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That’s the gist of a research note from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who says that China’s stricter filtering of Google search results and the continued willingness of Chinese companies to purchase advertising on the site suggest that Beijing is unlikely to block Google (GOOG) completely.

Over the weekend, Munster and his team conducted a series of everyday searches on Google.com.hk, as well as five searches on politically sensitive topics. While the majority of the former were not filtered, all five of the latter were, with two–“Tiananmen Square Incident” and “Falun Gong”–blocked outright.

To Munster, this suggests the Chinese government intends to leave the Google.cn redirect in place:

“Our take is that if the Chinese government intended to shut down access to Google’s Hong Kong portal, it would have done so soon after Google’s announcement in policy change. We believe the more strict filter we observed over the weekend is another sign of Google being able to continue to operate a Chinese search portal….We believe another factor in China’s reaction to Google is the country wishes to promote stability, which enables the government to achieve its objectives. While the mainstream media in China has not been talking about the Google situation, we believe that there is awareness of the conflict, especially amongst younger people, and we therefore believe the government is unlikely to block Google.”

Stearns, a Florida Republican, unveiled legislation Tuesday that would require the FCC, if it passed net neutrality rules prohibiting broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web content and services, to also enforce the rules on Web application and content providers.

Under a narrow reading of Stearns’ legislation, the bill would prohibit search engines from ranking results and would forbid Web content providers, such as video and news sites, from entering into exclusive content-sharing agreements that are now pervasive across the Internet. If the FCC creates net neutrality rules, the bill would require the Wall Street Journal’s Web site, for example, to carry news from all news outlets.

Under a bit broader reading of the Internet Investment, Innovation, and Competition Preservation Act, the bill would require Web sites to publish all comments, rants, and half-baked conspiracy theories from all Internet users, if the FCC creates net neutrality rules.

It’s hard to see how legislation that would force Web sites to carry other people’s content would pass a First Amendment challenge. The language in Stearns’ bill is a textbook example of a law that would curtail the freedom of speech and the press.

Stearns announced his legislation at a press conference hosted by Americans for Prosperity (AFP), an antiregulation advocacy group. AFP announced Tuesday that it would launch an advertising campaign opposing FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s plan to reclassify broadband as a regulated service.

Last week, Genachowski announced the plan to reclassify broadband in response to an appeals court decision saying the agency did not have the authority to enforce informal net neutrality principles.

At the press conference Tuesday, Stearns announced that his proposed legislation would require the FCC to issue a detailed report to Congress about market failures in the broadband industry before the agency could reclassify broadband. The bill drew praise from several broadband providers and related trade groups.

Buried in the Stearns bill, however, is a provision on “neutral network neutrality.” The provision is squarely aimed at net neutrality backer Google — some Republican lawmakers, broadband providers and other net neutrality opponents have complained that Google, in providing ranked search results and other services, isn’t neutral.

The argument from net neutrality opponents goes like this: If the FCC regulates one part of the Internet, in this case, broadband providers, then it should regulate other parts of the Internet as well.

“If cable and phone can’t manage their networks for congestion and quality of service, neither can Google when it comes to their data farms, search results, YouTube, etc.,” a spokesman for Stearns said. “If cable and the Bells can’t negotiate special deals, neither can Google.”

The spokesman seems to be misreading the FCC’s net neutrality proposal, at least as it currently stands. The FCC’s proposed rules would allow broadband providers to manage their networks.

What the rules wouldn’t allow is for broadband providers to selectively discriminate against Internet traffic. However, applying that kind of rule to a search engine or a Web site becomes troublesome, at best.

Here’s the language in the Stearns bill: “The Commission shall apply and enforce any regulation governing the rates, terms, conditions, provisioning, or use of an information service … or an Internet access service on a nondiscriminatory basis between and among broadband network providers, service providers, application providers, and content providers.”

There are a lot of problems here, not the least of which is how a search engine or a Web content provider would actually achieve net neutrality.

For some Web applications, there is an expectation of net neutrality. Internet users expect a service like Skype to treat all calls the same. But what the heck would net neutrality look like for a Web content provider? How exactly would a news site achieve net neutrality?

