As the U.S. government investigation into the cyber attack on Google continues to lean closer and closer to actually accusing the Chinese government of, if not directly leading the attack, at the very least supplying the ammunition and pointing its vast hacker community in the right direction, China has already started moving in another direction.
After such accusations by the New York Times were swiftly denied, China announced today that it would introduce new, stricter regulations for first-time website operators. This follows a two month freeze of new domain names that started in December to prevent the spread of “pornographic content.” According to the Chinese authorities, almost 5,400 people were detained last year for pornography related charges. Of course, these are numbers supplied by a government that has people curious if twitter is a trap, and that forces organizations like Amnesty to work with historically uncertain numbers like, “…a minimum of 7,000 death sentences were handed down and 1,700 executions took place", which makes believing that the detained were detained for anything related to pornography, or that there were only 5,400 difficult to trust. (Read more after the jump)
So, if the Chinese government is at least indirectly tied to the Google hacks, what are the new security measures and what do they mean? Essentially, in order to register a new domain name, users would have to submit a photo, provide an identification card, and then meet with regulators and representatives of service providers. While this could be seen as a move to truly crack down on pornography, looking at this information after hearing Google’s initial response that “human rights activists had been targeted,” according to Electronic Frontier Foundation’s international outreach coordinator Danny O’Brien, suggests a different motive entirely. If every domain name registered has to go through all of these steps, it is just one more way for China to reel in the activists they believe are most worth watching. And while these activists have shown little fear, and they continue to navigate their way around the Great Firewall, as these new laws and regulations continue to pile up, they may eventually find themselves surrounded.