Interesting AP story: China snoops Google's e-mails. Google may have to shut down its business in China since it has discovered a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China." Turns out e-mails were rummaged through, like so many underwear drawers, looking for stuff to nail human rights activists.
Sleep with dogs and you get flees. Merge your economy with totalitarians and you lose freedoms. 'Nuf said.
Google didn't want to accuse the Chinese government for the intrusion, but who else would it be? To Google's credit, they are
No longer willing to continue censoring our results on its Chinese search engine that government requires. Google says the decision could force it to shut down its Chinese site and its offices in the country.
It's about time. Google buckled to Chinese pressure in 2006, allowing censorship of its product:
It created a version of its search engine bearing China's Web suffix, ".cn."
The company felt it had to play by the totalitarian rules and the Chinese wouldn't give it a license to operate unless it did. Google meekly agreed to omit all Web content about the Chinese government that authorities didn't approve of. A sorry, sorry behavior for any genuine information entity. Bootlicking does, apparently, become distasteful.
At the time Google executives said they struggled with how to reconcile the censorship concessions with the company's motto of "don't be evil." By then Yahoo had come under fire for giving the Chinese government account information of a Chinese journalist who was later convicted for violating state secrecy laws.
Hopefully Google will follow through and bail out. Censored information isn't worth a shit anyway, right?