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Cable Allegedly Tying Google Hack to China Released

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WikiLeaks

The State Department cable released by WikiLeaks that claims China's Politburo ordereds the cyber attackson Google have been made public.

The actual text of the cable is available from the Guardian, a UK paper. The relevant excerpt follows:

XXXXXXXXXXXX told PolOff that the closely held Chinese government operations against Google had been coordinated out of the State Council Information Office XXXXXXXXXXXX It was not until Google's public announcement of the intrusions into its systems that the issue had been discussed more widely within the Party. (Note: It is unclear whether President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao were aware of these actions before Google's going public.) As a result of Google's announcement, the PBSC had taken up the issue of Internet controls and the Google case in a series of meetings (reftel). XXXXXXXXXXXX stated that PRC operations against Google were "one hundred percent" political in nature and had nothing to do with removing Google, with its minority market share, as a competitor to Chinese search engines. Separately, XXXXXXXXXXXX told ECON MinCouns that he believed PBSC member XXXXXXXXXXXX was working actively with Chinese Internet search giant Baidu against Google's interests in China.

XXXXXXXXXXXX is the redacted name of the source. It appears that WikiLeaks redacted it. The State Council Information Office is not exactly, as the New York Times reports, the Politburo. The Office describes itself, on their own site china.org.cn, as:

...the State Council's office equivalent to the Publicity Department which reports to the Party Central Committee. While not normally involved in media regulation, the Information Office of the State Council has influence on Ministry of the Information Industry (MII), the General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP) and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) in addition to its propaganda role.

The cable covers related topics, mostly having to do with reactions in the state-controlled Chinese press to Google's revelation of the attacks and their demand at the time not to perform censorship anymore. The Chinese press reactions, unsurprisingly, defended government regulations and accused the U.S. government of hypocrisy and of colluding with Google and other U.S. companies.

Originally posted to the PCMag.com security blog, Security Watch.

About Our Expert

Larry Seltzer

Larry Seltzer

Larry Seltzer has been writing software for and English about computers ever since—much to his own amazement—he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983.

He was one of the authors of NPL and NPL-R, fourth-generation languages for microcomputers by the now-defunct DeskTop Software Corporation. (Larry is sad to find absolutely no hits on any of these +products on Google.) His work at Desktop Software included programming the UCSD p-System, a virtual machine-based operating system with portable binaries that pre-dated Java by more than 10 years.

For several years, he wrote corporate software for Mathematica Policy Research (they're still in business!) and Chase Econometrics (not so lucky) before being forcibly thrown into the consulting market. He bummed around the Philadelphia consulting and contract-programming scenes for a year or two before taking a job at NSTL (National Software Testing Labs) developing product tests and managing contract testing for the computer industry, governments and publication.

In 1991 Larry moved to Massachusetts to become Technical Director of PC Week Labs (now eWeek Labs). He moved within Ziff Davis to New York in 1994 to run testing at Windows Sources. In 1995, he became Technical Director for Internet product testing at PC Magazine and stayed there till 1998.

Since then, he has been writing for numerous other publications, including Fortune Small Business, Windows 2000 Magazine (now Windows and .NET Magazine), ZDNet and Sam Whitmore's Media Survey.

He is co-author of Linksys Networks: The Official Guide, author of ADMIN911: Windows 2000 Terminal Services and Webmaster of ADMIN911 and CPA911.

Larry can be reached at larryseltzer@ziffdavis.com.

Check out Larry Seltzer's introductory column: Ziff Davis' Security Supersite: Blocking the Bad Guys

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