Hackers have unmasked some of the tactics Beijing and Tehran use to silence their opponents.
A decade ago, the U.S. government had its dirty laundry aired by leakers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Now it’s the Chinese and Iranian governments’ turn. Millions of documents from a Chinese cybersecurity contractor and the Iranian court system revealing how both governments repress dissent abroad have been posted online over the past two weeks.
The techno-libertarian optimism of the early internet has given way to pessimism over the past decade, as governments around the world have developed new tools of surveillance and social control. But the latest leaks show that the internet is still a force that can turn against even the most tightly controlled police states.
After all, new repressive technologies create new paper trails for repression. And it doesn’t take much for those files to become public.
On February 16, a trove of documents from Chinese cybersecurity company I-Soon was posted on GitHub, a public platform for programmers. They revealed that dozens of Chinese government agencies, from local police departments to the army, had hired I-Soon to gather information on opponents by hacking into social media platforms and foreign government databases.
The alleged targets included people from a range of regions suffering unrest: Hong Kongers, Tibetans, and Uyghurs. The United Nations has accused the Chinese government of subjecting Uyghurs to sterilization and forced labor in Xinjiang, where hundreds of thousands have been detained in « re-education camps, » a process the U.S. government considers genocide.
Where foreigners saw a horror show, security contractors saw a lucrative yet difficult business opportunity.
