The Glade 4.0

Google, Citing Cyber Attack, Threatens to Exit China

By ANDREW JACOBS and MIGUEL HELFT
Published: January 12, 2010
BEIJING — Google, facing an assault by hackers who sought to penetrate the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, will stop cooperating with Chinese censorship and consider closing its offices and operations in China altogether, the company said on Tuesday.

If it makes good on its threat, the abrupt departure from China would be a startling end to Google’s foray into a country with more than 300 million Internet users. Since arriving here in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what its citizens can read on the Internet.

Google said it was unclear who orchestrated the attacks on its computer systems but described them as “highly sophisticated” and said they included an assault on at least 20 other large companies in the finance, technology, media and chemical sectors.

The attackers’ primary goal of the hackers, the company said, were the Gmail accounts of human rights activists, although none of the targeted accounts were breached.

Google did not publicly link the Chinese government to the cyberattack, but people with knowledge of Google’s investigation said they had enough evidence to justify its actions.

The company said the attacks originated within China, which has long constrained the search engine’s results and presented a challenge to the company’s guiding zeitgeist, “Don’t be evil.” The company said it would try to work out an arrangement with the Chinese government to provide an uncensored Internet — a tall order in a country that heavily filters the Web — but that it would close its offices in China if its demands were not met.

“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,” David Drummond, a senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer, said in a statement.

Wenqi Gao, a spokesman for the Chinese Consulate in New York, said he did not see any problems with Google.cn. “I want to reaffirm that China is committed to protecting the legitimate rights and interests of foreign companies in our country,” he said in a phone interview.

In China, search requests that include words such as “Tiananmen Square massacre” or “Dalai Lama” come up blank. In recent months, the government has also blocked YouTube, Google’s video-sharing service.

Google’s apparent decision to play hardball with the Chinese government raises enormous risks. While Google’s business in China remains small for now, analysts say that the country could soon become one of the most lucrative Internet markets.

“The consequences of not playing the China market could be very big for any company, but particularly for an Internet company that makes its money from advertising,” said David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School. Mr. Yoffie said that advertising played an even bigger role in the Internet in China than it did in the United States.

At the time of its arrival, the company said that it believed that the benefits of its presence in China outweighed the downside of being forced to censor some search results there, as it would provide more information and openness to Chinese citizens. The company, however, has repeatedly said that it will monitor restrictions in China.

Google’s announcement drew praise from free-speech and human rights advocates, many of whom had criticized the company in the past over its decision to enter the Chinese market despite censorship requirements.

“I think that with the increasing demands that were being placed on Google vis-à-vis censorship combined with these very troubling cyberattacks, Google reached a tipping point,” said Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. “It is a principled decision.”

Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN reporter and an expert on the Chinese Internet, said Google had endured repeated harassment in recent months and that by having operations in China it potentially put at risk the security of its users in China. “Unless they turn themselves into a Chinese company, Google could not win,” she said. “The company has clearly put its foot down and said enough is enough.”

A United States expert on cyberwarfare said 34 companies were targets of cyberattacks last week, most of them high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. The attacks came from Taiwanese Internet addresses, according to James Mulvenon, an expert on Chinese cyberwarfare capabilities. Mr. Mulvenon said the stolen documents were transmitted electronically to a server controlled by Rackspace, based in San Antonio.

In the past year, Google has been increasingly constricted by the Chinese government. Last June, after briefly blocking access nationwide to its main search engine and other services like Gmail, the government forced the company to disable a function that lets the search engine suggest terms. At the time, the government said it was simply seeking to remove pornographic material from the company’s search engine results.

At the time, some company executives suggested that the campaign was a concerted effort to stain the Google’s image. Since its entry into China, the company has steadily lost market share to Baidu, the country’s leading search engine.

Google called the attacks highly sophisticated. In the past, such electronic intrusions have either exploited the practice of “phishing” to persuade unsuspecting users to permit their computers to be compromised, or exploited vulnerabilities in software programs permitting the attacks to gain control of systems remotely. Once they have taken over a target computer, it is possible to search for specific documents.

People familiar with the investigation into the attacks said they were aimed at source code repositories at high-tech companies. Source code is the original programmer’s instructions used to develop software programs and can provide both economic advantages as well as insight into potential security vulnerabilities.

In its public statement Google pointed to a United States government report prepared by the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission last October and an investigation by Canadian researchers that revealed a vast electronic spying operation last March.

The Canadian researchers discovered that digital documents had been stolen via the Internet from hundreds of government and private organizations around the world from computer systems based in China. At the time the researchers said they could not conclusively say that the Chinese government was involved.

The researchers, who are based at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, had been asked by the office of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader whom China regularly denounces, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.

The researchers said that the new attacks indicated a link between targeted attacks and the censorship activities of many of the world’s governments.

Several Internet civil liberties specialists hailed Google’s stand. “I think it’s both the right move and a brilliant one,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a legal scholar at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. “It helps realign Google’s business with its ethos.”

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin