From the Iron-Fist’s Crushing Grip to its Invisible Panopticon - Understanding the Impact on Hong Kong’s Political Culture through the Net’s Dynamics

Hong Kong’s Culture War: Moving the Battle Online

The Government’s Attack Strategy: Covert Infiltration over Overt Suppression

The bruised Cyberspace, post-erosion of Hong Kong’s Free Internet

This is a fine first draft, Skye. The best route to improvement is the one you recommend yourself: larger context.

The real subject here is the dynamics of the Net as the Chinese state tries to seize full control of political culture in Hong Kong. But the CCP and the now-decapitated and perforce "decentralized" resistance are by no means the only parties and people shaping history. The official Beijing narrative demands the existence of foreign influence, and Hong Kong is in fact integrated into global society. Berlin could be divided by a wall, taking on many pathological elements from the result of that amputation, but it became the more intricately international for that very reason before it was unified again. As its free press collapses, student unions are disavowed by universities, intellectuals and political activists flee the city, Hong Kong's Net is responding like the nervous system of a body undergoing trauma. Trying to understand all the people and parties involved in that process—other governments and their spies, the platforms and the finance powerhouses, the foreign telecomms, and so on—is too much for 1,000 words, of course. But the essay can only gain strength from taking more of them into account.

From the Iron-Fist’s Crushing Grip to the Invisible Panopticon - The tug-of-war between surveillance strategies and political dissidents

-- By SkyeLee - 16 Dec 2021

The first tug: Using Encrypted Communications

The significance of this Telegram-related suppression has to be contextualised within the unique dynamics of Hong Kong’s current anti-establishment movement. The movement in Hong Kong that started in 2019 is uniquely ‘diffused’, participation in the movement is ‘open’ and, unlike previous protests such as the 2014 ‘Umbrella Movement, there is no particular organization or leadership predominating its coordination. With no identifiable leaders determining the overall direction and agenda, strategising within a ‘flat structure’ has influenced the manner of information transmission within the movement. Absent top-down dissemination from a leading organisation, decentralised access to knowledge, communication and coordination has been conducted through social media messaging apps.

The second tug: Government suppression and infiltration

In Hong Kong, the government has responded by mirroring the Chinese government’s second approach of infiltration. In the spirit of crackdown, hacking attempts have been made by national network founders on both a systemic and individual level. State-actor sized DDos technology networks attacked Telegram concurrently during demonstrations in Hong Kong. Direct seizure of personal devices allows for a surveillance network to be constructed through piecemeal infiltration from individual and separate ‘nodes’. And in the spirit of infiltration, there begins the covert creation of fake accounts to join channels in decentralised communication networks like Telegram.

However, there are additional reasons for Hong Kong’s preference for infiltration beyond effectiveness, mainly the government’s continued interest in maintaining a veneer of democracy in the nation. Unlike mainland China, there are political and (more importantly) economic interests in retaining Hong Kong’s appearance as a democratic hub that is not fully integrated into the Chinese monolith. Therefore, Hong Kong is unlikely to enact a similar ‘Great firewall’ that China has established for many years. For evidence that the Hong Kong government is entirely committed to keeping up appearances of democracy, one need turn no further than the latest political battle over the upcoming legislative council election. Given that the majority of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy candidates have been arrested or chased into exile, the line taken by the anti-establishment is now one of boycott - hoping that the low turnout numbers will make evident the lack of democratic legitimacy vested in the establishment. But in the desire to keep up Hong Kong’s global reputation, the government has churned out advertisements and messaging urging citizens to vote in the upcoming election. The government’s vested interest in this veneer of democracy makes infiltration all the more explicable as its weapon against the anti-establishment movement.

In light of police actions, the Anti-establishment has also made its own adjustments. For instance, communication has become more diffused than ever such that information is passed through connections of trust and only into small, contained groups. A notable practice that has developed is a ‘scorched-earth’ deletion of data upon arrest. Arrestees sever and delete all online traces, accounts, and connections. The intention is not only to protect themselves from incriminating evidence, but to prevent their device from being used as a ‘node’ for incriminating one’s friends and allies.

The third tug: Heightened user demands from encryption to deletion

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