The hacking of search giant Google was orchestrated by a senior Chinese official who searched for his name and found critical articles via the search engine, according to new documents released by the website Wikileaks.
The attack, which took places ealier this year, resulted in Google walking away from a potential market of 400m internet users in China.
The WikiLeaks report claimed the hacking was “100% political in nature”, the Observer reported.
Senior Chinese official Li Changchun searched for his own name, the cables allege.
The cable quoted a ‘well-placed contact’ telling US diplomats that leading members of the Chinese politburo coordinated the attacks late last year.
A separate cable released by WikiLeaks claimed that Li Changchun, the fifth highest-ranked official in China and head of propaganda, demanded action against Google after looking for his own name on the search engine and finding criticism of him.
One of the cables also alleged that an official from the politburo was ‘working actively with Chinese Internet search engine Baidu against Google’s interests in China.’
If true, said sources, the memos showed the political pressures on Google when it decided to close down its China-based search engine in March, after refusing to co-operate with China’s censorship of search results any more.
Wikileaks saga rumbles on
As Wikileaks continues to throw previously confidential corresponce into the public eye, US authorities have opened up a new front against WikiLeaks’ by effectively “killing” its web address, meaning the whistleblowers’ website was off-line for the third time in a week.
Last week Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate’s committee on homeland security, called for organisations helping to sustain the site to “immediately terminate” relationships with it.
EveryDNS, the site’s US domain name system provider, withdrew its service after hacker attacks threatened the rest of its network.
However, the site re-emerged using a Swiss-based internet address after being off-line for several hours.
