infrastructure, leaving their economy vulnerable to attack. It's alleged that Russia also targeted opposition and state websites in Georgia and Azerbaijan.

Murad Gassanly, an Azeri human rights activist said: "During the cyber attacks against Estonia, all opposition-linked Azeri websites went down at the same time. My colleagues in Georgia and Belarus noted their websites were down as well. It was integrated and looked like there was a central plan to it."

Any operation such as this would need to be coordinated, and the suggestion is that Russia's domestic security service, the FSB, was behind the planning of these attacks.

Cyber security expert, Gadi Evron, who advised Estonia during the attacks, hasn't ruled out this theory. Following this first wave of attacks on Estonia, more sophisticated cyber weapons were used, with 'botnets'

In China any politically sensitive material is blocked by a firewall called the Golden Shield

sending traffic to Estonian addresses at 100-1,000 times their normal rate. This pattern reflects what happened in the other former Soviet states.

"Our organisation received 600,000 hits within eight hours that day," Gassanly said. "We normally have 20,000 hits a month. It was sufficient to get our website blocked by our provider. The same thing happened in Georgia and Belarus."

It is easy to conceal the source of the attacks and blame them on hackers. "It's the internet, and the internet is chaos," Evron explains. "Attacks happen all the time."

But while large-scale intimidation and attacks are easier to co-ordinate, the might of the totalitarian state finds it more difficult to target individual bloggers in cyberspace. In these cases, as the jailing of Chen Shuqing and Savva Terentyev's impending trial demonstrates, the state cracks down in a more traditional fashion.