Wall Street Journal Suggests Snowden Gave China Its 'Great Cannon' Software... Based On Pure Random Speculation

from the journalism! dept

There's been lots of talk lately about China's "Great Cannon" -- the DDoS tool that China used to launch a massive attack on GitHub a few weeks ago. Much of the research on this tool was provided by Citizen Lab. That report is great and interesting. And then, the Wall Street Journal -- still a respected news source -- jumps in to speculate wildly based on nothing in particular, that Ed Snowden gave China NSA source code to build the Great Cannon.

Edward Snowden sabotaged the intelligence capabilities of the U.S. and its allies, and now we learn he may have given the Chinese regime a weapon to spread Internet censorship across the planet. The Great Firewall, the unofficial name for a suite of blocking tools, stops Chinese citizens from accessing outside information. In the past few weeks Beijing has deployed a new offensive capability, dubbed the Great Cannon.

First of all, Snowden didn't "sabotage" any intelligence capabilities at all. He revealed to journalists how the NSA and its partners were abusing certain powers, likely breaking the law. That's not "sabotage." Second, the "we learn" is not based on anything the WSJ's nameless author of the opinion piece actually "learned." It's based on wild speculation by stringing some misleading and unrelated ideas together. So we're already off to an inauspicious start to the piece.

According to a report from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, the Great Cannon is similar to Quantum, a tool developed by the U.S. to track potential terrorists and criminals abroad. Snowden, a former system administrator for the U.S. National Security Agency, revealed the existence of Quantum for the first time in 2013 when he fled to Hong Kong and then Moscow.

Loose connection #1.

Did Snowden give the Chinese the code for the Great Cannon? He denies sharing anything with foreign governments. But then he’s an admitted liar, and we don’t know what the Chinese and Russian spy services have been able to copy from what he stole. In any event he alerted them to a weakness that could be exploited.

Wait, what? How is he "an admitted liar?" That seems like a stretch already, and seems like the kind of line you'd find in a conspiracy website, not the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Second, the idea that the Chinese didn't already recognize how to do online attacks via such methods until Snowden revealed it seems especially questionable. Among the other things that Snowden revealed: the NSA knows that the Chinese are among the most sophisticated in building tools for mounting online attacks. The idea that they would be totally ignorant of methods like these until Snowden's revelations came out seems difficult to believe.

A South China Morning Post report that the Great Cannon has been under development for about a year is suggestive. This means China’s hacking bureaucracy geared up to produce this new product soon after the Snowden leaks.

Loose connection #2. Also, notice that the WSJ doesn't actually link to the SCMP story, so we'll do that for you. It actually doesn't say it was in development for a year. It says that it's "been in operation for about one year." I guess the timing still sorta works if you're making loose connections, but it seems like a pretty big leap to argue that's somehow evidence that Snowden gave the info to the Chinese during his brief stay in Hong Kong.

It also means that in the name of “transparency,” Snowden and his media accomplices may have empowered one of the world’s worst censors.

Uh, no, it doesn't. If the WSJ's editorial board knew the first thing about technology, they'd know that it didn't require Ed Snowden to teach the Chinese how to build a giant DDoS machine.

This is another example of how the Western left fails to distinguish between the secrecy and surveillance required by democracies to preserve freedom and that used by dictators to quash it.

Huh? That sentence doesn't even make sense.

Either way, as one commenter noted, you'd think that the WSJ might realize that even if China modeled the Great Cannon on the NSA's Quantum, it really says something that we're building tools that can be used to censor the internet. And they should realize that's a problem. Instead, they try to blame the whole thing on Snowden, because... well, actually not for any actual reason that I can see -- just pure speculation. That's the kind of thing we'd expect to see on conspiracy theory websites. Not the Wall Street Journal.

Filed Under: china, ddos, ed snowden, great cannon, nsa, quantum, rumors, speculation
Companies: wall street journal

Another Reason To Deploy Encryption Widely: Spiking China's 'Great Cannon' Attack

from the reasons-to-be-crypto dept

A couple of weeks ago, Mike provided an in-depth analysis of China's new tactic in its longstanding efforts to restrict access by its population to material that challenges the official narrative. This powerful DDoS attack has now been dubbed "China's Great Cannon" by researchers in a fascinating analysis published by The Citizen Lab. As Mike pointed out, one reason why this new approach has been developed is that it is not possible to block individual URLs when HTTPS traffic is involved. Thus, ironically, the increased use of encryption -- which is meant to protect users online -- led to the development of a powerful new digital weapon that potentially makes them not just victims, but even part of the attack. However, encryption is also a remedy, as The Citizen Lab researchers write:

Our findings in China add another documented case to at least two other known instances of governments tampering with unencrypted Internet traffic to control information or launch attacks -- the other two being the use of QUANTUM by the US NSA and UK’s GCHQ. In addition, product literature from two companies, FinFisher and Hacking Team, indicate that they sell similar "attack from the Internet" tools to governments around the world. These latest findings emphasize the urgency of replacing legacy web protocols, like HTTP, with their cryptographically strong versions, like HTTPS.

However, the remedy is only partial. Writing on his blog, Brian Krebs quotes Bill Marczak, one of the lead authors of the Great Cannon report, as saying:

Relying on an always-on encryption strategy is not a foolproof counter to this attack, because plug-ins like https-everywhere will still serve regular unencrypted content when Web sites refuse to or don't offer the same content over an encrypted connection. What's more, many Web sites draw content from a variety of sources online, meaning that the Great Cannon attack could succeed merely by drawing on resources provided by online ad networks that serve ads on a variety of Web sites from a dizzying array of sources. "Some of the scripts being injected in this attack are from online ad networks," Marczak said. “But certainly this kind of attack suggests a far more aggressive use of https where available."

This confirms that encryption is no panacea, but is certainly worth deploying. The fact that it can make China's Great Cannon attacks harder, if not impossible, should also give pause to government officials around the world as they try to demonize encryption and call for it to be weakened or even banned.

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Filed Under: ddos, encryption, great cannon, great firewall, https