George Post 9 - Google Principles or Business

By the Monitor's Editorial Board The Monitor's Editorial Board – Tue Jan 26, 11:30 am ET

The rift between the corporate giant Google and the giant country China, with 338 million people online, has revealed a disturbing fact.
Someone, perhaps the Chinese government itself, has been trying not only to read e-mail accounts on Google's Gmail but steal the company's corporate secrets through sophisticated online techniques.

Major corporations are confronting a new era of cybercrime, as The Christian Science Monitor's exclusive story on electronic spying in the oil and gas industry vividly shows. Yet many don't realize the full extent of the threat they face. Worldwide, $1 trillion in intellectual property was stolen online in 2008, according to one study.

The new cyberspies are among the elite of cybercrime, on the prowl for trade secrets and technical know-how. The identities of the attackers can be hard to trace, but many are likely to be governments or their surrogates. (The Chinese government strongly denies any involvement with the Google espionage.) The human spy on the scene is being replaced by cybersleuths at a computer terminal.

The oil and gas industry has seen "real, targeted attacks on our C-level [most senior] executives,” says one oil company 
official. “Industrial espionage has moved from the real world to the cyberworld,” says Greg Garcia, a cybersecurity expert in the Bush administration. “Any country that wants to support and develop an indigenous industry may very well use cyberespionage to help do that.”

Organized cybercriminals are beginning to operate much in the fashion of drug cartels, with elaborate international ties. One common attack is to send e-mails or instant messages that appear to be from a colleague to key personnel, such as technical managers, asking them to click on a link. Once that's done, the criminals exploit a flaw in the browser that lets them take over that computer and poke around the company's network for valuable information.
Another ploy involves scattering pocket USB sticks with the company logo in the parking lot of a corporation. Employees place them in their computers to see what's on them and inadvertently load hidden spy viruses, which spread elsewhere.

Corporations need to more fully acknowledge the threat and step up their defenses. And President Obama's new "cyber czar," Howard Schmidt, tasked with strengthening the nation's online security, now has fresh reasons to place industrial espionage high on his agenda, too.
As US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a speech on Internet freedom Jan. 21, "Countries or individuals that engage in cyberattacks should face consequences and international condemnation."

My Thoughts -

The China / Google incident is really not a Google issue but really an ethical issue. The corporate world, Google being the first, is starting to ask the question - Should we do business with a country who views relationships as a Win - Lose and who is willing to go to extraorinary measures to achieve their objectives on trade and censorship. A new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers claims China could overtake America as the largest economy as quickly as 2020. Their means aof doing so is new age stuff. The quest for world leadership through economic leadership versus military strength. The combatants don’t use bullets they use computers.

So whats wrong with a little hacking? Why is this dangerous to the U.S. ? Because the Chinese economy is growing at 10 % while the U.S ran negative in 2009. Research is expensive if China can compete on the world stage with us without spending on research, what an advantage!

The intrusions aren't limited to the internet companies. Other companies believed to be hacked into are Dow Chemical and Northrop Grumman. This is scary - The U.S. Pentagon is also believed to been hacked into by China.

It seems to me that Google is doing the right thing and standing by moral and patriotic principles in threatening to pull out of China while other U.S. companies are dismissing the incidents and calling for business as usual. Microsoft's Ballmer states that "People are always trying to break into other people's data. There's always somebody trying to break into Microsoft." “Bill Gates also downplayed the controversy and scoffed at Google's maneuvers, which attracted big and positive media coverage in China”.

While Google is also fighting China on censorship, Microsoft’s position is soft stating that they must abide by internet censorship on a country by country basis and that even in the U.S. there is censorship (child porn). Where is there backbone? Hasn't Mircosoft been victimized by Chinese fake copies of their software?

Motorola also threw Google under the bus. Motorola struck a deal with Google's rival Baidu. Motorola will let consumers choose Baidu or other search alternatives instead of Google as the default search option on Android-based phones in China. Google must find this hard to take since the Motorola turnaround has been built on Google powered phones.

I'm hoping that other European and US companies will take notice and start pushing back on China's business practices. Certainly the Obama administration is paying attention. Hillary rebuffed the Chinese and this from US Commerce Secretary Locke "China needs to continue making strides to be more transparent, predictable and committed to the rule of law," Locke said in a speech, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. "If there is backsliding on these issues, it will affect the appetite of U.S. companies to enter the Chinese market and ultimately that will be bad for both the people of China and the United States."