Cyber-nationalism? Not So New.

From Strategy Page:

December 6, 2008: China and Russia are displaying numerous instances of a new phenomenon; cyber-nationalism. This new disease manifests itself when an event, or government propaganda, stirs up nationalistic feelings among many Internet users. There then follows much chatter on message boards, email, messaging and so on. This quickly evolves into the organizing of online vigilantes. Nationalistic hackers proceed to do damage to any available target of these nationalistic feelings. Often there isn’t a target, as in the case of a natural disaster, where the mobilized net users concentrate on helping out. But when the news event involves another nation, or person, there follows hacking attacks, of varying degrees of intensity, against the designated “enemy.”

All true, apart from the fact it’s not “new” or a “disease”. Whilst I think this particular form of ‘cybernationalism’ certainly deserves further research, it’s been around a while. I found this article earlier which presents a number of examples of this type of activity dating back to the late 1990s, whilst providing a useful framework of nationalism within which to locate these actions:

Nir Kshetri (2005), ‘Pattern of global war and crime: A conceptual framework’, Journal of International Management, Vol.11, No.4, pp.541-562 [login required]

The flourishing synergy arising between organized crimes and the Internet has increased the insecurity of the digital world. How hackers frame their actions? What factors encourage and energize their behavior? These are very important but highly underresearched questions. We draw upon literatures on psychology, economics, international relation and warfare to propose a framework that addresses these questions. We found that countries across the world differ in terms of regulative, normative and cognitive legitimacy to different types of web attacks. Cyber wars and crimes are also functions of the stocks of hacking skills relative to the availability of economic opportunities. An attacking unit’s selection criteria for the target network include symbolic significance and criticalness, degree of digitization of values and weakness in defense mechanisms. Managerial and policy implications are discussed and directions for future research are suggested.

This is not an area I know much about (see Jeff Carr for that) but this article looks like a good place to start looking at nationalist hacking. The Chinese have been at it since at least 1994, and there are plenty of sources that the ever-fallible Strategy Page should have looked at. There’s also a huge literature on cyber-nationalism itself, of which hacking is but one manifestation.

[h/t Matt]