In addition, the bill doesn’t define what a “content provider” is. There’s no language in the bill limiting the content-sharing rules to commercial content providers. On the Internet, we’re all content providers. If the Stearns language becomes law, all Web sites could become, basically, the same collection of stream-of-consciousness rants from any “content provider.” There would be little difference between NYTimes.com and 4chan.org.

Stearns didn’t invoke the First Amendment at the AFP event, though he should have considered it. Another speaker at the press conference, however, did raise free-speech concerns in a rather creative reading of the First Amendment and the FCC’s net neutrality proposal.

At the event, some net neutrality opponents voiced objections that make some sense. Some are concerned that the FCC’s efforts to reclassify broadband and create net neutrality rules will create market uncertainty and cause broadband investment to slow.

But conservative antitax activist Grover Norquist took the argument a step further. Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, compared the FCC’s recent efforts to reclassify broadband as a common-carrier type of service to China’s vast censorship efforts.

“The idea of putting policemen and regulators throughout the Internet ought to frighten everybody,” he said. Backers of net neutrality rules are “whining that the Chinese are doing exactly what they’re advocating we should do here.”

In Norquist’s mind, this new police regime would apparently decide what people can do on the Internet, never mind that the goal of net neutrality advocates is to give Internet users unfettered free speech. “This is an incredible attack on the First Amendment,” he said.

Norquist and others imagine some huge FCC monitoring system to track net neutrality violations. The FCC’s move toward broadband reclassification is in its infancy, but no one at the FCC has called for an Internet police force to monitor the activity of broadband providers.

Norquist may not realize this, but in the handful of cases where the FCC has looked into violations of its net neutrality principles, it’s been broadband customers who have reported the problems. In a recent Comcast case, which led to the appeals court ruling against the FCC, a customer with a networking background first noticed that some of his applications seemed to be running slower than the others.

Norquist seems to assume that the FCC would have both the technological ability, and the inclination, to monitor a significant amount of Internet traffic. There are no indications it has either.

There are a lot of legitimate concerns about both net neutrality rules and the FCC’s efforts to reclassify broadband. Opponents of both efforts, however, do themselves no favors by twisting the First Amendment into knots in their drive to stop the FCC.

Copyright 2010 PCWorld Communications, Inc.

Probably not.

Google executives struck a blow for free speech in China last week when they announced they were moving their service to Hong Kong after a series of mounting conflicts with the government over the privacy of its users and the free flow of information.

That would seem to put Google in league with newspapers, television news divisions and other outlets that look to protect information from government control. But no, Google insists, it is definitely not a media company.

“We are not interested in owning or creating content,” the company says whenever the subject comes up.

But regardless of how it defines itself, Google has come to grips with its role as both enabler and protector of the global exchange of information. After making several business moves that gave many observers pause — including what many saw as a land grab in books and its dealing with Chinese authorities in the first place — Google made a decision that represents an opportunity for the company to walk its talk about not being evil.

By espousing traditional journalistic values like openness, transparency and access, the company is walking away from the largest Internet market on the planet in the hopes of putting pressure on China’s government.

“This represents a return to principles, and it might go some way toward convincing people that they have not gone over to the dark side,” said Andrew Lih, visiting professor of journalism and director of new media at the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.

That’s not to say Google doesn’t see this as good business ultimately: the company wants consumers to believe its searches are free from commercial and political agendas. But it’s notable that while Nike, Coca-Cola and even General Motors have made significant progress in China in the last few decades, media companies like the News Corporation, Viacom and Time Warner all have very little to show for years of investment and dialogue. As my colleague Tim Arango wrote last year, many were pulling up their stakes, frustrated by censorship, corruption and strict limits on what they could do.

Google has shied away from the media label, and for good reason. Already, Italian courts have held three Google executives criminally liable in an invasion of privacy case over an offensive video on YouTube. Among other arguments, the courts held that because Google monitors and censors search results in China, it could be expected to observe community standards in Italy. Australia, South Korea and other countries are also looking to Google to exercise editorial control over its Web products.

