East Timor, one half of a small, crocodile-shaped island in Southeast Asia, had been fighting a bloody battle for independence from Indonesia for two decades when a strange proposal was smuggled into the maximum-security prison in Jakarta destined for Xanana Gusmao, the imprisoned leader of East Timor’s guerrillas. It was a futuristic-sounding plan from an early internet entrepreneur in Ireland: East Timor could be declared independent in cyberspace.
It was 1997. Martin Maguire, whose proposal had been hidden between the pixels of a seemingly innocuous image and sent through a trusted relay in Portugal, explained that he had discovered that East Timor had been allocated a patch of cyberspace by the computer scientists laying the foundations of the nascent internet. It was, unlike most of East Timor, unoccupied and beyond the reach of Indonesian soldiers. “You could declare independence virtually,” Maguire told Gusmao, whose blessing for the strange scheme he needed. It was an opportunity too good to pass up for a guerrilla movement that was outgunned and outmatched.
In the run-down office of Connect Ireland, the tiny internet provider he owned, Maguire had stumbled on a list of domains that had been assigned to countries (best known by the two-letter codes that are tacked onto URLs, such as .jp for Japan and .fr for France) and which people or organizations had been picked to run their day-to-day operations. He scanned through the list. There were still a few dormant domains which nobody had yet claimed. “One of them was East Timor,” he told New Lines almost three decades later. The domain existed despite the territory having been occupied by Indonesia since 1975. Maguire knew about Timor from a customer that was involved in Irish activist circles. “I thought it was crazy that nobody had thought of protecting [the domain],” he said.
Without knowing it, Maguire would become part of a campaign that was making one of the least-connected countries on Earth into a cutting-edge experiment. Activists, hackers and dissident exiles became determined to use the internet to make the case for East Timor. They pioneered campaigns on a platform whose potential seemed limitless. It would also result, or so Maguire claims, in Ireland being hit by one of the first state-sponsored cyberattacks.
Indonesia had invaded and occupied neighboring East Timor, the eastern half of a remote island north of Australia, in 1975. Portugal, which had ruled East Timor for almost 300 years, had begun a hasty withdrawal after a military coup in Lisbon. East Timor had been plunged into chaos and, after a brief civil war, Fretilin, a left-wing pro-independence movement, had emerged as the dominant force by September 1975.
President Suharto, who ran a hardline dictatorship in Jakarta and benefited from the quiet backing of the United States and Australia, claimed that an independent East Timor posed an unacceptable threat to Indonesia. Thousands of crack troops descended on the small territory in December 1975. Despite putting up a stiff fight, the Fretilin resistance movement was outmatched. It quickly took to the mountains to wage a desperate guerrilla campaign.
But it looked futile. East Timor, which was formally annexed by Indonesia in 1976, was quickly sealed off from the outside. Over 100,000 Timorese, out of a population of some 700,000, are thought to have died during the Indonesian occupation, according to a commission set up under the auspices of the United Nations. This is a conservative estimate. Academics have suggested that the figure could have been as high as 200,000. But with up-to-date information hard to come by and access all but impossible, East Timor would suffer in the shadows.
East Timor began climbing back onto the international radar as the Cold War ended. In 1989, the pope visited East Timor and foreign cameras picked up protests by nationalist Timorese. Then, in November 1991, over 250 people were gunned down in a massacre beamed onto TVs worldwide. Activists mobilized. Journalists were smuggled into Timor to interview Fretilin commanders in remote redoubts. Jose Ramos-Horta, the exiled Fretilin spokesperson, and Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, a dissident clergyman, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996.
East Timor had broken into the mainstream. But independence was still a distant dream when Maguire, sitting in his office thousands of miles away, spotted that East Timor had been assigned an internet domain. East Timor had been allocated .tp, which stood for Portuguese Timor.
Jonathan Postel, the father of the internet domain system, wanted to avoid computer geeks needing to make choices about what was and was not a country, so he simply adopted a preexisting list of two-letter codes drawn up by the International Organization for Standardization in 1974. This list, ISO 3166, is used for a host of statistical and bureaucratic reasons, like mail forwarding, trade statistics and vehicle license plate codes. (Along with East Timor, there were a handful of other dubious inclusions, including Antarctica and small island chains such as Tokelau, Bouvet Island and others.) It seemed simplest to use this existing system, whatever its foibles might be.
