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NGOs under fire (no bullets involved)

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No sooner had I written yesterday’s post about digital security than the New York Times has a piece by Nicholas Kristol on how the Save Darfur campaign website has been under attack recently - from Chinese IP addresses.

As the coalition’s China advocacy campaign has intensified, officials have noticed increasingly sophisticated and subversive attempts to intercept emails and infect computers with malicious programs.

Kristol relies mainly on innuendo to suggest that the Chinese government might be behind the attacks, with very little evidence to support the accusation. From a technology point of view, though, it’s irrelevant who’s responsible - this is a cautionary tale for NGOs and other organisations. We can enjoy the benefits that technology brings - but we also need to guard against the dangers. The price of liberty, and all that…

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Written by Paul Currion

March 22nd, 2008 at 8:31 am

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  1. [...] subject to similar attacks, whether organised by another government or not. I wrote yesterday about the experience of the Save Darfur campaign, and with the recent unrest in Tibet, a number of Tibetan NGOs are reporting malicious emails with [...]

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