Furious Google throws down gauntlet to China over censorship

Well, we’ve got to hand it to Google—the company’s “don’t be evil” schtick has long worn thin and governments around the globe are already probing its potential monopoly power, but who else would come out swinging against the entire Chinese government and announce an end to its own collaboration in censorship, all while recognizing that it could lose access to the entire Chinese market? And do it in a blog post?

This far but no further

The extraordinary announcement came this afternoon: Google has had it with China’s pervasive web of censorship and spying, and the company is done censoring its search results in China. The decision wasn’t made in a vacuum, but rather came after years of increasing cyberattacks from the Chinese mainland. A recent, massive infiltration attempt that targeted Google and 20 other tech companies was the final straw. Though Google stops short of naming the Chinese government as the party behind the attacks, the implication is clear.

In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident—albeit a significant one—was something quite different.

The attack hit major companies in the “Internet, finance, technology, media, and chemical sectors” as well. Its goal was “accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists,” though it does not appear that anything more than subject lines were ever compromised. If that’s not bad enough, Google also says it has acquired some intriguing evidence over the course of its investigation: “the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.”

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn…

The sheer scope of such attacks is staggering. They show a coordinated effort to target specific human rights advocates not just in China but around the world, and to do so by attempting to infiltrate some of the world’s most advanced computer networks belonging to some of the world’s largest companies. (A Microsoft spokesperson tells Ars tonight, “We have no indication that any of our mail properties have been compromised.” In response to some follow-up questions, we were told that the software giant would have no further comment.)

China has been well-known for going after the electronic communications of dissidents, and companies like Yahoo have in the past complied with Chinese government requests for e-mails. Those demands, however distasteful, at least followed a rough legal process in China. But Google’s account indicates that, if the Chinese government is in fact linked to these recent attacks, it is willing to adopt extra-legal hacking in order to keep up its surveillance—and to do so anywhere in the world that communications of interest might be stored. Such a concerted program would be a marked escalation in the government’s willingness to interfere in the operations of Internet companies in order to promote “stability.”

Google has always claimed to be dissatisfied with the demands that it censor Chinese search results, but it has gone along with them since 2006. The argument has been that engagement with China, even in a censored fashion, was better than no access to tools like Google. But the recent attacks have caused a change of heart in Mountain View.

“We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn,” announced Google’s Chief Legal Officer David Drummond today, “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. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”