Month: January 2010

Google made a surprise announcement that it may withdraw from China following a series of cyber attacks on its users and infrastructure. Chief Legal Officer David Drummond wrote that the attacks were aimed at identifying advocates for human rights in China. Even after four years of operations Google is unlikely to win the search giant any concessions from Beijing censors, several analysts said.As reported on MarketWatch, Drummond wrote that: We have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists (before Google has subsequently also discovered that dozens of Gmail accounts held by advocates of human rights in China have been “routinely accessed by third parties. 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. On Tuesday, Drummond wrote: 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.We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. (The...