China and Google: A detailed look Al Jazeera's Ayman Mohyeldin On Mideast Revolution, U.S. News, Glenn Beck's Caliphate Theory

Photo by Reuters

NEW YORK -- Egypt's government bannedhis network and its military threw him in jail, but Al Jazeera English correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin says he feels vindicated as the country takes its first steps towards democracy.

It's often been a challenge to find words to convey what's been happening in the Middle East during the last three months, but Mohyeldin has tried. In the process, he's become something of a celebrity in his own right. While touring the United States on a short break from assignment in Cairo, Mohyeldin spoke with HuffPost about the whirlwind year so far.

His trip is aimed in part at advancing his network's campaign for pickup from U.S. cable providers, so he has appeared on "The Rachel Maddow Show" and "The Colbert Report" to make the case.

"You kind of are left wondering why, despite all of this progress, and despite all of this, American cable companies have completely remained behind," Mohyeldin said. "It seems like the most instinctively anti-capitalist, anti-democratic thing."

Mohyeldin said he believes part of the continued reluctance to pick up Al Jazeera is due to stereotypes, perpetuated by "former American officials," about the network. He also worries that negative American impressions of Arabs in general have played a role.

But given that international news has come to be seen generally by U.S. networks as a money pit that pays few dividends in terms of ratings, Al Jazeera is certainly at least battling conventional market wisdom. Polls notwithstanding, Mohyeldin said he holds little regard for that attitude and its "arrogance in assuming that Americans don't care what happens abroad" -- and he expressed disappointment with the options presented to U.S. audiences instead.

"There's just no place to get good international news in the United States," he declared. That includes, he said, Fox News Channel, which is not quite an Al Jazeera rival but does have personalities who like to sound off on foreign affairs.

Citing Fox News host Glenn Beck, who has conjured an elaborate conspiracy theory about a future Muslim Brotherhood-run caliphate looking to stretch across the Middle East with the aid of a grand Islamist-communist alliance, Mohyeldin quipped, "I wonder if he actually knows that Marxists and Islamofascists have nothing in common."

There has been a tendency among some U.S. analysts to view recent events in the Middle East largely through the prism of what they will mean for Islamic extremism. Mohyeldin was critical of that approach, but said that doesn't mean the Muslim Brotherhood won't play any role in Egypt.

"You have to make a very clear distinction between the revolution and the post-revolution," he argued. "Yes, in the post-revolution political atmosphere, Islamic parties can rise to power, you can have Muslim Brotherhood parties become players in Egypt's political arena. That does not mean that the revolution was led, or started, or was an Islamic revolution started by the Muslim Brotherhood."

Many of Al Jazeera's on-air journalists referred to Egyptians taking to the streets as "pro-democracy" demonstrators -- a term more partial to the protests' aims than, say, "anti-government," and the sort of editorial decision that the authorities took as a provocation. Mohyeldin said he is at ease with that choice. "I never met a single protester in Egypt who said, I don't want democracy, I want dictatorship," he said.

So far, Al Jazeera has fared well under the military government, he added: "I think it's safe to say that post the departure of Mubarak, Al Jazeera has been relatively untouched in Egypt by the authorities."

Of course, as Mohyedin noted, Al Jazeera is still technically banned in the country -- and the revolution's gains remain fragile.

The same is true elsewhere in the region. Across the border in Libya, one of the network's cameramen has been killed, four of its employees have been held by the government, and the wave of change sweeping across the Middle East has come up against a sea wall of repression.

Al Jazeera's employees have paid a heavy price for their work in the past decade. Mohyeldin himself has not been seriously harmed but was detained briefly in Egypt during the protests, which he said underscored the fact that hostile governments "still view journalists as legitimate targets."

Other international networks, Mohyeldin said, have placed too much weight on the recommendations of security consultants. "At the end of the day, you always as a journalist have to balance the responsibility and the weight of what it is that you're doing with the security assessment," he said.

Did it take a revolution for Al Jazeera English, still something of a junior sibling to the original, Arabic-language Al Jazeera, to find its voice?

No, Mohyeldin said, the voice has been out there. "I think the world has finally heard what Al Jazeera's been doing," he said.

After weeks of frustration from Gmail users within China, Google has finally come out to accuse the Chinese government of being behind the interference that has prevented users from accessing the site.

This comes after a statement from Google on March 11th that it had "noticed some highly targeted and apparently politically motivated attacks against our users. We believe activists may have been a specific target".

The focus of this piece will be on this March 11th announcement, which has been overlooked or given briefer mention in articles. This is because much of the focus has looked at the general step-up of Internet censorship in China. The point of this exercise is to, with one example, give you a more detailed look at how creepy all of this stuff going on is.

While Google has not mentioned from which country these targeted activists were from, and did not answer Al Jazeera's query when we contacted them for more information, we have learned that at least some of the targets were in China, and that some of the perpetrators are also based in China.

The March 11th announcement from Google discussed a MHTML vulnerability that basically allows an invader to steal your cookie. In this case, a cookie is not a tasty treat, but a piece of valuable information. It's sort of your computer's way of connecting you to Gmail, and when someone steals your cookie, they can hijack your Gmail session, and the invader can then access your Gmail account and then do whatever he or she wants.

In early March, a foreign correspondent based in China received an email from a user by the name of jerwen500-at-gmail.com, claiming to have pictures related to China's "Jasmine Revolution". Now, journalists are not activists, but it appears this email was sent to people who were either invested in or interested in calls for a "Jasmine Revolution." Also, some people in China do view foreign journalists as activists, not convinced we actually only report the news, so it could have made sense for the perpetrators to target journalists.

I am going to show a hoax "Jasmine Revolution" email I myself have received from that time:

Without going into the technical details, the idea is to lure the recipient to click on Moli Hua, which is the word "jasmine" in Chinese. Then, all sorts of bad things happen in your cyber world.

The email from jerwen500-at-gmail.com was analysed by Greg Walton, director of metaLab Asia, a cyber intelligence lab. With a programme called Cytoscape, which was originally a software used for analysing DNA, Walton analysed where the malware attack came from.

Walton determined that the malware from jerwen500-at-gmail.com takes advantage of the same MHTML vulnerability mentioned in the Google post from March 11th. Take a look at this nifty visual showing how everything is connected:

In the visual, you'll notice the server hosting this malware is the responsibility of an entity known as DYX NOC with this IP address: 219.90.118.182. In other words, some place in Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong. Walton tells Al Jazeera he suspects this IP address has links back to cyber criminal operators in Beijing. (Walton informed Hong Kong authorities about this attack, by the way, on March 22nd.)

You’ll also notice that once your cookie is stolen, the information is delivered to the following three Gmail addresses: taiwanorthodoxx-at-gmail.com, freeofchina2008-at-gmail.com, and tony.f.brown-at-gmail.com.

I honestly hope that Google has closed down all these accounts, because hackers are using them. I also hope Google will give the public more clarification on their March 11th blog posting soon. It would be good to know whether the activists Google mentioned were in China. And if not, it looks like activists in at least more than one country are being targeted with this complex piece of malware.

**If reading this has suddenly made you feel less safe about using Gmail or about cloud computing in general, know that Google has recently unveiled a 2-step verification system to access your account. It’s unwieldy, but Walton recommends you use this new authentication scheme if you’d like the best possible security against anyone accessing your account.