Google May Pull out of China over Cyber Attacks

KOMPAS.com - Google said Tuesday that it may pull out of China because of a sophisticated computer network attack originating in China and targeting its e-mail service.

The company said it had evidence to suggest that "a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts" of Chinese human rights activists. The attack was discovered in December.

Based on its investigation to date, Google said it does not believe the cyber attack succeeded. "Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves," the company said in a blog posting.

But David Drummond, Google senior vice president and chief legal officer, added that the attacks "have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China."

Google has further decided it is no longer willing to continue censoring its search results in Chinese Google sites, Drummond said, and over the next few weeks it will discuss with the Beijing government how it may operate "an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all," he said.

"We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China," he said.

Privacy advocates applauded Google's move to disclose the attack and reverse its stand on censorship of its China search engine results.

"Google has taken a bold and difficult step for Internet freedom in support of fundamental human rights," said Center for Democracy & Technology president Leslie Harris. "No company should be forced to operate under government threat to its core values or to the rights and safety of its users. We support Google for being willing to engage in this very difficult process."

At least 20 other large companies have been similarly targeted with such attacks, Google said. The firms' industries range from finance and technology to media and chemicals.

"We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech," Drummond said.

In a separate development, Google officials said, the company discovered that the Gmail accounts of dozens of China human rights advocates in the United States, China and Europe "appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties." The hacking occurred most likely through phishing scams -- luring users to download malicious software by opening innocent-looking e-mails -- or malware placed on users' computers, rather than by breaking into Google's corporate infrastructure, the company said.

China is among a handful of countries considered to have impressive cyber offensive capabilities, but U.S. officials have refrained from publicly accusing the country because determining with certainty who is behind an attack is quite difficult.

Attacks against China rights activists have been growing, however, and suspicion has fallen on the Beijing government or its broad army of proxies.

When Google set up a subsidiary in China in 2005 and purchased servers hosted in the country, it agreed to censor its search results. But the company and the government officials trolling the Internet have continued to clash over what content should be blocked.

The conflicts escalated in June when Beijing blamed Google for smut on the Internet, saying that some search results could be considered pornographic. The government ordered Google to halt foreign Web searches. Many Chinese bloggers pointed out that Chinese search engines would produce the same results but only the foreign company was singled out for blame in headlines in the state-run People's Daily and New China News Service.

That same month China temporarily blocked Google.com and Gmail in what was believed to be a punishment.

The U.S, government, working with Congress, seems to be slowly moving toward a policy to attempt to deal with this new threat to freedom of expression. Congress recently passed the Iran Voice Act, which has provisions that require the government to investigate companies that may have helped Iran to conduct surveillance online.

The State Department has allocated funds to companies to help get around Internet firewalls put up by China and other countries, although there is some controversy over those funds because one of the most successful outfits that does that kind of work is run by members of the Falun Gong sect, which is banned in China. The Global Internet Freedom Consortium has yet to receive significant, if any, government funding.

"The Chinese would go ballistic if we did that," said one U.S. official.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is scheduled to give a speech on Internet freedom next week.

Staff writer Ariana Eunjung Cha contributed to this report.