China Linked To Attack On Google
US diplomats in Beijing have linked China’s top propagandist to the cyber attacks that prompted Google to take down its search engine in China early this year, leaked diplomatic cables show.
”A well-placed contact claims that the Chinese government co-ordinated the recent intrusions of Google systems,” a cable dated earlier this year said.
”According to our contact, the closely held operations were directed at the Politburo Standing Committee level,” the cable said, referring to the ruling body of the Chinese Communist Party.
The cable was from a trove of 250,000 US diplomatic messages leaked by WikiLeaks, whose contents were dismissed last Thursday by a Chinese foreign ministry official as ”absurd”.
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 2009 cable quoted a well-placed source as saying that Li Changchun, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, and the country’s senior propaganda official, was taken aback to discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google’s main international website.
When Mr Li typed his name into the search engine at google.com, he found ”results critical of him”.
That cable from US diplomats was one of many made public by WikiLeaks that portray China’s leadership as nearly obsessed with the threat posed by the internet to their grip on power - and, the reverse, by the opportunities it offered them, through hacking, to obtain secrets stored in computers of its rivals, especially the US.
Hacking operations suspected of originating in China, including one aimed at Google, are a central theme in the cables. The operations began earlier and aimed at a wider array of US government and military data than generally known, including on the computers of US diplomats in climate change talks with China.