But while Google has positioned itself in court as a global utility — a company that brings smart results from dumb pipes — it does more than search. Its results pages support a lucrative advertising business. The Google News service is a go-to source for consumers, and 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. And the company is undertaking a vast effort to serve as a searchable repository for scanned books.

As recently as 2007, Google’s chief, Eric Schmidt, told Ken Auletta, the New Yorker writer and the author of “Googled,” that, “One day, Google could become a $100 billion media company — more than twice the size of Time Warner, the Walt Disney Company or News Corporation.”

Fearing it might put its media partners’ teeth on edge, the company has since tacked away from talk like that, but its dominion over content has only grown.

“It just shows that in a converging world, there are no hard and fast lines,” Mr. Lih, the journalism professor, added. “When Google indexes the Web and returns content in the context of who they rank first, their claims aside, they inherently become a media company. They are crucial to the media ecosystem.”

In China, Google and other Internet companies act as virtual publishers for millions of people using the Internet to connect with others and to question the excesses of their government. In a sense, Google is championing the rights of all the citizens of the Internet kingdom.

“The state likes to have intermediaries: media companies that have large investments to protect,” said Clay Shirky, professor of new media at New York University. “But when everyone is capable of being a publisher, the state has far less control.”

The company was extremely aggressive in telling its story about why it was leaving mainland China. In speaking to James Fallows at The Atlantic about the decision, David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, did not mince words. “It seemed to us that this was all part of an overall system bent on suppressing expression, whether it was by controlling Internet search results or trying to surveil activists,” he said. “It is all part of the same repressive program, from our point of view. We felt that we were being part of that.”

The big announcement had yet to be made last Monday when Sergey Brin, a founder of Google, stopped by our office for what had been billed as a cup of coffee. We chatted a bit about this and that, before the subject of China came up and he let me know that the company was moving its operations to Hong Kong and would no longer be in the business of censoring results at the behest of the People’s Republic of China.

Although Mr. Brin hardly conducted himself as a media executive — he had no big entourage and answered every question forthrightly — he certainly espoused values the business holds dear. He explained that Google had entered China in good faith in 2006 and had been worn down by a lack of good faith in return.

Mr. Brin clearly felt strongly as he talked about how the Chinese government — or agents acting in its interests — tried to track and monitor dissidents by hacking Gmail accounts.

“It was the last straw,” he said, pointing out that he and his family were visited repeatedly by the police before they left the Soviet Union when he was 6 years old.

Google obviously has a big business interest in protecting the sanctity of its e-mail accounts. But as he spoke, Mr. Brin reminded me a lot of the people I have worked for as a journalist, who take as an article of faith that they will protect me and my sources regardless of who comes after us.

Running a media company requires a set of values that selling a can of soda or a pair of sneakers doesn’t. So Google, which held itself to a higher standard last week, can expect to get hammered any time it falls short in the future. Google may or may not be a media company, but people will expect it to act like one.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Now China has tightened its grip on the much more variegated world of online information, effectively forcing Google Inc., the world’s premier information provider, to choose between submitting to Chinese censorship and leaving the world’s largest community of Internet users to its rivals. It chose to leave.

Google’s decision may not cause major problems for China right away, experts said. But in the longer run, they said, China’s intransigent stance on filtering the flow of information within its borders has the potential to weaken its links to the global economy.

It may also sully its image — promoted to its own people as well as to the international community — as an authoritarian country that is economically on the move, perhaps even more so than the sclerotic, democratic West.

“The Chinese are very serious about pushing their soft-power agenda,” Bill Bishop, a Beijing Internet entrepreneur and author of the technology blog Digicha, said Tuesday. “Google just put a big hole in that sales pitch, and I think they know that.”

China’s leaders appear fully aware of their dilemma. But at this stage in China’s history, and given the Communist Party’s determination to maintain absolute rule, they still put political control ahead of all other concerns.

“What does Google’s exit say? What it says publicly is what everyone deeply engaged in China knows privately,” Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a Brookings Institution scholar and former Clinton administration adviser on China, said in an interview.

“This is a system with very substantial domestic imperfections,” Mr. Lieberthal said. “And the view from afar that this is simply an unstoppable juggernaut — that they have found the keys to the magic kingdom — is not correct. China’s leaders understand this as well as anyone.”

