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Longtime Battle Lines Are Recast In Russia and Georgia's Cyberwar
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"Battles today are as much about ideas and images as they are territories," Deibert said. "If you're a military and intelligence agency, you're going to take down information that is in opposition and control the message."
To get around the blockade, Georgian officials relocated national Web sites to addresses hosted by Google's Blogspot, whose U.S. servers are more immune to attack. Citizens used blogging platforms such as LiveJournal -- the dominant platform in Russia and Georgia -- to post their own reactions during the fighting.
For example, a Georgian refugee from Abkhazia who blogs under the name Cyxymu on LiveJournal posted photos of Russian troops entering the Georgian town of Gori. The blogger said the photos were taken after Russia had announced its withdrawal, proving, he said, that fighting continued.
Morozov said only a few hundred Georgians used blogs to communicate with people outside the country. Even that tool was threatened, he said, when a group of Russian bloggers sent a letter asking Sup, the Russian company that owns and manages LiveJournal, to censor posts with pro-Georgian sentiment. Sup did not comply.
Givi Bitsadze, in Tbilisi, used microblogging site Twitter to share updates about the fighting in English and Russian.
"Tbilisi is still safe, but other cities are under attack, bombs kinda stopped, but Russian soldiers are breaking in a houses," one post read yesterday. He also noted an Olympic victory: "Georgia beats Russia in beach volleyball."
The cyberwar will most likely serve as a Web security wake-up call, Morozov said.
"Georgia was completely unprepared to the fact that all this information was on the Internet," he said. "I think it taught them -- and a lot of people -- a lesson."
