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Journalism of Courage
As China ratcheted up the pressure on Google to censor its Internet searches last year,the American Embassy sent a secret cable to Washington detailing one reason top Chinese leaders had become so obsessed with the Internet search company: they were Googling themselves.
The May 18,2009,cable,titled Google China Paying Price for Resisting Censorship, quoted a well-placed source as saying that Li Changchun,a member of Chinas top ruling body,the Politburo Standing Committee,and the countrys senior propaganda official,was taken aback to discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Googles main international Web site. When Li typed his name into the search engine at google.com,he found results critical of him.
Extensive hacking operations suspected of originating in China,including one leveled at Google,are a central theme in the cables. The operations began earlier and were aimed at a wider array of American government and military data than generally known,including on the computers of the US diplomats involved in climate change talks with China.
One cable,dated early this year,quoted a Chinese person with family connections to the elite as saying that Li himself directed an attack on Googles servers in the US,though that claim has been called into question. In an interview with The New York Times,the person cited in the cable said that Li personally oversaw a campaign against Googles operations in China but the person did not know who directed the hacking attack.
The cables catalog the heavy pressure that was placed on Google to comply with local censorship laws,as well as Googles willingness to comply up to a point. That coercion began building years before the company finally decided to pull its search engine out of China last spring in the wake of the successful hacking attack on its home servers,which yielded Chinese dissidents e-mail accounts as well as Googles proprietary source code.
The demands on Google went well beyond removing material on subjects like the Dalai Lama or the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Chinese officials also put pressure on the United States government to censor the Google Earth satellite imaging service by lowering the resolution of images of Chinese government facilities,warning that Washington could be held responsible if terrorists used that information to attack government or military facilities,the cables show. An American diplomat replied that Google was a private company and that he would report the request to Washington but that he had no sense about how the government would act.
Yet despite the hints of paranoia that appear in some cables,there are also clear signs that Chinese leaders do not consider the Internet an unstoppable force for openness and democracy,as some Americans believe. In fact,this spring,around the time of the Google pullout,Chinas State Council Information Office delivered a triumphant report to the leadership on its work to regulate traffic online,according to a crucial Chinese contact cited by the State Department in a cable in early 2010,when contacted directly by The Times.
The message delivered by the office,the person said,was that in the past,a lot of officials worried that the Web could not be controlled.
But through the Google incident and other increased controls and surveillance,like real-name registration,they reached a conclusion: the Web is fundamentally controllable, the person said.
