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Top Chinese officials ordered attack on Google:Wikileaks

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Top Chinese officials ordered attack on Google, Wikileaks cables claim

The hacking of Google which forced the search engine to pull out of China was masterminded by a senior member of the Communist regime, according to leaked US diplomatic cables.

By Patrick Sawer 7:57PM GMT 04 Dec 2010
Classified information sent by US diplomats to the State Department in Washington and published on WikiLeaks, claims that the Chinese politician became hostile to Google after he searched his own name and found articles criticising him.
This apparently prompted an assault on the search engine, forcing it to "walk away from a potential market of 400 million internet users" in January this year, amid a highly publicised row about internet censorship.
The allegation that the attack on Google was orchestrated by Communist party leaders has not been revealed until now.

The politician is accused of acting with a second member of the politburo in an attempt to force Google to drop a link from its Chinese-language search engine to its uncensored google.com version.

One cable from the US embassy in Beijing, marked as secret, records that attempts to break into the accounts of dissidents who used Google's Gmail system had been co-ordinated "with the oversight of" the two politburo members.
The cyber assault was described to the Americans by a high-level Chinese source as "100% political in nature" and having "nothing to do with removing Google... as a competitor to Chinese search engines".
Last December Google said that it was hit by a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure". Part of it was aimed at the Gmail accounts of "Chinese human rights activists".
Shortly after the attack, Google withdrew from mainland China, and relocated to Hong Kong, where it was able to run an uncensored version of its website in English and Chinese.
Both Google and the US suspected leading Chinese politicians were behind the hacking, but neither said so at the time.
The cables show that diplomats at the time discussed whether China's most powerful man, Hu Jintao, the president, or his prime minister, Wen Jiabao, were "aware of these actions". The secret note sent back to Washington concedes that "it is unclear" whether advance knowledge of the strike went right to the top.
Google began operating in China in 2006 and in a bid to gain market share from its local rival Baidu launched Google.cn, in which results relating to contentious issues such as Tibet, Taiwan and the Tiananmen Square massacre were filtered out.
Google, whose motto is Don't Be Evil, retained a link to the unfiltered Google.com on its Google.cn website, which prompted months of tension with the Chinese government.
A cable from Beijing notes that Google had already begun to raise concerns with the most senior American diplomat in the country at the time.
Dan Piccuta, the US chargé d'affaires, was told how the prominent politician had "recently discovered that Google's worldwide site is uncensored" after he "allegedly entered his own name and found results critical of him".
According to the cable, the Chinese government shortly afterwards ordered "the three dominant SOE [state influence enterprises] telecoms [companies] to stop doing business with the company".
Google held out however and refused to block access to Google.com. The US embassy was told that "removing the link to Google.com is against the company's principles".
China subsequently increased its attacks on Google, another cable claims. A group of Chinese internet users reported that Google China was "not effectively filtering pornographic sites" and the Chinese government blocked access to Google for 24 hours.
The documents shed light on the extent of the close working relationship between Google and the US authorities in China. In January, a few days after Google made the hacking public, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, made a speech in Washington entitled "remarks on internet freedom".
Clinton warned that "countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century".
She called on the Chinese government to "conduct a thorough review of the cyber intrusions" without revealing that it was her own officials who believed the attack was co-ordinated from inside the Chinese politburo.
It was revealed yesterday that the online payment service PayPal has suspended the account used by WikiLeaks to collect donations.
The decision follows the publication by WikiLeaks of thousands of leaked US embassy cables.
WikiLeaks accused PayPal, which is based in America, of bowing to US Government demands to withdraw its service. PayPal is one of several methods that enables WikiLeaks to receive donations and finance its operations.
On Wednesday, Amazon ended an agreement to host WikiLeaks, forcing the website to switch to a Swiss internet address on Friday. It had also been dropped by another US internet service provider.
 
Google learned it's lesson when its stock dropped 200 billion dollars when it decided to "take a moral stand" against China.

Let see it take another "stand" after it having crawled back on its hands and knees for a license in China.
 
Google learned it's lesson when its stock dropped 200 billion dollars when it decided to "take a moral stand" against China.

Let see it take another "stand" after it having crawled back on its hands and knees for a license in China.

China has the largest number of internet users out of any country in the world, and also has the fastest growth in the number of internet users in the world.

Google found itself unable to compete with Baidu for the domestic market, so they went for an all-in bluff against the CCP and lost.

The lesson is, when negotiating with China, never push the Chinese side into a position where they will be forced to lose face. It is just bad strategy.
 
Google learned it's lesson when its stock dropped 200 billion dollars when it decided to "take a moral stand" against China.

