Why Google's China gambit doesn't make sense

There's an important piece of information missing from the debate about Google's threats to withdraw from China. Without it, the speculation about Google's motives will remain just that.

The company says that it made its move after detecting a sophisticated hacking operation aimed in part at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

The unspoken implication is that the Chinese government was behind the attacks. But there are two reasons for thinking that Google cannot be certain of this.

The first is a technical one. Even unsophisticated hackers can obscure their tracks by routing their activity through hijacked servers.

So the Google hack may appear to have come from China, but the hackers themselves could be based anywhere.

Last year, for example, a global cyber-espionage network aimed in part at Tibetan exiles was discovered. It was a triumph for the crack team of security researchers who uncovered it, but even they could not identify the hackers behind the scheme.

In most cases, it's simply impossible to know who is responsible.

The second uncertainty has political roots.

It's true that the Chinese government has an obvious interest in tracking human rights activists. But that does not mean that government officials were actually doing so.

In fact it is often patriotic hackers who are responsible for cyber crimes.

When Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, websites in the former Soviet republic were forced offline by hackers. But it was a loose collection of patriotic Russian hackers, not a cyber branch of the country's army, that was responsible.

The Russian government was no doubt happy about the cyber conflict, but that is not the same thing as directing it.

So does Google know for sure that the Chinese government was responsible for the attack? I doubt it.

And if Google doesn't know, why is it threatening to quit the country? After all, switching off its servers in Beijing won't make Gmail any more secure.

Google has been weighing the public relation costs of its involvement in China ever since it launched Google.cn in 2006. It's said that senior officials at the company have always been worried about colluding with Chinese government censorship, a necessary evil for any search engine based there.

My guess is that Google has been thinking about getting out for some time.

Suggesting that this hack was organised by the Chinese authorities, whether or not there is evidence to back this up, provided Google with a public relations story that finally made its departure worthwhile.

Courtesy Computer Crime