Associated Press
谷歌在北京的办公楼
谷
歌公司(Google Inc.)表示可能退出中国，原因是经过调查发现，它遭受了据信源自中国的重大网络攻击。此举将成为目前为止美国大公司对中国发起的最引人瞩目的责难。相关调查已进行了几周，两名知悉调查内情的人士说，攻击针对了34家不同公司或其他机构。
一名知情人士说，调查人员正在侦查攻击是否与中国政府或情报部门有关。这名人士说，攻击引起了美国国家安全局(National Security Agency)等美国情报部门的注意。
谷歌称，去年12月中旬，他们侦测到一次来自中国、针对公司基础架构发起的非常高技术、有针对性的攻击，这次攻击导致其知识产权被盗。该公司表示，有证据表明攻击者的主要目的是进入中国人权活动人士的Gmail账户。
谷歌若撤出中国，则意味着一家西方公司极为罕见地放弃了几乎被所有大企业视为世界最重要市场之一的中国市场。截至去年6月，中国拥有3.38亿互联网用户，超过任何其他国家。它公开表示正在考虑撤出中国这件事本身，也有可能激怒中国当局。谷歌的声明可能令其他一些科技公司面临的情势复杂化，这些公司本身就对被视为中国政府帮手一事很敏感。
谷歌表示，未来数周将就如何在没有审查的情况下运营在华业务与中国政府谈判。长期以来，审查都是拥有在华业务的西方网络公司的一个肉中刺。谷歌首席法律顾问大卫•多姆德(David Drummond)在博文中表示，公司已经决定不愿意继续审查中文网站Google.cn上的搜索结果。
多姆德写道，我们认识到，这很有可能意味着公司将不得不关闭Google.cn，还有我们在中国的办公室。
记者未能立即联系到中国官员置评。中国政府过去曾反复为它处理互联网的措施进行辩护，并驳斥了有关中国针对外国实体发起网络攻击的指责。
两名知情人士说，谷歌公司高层也对声明展开了激烈辩论。谷歌首席执行长施密特（Eric Schmidt）担心此举可能会造成不利反响，但谷歌创始人之一布林(Sergey Brin)对在中国的运营一直有所担心。
谷歌在2006年推出中文搜索引擎google.cn，同时同意审查部分搜索结果，此举激起了人权团体和反对任何限制互联网行为的网络行业人士的激烈批评。谷歌与中国政府的紧张关系很快开始，并在2009年升级。这一年，中国官员谴责谷歌，称它的网站有黄色内容。谷歌的视频分享网站YouTube从去年3月前后起就基本上无法从中国境内登陆。
谷歌采取这个措施之前，它一直在跟中国官方就多项谷歌服务在中国的问题进行谈判。为安抚中国官员，去年谷歌同意删除其中国网站主页上的一些链接。
公司表示，看上去只有两个Gmail账户被人攻入。一位谷歌发言人说，谷歌的所有服务都没有受到严重的干扰。
多姆德写道，这些攻击、攻击所揭示的监视行为，以及在过去一年试图进一步限制网络言论自由的行为使得谷歌得出这样一个结论，那就是我们应该评估中国业务运营的可行性。
如果谷歌决定继续在中国运营，那它威胁要退出中国的举措有可能会恶化其与中国有关当局之间本来就不友好的关系。中国政府掌握所有在中国运营的互联网公司的生杀大权，可能最终还是会迫使谷歌撤出中国。谷歌在中国的业务并不仅限于搜索服务，举例来说，中国一些电信运营商就计划出售使用谷歌Android操作系统的手机。
人权活动人士支持谷歌的声明。人权观察(Human Rights Watch)发表声明说，谷歌的决定彰显出言论自由和网络隐私权的重要性。
一家国家安全事务公司Defense Group Inc.下属的情报研究与分析中心(Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis)主任穆尔维农(James Mulvenon)说，这些攻击似乎是通过至少6个位于台湾的网络地址发起的，这是中国黑客掩盖其身份的惯用策略。
穆尔维农说，这些黑客还盗用了位于德克萨斯州圣安东尼奥的Rackspace公司的网络地址，该公司是美国最大的互联网服务托管提供商之一。黑客将从谷歌和其他公司盗取的数据转到圣安东尼奥的站点，然后再发送至海外。
Rackspace的一名管理人员说，公司的一台服务器受损无法使用，我们积极协助针对这起网络攻击的调查，与受影响的各方通力合作。
加拿大安全咨询公司SecDev Group 的负责人Rafal Rohozinski说，攻击者使用了至少七种攻击代码，以鉴别并从谷歌窃取数据。这家公司去年发现了一起中国针对达赖喇嘛(Dalai Lama)的大规模间谍活动。
知情人士称，谷歌遭受的攻击与达赖喇嘛办公室以及许多外国大使馆的电脑早些时候受到的攻击类似。研究人员监测到这起攻击，并将其命名为“幽灵网”(GhostNet)事件。事件中，受害者收到看上去像是认识的人发送的电子邮件，但实际上是出自黑客之手。当收件人打开附件时，一则计算机代码就会自动安装在受害人的电脑上，令黑客得以控制电脑。
美国国务卿希拉里•克林顿(Hillary Clinton) 在一份声明中说，谷歌已经把相关指控告知了我们，此事引发了非常严重的担忧和质疑。我们希望中国政府对此作出解释。对网络空间运作的信任对一个现代社会和经济体非常重要。美国政府一位官员说，还没有联邦网络系统受袭击事件影响的相关报告。
谷歌在中国的收入规模相对较小，该公司2008年总收入近220亿美元，分析师们预计来自中国的收入只占其中很小比例。但中国庞大的互联网用户群体令它对于谷歌具有重要的战略意义，因谷歌试图扩大其在全球搜索及搜索广告领域的统治地位。
2009年第三季度，中国搜索市场总收入为人民币20亿元（合2.92亿美元），比上年同期增长28%。截至该季度，谷歌的市场份额为31.3%，百度为63.9%。研究公司易观国际（Analysys International）的数据显示，其他竞争对手目前的市场份额均不足1%。
去年9月，谷歌遭遇又一次重大挫折，它于2005年从微软(Microsoft Corp.)挖来负责中国业务的李开复离职，创办自己的中国互联网投资企业。
谷歌可能会走上其他一些互联网公司的老路，如eBay Inc.和雅虎(Yahoo Inc.)，这些公司近年来都放弃了在中国扩张的计划，不过都没有像谷歌这样以公开批评的方式进行。eBay和雅虎都将在中国的分公司转让给了中国公司，换取股权。
外国互联网公司在中国全都处境艰难，既要面对严酷的商业竞争，又要面对中国政府的管制和审查。
不过，人们公认无论外国公司在中国面临多么繁杂的限制和挑战，这个市场实在是太大了，以至不容放弃。出于这样的考虑，一些外国公司在中国不得不接受他们在其他国家或许不会忍受的条件。
谷歌可能会是近年来明确指出自己曾经愿意做出的妥协并撤出中国的最知名的西方公司。1989年的天安门事件之后，许多外国公司退出了中国，不过后来大多又重返这里。
Jessica E. Vascellaro / Jason Dean / Siobhan Gorman
Google Inc. said it may leave China after an investigation found the company had been hit with major cyber attacks it believes originated from the country -- a move that would amount to a high-profile rebuke of China by a major U.S. firm.