Let see it take another "stand" after it having crawled back on its hands and knees for a license in China.
I still feel that google is on a higher moral ground. U should have the freedom to choose what u like or dislike without other people interfering

Baidu is not more successful bcoz they r technologically superior google but just bcoz they will BEND
 
I still feel that google is on a higher moral ground. U should have the freedom to choose what u like or dislike without other people interfering

Baidu is not more successful bcoz they r technologically superior google but just bcoz they will BEND

No surprise...

Anyway the point is moot. If you want to operate in China, then you have to follow the law of China.

If you disagree with our laws, then you don't need to come here. Your place will just be taken by another foreigner who is willing to work within the context of Chinese law.
 
I still feel that google is on a higher moral ground. U should have the freedom to choose what u like or dislike without other people interfering

Baidu is not more successful bcoz they r technologically superior google but just bcoz they will BEND

Don't be stupid. Google was throwing a hissy fit because it couldn't get 60%+ of the market share like it did in the North Am. market. Google thought that they would get postive publicity from gullible fools like you by making it a freedom vs authoritarianism issue in return for their small market share in China, when the actual fact is they just couldn't breaking into the Chinese language market and they don't operate well when they don't have a near monopoly.


Sht if google is such a fvcking saint, why did it illegally tap into unsecured wireless networks using Google street view vehicles, and why is it being sued by the EU for manipulating its search result?
 
No surprise...

Anyway the point is moot. If you want to operate in China, then you have to follow the law of China.

If you disagree with our laws, then you don't need to come here. Your place will just be taken by another foreigner who is willing to work within the context of Chinese law.
I doubt that you would support the same principle for other countries if their laws negatively affect Chinese businesses in any way.
 
Google learned it's lesson when its stock dropped 200 billion dollars when it decided to "take a moral stand" against China.

Let see it take another "stand" after it having crawled back on its hands and knees for a license in China.
Aahh...So you support government sanctioned break-ins.
 
I doubt that you would support the same principle for other countries if their laws negatively affect Chinese businesses in any way.

Why not? Care to explain what it is exactly that I would not support?

If you're in a particular country, you should obey the laws of that country. This doesn't just apply to businesses, but individuals too.

Americans are coming over here by the boatload, trying to grab a share of a growing market. Companies like Microsoft are welcome here because they follow the laws of the land. In fact, I think Microsoft's search engine was one of the biggest beneficiaries of this little Google dispute.
 
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Aahh...So you support government sanctioned break-ins.

Oh hell I didn't even really read the article. What I really paid attention to during the Google crisis was GOOG price action (I was learning technical analysis) They did their shareholders a major disservice, by thinking moral high-ground equate to more business revenue... Well, it didn't... and God knows what they had to give up in order to renew their China license back in Aug.

It was a mistake through and through by the business sense (I think).
 
To be honest, when Goolge claimed she was gonna leave China, i felt a little pity for that little hctib.

But after I found out she was bluffing, I realized Google was just a shameless hctib who wanted to maintain a good reputation while still being a hctib.
 
Why not? Care to explain what it is exactly that I would not support?

If you're in a particular country, you should obey the laws of that country. This doesn't just apply to businesses, but individuals too.
Censorship. Do you support blanket censorship? We can safely assume not because there are Internet access in China. Do you support selective censorship? We can safely assume yes because, realistically, we all do support some measure of selective censorship and prosecution of violators. I do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/world/asia/05wikileaks-china.html?_r=2
As China ratcheted up the pressure on Google to censor its Internet searches last year, the American Embassy sent a secret cable to Washington detailing one reason top Chinese leaders had become so obsessed with the Internet search company: they were Googling themselves.

The May 18, 2009, cable, titled “Google China Paying Price for Resisting Censorship,” quoted a well-placed source as saying that Li Changchun, a member of China’s top ruling body, the Politburo Standing Committee, and the country’s senior propaganda official, was taken aback to discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google’s main international Web site. When Mr. Li typed his name into the search engine at google.com, he found “results critical of him.”
But why do we in America support Internet censorship of the sexual exploitation of children but not censorship of crass insults of political leaders? Apparently a lot of members of China's top political leadership took offense that their opinions, policies, and image perceptions are not accorded deity status by the less important crowd, aka 'the people'. The less state power is available to any single person, the less harm he can do to those he hate. A minor bureaucrat can make life very difficult for me to get a business license, but an advisor to the mayor who holds a grudge against me can exert much more state resources, from legal to even police, to discourage me from starting a business altogether.

Americans are coming over here by the boatload, trying to grab a share of a growing market. Companies like Microsoft are welcome here because they follow the laws of the land. In fact, I think Microsoft's search engine was one of the biggest beneficiaries of this little Google dispute.
I see nothing wrong with going to where the money making opportunities might be. Moral compromises will be made and that arena is the focus of attention.

