Update Sept 2004:

Google confesses





We have no position on Google and China. Since the Patriot Act, we also don't know what to think about Google's dealings with the U.S. government. If we ever get full disclosure from Google, we will form an opinion. That's the prior problem and the fundamental issue. No one can believe what Google says about anything important.  It's none of our business !

Lies, damned lies, and Brin spin

From the September 2004 issue of Playboy; the interview occurred in April

Playboy: How did you respond when the Chinese government blocked Google because your search engine pointed to sites it forbade, including Falun Gong and pro-democracy websites?

Sergey Brin: China actually shut us down a couple of times.

Playboy: Did you negotiate with the Chinese government to unblock your site?

Brin: No. There was enough popular demand in China for our services -- information, commerce and so forth -- that the government re-enabled us.

Playboy: Have you ever agreed to conditions set by the Chinese government?

Brin: No, and China never demanded such things. However, other search engines have established local presences there and, as a price of doing so, offer severely restricted information. We have no sales team in China. Regardless, many Chinese Internet users rely on Google. To be fair to China, it never made any explicit demands regarding censoring material. That's not to say I'm happy about the policies of other portals that have established a presence there.

Playboy: Which sites cooperate with Chinese government censors?

Brin: I've heard various things, but I don't want to spread secondhand rumors. There is a Harvard site that lists what you can and can't get from different places around the world.

Larry Page: Search for "censorship" and "Berkman" and you can get the website. [Editor's note: The website is at cyber.law.harvard.edu/home.] It has some cool programs that automatically track what is and isn't available on the web.

Playboy: What would you do if you had to choose between compromising search results and being unavailable to millions of Chinese?

Brin: There are difficult questions, difficult challenges. Sometimes the "Don't be evil" policy leads to many discussions about what exactly is evil. One thing we know is that people can make better decisions with better information. Google is a useful tool in people's lives. There are extreme cases, we're told, when Google has saved people's lives.

Playboy: How has Google saved lives?

[ blah, blah, blah ... ]


China, Google, and press spin

7 September 2002

China's recent blocking of Google and AltaVista has us asking whether they might be doing it for reasons that have not been mentioned in the press.

Our proxy has not been blocked. We wonder who will block us first -- China or Google, Inc.? The former because we're a back door to Google's index, or the latter because our interface is ad-free and unauthorized by Google?

U.S. intelligence agencies have recently shown a great deal of interest in Internet surveillance. One thrust of this is determining geolocation from IP number. Currently this is about 80 percent effective in fixing the IP number to a major city, and over 90 percent in fixing it to a country.

Another important aspect is the search terms used to query search engines. These terms are absolute pearls; they are a succinct window into the Internet user's interests and state of mind at a particular point in time. Cluster analysis that uses geolocation along with search terms would provide an insight into a society and its subcultures.

Chinese officials may be worried that Google logs all search terms together with the IP number, a time stamp, a unique cookie ID, and browser information. If this information is available to the National Security Agency from Google -- and current U.S. laws almost require Google to provide this information to the feds, especially when the Internet user is a non-U.S. citizen in a country that's of national security interest to the U.S. -- then China may be well-advised to block the use of U.S. engines to protect their own national security.

The NSA, if it gets this information straight from Google, is operating at a level of efficiency much greater than Chinese officials themselves, who must intercept and collate such information by monitoring the packet stream. This puts the NSA at a tremendous advantage in determining where pro-U.S. sentiment may exist in China.

The privacy policies of search engines generally do not cover items such as IP number storage, and storage of search terms. In the case of portals that use Google results, it is important to know whether the portal forwards the IP number to Google along with the search terms. We've asked this question of several portals, and received a reply only from Netscape, which said that they do not forward the IP number to Google.

Journalists interested in privacy can provide a service by asking search engines and portals about the user data they collect. When engines fail to reveal this, then they should at least allow proxies and meta-engines to access their index as a matter of policy and convenience to Internet users around the world. We hope our proxy can continue to operate, both in China and in the U.S.

Geolocation links:

News item: "The winner of the 2002 Google programming contest and the $10,000 prize was Daniel Egnor. Egnor's winning project allows users to search web pages based on locale. Egnor took street addresses, converted them to latitude and longitude coordinates, and then created a location index. The result was a system that allows users to focus keyword searches to an area of a specific location."

Bottom line: Geolocation is neither fad nor fantasy. It's something that must be considered when evaluating the behavior of major Web players.

Update, March 2003: We still don't know the story behind China's blocking and unblocking of Google. It may be that Google's acute interest in geolocation by IP number is designed primarily to sell more ads in more markets. In an article by Josh McHugh ("Google vs. Evil," Wired Magazine, January 2003), several paragraphs imply that Google worked out some sort of secret deal with Chinese authorities:

Brin was no expert on international diplomacy. So he ordered a half-dozen books about Chinese history, business, and politics on Amazon.com and splurged on overnight shipping. He consulted with Schmidt, Page, and David Drummond, Google's general counsel and head of business development, then put in a call to tech industry doyenne Esther Dyson for advice and contacts. Google has no offices in China, so Brin enlisted go-betweens to get the message to Chinese authorities that Google would be very interested in working out a compromise to restore access. "We didn't want to do anything rash," Brin says. "The situation over there is more complex than I had imagined."

Four days later, Chinese authorities restored access to the site. How did that happen? For starters, the Chinese government was deluged with outcries from the nation's 46 million Internet users when access to Google was cut off. "Internet users in China are an apolitical crowd," says Xiao Qiang, executive director of New York-based Human Rights In China. "They tend to be people who are doing well, and they don't usually voice strong views. But this stepped into their digital freedom."

The quick workaround: Chinese authorities tweaked the national firewall, making the new Google China different from the site that was turned off. Today, Chinese who use Google to search on terms like "falun gong" or "human rights in china" receive a standard-looking results page. But when they click on any of the results, either their browsers are redirected to a blank or government-approved page, or their computers are blocked from accessing Google for an hour or two. "They have a new mechanism that can block the results of certain searches," Brin says. Did Google help China find or obtain the filtering technology? "We didn't make changes to our servers" is all he'll say.


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