Google is encrypting search globally. That’s bad for the
NSA and China’s censors.
BY CRAIG TIMBERG AND JIA LYNN YANG
March 12 at 12:51 pm
China’s Great Firewall, as the world’s most sophisticated
Internet censorship system is known, is facing a new challenge as Google begins
to automatically encrypt searches there as part of its global expansion of
privacy technology.
The development is the latest — and perhaps most
unexpected — consequence of Edward Snowden’s release last year of National
Security Agency documents detailing the extent of government surveillance of
the Internet. Google and other technology companies responded with major new
investments in encryption worldwide, complicating relations between the companies
and governments long accustomed to having the ability to quietly monitor the
Web.
Googling the words “Dalai Lama” or “Tiananmen Square”
from China long has produced the computer equivalent of a blank stare, as that
nation’s government has blocked Web sites that it deemed politically sensitive.
But censors spying on Google’s search queries in China increasingly are seeing
only gibberish, undermining the government’s ability to screen them.
China — and other nations, such as Saudi Arabia and
Vietnam, that censor the Internet on a national level — will still have the
option of blocking Google search services altogether. But routine, granular
filtering of content will become more difficult, experts say. It also will
become more difficult for authorities to monitor search queries for signs that
an individual Internet user may be a government opponent, experts say.
Chinese officials did not immediately respond to
questions about Google’s decision to automatically encrypt searches there, but
the move threatens to ratchet up long-standing tensions between the American
tech powerhouse and the world’s most populous nation.
“No matter what the cause is, this will help Chinese
netizens to access information they’ve never seen before,” said Percy Alpha,
the co-founder of GreatFire.org, an activist group that monitors China’s Great
Firewall. “It will be a huge headache for Chinese censorship authorities. We
hope other companies will follow Google to make encryption by default.”
Alpha, who like other members of the group uses a
pseudonym to evade Chinese authorities, noted that Google began encrypting
searches in the country more than two months after GreatFire publicly
challenged the company to do so in an opinion piece published in Britain’s
Guardian newspaper in November.
Google denied that there was any connection, saying that
the global rollout of automatic encryption for search began in February for
unrelated reasons. All searches made from most modern browsers will be
encrypted in the coming months. The completion date for the worldwide rollout
is not yet clear, the company said.
“The revelations of this past summer underscored our need
to strengthen our networks. Among the many improvements we’ve made in recent
months is to encrypt Google Search by default around the world,” spokeswoman
Niki Christoff said in an e-mailed statement. “This builds on our work over the
past few years to increase the number of our services that are encrypted by
default and encourage the industry to adopt stronger security standards. ”
Google largely pulled out of mainland China in 2010,
moving its operations to the quasi-autonomous base of Hong Kong after refusing
to comply with orders to censor searches — something that competitors who
remained behind still do.
Google began offering encrypted search as an option for
some users that same year and made the protection automatic for many users in
the United States in 2012. The company began encrypting traffic between its
data centers last year, after The Washington Post and the Guardian, relying on
documents provided by Snowden, reported on the massive extent of Internet
spying by the National Security Agency and its allies. Microsoft and Yahoo soon
followed with similar initiatives.
The rising use of encryption on a range of services has
made it harder for intelligence services to spy on Internet traffic, including
e-mails, search queries and video chats, experts say.
Encrypted search has come more slowly in other parts of
the world, and especially to those using older browsers. Firefox, Safari and
Google’s own Chrome browser support automatic encryption, but older generations
of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer — still popular in China and much of the world
— do not. Internet Explorer 6, which was first released in 2001 and does not
support encrypted Google searches, still is used for 16 percent of Chinese
Internet traffic, according to NetMarketShare.com, which tracks usage.
The move to automatic encryption could spark backlash
from Chinese authorities, who constantly tweak their Great Firewall to block
the flow of unwanted content and also to maintain the ability to monitor
Internet users in China, Western analysts say.
“The Great Firewall is entirely a moving target,” said
Richard Clayton, a computer security researcher for the University of Cambridge,
in England, who has studied Chinese Internet filtering. “They are tweaking it
all the time.”
The censorship poses an obstacle to Chinese businesses
that are trying to go global since they don’t have reliable access to sites
like Facebook. And there’s no telling on a given day what the government is
choosing to block.
“In China, a lot of things are like this,” said Jiang
Tao, founder of CSDN, a Chinese software developer community. “You don’t know
what you can do, what you can’t do. No one tells you.”
Google’s move toward encryption could prompt China to
block Google searches altogether or even all services offered by the company.
Google has a much lower market share in China than elsewhere in the world but
still is widely used by international firms and some others, meaning there
could be economic consequences to an outright block.
Another option would be what experts call a
“man-in-the-middle attack” that would allow Chinese censors to intercept
encrypted traffic and decode it before it reaches Google servers. For many
users, such an attack would be obvious because their browsers would warn that
the encrypted communication had not reached its intended recipient. Users would
be free to proceed with the query, even in the face of a man-in-the-middle
attack, but the protection offered by Google’s encryption would be lost.
Alpha, the co-founder of GreatFire, said that Chinese
authorities will be reluctant to block Google entirely for the long-term,
though they have on occasion slowed access to the company’s services. The
economic costs of a major showdown with Google, he said, could be profound.
Privacy advocates, who long have criticized Google, said
its expanded use of encryption will do nothing to curb the company’s own
tracking of the Web site visits, e-mails and search queries of its users. Such
information helps the company target advertising, the key source of revenue for
the company.
“It’s a good move to encrypt as much as possible, but I
really think Google is grandstanding here,” said Jeff Chester, executive
director of the Center for Digital Democracy, an advocacy group based in
Washington.
William Wan and Li Qi contributed to this report from
Beijing.
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