So do you support the notion that government officials, high or low, should have the moral right to enact laws that specifically favor them, meaning to protect them even from negative perceptions alongside preferential treatments wherever they can find them, and therefore they should enact laws to persecute those who are critical of these laws and wishes to express those opinions?
 
@Gambit, the NYT story may have been counterfactual and since neither of us are legal experts on Chinese law, I found this article written by an American law professor teaching in China.


New York Times May Have Screwed the Pooch on WikiLeaks Google Story


Hopefully I will have some time tomorrow evening to write up something more comprehensive on this Google-WikiLeaks story, but I had to pump out this narrow, somewhat irate post tonight after reading some initial press accounts.

Since we are in the middle on an all-out media blitz on what the WikiLeaks cables say about Google and China, it seems as though some news outlets are throwing caution to the wind in an effort to get something, anything out there as quickly as possible, facts be damned.

I understand the excitement, but getting folks to write about the Google-in-China story is not so easy. At the time Google pulled out, a lot of our friends in the media screwed the story up royally because they did not understand how search engines worked, had no clue what Chinese Internet law had to say on the subject, or didn’t know anything at all, and probably didn’t care. I had some words to say about the press accounts of the Google story at the time.

So now we have Round Two, and the guys that are writing about Google’s actions in China are doing so with even less knowledge of what actually happened, are relying on those inaccurate original stories as background, and are probably going to get a lot of facts wrong.

I haven’t read much yet, but I did peruse the New York Times writeup, which breathlessly focuses on a sexy story alleging that Li Changchun, often referred to as being in charge of China’s propaganda/censorship efforts, somehow ordered a hack attack against Google because he didn’t like the search results associated with his name. I’ll leave aside my opinion on the veracity of that story until tomorrow, but I do want to point out how the New York Times story on that topic started off. This is the lede:

As China ratcheted up the pressure on Google to censor its Internet searches last year, the American Embassy sent a secret cable to Washington detailing one reason top Chinese leaders had become so obsessed with the Internet search company: they were Googling themselves.

This is just awful stuff. Look, China never “ratcheted” up pressure on Google to censor search results. Why? Because Google was already censoring (for several years) due to very clear legal requirements. Once Google decided to unilaterally stop censoring, the government told them in no uncertain terms that they must, repeat must, go back to following the law or the site would be shut down.

No “ratcheting” necessary. It was “follow the law” or else. That’s it.

The NYT lede seems to suggest that Google had been offering unfiltered search results for some time, which displeased the government, and therefore Beijing was slowly turning up the heat on Google to change their policies. Absolutely, flat-out wrong!

Further on in the article, after presenting the entertaining story of Mr. Li and the self-googling, and portraying the Central Government elites as being “obsessed” with Google (what determines an obsession?), we get this:

The cables catalog the heavy pressure that was placed on Google to comply with local censorship laws, as well as Google’s willingness to comply — up to a point. That coercion began building years before the company finally decided to pull its search engine out of China last spring in the wake of the successful hacking attack on its home servers, which yielded Chinese dissidents’ e-mail accounts as well as Google’s proprietary source code.
One could interpret this language several different ways, but to me, it really sounds like the writers here have no fundamental understanding of what they are writing about, and that’s not really a good thing. I usually don’t go after journalists who are writing “neutral” news stories like this, so let me explain.

Was Google being pressured by the government to comply with censorship laws? Yes, of course. Google announced that it would break the law, so of course the government said that it must comply or it would be shut down. The context presented here in the article is clearly that the government was unfairly targeting Google, doing something to a private, foreign company that it shouldn’t. I’m reading between the lines here, but use of the word “coercion” alone, I believe, supports my contention.

The worst part, though, is the statement that this “coercion” began years before Google decided to pull out of China. But wait a minute. It seems pretty clear from the article that this coercion was designed to get Google to comply with censorship rules (see above language in the lede in addition to that second quote).

That’s obviously wrong, because Google was, in fact, complying with censorship rules until just before it fled the mainland for Hong Kong. So according to the NYT, the government was involved in coercing Google into doing something it was already doing. [/B]Or to put it another way, the government was coercing Google for years, but for reasons that had nothing to do with censorship.

Are you confused?

Here’s what I think happened here. The NYT threw these two guys onto this story (they are reportedly from New York and San Francisco) even though they don’t know the facts. They incorrectly assumed, since all the background stories on this topic are about complying with censorship rules, that the government had been pushing Google for several years to start censoring, as opposed to what really happened (i.e. Google decided to stop censoring).

If I’ve gotten this totally wrong, not to mention hopelessly confused, then I apologize to these guys. However, it looks awful at first glance, and I expect better from the Times on a story this important.

More tomorrow night after, ironically, I give a lecture on China Internet Law to my FDI class.
 

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