The conclusion of Google’s four-year Internet experiment in China — an effort to transplant Western free-speech norms here — was anything but smooth. On Monday, it effectively shut down the search engine it hosted inside China, after declaring in January that it would stop cooperating with Chinese censors.

As Google began redirecting tens of millions of mainland Chinese users early Tuesday, Beijing time, to its Hong Kong-based Web site, google.com.hk, parts of the company’s remaining mainland operations quickly came under pressure from Google’s Chinese partners and from the government itself.

China’s biggest cellular communications company, China Mobile, was widely expected to cancel a deal that had placed Google’s search engine on its mobile Internet home page, used by millions of people daily. One official in China’s media industry said that the company was scrapping the deal under government pressure even though it had no replacement lined up.

Censorship, of course, is not new in China. The government has never released its grip on the information industry, and if anything has steadily tightened supervision of the Chinese Web in the past couple of years. Those restrictions have not noticeably inhibited its economic growth, which remained robust even as the West staggered through its worst recession in decades.

But China also does not acknowledge to its own people that it censors the Internet to exclude a wide range of political and social topics that its leaders believe could lead to instability. It does not release information on the number of censors it employs or the technology it uses for the world’s most sophisticated Internet firewall. Its 350 million Internet users, many with fast broadband connections, are assured they have the same effectively limitless access to information and communications that the rest of the world enjoys.

Google publicly challenged that stance in January, and reinforced its ideological opposition to China’s policies by finally pulling the plug on its mainland search engine after a failed round of talks with Chinese officials. That forced Chinese leaders to defend their control of the Web, which they did partly with an outburst of nationalism and vitriol.

The cost, at least with some influential sectors of its own society, could be steep. In the technology sector, Google is viewed as an innovator that has spurred rapid development of the Chinese Web. Its departure will leave some Chinese companies with greater influence, but could also stifle competition, some fear.

“Google is good at innovation, and when it leaves, the rest of the companies in China will lack motivation. Without its countervailing power, the industry won’t be as healthy,” said Zhang Yunquan, a professor at the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Fang Xingdong, chief executive of Chinalabs.com, said the vast majority of Chinese Internet companies invested little in research and “simply copy each other’s technology.” With Google’s departure, their profits may rise, but China’s Web space will begin to stagnate, he predicted.

Despite China’s mantra that the Google issue should not be “politicized,” it is, at the end of the day, highly politicized, especially inside China.

Xiao Qiang, founder and editor in chief of China Digital Times, said that China’s leaders once saw the Internet as having both political and commercial uses that balanced each other to a degree. “But increasingly they see it as a political space,” he said.

The implication of that thinking, post-Google, is that companies that want to be major players on the Chinese Web will have to prove their political fealty to the leadership, much as traditional media companies do. “Chinese companies have to be collaborators,” Mr. Xiao said.

One Western official in China said that the leadership is now treating the Internet as a “core interest,” an issue of sovereignty on which Beijing will brook no intervention. The most commonly cited core interests are Taiwan and Tibet, the third-rail issues in China’s international diplomacy.

That could make it even harder for China to negotiate Internet freedom issues with the United States and other nations. In fact, even among those who argue that China will do just fine without Google, China’s battle with the Internet giant is seen as a proxy for its broader confrontation with the West over rights, trade, climate change, and declining American hegemony.

“I believe Google got some support from the U.S. government,” said Yan Xuetong, director of the Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua University. “This means the American government will adopt a tougher, more aggressive policy toward China.”

David Barboza contributed reporting from Shanghai, and Edward Wong and Jonathan Ansfield from Beijing.

For the popular blogger and human rights activist, the flowers signified his support for Google’s battle for freedom of expression — but they also underscored a loss. Chinese send flowers to funerals. To Zhao and many others here, the Jan. 12 announcement foreshadowed Google’s demise in China — and the end of something else: the notion that China would continue to slowly evolve as a more tolerant nation.

“I used to believe that over time there would be more freedom and openness,” Zhao said. “But I haven’t seen it so far. I feel lost.”