With an Irish East Timor activist named Tom Hyland, a former bus driver whose campaigning had turned Ireland into one of the fiercest critics of Indonesia, Maguire decided that, if it was impossible to liberate East Timor on the ground, then the internet could open a new front. “Our intention was to generate some publicity for East Timor,” Maguire remembers. He was sent to Ramos-Horta. He pitched the idea: Activate .tp and have East Timor claim its place as an equal to Indonesia and its .id domain. “He knew nothing about any of this,” Maguire said. But he was sold. Connect Ireland was going to connect East Timor.
But it would not be straightforward. East Timor, having been occupied, was a unique case. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, or IANA, the opaque technical body that runs the domain name system, would need to be convinced that East Timor could meet its requirements. “There was one big failing,” Maguire says. “We had to give them the name and address of someone who was resident in East Timor.”
Anybody that they named publicly in East Timor as the contact for .tp was at risk, Maguire and Hyland realized. They worried that Indonesian soldiers would sweep through neighborhoods and arrest innocent people if they invented a name and picked an address at random. They debated for weeks. “There was only one person that we knew who had up-to-date links with East Timor,” Maguire says. That person was Xanana Gusmao.
Gusmao was a dashing guerrilla commander who had been captured and whisked away to a maximum-security prison in Jakarta in 1993. He had become the face of East Timor and was regularly visited by Nelson Mandela, who believed Gusmao was fighting a David vs. Goliath battle similar to the anti-apartheid struggle. Maguire and Hyland wanted to ask Gusmao to be their Timorese backer. “What we wanted to do was ask him, ‘Are you prepared to take the risk of being signatory to this?’” Maguire says.
But how to get the message to him? Maguire was told by contacts in Europe to draw up a pitch and was given strict instructions on how to beat the censor. He was to hide the message between the pixels of an image that would be sent to Gusmao through Portugal. A team that had access to Gusmao had been trained in secure messaging and would know how to find the message. It took weeks before a reply came. It was simple: “Do it.” They had been given the blessing of one of the best-known independence fighters to make their own bid for independence.
But there was still a problem. Gusmao, under lock and key in Jakarta, was no longer a resident of East Timor. He had spent his last night in East Timor being held in a cell at the main Indonesian barracks. “I came up with the idea of putting him under the care of the military governor in Timor,” Maguire says. But they needed to be sure that the bureaucrats at IANA would not double-check that there was someone who would pick up the phone at the military address they wanted to give for Gusmao.
“It was real shot-in-the-dark stuff,” Maguire says. He picked up the phone and was bounced through Australia to a telephone exchange in Timor. “We told them that we were trying to reach the military governor in East Timor and whether they could connect us.” The reply from the operator was exactly as they had hoped. “No such place as East Timor exists.” It was good enough.
On Dec. 7, 1997, exactly 22 years after Indonesia had invaded, East Timor was declared “independent” in cyberspace. Maguire registered a symbolic website: freedom.tp. It looked amateurish to modern eyes. Visitors were greeted with a hand-drawn wall tagged with posters linking to a petition and information about atrocities.
But it served its purpose. There was a flurry of fevered newspaper reports. “The handover of the domain to the government of East Timor is beyond imagination,” the Indonesian Embassy in London snapped back, “since the government of East Timor will not exist.” There were quickly a few hundred websites registered using the new domain.
It was just the start. Maguire began receiving threatening phone calls from men with Southeast Asian accents. Then he started being warned that attacks against .tp were coming. “If somebody hits you, you have to hit back,” he told New Lines.
Those involved in East Timor activism followed closely. It felt like the natural step for a movement that had already spotted opportunities the internet offered. “We were early adopters,” remembers David Webster, an activist-turned-academic who got involved in East Timor activism in Canada in the 1980s.
Activists had begun messaging and communicating on discussion platforms as early as 1990. “It was not fast: The characters appeared on the screen more slowly than I could read them. You had to take breaks and wait for the next phrase to load up. But it worked,” Webster says.
Environmentalists had been experimenting with rough-and-ready platforms for communication since the mid-1980s and these earlier experiments offered East Timor something revolutionary. There were so few people interested in Timor that it was often difficult to find a kernel of activists to share and strategize with. “It was not Palestine,” says Webster. East Timor activists were often marooned without a community. “It was almost a niche issue for people.”