The attack targeted as many as 34 different companies or other entities, according to two people familiar with the investigation, which has been under way for weeks.
Investigators are probing whether the attack is linked to the Chinese government or intelligence services, one person familiar with the investigation said. The attack has piqued the interest of U.S. intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, this person added.
Google said it suffered a 'highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China' in mid-December, which it said resulted in 'the theft of intellectual property.' The company said it found evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists.
A company spokesman declined to identify the other companies affected, saying only that it was in the process of notifying the companies and working with U.S. authorities.A spokeswoman for Adobe Systems Inc. said Tuesday that the software company experienced an attack that appeared to be related to the attacks Google described.
For Google to withdraw from China would be an extremely rare repudiation by a Western company of what is almost universally seen in business circles as one of the world's most important markets. The country has 338 million Internet users as of June, more than any other country. Even the public suggestion that it is considering such a move is likely to infuriate Chinese authorities. Google's statement could complicate matters for other tech companies already sensitive to being seen as accomplices of the Chinese government.
Google said it will be talking with Beijing in coming weeks about how it might operate in China without censorship, long a thorn in the side of Western Web companies operating there. 'We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results' on Google's China Web site, Google.cn, the company's chief legal officer, David Drummond, said in the post.
'We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China,' he wrote.
Chinese officials couldn't immediately be reached for comment. The government in the past has repeatedly defended its handling of the Internet, and has rejected accusations that China is responsible for cyber attacks against foreign entities.
Google's statement was hotly debated within the senior ranks of the company, according to two people familiar with the matter. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt was concerned about the potential backlash, but operating in China has been a concern of Google co-founder Sergey Brin in particular, these people said.
Google launched its Chinese-language google.cn search engine in 2006, agreeing to censor some of its results, a move that drew fire from human-rights groups and Web-industry officials who are critical of any restrictions on the Internet. Tensions between Google and the Chinese government began soon, escalating in 2009 when China reprimanded Google and accused it of having pornography on its sites. Google's video-sharing site, YouTube, has also been largely inaccessible within China since around March.
Google's move comes as it has been in negotiations with Chinese officials over various Google services in China. Last year, to placate Chinese officials, Google agreed to remove some links on its China homepage.