Since coming to China in 2005, Google has, as in much of the rest of the world, become embedded in the lives of its users. Its search engine Google.cn has almost one-third of the market share in a country with 350 million Internet users. Hundreds of government officials have Gmail accounts, according to estimates by one senior Chinese official involved in monitoring the Internet. Chinese exporters can’t work without Google Translate. An estimated 12 million Chinese use Google Maps every day. Scientists and researchers rely on the Google Reader and Google Scholar for the latest in academic work.

“When I meet something unfamiliar, my first reaction is to Google it,” said Chen Xiaoqiang, a 30-year-old instructor at a business school, sounding like the average Web-savvy American. “Even when I can’t find my glasses, I have the impulse to search for them on Google.”

“Without Google, our academic research will be seriously affected,” said Ma Yuanye, a 55-year-old biologist based in Kunming in southwest China. “If Google is blocked, we will see nothing but darkness.”

But Google’s exit would mean something else to Chen, Ma and others like them — a kind of abandonment, they say. Although many who were interviewed said they supported Google’s decision to confront the Chinese government, they also said its departure would make them feel even more marginalized in Chinese society, stuck between a state committed to controlling information and a freer outside world.

Even though it didn’t dominate the Chinese market, Google’s presence put pressure on its main Chinese search engine competitor, Baidu, to limit questionable practices such as mixing ads with search results.

There are ways to work around the government barriers. Some Internet users join a virtual private network that allows them to jump what is known as China’s Great Firewall and access the uncensored Web. But only an estimated 400,000 Chinese have accounts with commercial VPN services, for $25 to $40 a year. And the Chinese government blocks free VPN sites.

In the end, as is true in most places, Google matters here.

It has been targeted by the government for months. On June 18, China’s state-run television accused Google of providing links to pornographic content. A reporter on air with a computer screen next to him entered the search term for “son.” The result, he claimed, was “mother-son incest.”

Later that night, the popular “Focus Interview” program featured an interview with a university student named Gao Ye. Gao recounted how one of his classmates became fixated with pornography after searching for it on Google.

But then online researchers discovered that Gao was not just a student but an intern at the TV station, casting doubts on his on-air claims. Online researchers also turned up evidence of large-scale searches for “mother son incest” from Internet service provider addresses located near the TV station, leading some to conclude that the Google search had been fixed from the outset.

It is unclear how the attacks on Google might have played into the U.S.-based company’s decision to vow to stop censoring its search engine results. Google spokespeople have declined to comment.

What does appear certain is that Google is following through with its threat to close at least its Google.cn search engine. The Chinese Business News newspaper on Friday quoted an unidentified business agent close to Google as saying the firm would cease some operations in April. A Google spokesman declined to comment. Earlier Chinese news reports cited official sources saying discussions between the company and the government are at an impasse.

Tencent, China’s biggest online chat service, already has a search engine and may have plans to improve it. Even the state-run New China News Agency might get into the game. Baidu’s stock has jumped almost 50 percent since Google’s January announcement.

For its part, the Chinese government has looked at Google’s threats with alarm, although publicly it has sought to appear unconcerned. Google’s departure would mark the first time that a major corporation has left China since Levi Strauss pulled out in 1993 after alleging “pervasive” violations of human rights in the country. (It returned to China in 2008.)

Chinese officials have expressed concern in internal meetings, several participants said, that a Google pullout could result in an anti-government backlash, comparable to the anti-government sentiment that led to massive student protests in 1989. In part to head off such an outpouring, the government has sought to frame the Google fight as a battle against American imperialism.

“The United States has been weakened by the international financial crisis and its wars against terrorism so the U.S. has shifted its strategic center from the military to the Internet,” said the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party. “Google has become a tool of the U.S. to implement its Internet hegemony.”

That thinking has begun to influence some Google users in China.

“Google knew that China had Internet censorship when they entered the market several years ago, so why didn’t they say anything then?” asked Liao Guanhui, a 29-year-old real estate investor in the southern province of Guangdong. “I’m sure there is pressure from the U.S. government. The U.S. is trying to push the Chinese government. But this is irritating. And the Chinese government won’t agree.”

