Verified Voting Blog: What Google's New China Policy Tells Us About Internet Voting
Google recently announced in an important change of policy that it will stop censoring search results for queries coming from China. That is interesting in its own right, but is not why I am writing this article. According to their corporate blog post, what prompted this change of policy was the discovery of “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on [Google’s] corporate infrastructure originating from China”. They found similar attacks on “at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses”. Google further said that they “have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists”. We are not likely to hear more detail in public about the attacks, but this is extraordinary news.