An article about China's hacker culture. It reads almost like the show Ghost in the Shell.
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For years, the U.S. intelligence community worried that China’s government was attacking our cyber-infrastructure. Now one man has discovered it’s worse: It’s hundreds of thousands of everyday civilians. And they’ve only just begun.
By Mara Hvistendahl Posted 04.23.2009 at 10:34 am
Some pictures by Scott Henderson.
Goodwell: Founder of the Green Army, with a membership of as many as 3,000, Goodwell is perhaps China’s most famous hacker, directly or indirectly responsible for hacking countless foreign Web sites Courtesy Scott Henderson
Xiao Tian: In the male-dominated world of hacking, Xiao Tian, leader of a female hacker group called the China Girl Security Team, is a rarity. Her 2,200-plus-member group is responsible for several defacements. Courtesy Scott Henderson
Withered Rose: His group, NCPH, built viruses that may have stolen classified U.S. documents. Withered Rose represented the Sichuan Military Command in a hacker competition against other provinces—and won. courtesy Scott Henderson
Quote:
"There were localized clubs, whose members saw one another regularly. There were fleeting groups, whose sites appeared and disappeared in a matter of weeks. There were kid hackers, femme-fatale hackers and hacker wannabes (although most hackers are simply computer-savvy 20-somethings -- what Henderson calls "normal guys"). One group penned a theme song. Henderson recognized early on that such publicity ploys were not the work of the state. "If this was some secret government-run organization," he says, "it was the most horribly run secret government organization in the universe."
Instead, Chinese hackers work in small, competing crews, he found. During moments of crisis, like the 2001 EP-3 collision, the groups band together into coalitions called "Chinese emergency conference centers." The Red Hacker Alliance, often described in the Western press as a monolithic group, is in fact a loose association allowing disparate cells to coordinate their efforts.
But the largest unifying characteristic is nationalism. In a 2005 Hong Kong Sunday Morning Post article, a man identified as "the Godfather of hackers" explains, "Unlike our Western [hacker] counterparts, most of whom are individualists or anarchists, Chinese hackers tend to get more involved with politics because most of them are young, passionate, and patriotic." Nationalism is hip, and hackers -- who spearhead nationalist campaigns with just a laptop and an Internet connection -- are figures to revere."
Comments---
From China, where I've lived for four years, this assessment looks spot-on. Hackers are pervasive, their imprint inescapable. There are hacker magazines, hacker clubs and hacker online serials. A 2005 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences survey equates hackers and rock stars, with nearly 43 percent of elementary-school students saying they "adore" China's hackers. One third say they want to be one. This culture thrives on a viral, Internet-driven nationalism. The post-Tiananmen generation has known little hardship, so rather than pushing for democracy, many young people define themselves in opposition to the West. China's Internet patriots, who call themselves "red hackers," may not be acting on direct behalf of their government, but the effect is much the same.
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