The attacks by Chinese hackers on Google’s systems have entered the realm of international relations. In a speech on Internet freedom in Washington on Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on China to make a “transparent” probe of the situation.
“Countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century,” Clinton said at the Newseum journalism museum. The U.S. and China “have different views on this issue, and we intend to address those differences candidly and consistently,” she said, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Earlier this month, Google announced it had suffered an unusual series of attacks emanating from China. “We have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists,” Google’s chief lawyer, David Drummond, wrote in a blog post. “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.”
Threats to ‘Free Flow of Information’
These politically based attacks, Drummond announced, “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.”
Clinton said China is one of several countries — including Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam — where there has been a recent “spike in threats to the free flow of information” over the past year. “Some countries have erected electronic barriers that prevent…