Whoa, some potentially very significant news coming out of Google-ville this morning. The California-based company is now saying that security threats and government-mandated censorship has them reconsidering whether they should even be doing business in China, an enormous market for the company that also happens to represent a considerable chunk of the user base of the Internet. Email accounts of human-rights activists in not only China, but in the U.S. and Europe as well, were being infiltrated, says Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond in a blog post on the Google Policy Blog.

Drummond stops short of saying it, but it's a quick leap from his comments and from the idea that the company is laying at least part of the blame for the security breaches squarely at the feet of the government in Beijing. These recent events have Drummond saying that Google will both (a) stop censoring search results on Google.cn immediately and (b) review the feasibility of our business operations in China. The Times UK is reporting that the decision was made by, more or less, three men in a room: CEO Eric Schmidt, and company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

It's the (a) part of that reaction that is particularly interesting, since it doesn't necessarily follow from the hacking attacks Drummond describes. Google's policy of working with the Chinese government to shape the Internet according to the Beijing's liking has always been discordant with it's "Don't Be Evil" mantra. But the company has, as we've noted recently, been more forceful in its rhetoric about being protectors of a free and open Internet, most recently with an openness manifesto of sorts posted on the company's policy blog. (The Times UK adds a business note: Google hasn't been particularly successful in China compared to the homegrown Baidu service, and a pullout would be a way to "save face.")

The Times UK also has a great tidbit that goes to show how technology impact today reaches the highest level of politics. Once those three guys in a room made a decision, they were sure to notify a fourth person: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The landscape of global online activism is constantly changing, but one lesson shows signs of being rock solid. As savvy as activists get about using the Internet, governments are going to attempt, at least, to exert some measure of control there. Iran's struggles of late have been only the most recent demonstration, where authorities there have reacted to the proliferation of web videos and protesting blog posts by sometimes throttling the nation's already skinny Internet backbones and sometimes shutting off mobile access all together.

And so, the activists attempting to thrive online could use a little help. To that end, Google and Global Voices, the Berkman Center-born organization that works with bloggers from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe (and Macedonia in between) to aggregate blog content from all over the world, have teamed up to fund the "Breaking Borders Award," a trio of grants at $10,000 a piece that goes to groups or individuals whose work "demonstrate[s] courage, energy and resourcefulness in using the Internet to promote freedom of expression."

Applications are for the award due by February 15th, 2010, and grants will go to winners in the categories of advocacy ("given to an activist or group that has used online tools to promote free expression or encourage political change"), technology, ("given to an individual or group that has created an important tool that enables free expression and expands access to information,") and policy ("given to a policy maker, government official or NGO leader who has made a notable contribution in the field.")

There is evidence that, of late, Google seems to be devoting some attention to boosting its role as an energetic (and well funded) protector of free expression. It's not always an easy fit, most particularly on the world stage. The company has in the past been criticized for contributing to a less than open Internet. As late as last June, Reporters without Borders found that search results for the 1989 violence in Tienanmen Square were filtered on Google.cn, the company's default portal within China's borders. More recently, though, the company's Senior Vice President for Product Management Jonathan Rosenberg posted a much noticed and passionate company manifesto on openness. "Open will win," wrote Rosenberg on the Google Public Policy Blog. "It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom."

Here's a cautionary tale in how not to manage your message in a networked media age, or rather, further evidence of John Gilmore's brilliant maxim, "The internet interprets censorship has damage and routes around it." Late Monday night in England, the Guardian posted a strange article reporting that it was being prevented from reporting on a question pending in Parliament. The only thing the Guardian could say was that the case involved Carter-Ruck, a prominent PR firm that specializes in working with global corporations. But that didn't stop the blogosphere, which immediately took affront at the assault on free speech. Within 24 hours the whole story was out in the open, to the chagrin of Carter-Ruck and the oil commodities firm Trafigura, which was trying to hush up an embarrassing report on toxic dumping in the port of Aibidjan by one of its ships in 2006.

Yet another reminder that if Facebook's enormous user base makes it sensible to see the site as a country, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg likes to say, then it's less like the United States or France than it is Qatar or Myanmar. Facebook is a private corporation, no matter how noble or idealistic its intentions. At the risk of being overly dramatic, a recent case makes the point that we users of the free service are subjects, not citizens in any real sense of the word. Wired's Ryan Singel is following the story of how Facebook has been blocking messages sent through the site that include links to the Pirate Bay BitTorrent service, whose operators have been in the new recently because they were just sentenced to prison in Sweden for facilitating the violation of copyright infringement.

But here's the latest wrinkle that's making Facebook look not so stellar: they're blocking torrent links, reports Singel, to perfectly legal content, like the 400-year old Don Quixote, now in the public domain.

Singel's concerned that Facebook may be violating federal wiretapping law if it's peering inside the notes its users send to one another (instead of simply applying a dumb filter). But unless new details emerge, it seems likely that Facebook is not breaking any law at all, and that they're well within the range of stuff a private corporation can do -- a cautionary note for those of you who use Facebook for political organizing or sensitive advocacy work.

At about 2:00 PM on April 6, 2007, I submitted a comment to a Tancredo blog post that was driving people to a Laura Ingraham poll (April 4, 2007). Here is my comment:

“These polls have no scientific value. They are self-selected samples and therefore reflect only the views of the limited number of people who take the time to respond to them.

Detailing what he thought was a bug at BarackObama.com, Michael Arrington found it odd that the site listed the "Gay Nigger Association of America for Barack Obama" as a supporter. Some quick digging turned up an error alright. The system automatically displayed the latest group created, whether it was actually supportive or not.

The bug ended up being the openness of the system.