Communications of the ACM
Cables Discuss Vast Hacking by a China That Fears the Web
Taiyuan, China | Customers use computers at an Internet cafe. Cables document the Politburos near obsession with Chinese Internet users accessing politically delicate information.
Reuters
As China ratcheted up the pressure on Google to censor its Internet searches last year, the American Embassy sent a secret cable to Washington detailing why top Chinese leaders had become so obsessed with the Internet search company: they were Googling themselves.
The May 18, 2009, cable, titled "Google China Paying Price for Resisting Censorship," quoted a well-placed source as saying that Li Changchun, a member of China’s top ruling body, the Politburo Standing Committee, and the country’s senior propaganda official, was taken aback to discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google's main international Web site. When Mr. Li typed his name into the search engine at google.com, he found "results critical of him."
That cable from American diplomats was one of many made public by WikiLeaks that portray China’s leadership as nearly obsessed with the threat posed by the Internet to their grip on power—and, the reverse, by the opportunities it offered them, through hacking, to obtain secrets stored in computers of its rivals, especially the United States.
From The New York Times
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