Staff researchers Zhang Jie and Wang Juan contributed to this report.

A Chinese official Friday blasted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech calling for countries to respect the rights of their citizens by allowing the free flow of Information over the Internet. “The U.S. attacks China’s Internet policy, indicating that China has been restricting internet freedom. We resolutely oppose such remarks and practices that contravene facts and undermine China-U.S. relations,” Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in remarks posted on the agency’s Web site.

In her highly publicized speech Thursday, Clinton said while the Internet has brought much progress to China, “countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century. Now, the United States and China have different views on this issue, and we intend to address those differences candidly and consistently in the context of our positive, cooperative, and comprehensive relationship.”

China has imposed an Internet censoring system that blocks access in China to some information and Web sites. Despite this, Ma claimed China’s Internet is “open” and the country “supervises” the Internet according to Chinese law. The official called on the United States “to respect facts and stop attacking China under the excuse of the so-called freedom of [the] Internet.”

China also has been criticized in the wake of Google’s recent revelation that its computers and those of several other U.S. companies had been hacked by a source in China apparently seeking access to the e-mail of Chinese human rights activists and other information. In response, Google said it would stop censoring search results for users in China and may leave the country. Ma condemned hacking, saying it violates Chinese law and urged international cooperation to combat hacking.

Copyright 2010 by National Journal Group Inc.

BEIJING — As the Chinese government expands what it calls a campaign against pornography, cellular companies in Beijing and Shanghai have been told to suspend text services to cellphone users who are found to have sent messages with “illegal or unhealthy content,” state-run news media reported Tuesday.

China Mobile, one of the nation’s largest cellular providers, reported that text messages would automatically be scanned for “key words” provided by the police, according to China Daily, a state-controlled English-language newspaper. Messages will be deemed “unhealthy” if they violate undisclosed criteria established by the central government, the newspaper said.

The increased surveillance of text messages is the latest in a series of government efforts to severely tighten control of the Internet and other forms of communication.

Since late last year, China has closed hundreds of Web sites, including popular file-sharing sites, and limited its citizens’ ability to set up personal Web sites.

Citing cyberattacks originating from China, Google last week threatened to pull out of China unless the government lifted censorship of its search results.

“It really is quite a program to seize control of all the new forms of media, one by one,” said Jeremy Goldkorn, editor and publisher ofDanwei.org, an English-language Web site about the Chinese media and Internet that is currently blocked in China. “It has been a bad half year for censorship.”

Chinese authorities say the new restrictions are necessary to root out pornography, piracy and other law-breaking activity on the Internet and in electronic communications. Some analysts suggest that ministries are competing to fulfill the government’s demands for stricter controls.

Although China has quietly monitored cellphone text messages for some time, Kan Kaili, a professor of telecommunications at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunication, said the new measures appeared broader and more intrusive and punitive.

“They are doing wide-ranging checks, checking anything and everything, even if it is between a husband and wife,” he said. “I don’t think people will be very happy about this.”

He said the government had established no clear legal definition of unhealthy content. He also said commercial authorities like phone companies, even though government-owned, should not be involved in checking the contents of private messages. “This is totally wrong,” he said. “This violates citizens’ basic rights.”

In Beijing, some cellphone users were indignant about the reports. Sun Li, a businesswoman, said: “This is against the law. You can block Web sites for pornography or violence, but texts are from person to person. It has nothing to do with the public.

“If this is really so, I can’t text anyone anymore, or call anyone,” she said.

According to China Daily, the police will evaluate the text messages of users suspected of transmitting unhealthy content, and during that time, China Mobile will suspend the text-messaging function for those phone numbers. If the authorities clear a user of any violation, they will issue a certificate allowing text-messaging services to be resumed, the newspaper said.

Zhang Jing, Nancy Zhao and Jonathan Ansfield contributed research.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Just as Mongol invaders could not be stopped by the Great Wall, Chinese citizens have found ways to circumvent the sophisticated Internet censorship systems designed to restrict them.

An alleged cyberattack by the Chinese government into systems operated by Google and other U.S. companies, including federal contractors, has prompted the U.S. government to revisit the complicated issue of Internet freedom.

