The Google boys may be politically naive, but they’re learning fast.
At any rate, their decision to shut down their censored Chinese search engine and redirect queries to google.com.hk, its unfiltered service based in Hong Kong, was tactically masterful. To appreciate it fully, you need to remember that Hong Kong, although technically part of the People’s Republic of China, is a “Special Administrative Region” which plays to different rules than those obtaining in Beijing, particularly in respect to the rule of law and freedom of expression. The differences are a legacy of the deal with Britain in 1997 prior to the handover of the colony to China.
The Chinese leaders accepted the arrangement out of a pragmatic desire to avoid strangling a golden goose. Until now, that must have looked like a smart judgement call: Hong Kong has prospered under Chinese sovereignty.
Google’s move, however, throws down the gauntlet. Up to now, Hong Kong has been outside the “Great Firewall” of China. If Beijing responds by extending the firewall around Hong Kong, then the implications could be far-reaching and unpalatable — for Hong Kong and possibly for China.
Another sign of Google’s growing political sophistication is the way it has started to translate its Chinese difficulties into terms that the US government takes seriously, namely trade. “Since services and information are our most successful exports,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the Guardian, “if regulations in China … prevent us from being competitive, then they are a trade barrier.”
This is pure dog-whistle politics. Western governments, especially in the US, engage in endless posturing about human rights, but rarely do anything to endanger their economic interests. But governments do care about restraints on trade and are minded to take action to deal with them. As General de Gaulle, paraphrasing Lord Palmerston, once observed: “Great nations do not have friends; they only have interests.” By aligning their company’s commercial interests with the wider economic interest of the US, the Google boys have begun to recruit powerful allies.
China’s aggressiveness in cyberspace
In being open about the cyber attack that prompted Google’s original threat to stop filtering search results for Chinese users, Google’s leaders have also earned brownie points with the powerful US security establishment, which is increasingly alarmist — some would say hysterical — about China’s aggressiveness in cyberspace. The most recent example of this came on 10 March when a US military strategist told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that it should be concerned because Chinese researchers published a paper on how to attack a small US power grid sub-network.
Hmmm … the paper in question was published in Safety Science, an organ of that well-known subversive organisation, Elsevier. It’s a mathematical exploration of a topic of great interest to anyone working on network security, namely the vulnerability of real-life networks subject to intentional attacks. Security researchers work by exploring methods of attack to assess their chances of success. This doesn’t mean such research is evil; on the contrary, it’s the only way to do this kind of investigation. But it means that security researchers are generally loathed by banks, governments and other organisations with vested interested in concealing vulnerabilities.
My guess is that the Chinese researchers chose the US power grid as a case study for two reasons: the data are publicly available, and it has experienced a number of high-profile failures in the past. Using oodles of incomprehensible mathematics, the paper examines a number of scenarios involving “cascade failure” — ie, what happens when a grid fails as safety switches are automatically triggered to protect the network. The counter-intuitive conclusion is that, in the event of a cascade failure, an attacker would do better to focus on lower-load network nodes than on the ones carrying the highest loads.
If you’re responsible for the security of a critical network, then this is a useful result. The fact that such a theoretical study, published in the open scientific literature, could disturb the slumbers of a congressional committee suggests that the atmosphere in Washington is getting febrile. The Google boys could be pushing at an open door. – guardian.co.uk