The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

by David E. Sanger

That conclusion was likely the exact one that Li Changchun, the propaganda chief, wanted Google to reach. Since the Chinese had already replicated Google’s business model with Baidu, the next step, it seemed, would be to force Google out of the market. Schmidt told me afterward that the Aurora attacks had pretty much “ended the debate inside the company about what our future was on the mainland.” If China was willing to go to all that trouble to break into the company’s servers in the United States, it would clearly have no compunctions about demanding every bit of user data in China, and Google wasn’t willing to let that happen. By later in 2010, Google was packing up and moving out of Beijing. There was one more twist to the Aurora story that no Google executive revealed at the time. The Chinese had cracked a Google server that contained a database of court orders delivered to Google—the orders from the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and other judges around the country. The FBI’s counterintelligence team knew what this particular theft meant: the Chinese intelligence services were looking for evidence that their own spies in the United States had been compromised and placed under surveillance.