• Regaining moral high ground? Google tells Chinese when they're being censored

    By Ed Flanagan, NBC News

    BEIJING – Google has started telling users in China when web searches contain keywords that could be tracked by the country's keen-eyed censors, one of the company's top officials announced.

    “Starting today we’ll notify users in mainland China when they enter a keyword that may cause connection issues,” Alan Eustace, a Senior Vice President for Google, wrote on the company's Inside Search blog on Thursday.  “By prompting people to revise their queries, we hope to reduce these disruptions and improve our user experience from mainland China.”

    As the video on Eustace's blog shows (see below), triggering connectivity issues on Google.com.hk can be as easy as searching for one of the country’s greatest natural landmarks: The Yangtze River.

    Presumably in this case, "Jiang" the Chinese character for river, is a sensitive term because it is also the last name of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin. The 85-year-old, who is thought to still be politically connected, is the focus of constant erroneous rumors and reports about his death.

    Consequently, if you are looking for "Chang Jiang," the popular name of the Yangtze River here in China, you could run afoul of sensors looking to block rumors of the former leader's death and have your connection to Google temporarily terminated.

    Online coup rumors spark China crackdown on social media websites

    The video on Eustace's blog shows how it took about 90 seconds after each sensitive search for the connection to be re-established on several Internet browsers and devices.

    This graphic shows the message that will appear when users try to search for these restricted words:

    Google

    Google’s move will ostensibly allow users on the mainland to see when their searches are being censored and understand why the service is disrupted. Other Google products, such as Google Mail and Documents, often fail to load and frequently require refreshing or an enabled virtual private network (VPN) to access freely.

    However, since Google’s high profile “pullout” of its search engine from China in 2010, Google’s share of the search market here in China has shrunk from 30 percent in 2009 to 16.6 percent in 2012, according to Beijing-based research firm Analysys International.

    Much of that share has been ceded to its Chinese rival, Baidu, which now dominates the arena with 78.5 percent of the search market. Even Google Maps, which was the most popular online mapping service on the mainland for some time, recently lost the top spot  to a competitor.

    One tweet, 10,000 followers: Dissident artist Ai Weiwei slips, briefly, through China censor

    Those dwindling mainland users who have undoubtedly already encountered search restrictions and disconnection issues before, but continue to rely on Google, will probably not benefit too much from the company's new measures. After all, many of the users who suffered through 90-second connection resets in the past have already turned to other ways to bypass the restrictions.

    What this move will do, though, is help Google regain the moral high ground internationally by reclaiming “Don’t be Evil,” it's informal corporate motto. Google has long fought for a more open Internet around the world, and even created “Transparency Report,” which looks closely at net freedom issues.

    Read more news from Behind the Wall

    However, privacy issues in the United States and a European Union warning to Google to review its recently revamped privacy policies have haunted the Silicon Valley giant, forcing its data mining practices to the forefront.

    Google’s new service may help some mainland Chinese users better understand how Beijing restricts its netizens from accessing certain material, but for the message to be really effective, Google first needs to get people to use its service again. 

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  • China gets angry about cyberwar allegations

    By Ed Flanagan, NBC News

    BEIJING – China ratcheted up criticism Friday of the United States following back and forth charges about cyberwarfare.

    A day earlier, the government responded angrily to accusations that it was directly involved in a hacking scheme designed to trick American government workers, Chinese political activists, journalists and Asian regional defense representatives into giving up their Google email passwords. "Hacking is a problem that troubles the entire world, and China has always been targeted,” Hong Lei, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry said Thursday. “The Chinese government resolutely opposes hacking and any other forms of cyber-crime."

    And today, Chinese newspapers picked up where the government left off, publishing an inordinate amount of commentary on the Google hacking incident. The Global Times, China’s reliably nationalistic newspaper, alone carried three separate articles on the matter. 

    China’s media coverage of the latest incident highlights many of the government’s talking points. Beijing contends that it has enough problems controlling hacking domestically, it couldn’t be exporting it.

    Who is the victim? China
    Late last year, China’s state news agency, Xinhua, reported that in the first half of 2010, 60 percent of China’s Internet users were subjected to some form of hacking and that over 30 percent of users had passwords stolen.

    While positioning itself as a victim relatively unprepared to deal with increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, China has also framed the United States’ own cyber defense and warfare capabilities as far superior technologically and subsequently a larger threat to global stability.

    This storyline took a sudden, dramatic turn just days ago after the Wall Street Journal reported on the Pentagon’s first formal cyber warfare strategy plan. Though not yet officially released to the public, the document allegedly argues for “equivalency” when meting out retaliation in response to cyber-attacks.

    Or as one military official put it: "If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks."

    Predictably, news of the Pentagon’s strategic document in light of the Google hacks has been cited by the Chinese press as another example of the United States attempting to achieve strategic dominance.

    The People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official paper, was quick to jump on that idea, writing, “The U.S. is making the game rules of cyber war in order to seize the commanding heights of future cyber warfare.”

    The article pumped up the rhetoric by quoted Lin Zhiyuan, from the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences, as saying: “The U.S. seeking ‘cyber dominance’ will definitely trigger a trend of building up cyber troops in the world.”

    Lin’s line serves both as justification and warning for the necessity of China’s army of “cyber warriors,” known here as the “Blue Army.” The very existence of this 30-strong commando unit of cyber warriors was only acknowledged by a defense ministry spokesman late last month.

    A recent report from the People’s Liberation Army Daily described a simulated cyber battle in which the Blue Army successfully defended China’s military networks against an army of hackers four times its size, belying the high degree of competency of its force.

    Yet, despite the apparent triumph, defense ministry spokesmen continue to understate the unit’s capabilities, characterizing their ability to defend China from cyber attack as weak.

    Who frames the issue?
    Equally apparent in Chinese reports on the Google hackings is the apparent frustration with which a Western entity like Google can appear to frame and dictate the discussion. 

    The Global Times’ coverage underscores an argument China frequently makes during these “he said, she said” disputes that erupt from time to time in the Sino-U.S. relationship: he who shouts loudest, longest wins. 

    “Powerful Western public opinion makes people think that it is the Chinese who have done something bad,” said Professor Zhang Shaozhong of China's National Defense University in one article. “China needs to change its passive state it suffers whenever something bad happen.”

    The idea that China must stand up and repudiate what it considers false accusations or face being found guilty in the court of public opinion was seconded in an editorial published Friday in the Global Times on the need for greater information transparency in China.

    “In an era that people compete for voice and attention, silence often means tacit consent,” wrote one editor. “One who does not take the initiative to set an issue will be harassed by issues set by others.”