The company said only two Gmail accounts appeared to have been accessed. A spokesman said none of Google's services experienced significant disruptions.
'These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered -- combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the Web -- have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China,' Mr. Drummond wrote.
If Google decides to stay, it runs the risk that its threat to withdraw will worsen its already rocky relationship with Chinese authorities, who wield ultimate power over all Internet companies doing business there and could, ultimately, force Google's departure anyway. Google's business in China goes beyond its search service -- Chinese wireless carriers, for example, have been planning to sell mobile phones using the U.S. company's Android operating system.
Human-rights advocates endorsed Google's statement. The company's decision 'spotlights the importance of freedom of expression and privacy online,' Human Rights Watch said in a statement.
The perpetrators of the attacks appear to have launched them from at least six Internet addresses located in Taiwan, which is a common strategy used by Chinese hackers to mask their origin, said James Mulvenon, director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis at Defense Group Inc. a national-security firm.
They also hijacked the Internet address of a San Antonio-based firm, Rackspace, which is one of the largest internet-hosting companies in the U.S. They siphoned off the stolen data from Google and other companies to the San Antonio site before sending it overseas, Mr. Mulvenon said.
A Rackspace official said, 'A server at Rackspace was compromised, disabled, and we actively assisted in the investigation of the cyber attack, fully cooperating with all affected parties.'
The attackers used at least seven different types of attack code in their effort to identify and steal data from Google, said Rafal Rohozinski, a principal at the SecDev Group, a Canadian security consulting firm that discovered a major Chinese spying operation on the Dalai Lama last year.
The attack on Google is similar to an earlier one that affected computers belonging to the office of the Dalai Lama and many foreign embassies, people familiar with the episode say. In that incident, dubbed GhostNet by the researchers who detected it, victims were sent emails that appeared to come from someone they knew, but were really sent by a hacker. When the recipient opened an attached document, a piece of computer code installed itself on the victim's computer allowing the hacker to take control of the computer.
In a statement, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, 'We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese government for an explanation. The ability to operate with confidence in cyber space is critical in a modern society and economy.' An administration official said there were no reports of federal systems being affected by the attack.
Google's revenue in China is relatively small, with analysts estimating that only a few percentage points of Google's nearly $22 billion in 2008 revenue came from the nation. But the country's massive number of Internet users has made it strategically important for Google, as it tried to extend its dominance in search and search advertising around the globe.
Search market in China reached revenue of two billion yuan ($292 million) in the third quarter of 2009, 28% higher than a year earlier. As of that quarter, Google had 31.3% market share, compared with Baidu's 63.9%. Their competitors now all have less than 1% market share, according to Analysys International.
Google suffered another setback in September when Kai-Fu Lee, the high-profile former Microsoft Corp. executive it had hired in 2005 to lead its China operation, left to work on his own Chinese Internet-investment venture.
Google may go the way of other Internet companies, such as eBay Inc. and Yahoo Inc., which abandoned expansion plans in China in recent years -- although none of them in the publicly critical way that Google is suggesting. Both transferred their China businesses to local players in exchange for equity stakes.
Foreign Internet companies have all struggled in China both against tough commercial competition and also government regulation and censorship.
The common assumption, however, is that no matter how onerous the limitations and challenges faced by foreign companies in China, the market is too big and important to walk away from. That calculation has forced a number of foreign firms to accept conditions in China that they might not tolerate elsewhere.
Google would be the most high-profile Western company in recent years to draw a line under the kind of compromises it is prepared to make. A number of foreign companies exited China after the Chinese army crushed student protesters around Tiananmen Square in 1989. But they mostly came back in the following years.
Jessica E. Vascellaro / Jason Dean / Siobhan Gorman
The attack targeted as many as 34 different companies or other entities, according to two people familiar with the investigation, which has been under way for weeks.
Investigators are probing whether the attack is linked to the Chinese government or intelligence services, one person familiar with the investigation said. The attack has piqued the interest of U.S. intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, this person added.
Google said it suffered a 'highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China' in mid-December, which it said resulted in 'the theft of intellectual property.' The company said it found evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists.
A company spokesman declined to identify the other companies affected, saying only that it was in the process of notifying the companies and working with U.S. authorities.A spokeswoman for Adobe Systems Inc. said Tuesday that the software company experienced an attack that appeared to be related to the attacks Google described.
For Google to withdraw from China would be an extremely rare repudiation by a Western company of what is almost universally seen in business circles as one of the world's most important markets. The country has 338 million Internet users as of June, more than any other country. Even the public suggestion that it is considering such a move is likely to infuriate Chinese authorities. Google's statement could complicate matters for other tech companies already sensitive to being seen as accomplices of the Chinese government.
