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Mar 22, 2011
Google has accused Beijing of using a sophisticated ploy to interfere with its e-mail service, after several weeks of complaints by mainland internet users about difficulties accessing their Gmail accounts.
"There is no issue on our side, we have checked extensively," a Google spokesman said yesterday. "This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail."
Google and mainland technical experts said that instead of completely blocking the Gmail service, which would lead to an outcry both at home and abroad, Beijing had partially blocked access, leaving users with the impression that Google services were unreliable.
The strategy had fooled almost everybody, from hackers to Google engineers, said Google. And many mainland Google users had little choice but to drop Gmail as their primary e-mail service.
The secret blockade was allegedly set up early this month, coinciding with mysterious online calls for so-called "jasmine rallies" in mainland cities each Sunday afternoon.
The campaign, inspired by uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, has led to an intensified crackdown on internet content and tight security at designated protest sites.
On March 11, Google said in its official blog that the company had "noticed some highly targeted and apparently politically motivated attacks against our users. We believe activists may have been a specific target."
Although Google did not reveal technical details of the alleged blocking method, a leading information technology expert on the mainland believes he has managed to work out how the service has been disrupted.
As user complaints about access problems trickled in, the first thing Google engineers did was to see whether it was Google's own problem. Some users could gain access occasionally and, from a technical point of view, it seemed like a traffic overload or bandwidth squeeze, something that happens when signals travels through thousands of kilometres of cable.
Google staff told Associated Press that the Gmail blockade appeared to be more sophisticated than previous interventions because the disruption was not a complete block. Other Google services such as instant messaging functions had similar problems.
A senior scientist at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, who declined to be named because of the political sensitivity of the issue, said that the government was "likely" making trouble for Google, and that could be done "easily".
"All you need is to give the already quite busy internet traffic a squeeze and Google users will lose the link often but randomly," the professor said. "The beauty is that there is little evidence."
But there is some, according to William Long, an IT engineer based on the mainland, who ran a test last week to find out just what was going on.
Long used two servers, one in Shanghai and the other in Hong Kong, to run programs tracing the root of the blockage.
What he found was that one router on the mainland had been routinely blocking most of the traffic through port 443, the only gateway to Gmail and other Google services. Each blockage lasted about 15 minutes, and then the services would resume for about the same period of time, before turning off again.
That meant mainland users had a 50 per cent chance of accessing Google, he said.
Long said the government was trying to reduce Google's user base.
"Gmail cannot be monitored, but domestic mail servers can, and they will co-operate with the government to provide evidence for criminal investigations. People have gone to jail because of this," Long said.
Long said the jasmine rallies were probably one motive for the blockage because the access problem began on March 2, two days after the first Sunday that internet users called for peaceful protests in more than a dozen mainland cities.
An enormous turnout of police and secret service agents ensured the rallied never happened.
This is not the first time that Google has complained of interference from the central government. In January last year, the US web giant said it suffered cyber-attacks from mainland-based parties apparently intent on hacking into the Gmail accounts of Chinese rights activists.
The resulting row caused tensions to rise between Beijing and Washington and ended with Google reducing its presence in the mainland market.
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