Freedom of expression

China’s cyber spies

After hacker attacks on the email accounts of human rights activists, Google has threatened to pull out of China. For the moment, though, everything remains as it was. Meanwhile, China has extended state censorship to text messaging.

Claudia Isabel Rittel

10.02.2010

In January, Google announced hackers in China had accessed numerous email accounts the company provides. The cyber-attackers primarily targeted the mailboxes of Chinese human-rights activists as well as foreigners and journalists who are known to take interest in related issues.

Google spoke of a “highly sophisticated attack on our corporate infrastructure” but stopped short of directly accusing the Chinese government. Experts, however, do not doubt the state was involved. According to Google, cyber spies targeted at least 20 other large companies in similar ways. One of them was said to be Yahoo, though that company was slow to acknowledge in public it had been attacked by tech-savvy outsiders.

Since Google started operating in China in 2006, the company has bowed to the Chinese government’s insistence on censorship. However, it announced that the attacks and the overall surveillance practices they reveal led the company to review the feasibility of business operations in China. Google has been filtering web-search results on behalf of the Chinese leadership, but considers to stop doing so, even if that means having to withdraw from the Chinese market.

China has so far not shown any will to compromise. Press reports quoted a foreign ministry spokesman saying that foreign companies in China had to obey the country’s laws, customs and tradition and explicitly emphasising that no exception would be made in the case of Google. Since the incident, China has extended censorship to cellphone text messages. As has been done for webtraffick, keywords are used to identify supposedly subversive content.

Google’s share of the search engine market in China falls just short of a third; the share of its Chinese competitor Baidu is twice as big. At present, Google’s revenue in China is estimated to be around $ 300 million – a tiny fraction of its worldwide turnover of $ 22 billion.

Nonetheless, people familiar with the industry still consider China an important growth market for Google, for instance, in mobile telephony. In late January, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the company was still committed to doing business in the People’s Republic, but would change business practices in the future. For the moment, however, it is business as usual in the Middle Kingdom – and in terms of censorship too. (cir)