Google on Tuesday announced it had detected an intrusion into its corporate infrastructure from China that attempted to penetrate the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. According to a statement on the search firm’s blog, officials discovered that at least 20 other large companies were similarly targeted, and it is notifying the affected businesses and U.S. authorities.

VeriSign iDefense, a security consulting firm, conducted a separate investigation of the attack and reported that the companies targeted were Google Inc., several high-tech companies based in Silicon Valley, financial institutions and defense contractors.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the administration wants answers from the Chinese government in response to Google’s claims.

“We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions,” Clinton said in a statement on Tuesday. “We look to the Chinese government for an explanation. The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy.”

The Obama administration has had difficulty protecting Internet freedom during the past year. Iran, China and other U.S. trading partners often suppress Web access to silence political dissent. Complicating matters, it is sometimes unclear which agency has jurisdiction over Internet freedom. Trade officials last summer had some success combating censorship, when they intervened to stop China from forcing U.S. companies to install so-called Green Dam filtering software in computer equipment. That was possible because trade rules forbid requiring U.S. businesses to buy or use products from China in their goods.

But the administration, particularly the State Department, is basically powerless when the filtering and infiltration methods fall outside trade rules. Foreign policy moves often require orchestrated actions by the Commerce, State and Treasury departments, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and other agencies.

Defense officials said as a matter of policy they cannot comment on specific cyber intrusions, but the department aggressively monitors its information networks for breaches. Defense has “procedures to address threats to DoD information on defense contractor networks,” spokesman Eric Butterbaugh said.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, on Wednesday said he is drafting legislation to strengthen the nation’s cybsersecurity architecture.

“Google has provided an enormous service to Internet users the world over by publicly sharing news of attacks it says came from inside China against its Gmail users,” Lieberman said in a statement. “Educating Internet users of these threats and vulnerabilities is key to thwarting such attacks.”

The search firm said it went public with the information largely because of concerns about human rights.

“This information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech,” stated a Tuesday blog entry by David Drummond, Google senior vice president for corporate development and chief legal officer. “We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results.”

In response to the technology breach, Google modified the architecture of its systems to bolster security. The attempted human rights violations prompted the firm to end its agreement with China to censor search results on Google.cn.

“Over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all,” Drummond blogged. “We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

Copyright 2010 NextGov

BEIJING – Google, facing an assault by hackers who sought to penetrate the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, will stop cooperating with Chinese censorship and consider closing its offices and operations in China altogether, the company said on Tuesday.

If it makes good on its threat, the abrupt departure from China would be a startling end to Google’s foray into a country with more than 300 million Internet users. Since arriving here in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what its citizens can read on the Internet.

Google said it was unclear who orchestrated the attacks on its computer systems but described them as “highly sophisticated” and said they included an assault on at least 20 other large companies in the finance, technology, media and chemical sectors.

The primary goal of the hackers, the company said, were the Gmail accounts of human rights activists, although none of the targeted accounts were breached.

Google did not publicly link the Chinese government to the cyberattack, but people with knowledge of Google’s investigation said they had enough evidence to justify its actions.

The company said the attacks originated within China, which has long constrained the search engine’s results and presented a challenge to the company’s guiding zeitgeist, “Don’t be evil.” The company said it would try to work out an arrangement with the Chinese government to provide an uncensored Internet – a tall order in a country that heavily filters the Web – but that it would close its offices in China if its demands were not met.
“We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all,” David Drummond, a senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer, said in a statement.

Wenqi Gao, a spokesman for the Chinese Consulate in New York, said he did not see any problems with Google.cn. “I want to reaffirm that China is committed to protecting the legitimate rights and interests of foreign companies in our country,” he said in a phoneinterview.

In China, search requests that include words such as “Tiananmen Square massacre” or “Dalai Lama” come up blank. In recent months, the government has also blockedYouTube, Google’s video sharing service.

Google’s apparent decision to play hardball with the Chinese government raises enormous risks for the company. While Google’s business in China remains small for now, analysts say that the country could soon become one of the most lucrative Internet markets.

