China Terrorism Debate: Does the Internet Kill People?

WUZHEN, Nov. 19, 2014 Delegates attend the opening ceremony of the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, east China’s Zhejiang Province, Nov. 19, 2014. Representatives from nearly 100 countries and regions took part in the three-day Internet conference. 

China’s government says the dark side of the Internet was on full display in terror attacks over the past year — a train station knifing, a car that exploded near Beijing’s Tiananmen Gate and other attacks on civilians — because it has evidence such activity is planned online.

But when a key Chinese proponent of tougher laws to combat cyber-terrorism pushed that view on Thursday while showing video from the crime scenes at a forum called the World Internet Conference, he faced pushback from two American researchers.

“Cyber-terrorism is a sort of cancer on the Internet,” declared Gu Jianguo, who is China’s top policeman on cyber-crime as director of network protection at the Ministry of Public Security. “We are trying hard to elicit support of the international community.”

While condemning such attacks, not everyone agreed with Mr. Gu’s way of thinking about them. “There is very little cyber-war or cyber-terrorism,” said Bruce McConnell, a senior vice president at the EastWest Institute who formerly worked on such issues at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “Exaggerating the threat does not help defeat it.”

Peter Chalk, a senior political scientist at Rand Corp., said he agreed that the Internet is used for “enabling purposes” but not so far to actually carry out large-scale cyber-terrorism – like collapsing power systems – because it has proved too difficult.

The sharp differences of opinion illustrate how debate about the regulation of cyberspace parallels the gun-control debate in the U.S. over whether guns kill people or people kill people, as well as what constitutes terrorism. They appear to limit scope for the international cooperation on cyber-security that Chinese President Xi Jinping regularly calls for and which policymakers and academics agree is necessary because of the cross-border structure of the Internet.

A starting point, agreed those at the conference China is hosting this week in the eastern town Wuzhen is an international consensus on what constitutes cyber-terrorism.

Speaking after Mr. Gu, Mr. McConnell said he had to disagree with some of the Chinese policeman’s perspectives. The U.S. researcher said it is wrong to see the Internet as a source of evil, noting that when a car bomb explodes “we don’t call it auto-terrorism.”

Mr. McConnell, who has previously argued that cyber-terrorism is a misunderstood and often-exaggerated threat, said law enforcement should better harness the Internet for its power to track the digital fingerprints of terrorist planning and activity. “We should use their tools better than they do,” he said.

Rand’s Mr. Chalk posted a slide with a definition he uses when thinking about cyber-terrorism: “Premeditated and unlawful use of Internet technology by politically motivated sub-state actors to cause harm and destruction or otherwise further particular ideological operational and organizational objectives.”

China’s definition appears to be much wider and fuzzier.

Mr. Gu didn’t directly address the points made by people who spoke after him. But a top Chinese academic, Chen Lin, who heads a cyber-strategy unit at the Public Security University of China, introduced a broad view. “Any activity that is sympathetic of terror attacks should be considered cyber-terrorism,” said Mr. Chen.