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China Lashes Out at Crackdown Critics Sunday 23 March 2008 Chengdu, China - China lashed out Sunday at critics of its crackdown on Tibetan protesters, describing U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as "habitually bad tempered" while claiming the Western media serve those who want to smear the communist country. The barrage of complaints carried in official media - which included more broadsides against the Dalai Lama - came as the country sought to present its own version of the deadly anti-Chinese protests and their aftermath. The crackdown has been a public relations disaster for China ahead of the Beijing Olympics - a Thailand torchbearer withdrew Sunday in protest. With foreign media banned and troops dispatched en masse to quell the most widespread demonstrations against Chinese rule in nearly five decades, independent information barely trickled out of the Tibetan capital Lhasa and other far-flung communities. The People's Daily, the main mouthpiece of the Communist Party, placed the blame for the recent riots on Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Dalai Lama. "The Dalai clique is scheming to take the Beijing Olympics hostage to force the Chinese government to make concessions to Tibet independence," it said. The attacks on the Dalai Lama - who advocates nonviolence and denies being behind the March 14 riots in Lhasa - have been aimed at further demonizing him in the eyes of the Chinese public, which strongly supports the Olympics. The official Xinhua New Agency, meanwhile, published a commentary bashing Pelosi, a fierce critic of China who on Friday visited the Dalai Lama at his headquarters in India, where she called China's crackdown "a challenge to the conscience of the world." Xinhua accused Pelosi of ignoring the violence caused by the Tibetan rioters. "'Human rights police' like Pelosi are habitually bad tempered and ungenerous when it comes to China, refusing to check their facts and find out the truth of the case," it said. "Her views are like so many other politicians and western media. Beneath the double standards lies their intention to serve the interest groups behind them, who want to contain or smear China." Reports of how many people died in the violence have varied and been impossible to independently verify. China raised its death toll to 22, with Xinhua reporting Saturday that the charred remains of an 8-month-old boy and four adults were pulled from a garage burned down in Lhasa last Sunday - two days after the city erupted in anti-Chinese rioting. The Dalai Lama's exiled government says 99 Tibetans have been killed, 80 in Lhasa, 19 in Gansu province. The Chinese government has sought to portray itself and Chinese businesses as the victims. Xinhua said Sunday that 94 people had been injured in four counties and one city in Gansu province in riots on March 15-16. It said that 64 police, 27 armed police, two government officials and one civilian were hurt. It made no mention of any injuries to the protesters. China has been hoping to use the August Olympics to bolster its international image. There have been discussions of a possible international boycott of the Games, though the European Union and the United States have so far said they opposed the idea. The official lighting of the Olympic flame is set for Monday in Greece, and some 1,000 police will surround Ancient Olympia to keep away pro-Tibetan protesters from the ceremony. International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge is scheduled to attend. Some fear the arrival of the Olympic torch - scheduled to travel through 20 countries before the Beijing Olympics open on Aug. 8 - could spark violent protests against China. The torch relay is already becoming politicized. Narisa Chakrabongse- an environmentalist and one of Thailand's six torchbearers - said in an open letter that she decided against taking part in the relay to "send a strong message to China that the world community could not accept its actions." Narisa wrote, "The slaying of the Tibetans ... is an outright violation of human rights." Despite media restrictions, some information was leaking out on troop movements. One American backpacker who traveled to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, said he had seen soldiers or paramilitary troops in Deqen in northwest Yunnan province, which borders Tibet. "What was an empty parking lot by the library was full of military trucks and people practicing with shields. I saw hundreds of soldiers," said the witness, who would give only his first name Ralpha. There have been no reported protests in Yunnan. Xinhua issued several reports Sunday saying that in addition to Gansu province, life was returning to normal in other areas where protests took place in the wake of the Lhasa riots. It said "more than half of the shops on major streets were seen reopened for business" in Aba, the center of northern Aba county in Sichuan province. It quoted county Communist Party chief Kang Qingwei as saying government departments and major enterprises were "running normally" and that schools would reopen on Monday. Aba is where Xinhua has said police shot and wounded four rioters in self-defense. It was the first time the government acknowledged shooting any protesters. In Lhasa Saturday, Champa Phuntsok, Tibet's China-appointed governor, vowed that local authorities will make a concerted effort to maintain stability, Xinhua reported Sunday. "We must...win the final victory in all