Internet giant Google has threatened to shut down its Chinese operations after uncovering what it calls a highly sophisticated wave of cyber attacks targeted towards human rights activists.
The threat comes after the company ran into controversy due to its Google Books project, with executives apologising to Chinese authors for scanning literary works without their permission.
The company said cyber spies attacked Google and at least 20 other companies in an attempt to shut down the email accounts of several human rights activists around the world. It said in a subsequent statement it decided it cannot filter its search results for Chinese residents any longer.
“These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered – combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web – have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China,” Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond said in a blog post.
“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.”
The Chinese Government is notorious for blocking the amount of content its citizens can view through internet browsers and search engines.
Google said the attacks, which were detected last month, indicated a highly sophisticated attack on corporate infrastructure which originated from China.
“Independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of US-China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties,” Drummond said.
“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,” he said.
Drummond said in the blog post the company acknowledged the consequences of shutting down their Chinese operations, but said the decision had been made by executives at the company’s California headquarters.
The development comes after the China Daily reported an apology was given by Google to Chinese authors after being sued for copyright infringement in relation to its Google Books Project.
“We will have a serious study of the apology and hear the authors’ opinions before we decide whether or not to accept Google’s apology,” Chinese Writers Association secretary Yang Chengzhi told CCTV.
However, the controversy surrounding the Google Books settlement continues in other countries, including the US, Australia and Britain.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
