Hillary Clinton criticises Beijing over internet censorship

Hillary Clinton today called on Beijing to hold a thorough and open investigation into the hacking of human rights activists' email accounts.

The US secretary of state's comments, made in a speech, marked an apparent shift away from Washington's reluctance to challenge China on a number of issues in recent years.

Clinton voiced unusual – if cautious – criticism of China over its internet censorship, throwing her weight behind Google's threat to withdraw from the country over the hacking and also being forced to censor its search engine.

"In an interconnected world, an attack on one nation's networks can be an attack on all," she said. "Countries or individuals that engage in cyber attacks should face consequences and international condemnation.

"By reinforcing that message, we can create norms of behaviour among states and encourage respect for the global networked commons."

Clinton likened online censorship by countries such as China, Vietnam and Iran to the rise of communist Europe, warning that a new "information curtain" threatened to descend on the world unless action to protect internet freedoms was taken.

Her comments, which mark the Obama adminstration's first major foray into foreign policy online, come at a delicate time for relations between the US and China.

Last week, Google said it was "no longer willing to continue censoring" Chinese users' search results for subjects such as the Tiananmen Square massacre following what it called "a highly sophisticated and targeted attack", originating in China, against the Gmail accounts of human rights activists and others.

Clinton called on Beijing to complete a transparent investigation of the breaches, which were apparently used to try to collect data on critics of the Chinese government.

"We look to the Chinese authorities to conduct a thorough investigation of the cyber intrusions that led Google to make this announcement.

"We also look for that investigation and its results to be transparent," she said.

She backed Google's threat to pull out of China unless Beijing permitted it to "operate an unfiltered search engine".

"For companies, this issue is about more than claiming the moral high ground – it comes down to the trust between firms and their customers," she said.

"Consumers everywhere want to have confidence that the internet companies they rely on will provide comprehensive search results and act as responsible stewards of their information."

China's vice-foreign minister, He Yafei, responded by saying that the hacking investigation should not be a matter for international diplomacy.

"The Google case should not be linked with relations between the two governments and countries; otherwise, it's an over-interpretation," he added.

Despite China's attempts to dismiss the issue as domestic matter, Kurt Campbell, a US assistant secretary of state for East Asia, today revealed the two countries have had discussions about what he called "serious concerns" over the hacking of Google and said Washington was pressing China for an explanation.

"We have had a number of interactions with Chinese authorities about the Google matter," he added. "We are going to have more of those in the coming days."

In the speech, delivered in Washington, Clinton promised $15m (£9.2m) in funding for grassroots efforts to "expand civic participation and increase the new media capabilities of civil society in the Middle East and North Africa".

However, some analysts suggested the language used betrayed a lack of clear thinking and insight into the way in which repressive governments use technology.

"The references to the Berlin Wall and the information iron curtain show how the state department is still mired in a cold war mentality," Evgeny Morozov, an expert on political repression online, said.

"It shows that they are very naive in how they think about modern authoritarian regimes."

US officials have been working to come up with new ways of encouraging dissidents. Last year, they encouraged the online messaging service Twitter to stay online as a way of helping spread news of anti-government protests in Iran.

Officials also recently held talks with the Russian military over a new treaty intended to help quell the rise of cyber attacks.