Google May Pull out of China over Cyber Attacks

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.