Google and the Cold War that businesses must play

“What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not! They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives.” 

The line belongs to Alec Leamas, from the movie, The spy who came in from the cold.  The Cold War, a sordid world of espionage, sabotage, assassination and deception; where governments attempted to outcompete each other through war and other means.  It certainly wasn’t all James Bond and vodka martinis.

Klaus Fuchs passed on America’s nuclear secrets to the Soviets as they were being developed at the Manhattan Project in 1943.  The famous Rosenbergs coordinated a wide network of spies for the Soviets and were executed for their troubles.

Certainly, the US and their allies had their own spy networks but spies are more crucial for authoritarian dictatorships.  In a nation without free speech and free expression, it is hard to challenge prevailing views and established orthodoxies.  A world where politicians decide on the fate of scientists, innovators and entrepreneurs is a place without much science, innovation or enterprise.

Without their spies, the Soviets could not have developed the technologies that they did. 

Countries, aware of the value of strategic technologies in telecommunications, infrastructure and energy distribution, kept them locked tight and close.  Governments spied on governments and hardly ever took the trouble to systematically infiltrate and spy on companies unless they were closely aligned with military objectives.  Until now.

With the end of the Cold War in 1991 came a general relaxation.  Previously rigid industries became deregulated and there was an explosion of technological innovation and business creation.

The companies with some of the hottest ideas and intellectual property are now amongst the most deregulated and international in all of history. 

Yahoo! and Google have sophisticated systems that can track individual behaviour and make predictive responses to place adverts most likely to interest you in your path.  It has not escaped the world’s most aggressively anti-liberal governments that this type of technology could also be used to track and hunt down political dissidents.

The first battle was short and sharp.  In 2004, Yahoo! meekly passed over information regarding Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, to the Chinese police.  Shi had used his Yahoo! email account to post a story that the Chinese government found embarrassing.  Shi was arrested and sentenced to ten years in jail for "leaking state secrets".

The next company to fall in line was Google, the real Internet search giant.  Google – a company with the corporate mantra “Don’t be evil” – voluntarily censors all search results posted in China.  You can’t search for “democracy” or “Tiananmen Square Massacre” or anything that might trouble the serenity of the politburo.

All of this changed after the public disclosure of Operation Aurora.  In mid-December, a large-scale cyber attack was launched by “agents of the Chinese government” against a number of technology companies, including Adobe Systems, Juniper Networks, Rackspace, Yahoo, Symantec and Google.

Google mentioned the events in a blog post on 12 January in which they also mentioned that some Google mail accounts belonging to Chinese political activists may have been compromised.  This led the newspaper headlines.

However, as much as Chinese politicians may be attempting to read their political opponents’ mail, the list of corporate targets reveals the greater danger.  Chinese agents are actively attempting to steal the intellectual property of private companies.  Given the range and size of state-run Chinese businesses, this is a massive risk for private companies as well as for those of us who enjoy our freedom.

The Cold War has returned, and it is now a game that businesses are going to have to learn how to play if they are to keep their competitive edge.