Google’s Chief Legal Officer has fired a “shot across the bow” aimed at the Chinese ship of state.

In a post on the Official Google Blog a couple of hours ago, David Drummond, SVP Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, says that Google and other organizations have been the targets of attacks from China, and that Google may suspend operations within China.

He characterizes the attacks as “highly sophisticated” and “targeted” — though his description doesn’t really describe the sophistication — and it seems to be much like what we’re seeing in terms of attacks against the Tibetan exile community and Tibet support groups [TSGs] in general.

He specifically says the more than twenty attacks they identified, had as a primary goal:

“…accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.”

He cites a number of reports, including the GhostNet report, which you should read if you’d like a little more detailed analysis of how some of this stuff takes place.

And here’s the punchline:

“We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

Whoa! He used the word censoring here! I don’t recall that Google described their actions as censorship when they first started filtering results at Google.cn…

This is a welcome step forward, assuming they follow through, and I applaud their willingness to listen to others who have been criticizing Google’s decision (to provide censored search results in China) from the beginning, as well as (now) to respond to the  censorship and repression of free speech that we see spreading now.

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See my related posts (below) for more on the issue of free speech and human rights in China and elsewhere in the world.