Google said it will be talking with Beijing in coming weeks about how it might operate in China without censorship, long a thorn in the side of Western Web companies operating there. 'We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results' on Google's China Web site, Google.cn, the company's chief legal officer, David Drummond, said in the post.
'We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China,' he wrote.
Chinese officials couldn't immediately be reached for comment. The government in the past has repeatedly defended its handling of the Internet, and has rejected accusations that China is responsible for cyber attacks against foreign entities.
Google's statement was hotly debated within the senior ranks of the company, according to two people familiar with the matter. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt was concerned about the potential backlash, but operating in China has been a concern of Google co-founder Sergey Brin in particular, these people said.
Google launched its Chinese-language google.cn search engine in 2006, agreeing to censor some of its results, a move that drew fire from human-rights groups and Web-industry officials who are critical of any restrictions on the Internet. Tensions between Google and the Chinese government began soon, escalating in 2009 when China reprimanded Google and accused it of having pornography on its sites. Google's video-sharing site, YouTube, has also been largely inaccessible within China since around March.
Google's move comes as it has been in negotiations with Chinese officials over various Google services in China. Last year, to placate Chinese officials, Google agreed to remove some links on its China homepage.
The company said only two Gmail accounts appeared to have been accessed. A spokesman said none of Google's services experienced significant disruptions.
'These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered -- combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the Web -- have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China,' Mr. Drummond wrote.
If Google decides to stay, it runs the risk that its threat to withdraw will worsen its already rocky relationship with Chinese authorities, who wield ultimate power over all Internet companies doing business there and could, ultimately, force Google's departure anyway. Google's business in China goes beyond its search service -- Chinese wireless carriers, for example, have been planning to sell mobile phones using the U.S. company's Android operating system.
Human-rights advocates endorsed Google's statement. The company's decision 'spotlights the importance of freedom of expression and privacy online,' Human Rights Watch said in a statement.
The perpetrators of the attacks appear to have launched them from at least six Internet addresses located in Taiwan, which is a common strategy used by Chinese hackers to mask their origin, said James Mulvenon, director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis at Defense Group Inc. a national-security firm.
They also hijacked the Internet address of a San Antonio-based firm, Rackspace, which is one of the largest internet-hosting companies in the U.S. They siphoned off the stolen data from Google and other companies to the San Antonio site before sending it overseas, Mr. Mulvenon said.
A Rackspace official said, 'A server at Rackspace was compromised, disabled, and we actively assisted in the investigation of the cyber attack, fully cooperating with all affected parties.'
The attackers used at least seven different types of attack code in their effort to identify and steal data from Google, said Rafal Rohozinski, a principal at the SecDev Group, a Canadian security consulting firm that discovered a major Chinese spying operation on the Dalai Lama last year.
The attack on Google is similar to an earlier one that affected computers belonging to the office of the Dalai Lama and many foreign embassies, people familiar with the episode say. In that incident, dubbed GhostNet by the researchers who detected it, victims were sent emails that appeared to come from someone they knew, but were really sent by a hacker. When the recipient opened an attached document, a piece of computer code installed itself on the victim's computer allowing the hacker to take control of the computer.
In a statement, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, 'We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese government for an explanation. The ability to operate with confidence in cyber space is critical in a modern society and economy.' An administration official said there were no reports of federal systems being affected by the attack.
Google's revenue in China is relatively small, with analysts estimating that only a few percentage points of Google's nearly $22 billion in 2008 revenue came from the nation. But the country's massive number of Internet users has made it strategically important for Google, as it tried to extend its dominance in search and search advertising around the globe.
Search market in China reached revenue of two billion yuan ($292 million) in the third quarter of 2009, 28% higher than a year earlier. As of that quarter, Google had 31.3% market share, compared with Baidu's 63.9%. Their competitors now all have less than 1% market share, according to Analysys International.
Google suffered another setback in September when Kai-Fu Lee, the high-profile former Microsoft Corp. executive it had hired in 2005 to lead its China operation, left to work on his own Chinese Internet-investment venture.
Google may go the way of other Internet companies, such as eBay Inc. and Yahoo Inc., which abandoned expansion plans in China in recent years -- although none of them in the publicly critical way that Google is suggesting. Both transferred their China businesses to local players in exchange for equity stakes.
Foreign Internet companies have all struggled in China both against tough commercial competition and also government regulation and censorship.
The common assumption, however, is that no matter how onerous the limitations and challenges faced by foreign companies in China, the market is too big and important to walk away from. That calculation has forced a number of foreign firms to accept conditions in China that they might not tolerate elsewhere.
Google would be the most high-profile Western company in recent years to draw a line under the kind of compromises it is prepared to make. A number of foreign companies exited China after the Chinese army crushed student protesters around Tiananmen Square in 1989. But they mostly came back in the following years.
Jessica E. Vascellaro / Jason Dean / Siobhan Gorman
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