Once again, the Beijing Olympics changed everything. Hacking into accounts in China is bad enough but now Tibetan activists based in the US are also describing similar problems. And people think you can do business with that government? At what cost? As disturbing as this is, it's equally disturbing that Google has only come around on this issue after failing miserably in China. For them it appears to be more of a PR stunt to lick their wounds and less about principle.
Google said its investigation also showed that the accounts of dozens of Gmail users in the US, China and Europe who are advocates of human rights in China had been routinely accessed by third parties. This had not happened through an intrusion into its infrastructure, but probably through phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.
Ai, who helped to design the Bird's Nest stadium for the Olympics, came under pressure from authorities after leading a volunteer attempt to list all the children who died when their schools collapsed in the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan.
"We realised two months ago that our Gmail account [for the Sichuan investigation] had been invaded by someone who was transferring our emails so whatever we got, they got," he said. "Of course we changed the password but we later had problems again."
