The real cyber war involves products (and their reputations), not denial of services

ARTICLE: "Inside the War Against China's Blogs: Vengeful bloggers? Flaming posts? PR firms help global brands navigate the country's perilous Web," by Dexter Roberts, BusinessWeek, 23 June 2008.

Cool piece on a sort of industrial sabotage performed by bloggers paid by the nasty comment, and those Mad Men companies that fight them.

Comments

[Greg]

It seems that China is experimenting with keeping fewer restrictions on the Great Firewall -- allowing sites like BBC and RSF to remain accessible. However, it is also actively hiring and training students and other internet users to post pro-China and anti-western comments on the more popular China internet spaces. This tactic is quite interesting because it demonstrates China's ambition not only exert mind-control over its own population through media controls, patriotic education, and historical revisionism; China also wants to project this manner of control into the outside world. While the lack of credibility state of the Chinese media prevents it from gaining popular acceptance outside of China, commenters generally all have the same level of credibility, low as it may be.

To be sure, China has superpower ambitions, and part of being a superpower is being a "media superpower." This will become more apparent as China grows wealthier, its media more sophisticated and it attempts to project its homegrown values/agenda/ideas beyond its borders. One can only imagine how this might be effective, say, in the case of justifying and getting international support for a coercive Taiwan policy, other territorial disputes such as the Spratleys, or in projecting images of China intended to impress? intimidate/improve its national image, as it did very effectively during the Beijing Olympics.

[James Kielland]

Ultimately, all wars by major powers in the future will be fought on cyberspace. As a domain, it is more crucial to victory than naval power was in the 19th century and even more crucial than air power was in the 20th century.

And no, I'm not being hyperbolic. Not in the least.

And no, I'm not talking about any sort of DDOS, hacks, or cybersecurity threats.

War is not about guns, ships, or planes. It's not about missiles or bombs. It just was about those things for a very teeny, tiny, little bit of time in human history.