in the fastest growing internet (and every other) market of the world, china, google has said it’s had enough with its long-​time and well-​publicised col­lab­or­ative cen­sor­ship effort with the chinese gov­ern­ment. according to google, there’s evid­ence that the chinese gov­ern­ment has been tar­geting dis­sid­ents and human rights act­iv­ists in the main­land and abroad, and spear­heading security breaches where intel­lec­tual prop­erty has been stolen from major tech firms.

The extraordinary announce­ment came this after­noon: Google has had it with China’s per­vasive web of cen­sor­ship and spying, and the com­pany is done cen­soring its search res­ults in China. The decision wasn’t made in a vacuum, but rather came after years of increasing cyber­at­tacks from the Chinese main­land. A recent, massive infilt­ra­tion attempt that tar­geted Google and 20 other tech com­panies was the final straw. Though Google stops short of naming the Chinese gov­ern­ment as the party behind the attacks, the implic­a­tion is clear.

In mid-​December, we detected a highly soph­ist­ic­ated and tar­geted attack on our cor­porate infra­struc­ture ori­gin­ating from China that res­ulted in the theft of intel­lec­tual prop­erty from Google. How­ever, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident — albeit a sig­ni­ficant one — was some­thing quite different.

The attack hit major com­panies in the “Internet, fin­ance, tech­no­logy, media, and chem­ical sec­tors” as well. Its goal was “accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights act­iv­ists,” though it does not appear that any­thing more than sub­ject lines were ever com­prom­ised. If that’s not bad enough, Google also says it has acquired some intriguing evid­ence over the course of its invest­ig­a­tion: “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. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or mal­ware placed on the users’ computers.”

The sheer scope of such attacks is stag­gering. They show a coördin­ated effort to target spe­cific human rights advoc­ates not just in China but around the world, and to do so by attempting to infilt­rate some of the world’s most advanced com­puter net­works belonging to some of the world’s largest com­panies. (A Microsoft spokes­person tells Ars tonight, “We have no indic­a­tion that any of our mail prop­er­ties have been com­prom­ised.” In response to some follow-​up ques­tions, we were told that the soft­ware giant would have no fur­ther comment.)

China has been well-​known for going after the elec­tronic com­mu­nic­a­tions of dis­sid­ents, and com­panies like Yahoo have in the past com­plied with Chinese gov­ern­ment requests for e-​mails. Those demands, how­ever dis­tasteful, at least fol­lowed a rough legal pro­cess in China. But Google’s account indic­ates that, if the Chinese gov­ern­ment is in fact linked to these recent attacks, it is willing to adopt extra-​legal hacking in order to keep up its sur­veil­lance — and to do so any­where in the world that com­mu­nic­a­tions of interest might be stored. Such a con­certed pro­gram would be a marked escal­a­tion in the government’s will­ing­ness to inter­fere in the oper­a­tions of Internet com­panies in order to pro­mote “stability.”

Google has always claimed to be dis­sat­is­fied with the demands that it censor Chinese search res­ults, but it has gone along with them since 2006. The argu­ment has been that engage­ment with China, even in a cen­sored fashion, was better than no access to tools like Google. But the recent attacks have caused a change of heart in Moun­tain View.

“We have decided we are no longer willing to con­tinue cen­soring our res­ults on Google​.cn,” announced Google’s Chief Legal Officer David Drum­mond today, “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. We recog­nize that this may well mean having to shut down Google​.cn, and poten­tially our offices in China.”

That could be a big price to pay, given the size of China’s bur­geoning market. On the other hand, Google and other for­eign search engines have had trouble gaining real trac­tion in the local market and are reg­u­larly whipped by com­pet­itors like Baidu. And the price for oper­ating in China is already high; the gov­ern­ment has severe restric­tions on own­er­ship of busi­nesses, which forces Internet com­panies into part­ner­ships with local firms and sub­jects them to strict rules about cen­sor­ship, por­no­graphy, and data retention.

ars​tech​nica​.com: “Furious Google throws down gauntlet to China over censorship”