The company that has "Don’t be evil" as its motto has declared cyberwar on the world's biggest nation. Who would be brave enough to take on more than a billion people? Google has. It will no longer censor information for China. The Whitehouse signaled strong support.
The following are two articles about Google's withdrawal from ChinaFrom The Guardian by Charles Arthur
Google sends a shockwave through Chinese internet
Google has declared cyberwar on China, deploying the world's information against its repressive government
For years, security experts in the US and Europe have known that Chinese hackers sanctioned by its government have been probing the computer systems of important organisations – whether aerospace companies, science laboratories or the British parliament, which was targeted at the end of 2005. Now Google has discovered that it, too, is among the targets of those attacks.
The internet giant has declared cyberwar on the world's biggest nation. Who would be brave enough to take on more than a billion people? But the method it has chosen is to flood them with the resource that is so plentiful: the world's information.
It is a resource that China's population is hungrier than ever to get. News of tainted milk scandals, cover-ups over shoddy buildings that collapse in earthquakes, riots in Tibet … humans are infovores, always keen – once they have raised themselves beyond subsistence – to know more and more about the world around them.
Google is saying to China's government: we have played by your rules, we censored content as you demanded, but you didn't honour your side of the bargain – you let the people who work for you attack us. Therefore we will attack you in the way that is guaranteed to undermine you: by removing censorship. The truth – or at least "unapproved" opinions – about the Dalai Lama and the Falun Gong will reach the populace. And that will only be the beginning.
Can China's repressive government survive that? If it thought it could, it wouldn't block it in the first place. So the next step in the war will be that China's government will respond by kicking Google out of China. Then the war will go internal. China's millions of web surfers – more than there are in the US – are sure to notice the absence of google.cn, sure to ask, sure to enquire. The seeds of doubt will be planted.
It would be easy (but almost certainly hopelessly optimistic) to think that by those actions, internet censorship will end in China. The reality is that Google is only a minority player there (with about 12% of the search market, compared to the in-country Baidu.com with 77%). Yet it will make a difference.
Google has stood up to the most extreme form of cyberbullying and said: no more. This matters more because it is putting western companies and governments on notice that it is now OK to say China is a bad neighbour on the internet. Besides tolerating commercial espionage via hacking, it also allows the hosting of thousands of sites that help spammers rip people off around the world. It allows the theft of intellectual property (the complaint of Cybersitter being only the most recent). It may lead to a new maturity. China's government has been put on notice that it cannot do as it likes.
It would be nice to think that the outcome might be like that imagined in 1975 by the British science fiction writer John Brunner, whose book The Shockwave Rider predated the internet but imagined it beautifully. The denouement of the book comes when a hacker writes a program that makes all information available to everyone, at once rooting out corruption, lies, misinformation and bringing down tyrants. They're sure to know the book in Mountain View. Whether it's allowed in Beijing is another matter.
To read the original Guardian article, please click here.
From Times Online
White House backs Google as it signals pullout from China over Gmail hack
The White House signalled its strong support for Google today after the company said that it would no longer submit to China's internet censors.
The California-based search giant announced yesterday that it was withdrawing from China's Great Firewall because of a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China".
The company said that the hackers had been trying to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists and claimed that at least 20 other large companies had been similarly targeted.
The move looked likely to hit Sino-US relations, although the Chinese have yet to react to it. But both the White House and State Department made clear that they supported Google's fight for a more open web.
The White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, confirmed that officials had discussed the decision with Google before it was announced and said that the Obama Administration backed the "right to a free internet".
"The President and this administration have beliefs about the freedom of the internet," Mr Gibbs said, noting remarks Mr Obama made during a visit to China last November when he spoke out against censorship.
Google said that the cyber-attacks against it had been mostly blocked and that only minor information, such as creation dates and subject lines, had been stolen from two accounts.
It said the investigation showed that accounts of dozens of China human rights activists using Gmail in Europe, China or the United States had been "routinely accessed" using malware (malicious software).
Despite its government-mandated filters, Google remains one of the few sites where images of students crushed to death under tanks in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown can be found.
That may cease if Google holds to its promise to stop censoring its search engine and pulls its plug on the world’s biggest internet population.
The threat came in an official Google blog posting from David Drummond, the company's chief legal officer, who said: "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.
"We realise that that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China."
Google officials plan to talk to the Chinese Government to determine whether there is a way that the company can still provide unfiltered search results in the country.
If an agreement cannot be worked out, as is most likely, Google is prepared to leave China four years after it created a search engine bearing China’s web suffix, ".cn", to put itself in a better position to profit from the world's most populous country.
Mr Drummond added: "The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences."
The company's decision may mean it sacrificing the lucrative and growing Chinese market.
Shares in Google fell just over 2 per cent to $577.53 each in early market reaction. Shares in Baidu, its main rival in China, surged, up 11 per cent at $429 on Nasdaq, the technology-heavy American index.
The Chinese authorities have so far kept silent. The only government response has come from Xinhua, the official news agency, which quoted an anonymous official who said they were "seeking more information on Google’s statement that it could quit China".
However, Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, said: "We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese Government for an explanation.
"The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy.
"I will be giving an address next week on the centrality of internet freedom in the 21st century, and we will have further comment on this matter as the facts become clear."
Google has been investigating the cyber attack since December last year. Internet analysts believe the attacks were launched from at least six internet addresses in Taiwan, a tactic used by Chinese hackers to mask their origin.
A server at an American internet firm, RackSpace, was also hijacked. Stolen information from Google and the other companies was moved to Rackspace’s computers and site, before being sent abroad. The hackers used customised, specially developed "attack codes", to identify and try to steal data from Google.
Jeremy Goldkorn, a Beijing-based media expert, reflected the industry's surprise at Google's move.
"It’s quite remarkable. It is unprecedented for a foreign company with significant operations in China to publicly state such things with such evident hostility.
"It will be interesting to see what the fallout would be."
Reaction elsewhere was mixed. Some Chinese said users would not miss Google, but others delivered bouquets of flowers to the company’s Beijing office.
One accompanying note read: "Google: a real man."
Wen Yunchao, the prominent and outspoken Chinese blogger, said: "This attack from China really targets some democracy activists, and for Google this is a challenge to their morals and their legal bottom line.
"Google has fired an arrow and they know they can't take it back."
He added: "The Chinese Government cannot allow Google to operate without censorship. Of course, we hope that following its economic development, China could have more self-confidence and could be a little more open and globalised. The pity is that, since 2008, things have been going backwards with the internet."
The company that has "Don’t be evil" as its motto had been a late entrant into China and its market share is estimated at just over 30 per cent, compared with more than 60 per cent for Baidu.
The latter is the mainstay of China’s internet population, which, at more than 300 million, exceeds the entire population of the US.
Chinese surfers found today that Google had probably already implemented its promise to lift censorship: pictures of the Dalai Lama and the unknown man who blocked a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square in 1989 popped up easily in a search on its Chinese search engine.
One Chinese who tried just a week ago to try to take a look at pictures from Tiananmen Square in 1989 found virtually nothing. Today the page was awash with images of students killed in the crackdown.
Previously, Google had repeatedly said that it would obey Chinese laws requiring some politically and socially sensitive issues to be blocked from search results available in other countries.
The acquiescence had outraged free-speech advocates and even some shareholders, who argued that Google's co-operation with China violated its motto.
To read the original Times Online article, please click here.