respects against the secessionist forces to help ensure successful Olympic Games with a stable social situation in the Tibet Autonomous Region," he said. Cyber Attacks Target Pro-Tibet Groups Friday 21 March 2008 Human rights and pro-democracy groups sympathetic to anti-China demonstrators in Tibet are being targeted by sophisticated cyber attacks designed to disrupt their work and steal information on their members and activities. Alison Reynolds, director of the Tibet Support Network, said organizations affiliated with her group are receiving on average 20 e-mail virus attacks daily. Increasingly, she said, the contents of the messages suggest that someone on one or more of the member groups' mailing lists has an e-mail account or computer that has already been compromised. On March 18, as protests in Tibet intensified, a technology specialist working with Reynolds's group sent a message to members warning them to expect a sharp increase in e-mail and other cyber attacks against groups rallying the international community against China's crackdown. Less than 24 hours later, Reynolds said, someone sent the exact same message out to the list, urging recipients to review an attached Microsoft Word document for online safety instructions (file-named "cyberattack.doc"). The attachment included a Trojan horse program that opened a "backdoor" on any computer used to open the file, giving the senders remote access over the system. "If successful, these attacks can impact the safety of the people we work with, but the other part of this is it seems they're trying to make it more difficult for us to function effectively, to disrupt our activities," Reynolds said. Sharon Hom, executive director of the New York-based Human Rights in China, said the group's 25 member organizations worldwide have reported a marked upswing in the number and sophistication of e-mail virus attacks. In 2006, the group intercepted just two targeted e-mail attacks, and by the end of last year that number had grown to 40. In the first three months of 2008, the group's members have received more than 100 such targeted attacks. Experts say attributing such attacks to any one group or government is extremely difficult, as computer systems that appear to be the source of malicious activity online often are controlled by persons or groups using computers in completely different locations. But Reynolds said these types of sustained, targeted attacks suggest a level of organization, tenacity and degree of commitment not typically seen in attacks by individual hackers. "They're really trying to disrupt the Tibetan movement, and whoever is perpetrating this is doing it on full-time basis," she said. A handful of recent targeted attacks shared the same Internet resources and tactics in common with those used in a spate of digital assaults against number of major U.S. defense contractors, said Maarten Van Horenbeeck, an incident handler with the SANS Internet Storm Center, Bethesda, Md.-based organization that tracks online security trends. According to a January article in Air Force Online, a series of e-mail attacks originating in China targeted 28 defense contractor locations in the United States late last year. The story named specific Beijing-based Internet addresses that the FBI later determined were the origin of the attacks. Van Horenbeeck, who provides security and technical advice to several Tibetan groups, said he has uncovered evidence that those same numeric Internet addresses were used in targeted attacks against Students For a Free Tibet, another New York-based human rights group. The attacks on pro-Tibet organizations are not the first to be tied to computers in China. The Washington Post reported March 21 that the FBI is investigating whether hackers in China targeted a group working for human rights in Darfur, the war-torn province of Sudan. China has economic and strategic interests in the African nation's oil fields. Van Horenbeeck said the danger with the e-mail viruses involved in the attacks is that they are so hand-crafted and new that they usually go undetected by dozens of commercial anti-virus scanners on the market today. "Last week, I had two of these samples that were detected by two out of 32 different anti-virus scanners, and another that was completely undetected," he said. The specificity of information sought in the targeted attacks also suggests the attackers are searching for intelligence that might be useful or valuable to a group that wants to keep tabs on human rights groups, said Nathan Dorjee, a graduate student who provides technology support to Students for a Free Tibet. Dorjee said one recent e-mail attack targeted at the group's members included a virus designed to search victim's computers for encryption keys used to mask online communications. The attackers in this case were searching for PGP keys, a specific technology that group members routinely use to prevent outsiders or eavesdroppers from reading any intercepted messages. Dorjee said the attacks have been unsettling but ineffective, as the Students for a Free Tibet network mostly operates on more secure platforms, such as Apple computers and machines powered by open source operating systems. "The fact that we're being attacked with the same resources thrown at multi-billion defense contractors is flattering," said Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet. "It shows that we really are an effective thorn in the side of a repressive regime."
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