This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

On Tuesday, January 12, 2010, at 3:00 A.M. Beijing time, Google made its attack known to the world. Fearing for employees’ safety, Google had already tipped off the State Department. Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was personally briefed. American diplomats at the Beijing embassy prepared for a possible mass evacuation of Google’s Chinese employees and their families. And then they hit publish. “We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech,” then Google’s head lawyer, David Drummond, wrote in a blog post. “These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered—combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web—have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn.”