new grants (to go towards projects such as circumvention/anonymity tools) to online activists—particularly in countries with major cyber controls.

In the past, US promotion of “net freedom” has been met with suspicion. Following Hillary Clinton’s 2010 “Internet freedom” speech, Chinese authorities accused the United States of information imperialism. In this case, a Chinese op-ed stated: “countries disadvantaged by the unequal and undemocratic information flow have to protect their national interest, and take steps toward this. This is essential for their political stability as well as normal conduct of economic and social life. These facts about the difficulties of developing nations, though understood by politicians like Clinton, are not communicated to the people of Western countries. Instead, those politicians publicize and pursue their claims purely from a Western standpoint.”

Like the idea of humanitarian intervention, Internet freedom promotion may be seen as a disguised form of aggressive Western imperialism by some. As Ma Zhaoxu of the Chinese Foreign Ministry stated after Clinton’s speech, “We urge the US to respect facts and stop attacking China under the excuse of the so-called freedom of Internet.” We can expect to see continued contestation over such meanings.