Google accuses China of interfering with Gmail email system
Chinese government's crackdown on activists thought to be behind what Google
calls 'politically motivated attacks'
• Dominic Rushe in New York
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 March 2011 20.50 GMT
• Article history
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/20/google-gmail
Google has accused the Chinese government of interfering with its popular Gmail
email system. The move follows extensive attempts by the Chinese authorities to
crack down on the "jasmine revolution" – an online dissident movement inspired
by events in the Middle East.
According to the search giant, Chinese customers and advertisers have
increasingly been complaining about their Gmail service in the past month.
Attempts by users to send messages, mark messages as unread and use other
services have generated problems for Gmail customers.
In the wake of the catastrophic earthquake in Japan, Google set up an
application to help people find relatives and friends lost in the disaster.
This service too seems to have been compromised.
"Relating to Google there is no issue on our side. We have checked extensively.
This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is
with Gmail," said a Google spokesman. China's embassy in Washington was not
immediately available for comment.
The announcement follows a blog posting from Google on 11 March in which the
firm said it had "noticed some highly targeted and apparently politically
motivated attacks against our users. We believe activists may have been a
specific target." The posting said the attacks were targeting a vulnerability
in Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser. The two firms have been working
to address the issue. At the time, Google declined to elaborate on which
activists had been targeted or where the attacks had been coming from.
Last January Google said it had been the victim of highly sophisticated attacks
originating from China. At first the firm thought its intellectual property was
the target. The company's investigations found at least 20 other internet ,
financial, technology, media and chemical companies had been similarly
targeted. Google said it had uncovered evidence that the primary goal of the
attacks was the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
The search firm is not commenting further on this latest attack, but technology
experts said it seemed to show an increasingly high degree of sophistication.
"In the wake of what is happening in the Middle East I don't think China wants
to be seen making heavy-handed attacks on the internet, that would draw too
much attention," said one internet executive who wished to remain anonymous. He
said making it look like a fault in Google's system was extremely difficult to
do and the fact that these attacks appear to come and go makes the attack look
"semi-industrial and very, very sophisticated."
In February dozens of political activists were arrested in China after an
anonymous call online for people to start a jasmine revolution. The crackdown
came as China's president Hu Jintao called for tighter internet controls to
help prevent social unrest. Much of the unrest in the Middle East has gone
unreported in China, where the internet is already heavily censored. Facebook,
LinkedIn and YouTube are all blocked in China.
Google first opened for business in China in 2005. But after announcing that it
had been hacked in January last year the company said it was no longer prepared
to censor its search results and moved its operations to Hong Kong.
"We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our
services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has
been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a
non-negotiable legal requirement," David Drummond, Google's chief legal
officer, said at the time.
According to WikiLeaks cables, China's political elite have a love hate
relationship with the internet. On the one hand the authorities want the
information they can obtain via the web and on the other they are extremely
concerned by the threat they perceive it presents to their authority. The
cables suggest China has successfully hacked the US and other governments as
well as private enterprises.
The leaked cables also chronicle the pressure put on Google to comply with
Chinese censorship. As well as removing references to the Dalai Lama and to
1989's Tiananmen Square massacre, Google was asked to censor images of
government facilities displayed on the Google Earth mapping service.
Last month the Chinese authorities launched Panguso, a search engine joint
venture between Xinhua news agency and the state-owned telecoms giant China
Mobile. The site appears to be even more heavily censored than Baidu, the
largest search firm in China. Searches on Panguso reportedly produced no
results for Nobel peace prize laureate Liu Xiaobo.
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