Good for Google

In the past, criticisms have been made (rightly, in my view) about the extent to which Google has been willing to be complicit in China's repression of human rights activists and protestors, and suppression of free speech.  Well, no more. 

In a remarkably robust article, the Chief Legal Officer at Google has stated that

we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.

Moreover, he goes on to say that

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. In the last two decades, China's economic reform programs and its citizens' entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that "we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China."

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. 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.

Emphasis added.

By Alex Deane

Comments

[alastair]

The BBC is misreporting this as if Google has simply ceased censoring results, which is not what they’ve said at all.

I'm all for freedom of speech, but had it done what the BBC had suggested I think it would have been quite wrong. China's government, for all its faults, is still more representative of its citizens than Western liberals (who for the most part are not even Chinese, unlike the members of the Chinese government), and to those who say it is “illegitimate, unelected and unopposable” as someone said to me earlier today, it’s worth pointing out that nobody elected most of the people criticising it either. And certainly nobody elected Google, which is one very good reason that it would have been quite wrong of them to ignore Chinese law.

FWIW, I also contend that freedom of speech is merely the expectation that you will not be *punished* for what you say or write. It doesn't necessarily imply that what you have written might not be censored somewhere by somebody, which is a related but slightly separate issue.

[Giolla Decair]

I do have to wonder why google are suddenly concerned about operating "an unfiltered search engine" when the evidence is that they've not been so worried about this in the past.

[Volatile Barry]

Google Boss Eric Schmidt recently said, "Only miscreants worry about net privacy. If you don't want anyone to know, don't do it"

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," Schmidt tells CNBC

That tells more about their attitude to privacy than some publicity stunt in China (where they have been actively censoring on behalf of the State for some time).

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/07/schmidt_on_privacy/

[mike]

Google is, in fact, is a key participant in U.S. military and CIA intelligence operations involving torture; subversion of foreign governments; illegal wars of aggression; and military occupations of countries which have never attacked the U.S. and which have cost hundreds of thousands of lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

To begin with, Google is the supplier of the core search technology for 'Intellipedia, a highly-secured online system where 37,000 U.S. spies and related personnel share information and collaborate on their devious errands.

Agencies such as the so-called 'National Security Agency' have also purchased servers using Google-supplied search technology which processes information gathered by U.S. spies operating all over the planet.

Google's Deep CIA Connections

[Supra Shoes]

Your English is damn good!