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Pubcast: Smoking Gun

Wednesday, 27 January 2010

Google has been in the news of late, with accusations that hacking of their site has emanated from China, and questions regarding the role - if any - played by the Chinese government.

Dominic White joined us in the studio to discuss the events in a debate that ends up questioning whether information access is actually a human right.

A number of hacks over the past years have supported the policies of the Chinese government, and placed in question their impartiality regarding these events. Quoting from Dominic White’s Sensepost Blog, these include:

the story of Shawn Carpenter from 2003 on attacks from China to US military and industrial sites, similar attacks made public in 2005
the big story in 2007 with unclassified pentagon networks, Germany and the EU getting hit ...
the Dalai Lama's breach in March 2009 leading to uncovering GhostNet which was reported to have infiltrated economic, anti-China activist and media organisations in 103 countries
and finally now Google's public statement which sparked off admissions from several other companies including Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Symantec, Juniper, RackSpace, Dow Chemical [6], and finally resulting in the Aurora IE 0 day

The recent accusations regarding the Google hack bring into focus the degree to which the internet has become the battle ground for national interests, as well as drawing attention to the Chinese internet censorship approach, and the question of human rights when pertaining to online information access.

The Pubcast team debated the issues as well as getting insight into Dom and Danni’s new site.

Pubcast Episode 24 (Full)
Download the Full Audio File

Pubcast Episode 24 (Part 1)

Pubcast Episode 24 (Part 2)

Pubcast Episode 24 (Part 3)

Pubcast Episode 24 (Part 4)

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