TED BLOG EXCLUSIVE: Onstage at TED2010, TED curator Chris Anderson interviews Google’s Sergey Brin about the company’s recent statement on China. (Recorded at TED2010, in Long Beach, California, February 2010. Duration: 8:24.)
CA: What happened?
SB: Our story somewhat parallels what Shyam just told you all about. We initially began investigating a security incident at Google. You know, we have security investigations from time to time, it’s not such an unusual thing, but we quickly discovered that this was a very sophisticated adversary. And furthermore, the more troubling thing to me is that we discovered the motivation, which we believed to be to gain access to Gmail accounts, in particular for Chinese human rights activists. Upon further investigation, we discovered that the same attack had been used against dozens of other companies, and we’ve been contacting them, at that point on and ever since. And since we were now looking at this whole question, we started to understand that broadly even far less sophisticated means had been used, for example the kind of things that Shyam mentioned, spearfishing and whatnot, had been used against human rights activists with respect to their Gmail accounts.