Google is threatening to close its operations in China after what it said were a series of cyberattacks aimed at the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
The company said last night that it had detected a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China”. Further investigation showed that “a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists”. Google said that at least 20 other large companies from a range of businesses had been similarly targeted.
Google did not accuse the Chinese Government directly. However, the company added that it was “no longer willing to continue censoring our results” on its Chinese search engine, as the Government requires. Google said the decision could force it to close its Chinese site and offices in the country.
The internet giant believes that the attack was mostly blocked and that only minor information, such as creation dates and subject lines, were stolen from two accounts. It said that the investigation showed that accounts of dozens of China human rights activists using Gmail in Europe, China or the US had been “routinely accessed” using malware (malicious software).
Google first agreed to censor search results in China in 2006 when it created a version of its search engine bearing China’s web suffix, “.cn.” Previously, Chinese-language results had been available through the company’s main Google.com site.
To obtain its Chinese licence, Google agreed to omit web content that the Government found objectionable. At the time Google executives said they struggled to reconcile this concession with the company’s motto of “don’t be evil”.
By then Yahoo! had come under fire for giving the Chinese Government account information of a journalist who was later convicted for violating state secrecy laws.
David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said: “These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered — combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web — have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese Government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.”
The 20 other large companies attacked include finance, internet, media, technology, and chemical businesses, according to Google.
“We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant US authorities,” Mr Drummond said.
Mr Drummond said Google accepted that defying the Government’s demands about filtering internet search engine results may mean having to shut down its operations.
With an estimated 360 million internet users, China has a bigger online population than any other country. But the ruling Communist Party worries the internet could become a dangerous conduit for threatening images and ideas.
If Google were to pull out it would be a severe reversal for the internet search company which has endured sustained criticism for its policy in China.
Google set up in China in January 2006 and agreed to comply with the Government’s “Great Firewall”. This meant that whenever people in China searched for banned Chinese keywords, a warning came up that “In accordance with local laws, regulations and policies, part of the search result is not shown.”
The company argued that it was better to be in China to make most information available rather than not have its service available at all and that it could play a role more useful to the cause of free speech by participating in China’s IT industry.
Source : timesonline.co.uk
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They are just giving warning, its really hard for Google to move from there. Its a very big market.
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