POLITICO

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Clinton weighs in on Google-China clash

By ALEXANDER BURNS | 1/14/10 4:59 AM EST

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that Google’s allegations of censorship and online sabotage by China raised “very serious concerns.”

In a statement, Clinton said Google had briefed the State Department on possible plans to pull out of China.

“We look to the Chinese government for an explanation. The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy,” she said. “I will be giving an address next week on the centrality of Internet freedom in the 21st century, and we will have further comment on this matter as the facts become clear.”

Google said Tuesday it would stop censoring search results on Google.cn. That would allow users to find politically sensitive photos and websites abroad, though downloading them might still be barred by government filters. It also said it had discovered that computer hackers had tricked human-rights activists into exposing their e-mail accounts to outsiders.

On Wednesday, Google.cn said its top search term of the day was “Tiananmen,” possibly because of Web surfers looking for material on the government’s violent 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protests.

The No. 2 search topic was “Google leaving China.”

China’s foreign ministry and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press, but the state news agency Xinhua cited an unidentified official as saying the government was seeking more information from Google.

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Telegraph.co.uk

The activists, who include one of China’s foremost artists and a Tibetan student in the United States, came forward after Google announced it had suffered a “highly sophisticated” cyber attack in December, whose goal was to gain access to its email service, Gmail.

Google has since said it is preparing to quit its Chinese business and Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of State, has demanded an explanation from China for the attempted hacking.

Ai Weiwei, who is best known in the West for having helped design the Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing, said that two of his Google email accounts had been hacked by “unknown visitors” who read and copied his emails.

Mr Ai, who is also a vociferous activist, said he had no proof that the Chinese government had been behind the hacking attempt.

Teng Biao, a law professor at the University of Political Science and Law in Beijing and a human rights lawyer, said his emails had been hacked into in 2007. “Many of my friends told me they received entrapment emails from the email address I was using at the time: against.teng@gmail.com,” he wrote on his blog.

The email subjects were things like ’inside story’, ’contribute an article’ or ’democratic principles’ and had an attachment containing a virus,” he added.

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-- Edited by Sanders on Friday 15th of January 2010 06:55:17 PM