The internet promised a way to find and plan with other activists spread across Europe, North America and Australia, and to communicate with dissidents. “We were able to start planning common campaigns. We were able to share with each other. It made us a network,” remembers Webster. Messaging could be consistent and easily synchronized everywhere.
Even while most people in East Timor were yet to see a website, those fighting in their corner turned the internet into a cutting-edge weapon to get ahead of the Indonesian government’s narratives. In 1993, Amnesty International was told that Timorese dissidents were planning to scale the walls of the Swedish and Finnish Embassies in Jakarta to claim asylum. They sent a package online with information needed to build a press release.
“It was revolutionary,” says Geoffrey Robinson, who worked with Amnesty on Indonesia and East Timor at the time. Within an hour, there were photos of the dissidents and a statement on the wires. The Indonesian Foreign Minister accused Amnesty of having orchestrated everything. “That was the tipping point. Nobody could believe we could have done it so quickly. That was the internet effect.”
East Timor had emerged from an information vacuum. As Indonesia itself was hooked up, Timorese students began relaying information to organizations in Portugal, New York and London. It was pored over and made its way into a proliferation of newsletters, email campaigns and reports. When Suharto visited Germany in 1995 and Canada in 1997, campaigners organized online to have protestors wherever he went.
By 1998, Indonesia had been pushed to the brink by a financial crisis that tore through Southeast Asia. The “New Order” over which Suharto had ruled for more than 30 years had ossified. When pro-democracy protests spiraled into deadly rioting, the all-powerful military wavered. Suharto resigned. In East Timor, huge pro-independence demonstrations were held. It was now or never.
Western pressure had been building. There had been discussions over a much-criticized “autonomy plan” that would see East Timor remain part of Indonesia. But campaigners upped the ante. “The internet was decisive in shifting Western public opinion,” says Webster, who is now a professor at Bishop’s University in Canada, “which made it easier for governments to shift their policy.”
In January 1999, Jakarta made a shock announcement: Indonesia would be willing to grant East Timor independence if it voted for it. It was decided that a U.N.-supervised referendum would be held in August. But pro-Indonesia militias, backed and armed by the Indonesian military and bent on ensuring that East Timor would not wriggle free, started mobilizing. A campaign of intimidation and terror began, culminating in a final bloodbath. Yet as computers wound their way into homes and workplaces, the battle would not just be on the ground.
As Indonesia was plunged into chaos, in Ireland, Maguire began receiving worrying reports from his technicians. There were signs that hackers were sniffing around the server that hosted the Timorese domain, looking for vulnerabilities. “We could see strange activities going on,” Maguire remembered. Just before Indonesia announced its sea change on East Timor, 18 separate attackers launched an assault.
It looked like somebody wanted to wipe East Timor off the map. Maguire has no doubt whom he holds responsible: the Indonesian government. “There would be nobody else interested,” he claims. He points out that the attack was sophisticated for its time and targeted the .tp domain itself, rather than the websites it hosted. His team worked overnight, sleeping under desks, to fend off the attackers. They discovered that the attacks had been trying to break into the .tp domain to set up their own websites to send out threatening emails to institutions in the U.S.
The attack may have been one of the first state-sponsored cyberattacks of the internet age. “We knew it would be a target,” Maguire remembers. “We said, ‘If we are targeted, we’re news.’” He protested to the Indonesian Embassy, which denied his allegations, in London. He gave dozens of interviews and Connect Ireland, which replaced its website with a simple statement, received millions of hits. Newspapers in Ireland, the U.S. and Britain understood that this was not business as usual. “Virtual Country ‘Nuked’ on the Net,” led the BBC. “Ireland, Indonesia, in Info War?” asked Wired. “Cyberwar,” wrote MSNBC.
In August 1999, East Timor voted overwhelmingly for independence. There was an explosion of violence. Pro-Indonesian militias, which included both criminals and some Timorese who had supported the Indonesian occupation, went on the rampage destroying schools, churches and homes. Hundreds were killed.
Campaigns clicked into motion. Portuguese were encouraged to send emails and faxes to the U.N. and the White House demanding action. There were so many sent that they blocked incoming emails from Portugal’s entire .pt domain for days as the U.N. met to discuss the unfolding catastrophe. The overloaded Indonesian presidency’s web server, which had also been bombarded, was disconnected. The U.N. quickly approved the emergency deployment of an Australian-led peacekeeping mission in September 1999.