“The consequences of not playing the China market could be very big for any company, but particularly for an Internet company that makes its money from advertising,” said David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School. Yoffie said that advertising played an even bigger role in the Internet in China than it did in the United States.

At the time of its arrival, the company said that it believed that the benefits of its presence in China outweighed the downside of being forced to censor some search results there, as it would provide more information and openness to Chinese citizens. The company, however, has repeatedly said that it will monitor restrictions in China.

Google’s announcement drew praise from free-speech and human rights advocates, many of whom had criticized the company in the past over its decision to enter the Chinese market despite censorship requirements.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

HONG KONG — China’s national government tolerates an extensive network of secret jails in Beijing operated by provincial and municipal governments to prevent citizens from complaining to national officials, according to a report released here Thursday by Human Rights Watch.

Provincial and municipal officials in China are subject to a national civil service system that penalizes them based on the number of complaints received in Beijing about their management. So local and provincial officials have a strong incentive to prevent petitioners from reaching the central government.

Sophie Richardson, the advocacy director for Asia at Human Rights Watch, said that abuses were widespread in China’s prison system, which has some judicial supervision, but that they were worse in unofficial jails.

“We’re talking about a country with torture in formal detention centers, and the black jails are 10 floors down” in terms of the treatment of detainees, she said.

Jeffrey Bader, the National Security Council director for East Asian affairs, said Monday in a conference call with reporters that President Obamaplanned to raise human rights issues with President Hu Jintao when they meet next week in Beijing. While Mr. Bader did not mention the unofficial jails, he did say that Mr. Obama would discuss “rule of law,” a phrase that would cover a range of extrajudicial practices.

The jails have been the subject of news reports inside and outside China, but the new report offers many details of abuses. Central government officials continue to deny the jails exist.

“There are no black jails in China,” Qin Gang, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said at a regular news conference in Beijing on Thursday. “If citizens have complaints and suggestions about government work, they can convey them to the relevant authorities through legitimate and normal channels.”

China has taken steps in recent months to safeguard the legal rights of those who run afoul of the authorities. New regulations drafted by the Ministry of Public Security and released on Monday by the State Council, or cabinet, ban forced labor at government-authorized detention centers, where people accused of crimes are held before trial. The new rules also bar officials at detention centers from charging detainees for expenses like food.

But Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong researcher for Human Rights Watch, said that the new rules did nothing to help detainees at unofficial jails.

The unofficial jails have captured attention in recent months.

According to Chinese news media, a guard at an unofficial jail in an inexpensive guesthouse pleaded guilty on Nov. 4 to raping a 20-year-old woman from Anhui Province who had come to Beijing to complain about harassment at her university. Nearly a dozen people reportedly witnessed the rape, and about 50 detainees, including the woman, managed to escape jail when the guard fled after the assault.

The court dismissed charges against the guesthouse and two provincial liaison officials, according to the official China Daily newspaper.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

In China, Google is forced to censor its search engine, Facebook and Twitter are blocked, U.S. news agencies are barred from selling their services freely, and foreign investment in the media industry is closely watched. Yet when President Obama visits the country in a few days, it’s unknown if he will publicly pressure the Chinese government on issues of censorship or free expression.

The president yesterday defended his position on these issues, saying, “We believe in the values of freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of religion, that are not just core American values but we believe are universal values.”

This is a critical time for him to speak up because China appears to be increasing its efforts to censor Internet content, while also cracking down on journalists and bloggers. At the same time, the Obama administration has been sending mixed signals on democracy and human rights to China. For example, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted the 20th anniversary of the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown, and called on the Chinese government to “provide a public accounting of those killed, detained or missing, both to learn and to heal.” But she also celebrated the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China by congratulating the Party for its “truly historic accomplishment” of “lifting millions of people out of poverty.”

Meanwhile, Yang Zili, a young engineer who spent eight years in prison, recently urged President Obama to intercede on behalf of two colleagues still being held in custody. Their offense? Creating a website.

It’s true that gratuitous criticism towards China rarely produces results; but excessive restraint is also ineffective. Human right issues cannot be raised only in private, which is why it’s important to review some of China’s recent abuses of freedom of expression, and its renewed efforts at online censorship.