Sources told US diplomats that hacking attacks against Google were ordered by China’s top ruling body and a senior leader demanded action after finding search results critical of him, leaked US government cables show.
One memo sent by the US embassy in Beijing to Washington said a “well-placed contact’’ told diplomats the Chinese government coordinated the attacks late last year on Google Inc under the direction of the Politburo Standing Committee, the apex of Chinese Communist Party power.
The details of the memos, known in diplomatic parlance as cables, could not be verified. Chinese government departments either refused to comment or could not be reached. If true, the cables show the political pressures that were facing Google when it decided to close its China-based search engine in March.
The cable about the hacking attacks against Google, which was classified as secret by US Deputy Chief of Mission Robert Goldberg, was released by WikiLeaks to the New York Times and the Guardian newspapers.
The New York Times said the cable, dated early this year, quoted the contact as saying that propaganda chief Li Changchun (李長春), the fifth-ranked official in the country, and top security official Zhou Yongkang (周永康) oversaw the hacking of Google. Both men are members of the Politburo.
It said that it is unclear if Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) were aware of these reported actions before Google went public about the attacks in January.
The Times, however, said doubts about the allegation have arisen after the newspaper interviewed the person cited in the cable, who denied knowing who directed the hacking attacks on Google. The Times did not identify the person it interviewed.
Another source said in that cable he believed an official on the top political body was “working actively with Chinese Internet search engine Baidu (百度) against Google’s interests in China.”
Google’s relations with Beijing have been tense since the US-based search giant said in January it no longer wanted to cooperate with Chinese Web filtering following computer hacking attacks on Google’s computer code and efforts to break into the e-mail accounts of human rights activists. Google closed its China-based search engine on March 22 and began routing users to its unfiltered Hong Kong site.
Google’s spokeswoman in Tokyo, Jessica Powell, said the company had no comment on the cables released by WikiLeaks, and on the hacking attacks, referred to a January statement that said it had evidence that the attack came from China. Google did not release any details then.
A man who answered the phone at the spokesperson’s office of the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said no one was around to comment yesterday. Calls to the Chinese State Council Information Office and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs rang unanswered.
A separate cable released by WikiLeaks showed a Politburo member demanded action against Google after looking for his own name on the search engine and finding criticism of him.
The cable from May 18 last year cable did not identify the leader, but the New York Times reported it was Li.
The cable classified as confidential cited a source as saying the Chinese official had realized that Google’s worldwide site is uncensored, capable of Chinese language searches and search results, and that there is a link from the home page of its China site, google.cn, to google.com.
The official “allegedly entered his own name and found results critical of him” and asked three government ministries to write a report about Google and “demand that the company ceases its ‘illegal activities,’ which include linking to google.com,” the cable said.
The cable said US officials could neither confirm nor deny the details given by the source about the Chinese leadership’s action.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has