Speaking to ABC's "Good Morning America" show, Gates attacked Google's move to scrap censorship on its Chinese search engine, saying companies should obey the rules of the nations they operate in. "You've got to decide: Do you want to obey the laws of the country you're in or not?" he said. "If not, you may not end up doing business there."
Google announced it would stop censoring results on Google.cn two weeks ago, after state-backed hackers attempted to break into human-rights activists' e-mail accounts. Microsoft, in contrast, has agreed to continue observing government blocks on controversial search terms – such as "Tiananmen massacre" or "Tibetan independence" – on the Chinese version of its search engine, Bing.
Gates justified those restrictions to ABC, saying his company's Web filters weren't a big deal as people could easily circumvent them by using prohibited, but easily available, software. "Chinese efforts to censor the Internet have been very limited," he said. "It's easy to go around it, so I think keeping the Internet thriving there is very important."
Those comments have freedom-of-speech campaigners fuming. "Bill Gates is either unaware of the censorship regime in China or willfully ignoring it," said Brett Solomon, executive director of AccessNow.org, which has helped Iranian dissidents send video clips of protests to the outside world. "China is consistently listed at the top of all independent censorship ratings. So for him to say that it's not a problem is denying the reality of the situation."
While there's some truth in Gates' claim that Web users can employ anti-censor programs, Clothilde Le Coz, Washington director of Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns for press freedom, said "it's hard to gauge how many people know about these tools and can actually use them. I think they're a small part of the population." Also, downloading a program like Freegate – a piece of shareware that enables citizens of repressive regimes to view barred sites – doesn't guarantee a path to the open Net. "That tool is currently down because too many people in China are trying to use it, and it simply isn't powerful enough to support the demand," said Le Coz.
State censorship doesn't stop at blocking what people see. It's also about preventing unwanted information from getting out there in the first place. And China has been particularly successful at observing, tracking down and eliminating opposition voices on the Web. Of the 114 cyberdissidents serving time in jails around the world, 69 are imprisoned in China, some for offenses as minor as posting a photo of the Dalai Lama on the Net, according to Reporters Without Borders.
The cyberstrike on Google two weeks ago, during which some 30 other U.S. companies were also attacked, was apparently intended to gather information on Communist Party critics, experts say. And as more details about the hack's complexity are revealed, so the suspicion of Chinese government involvement grows.
On Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that before launching the attacks, hackers first identified friends of employees at the targeted companies on social networking sites. The acquaintances' accounts were cracked into, and messages containing links leading to malware were sent to the targets. As the employees thought they could trust e-mails from their friends, they clicked on the poisoned links.
"We're seeing a lot more up-front reconnaissance, understanding who the players are at the company and how to reach them," George Kurtz, chief technology officer at security firm McAfee, told the newspaper. "Someone went to the trouble to backtrack: 'Let me look at their friends, who I can target as a secondary person.' "
