China’s Cyber War Against Hong Kong
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 7 August 2019
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode Aaron Mak learns about all the ways China is using cyber warfare to disrupt the efforts of protesters in Hong Kong. His guest is Nick Frisch, a fellow at Yale’s Information Society Project and a scholar of media and technology in the Chinese speaking world. Frisch was recently in Hong Kong as a fellow at the Journalism and Media Studies Center at Hong Kong University.
After the interview, Shannon Palus joins the show for this week’s edition of Don’t Close My Tabs.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to If Then, the show about how technology is changing our lives and our future. I'm Aaron Mack. |
| 0:12.2 | Hey everyone, welcome to If Then. We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America. We are recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 6th. |
| 0:23.7 | On today's show, we'll talk about the protests in Hong Kong and how the Chinese government is using cyber warfare to foil the efforts of activists. |
| 0:30.6 | To learn more about the specifics of those attacks, I'll talk to Nick Frisch, a journalist who's been following the protests closely. |
| 0:36.9 | After the interview, my colleague |
| 0:38.2 | Shannon Paulus will join me for Don't Close My Tabs, where we'll talk about the best things we saw |
| 0:42.5 | on the web this week. That's all coming up on if then. The protests in Hong Kong have been |
| 0:48.2 | raging for about two months now. They started as a response to a piece of legislation that would |
| 0:52.7 | allow Hong Kong residents to be extradited to China for trial. That bill has been tabled for now, but protests have continued to |
| 0:59.2 | escalate. On Monday, thousands of Hong Kong residents participated in demonstrations. It disrupted |
| 1:05.1 | transportation across the city and resulted in more than 200 flights being canceled. |
| 1:09.6 | While riot police clash with protesters in the |
| 1:11.7 | streets, the Chinese government is waging a cyber war behind the scenes to foil the efforts of |
| 1:16.0 | activists, who have been using platforms like Facebook and the encrypted messaging app, Telegram, |
| 1:21.0 | to coordinate the protest. Joining us with the details of those cyber attacks is Nick Frisch, |
| 1:26.0 | a fellow at Yale's Information Society |
| 1:27.8 | Project and a scholar of media and technology in the Chinese-speaking world. He was recently at |
| 1:32.7 | Hong Kong University as a fellow at the Journalism and Media Studies Center. Nick, thanks for |
| 1:37.2 | joining us. Good to be with you. Can you first give us sort of a brief overview of why these |
| 1:42.6 | protests are happening now? |
| 1:53.8 | The root of the protests goes back to the handover of Hong Kong from British control to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. |
| 2:04.9 | Hong Kong was a British colony with British-style institutions, free press, and a certain level of representative government through a local legislature. And the promise from Beijing was that these institutions would be |
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