Wednesday, January 13, 2010

President Hu Jin Tao, Tear, Down, This, Firewall

In light of certain parties in China apparently attempting to hack the G-Mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, in addition to several businesses and other organizations, Google is considering a change in it's China policy. It very likely will no longer adhere to China's censorship policies, and as such, might well withdraw from China all together. This is a move that has heralded acclaim from human rights watchdog groups, freedom of information and free speech ideologues, techno-geeks, and those who monitor advances in technology and relevant concerns in legal and ethical applications, like here.

But is there more to all this than meets the eye?

It would seem as though another prominent Chinese search engine, Baidu, was also hacked, by the Iranian Cyber Army, the same group that recently hacked Twitter.

This brings up, to me, an interesting prospect. Was the recent breach of Chinese search engine Baidu really conducted by the Iranian Cyber Army, or was it the Chinese looking for a scapegoat in order to conceal their own alleged actions against Google accounts by establishing a degree of plausible deniability?

If so, is it possible that the previous Twitter hack was in reality a test run conducted by the CCP, taking advantage of the recent turmoil in Iran in order to set up it's own espionage operations targeting Chinese dissidents who might also make use of Twitter?

Interestingly, the People's Daily On-Line has an account of the Baidu hack, but nothing about the controversy over Google.

Ahhh Those Insclutabal Olientals.

(Psssst-some people are saying Google is really just wanting to leave China because Baidu is cleaning their clocks, but don't tell anybody, because if that's true, that might upset Google shareholders even more, which might be why this article has been censored from Google's search engine, nyuk nyuk).

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Either that, or the hack was simply to prevent the big G search engine from finding certain sites?

SecondComingOfBast said...

I don't think it was that, because Google was really censoring it's own search engine in China. That was the terms of the agreement it had with China for doing business there.

Frank Partisan said...

The IRI does harass Iranian activists. That is why they all have the same last name (Irani).

Anonymous said...

I hope Google leaves China. I'm tired of the Chinese government reading what's in my G-Mail account and then falling asleep.