Zero Hedge
September 22, 2018
It’s now confirmed that Google’s long suspected assistance to the Communist government of China to censor and monitor its citizens’ online activity runs deeper and is more proactive that initially thought.
The Intercept published a bombshell report based on internal Google whistle-blower testimony which shows the internet giant plans to launch a search engine for China with censorship capabilities built into it, which provides a backdoor monitoring platform allowing government authorities to track users’ entire search history and even their location.
The search system is code-named “Dragonfly,” according to a confidential memo outlining the project that circulated inside the company — the contents of which have been leaked to The Intercept by an engineer who worked on the search engine. The Google engineer said that employees were forced by Google bosses to delete the memo as it was authored and circulated among a group voicing concern and dissent over the planned search engine.
The Intercept summarizes the confidential memo’s contents as follows:
The memo, authored by a Google engineer who was asked to work on the project, disclosed that the search system, code-named Dragonfly, would require users to log in to perform searches, track their location — and share the resulting history with a Chinese partner who would have “unilateral access” to the data.
By requiring users to log-in to perform a simple search, system administrators can immediately identify the person behind the search and their profile; and a Chinese partner would then have the capability to “selectively edit search result pages” with few limitations, according to the memo.
The “Chinese partner” — thought to be a private company working in tandem with the Chinese government — will store user information in a database on servers in Taiwan.
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