They almost earned the status of national heroes last year, after NATO’s accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Cyberkiller and his fellow hackers went on an anti-U.S. rampage, trashing several high-profile targets, including the Web site of the American Embassy in Beijing. Furious Chinese hackers around the world joined the online riot. A photo of Bill Clinton with a Hitler mustache appeared briefly on a U.S. government Web site. Early this year, Cyberkiller says, Beijing actually recruited some of his online associates to do battle against separatist Taiwanese hackers in a tit-for-tat war of Web site attacks.
Ultimately, however, the hackers’ only loyalty is to their own libertarian ideals. Cyberkiller says he knows people who do security work for official Web sites by day. By night, they turn around and hack any sites they consider to be “shoring up the party’s absolute rule”–including the sites they were hired to protect. In 1998, when Beijing set up its own Web site ostensibly devoted to human rights, Cyberkiller and his friends defaced it within days. “It was designed to fool the people,” he says. “We want China to evolve into a more just and democratic society.” It’s an immense undertaking–but not as impossible as it used to seem.
