A note from Google:
Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.
Farhad Manjoo from Slate weighs in
On the eve of Hillary Clinton’s speech in response to Google’s decision, Atlantic correspondent and New America board member James Fallows moderated a discussion involving Open Society Institute fellow Rebecca MacKinnon, Foreign Policy contributing editor Evgeny Morozov, Columbia Law School professor and Slate contributor Tim Wu, and Clinton’s senior adviser for innovation, Alec Ross. Watch this lively panel debate.
Two things interest me about this story:
1. Google talks openly about the security breach, and in more detail than I would have ever imagined from such a tight-lipped organization. They should have just named the article “The Chinese government is funding cyber espionage against us, and we’re pissed.”
2. It’s likely that they were getting their butts kicked by Baidu (the competing Chinese search engine), and saw this as a grand opportunity, not to bow out gracefully, but to mask the real economic reasons for withdrawing. It’s likely Google would have continued to employ censorship if it was bringing in money hand over fist.