China Ordered Google Attacks

And learned the Internet was 'fundamentally controllable'
By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 5, 2010 7:25 AM CST
China Ordered Google Attacks
In this photo taken Monday, March 22, 2010, a Chinese woman cleans the Google logo outside the Google China headquarters in Beijing, China.   (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Chinese invasions of Google’s networks were perpetrated by the top levels of China’s government, an insider says in cables released by WikiLeaks. “According to our contact, the closely held operations”—in which Google said a “significant” amount of intellectual property was stolen—“were directed at the Politburo Standing Committee level,” a cable reads. The committee consists of the Chinese government’s nine most powerful people, the Washington Post notes.

A US official notes that “we have never been able to corroborate” the “single-source report” that a committee member angered by a Google search on himself called for the hack, but experts definitively point the finger at the government. But Beijing's lesson from the hack, the New York Times reports, was critical: “They reached a conclusion: the Web is fundamentally controllable,” a source cited in the cables tells the paper. (More Google stories.)

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