Did Google Just Worsen Chinas Human Rights Situation?
You’ll be waking up this morning to frantic discussions all over the Internets about a surprising decision by Google to uncensor its service in China. The question is that, though uncensoring may be bold, did it actually make things worse? In a blog posting yesterday Google explained exactly what’s been going on: It seems that though Google, “like many other well-known organizations” faces regular cyber attacks, in the middle of December it detected huge and deep hacks into the “corporate infrastructure” resulting in “theft of intellectual property.” Basically some very sophisticated attackers were trying to get into Google’s code–possibly with the intent of using it to power their own search technology. But that wasn’t the limit of the issue. As part of the investigation, Google turned up evidence that “dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users” have been routinely cracked by third parties via phishing or malware scams. That’s all deeply disturbing, and it’s even attracted