While East Timor entered this bloody endgame, Ramos-Horta made a startling claim. There were over 100 “computer wizards” in Europe and North America ready to paralyze Indonesia with specially coded viruses if it continued interfering in the referendum campaign, he told the international press in August 1999. They would hit military, financial and government targets. Maguire was horrified and quickly disassociated Connect Ireland.
But these claims did not seem outlandish. Hackers, mainly in Portugal, had been attacking Indonesia in an increasingly coordinated campaign for four years. Keyboard warriors were making their mark. Hacking was new and exciting, and even basic attacks could get widespread interest from journalists.
Jordi Murgo, a Catalan computer scientist, had fallen in with a Portuguese collective called “Toxyn,” which had declared war against Indonesia in February 1997. He wrote code used to attack email servers and government websites.
It was a new frontier. “It was a time when attackers could do much more than defenders,” he remembered. It was a fight that seemed as unequal to him as the one the Indonesians had waged in Timor.
But Murgo did more than just write code. He defaced the website belonging to the Indonesian military in April 1997. It was a significant moment. Visitors were greeted with a clear message: “East Timor is not Indonesia.” There was an image of Indonesian soldiers, clutching rifles, superimposed with the slogan “Professional Killers, Made in Indonesia.”
The page was taken down and scrubbed clean within a few hours. But then Murgo attacked it again. “They disconnected it from the internet for a long period.” It was embarrassing that the Indonesians had been forced offline by a handful of European hackers. Many Indonesian hackers, many of whom were students who celebrated attacks against Suharto, shared translations of what Indonesian newspapers were writing.
The playbook was being written for hackers who came afterward. Defacing websites was perfected by the Portuguese groups that took East Timor up as a cause. They went further and harder than many other hackers at the time. It is now so common that many serious hackers think it below them. But Chinese hackers quickly followed, and when Chinese Indonesians were targeted during the violence that preceded the fall of Suharto, they launched their own campaign against Indonesia.
“These campaigns helped redefine the idea of resistance and the fight in the digital age,” claims Murgo. “It opened the door to new forms of activism.”
East Timor became the first country to gain independence in the internet era.
It was helped by a U.N. administration that tried to repair the damage caused by the violence that had erupted in 1999. Gusmao, who was released from prison soon afterward, became the first elected president in 2002.
East Timor was helped along its path by the internet. Yet the digital divide has seen it fall quickly behind in the two decades that have followed. East Timor now has the fourth-slowest internet on earth.
But East Timor furrowed a digital activist pathway that has since been trailed by dozens of others, for better and for worse. “It was definitely the first cyberwar,” says Maguire, thinking back to how the internet helped East Timor break away. He handed over the .tp domain to East Timor in 2005. The East Timorese dropped it and moved to their very own .tl, a new code based on East Timor in Portuguese, Timor Leste. The .tp domain was finally deleted from the internet in 2015.
Many who were active in making the case for East Timor online say they do not feel that similar campaigns that followed had the same creativity. “We wrote the cliches,” says David Webster. The internet then was a space without templates. There was no spell-check. Learning how to use the internet was not a question of exploring new platforms but of discovering how to marry a new frontier with real-world problems.
“I feel like we contributed to writing a certain script,” Webster adds. Activists involved with Tibet and Burma reached out for advice on how to use the internet successfully. Many more have followed along digital pathways that were first charted by Timor activists. “We were in a playground where everything was possible. I don’t feel that anymore.”
It may not even be possible to replicate it. By the time the Indonesians wised up to the picture of East Timor that had been established online, it was too late. “It was a battle that we were fighting and that we won because we had good online positions already,” says Webster. But now wars are equally found in cyberspace. It is no longer a neglected front line.
East Timor may have been a sign of what was to come, in more ways than one. “The expanded access to the internet made each piece of information less valuable,” remembered Robinson. Information was recycled. Mistakes crept in. Newsletters were no longer edited. “It was not always properly vetted, or it was redundant, or it was hyperbolic,” he says. “It was a harbinger of things later.”
“We were just doing our job,” says Maguire, evidently with a tinge of disappointment about how East Timor has developed. “We got it done. It was time for them to take it over. It was very messy the way they did it.”
Although East Timor was the first country to gain independence in the internet era, its connectivity today ranks above only Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen. All are home to conflicts that have been fought as much online as on the ground, following the lead of the tiny country that declared its independence in cyberspace in 1997.
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