Massive public protests taking place in Hong Kong over the past week are aimed at a new extradition law, known as the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance, that would see accused criminals extradited to mainland China to face prosecution. Hongkongers feel the law could be used to legalise the kidnapping of people who express views, and act in ways, that are not popular with the Chinese government.
The same law could also be used to extradite tourists and visitors to
China who are arrested on suspicion of having committed these crimes. Protesters want the bill scrapped. For now, debate of the legislation has been postponed. Organisers say one million people
turned out for the protests, while police estimate the number was
around 240,000. Either way, it was a significant number of Hong Kong’s
7.5 million population. Commentators on Twitter remarked on how well
organised the protesters were. So, how did they do it? Protesters across the world are using new technologies to organise.
Social media platforms were used to share information about the Hong
Kong protests. And messaging apps, such as Telegram and WhatsApp, were
essential for coordinating with other protesters.
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Beyond hashtags: how a new wave of digital activists is changing society
Telegram as a protest tool
In choosing a messaging app, organisers are looking to communicate
effectively while avoiding surveillance. Telegram, which launched in
2013, has become a more secure competitor to WhatsApp. Telegram says it has standard end-to-end encryption for its chats, to prevent spying on the contents of communications. There is the “cloud chats” option for group messaging. Telegram also
allows for “secret chats” between two people. These chats are stored on
the phones rather than in the cloud, and can be set to self-destruct at a
time determined by the user. Unlike WhatsApp, Telegram hasn’t suffered major hacks in the recent past. Earlier this year, WhatsApp was reportedly
infected with the Pegasus spyware as part of an attempt to access the
messages of a UK-based human rights lawyer who was working on a case for
civil rights activists. During the 2014 protests, WhatsApp was also reportedly attacked to spy on Hongkongers. Telegram is a partially open source
platform. Anyone can contribute to strengthening its security by
looking for and fixing vulnerabilities, which can help to prevent hacks
like those from Pegasus. Telegram therefore offered Hongkongers a messaging service they could
use with a bit more confidence, or so the organisers thought. But the
use of spyware isn’t the only method available to those who might want
to disrupt the communications of protesters.
Read more:
Shutting down social media does not reduce violence, but rather fuels it
Telegram becomes a target
The administrator of a 30,000-member Telegram chat group, which was
used to organise the protests, was arrested on Tuesday. Ivan Ip, 22, was
accused of conspiring to commit a public nuisance. Ip told the New York Times:
I never thought that just speaking on the internet, just sharing
information, could be regarded as a speech crime […] I’m scared that
they will show up again and arrest me again. This feeling of terror has
been planted in my heart.
In a further show of force, Telegram was also targeted in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack during the protests. DDoS attacks use botnets, which are computers that have been
compromised by malicious software and then used to launch cyber attacks
in an automated fashion. The owner of the computer may not even know
that their property was used as a tool to suppress civil rights
activists. Telegram’s servers were flooded with junk communications at rate of
200-400 gigabits per second, slowing functioning of the service until it
was ineffective or unusable. Based on past trends, this size of an attack is likely to have been
carried out by a state actor. Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov said
source IP addresses indicated the geographic location of the attacks
were mainly originating in China. This disruption appears to have been coordinated to occur at the
height of the protests for maximum impact, creating a chilling effect on
the ability of protesters to organise and communicate. The effect of the attack was global, impacting Telegram users in
other countries like the United States. This shows how targeted internet
censorship techniques in one country could punish citizens of another.
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Forcing protesters into a corner
By making Telegram unusable, the cyber attack redirects the
communications of organisers onto less secure platforms, where
vulnerabilities can be exploited. Communications on these platforms might be more easily intercepted,
and metadata and location information might be available from
telecommunications companies and ISPs. This can heighten protesters’
fears of being identified and prosecuted for their political actions. Protesters during a rally against an extradition bill outside the Legislative Council in Hong Kong on June 12.Vernon Yuen/EPAThe power of governments to attack and disrupt the communications of
protesting citizens has a chilling effect on the universal right to
march and to protest. Social media hacking tools, which are sold to
repressive governments to spy on their own citizens, further erode the
right to free speech and to organise political activity. In this environment, demand for secure social media apps will only
increase out of a basic necessity to break free from surveillance, and
for protection against authoritative regimes around the world.
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