China storm for Google

Search engine censors info

Google is reportedly planning to launch a highly censored — and lucrative — version of its search engine for China that will block Web sites and certain search terms to which the Beijing government objects.

The hush-hush project code-named “Dragonfly,” has been underway since the spring of 2017, according to The Intercept, which broke the story on Wednesday, citing internal Google documents and sources familiar with the plans.

Search terms about human rights, democracy, religion and peaceful protests would be among the words blacklisted in the search engine app, the report said. It would also block sites like the BBC and Wikipedia.

The censorship would be embedded in image searches, spell checks and even in suggested searches.

That means Google can’t point people to potentially “sensitive” terms or photographs banned by Beijing.

According to the report, a few hundred people at Google are aware of the Dragonfly project, with one whistleblower speaking out because of ethical concerns, Business Insider reported.

Most of the work is being conducted out of Google’s Mountain View headquarters in California.

Amnesty International slammed the censorship.

The human-rights group said it would be a “dark day for Internet freedom” and constitute “a gross attack on freedom of information and Internet freedom,” according to The New York Times.

Google’s Chinese version has already been demonstrated to Beijing government officials, who keep a tight lid on a wide variety of information.

Progress on the project — which would end Google’s eight-year boycott of the country over complaints about censorship — picked up after a December meeting between Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, and a top Chinese government official.

The final version could be launched in the next six to nine months, pending approval from Chinese officials.

A Google spokeswoman told Business Insider the company was already doing business with the Chinese.

China’s top Internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Google won’t comment on the scoop by The Intercept’s Ryan Gallagher, which pretty well confirms the story: The company is rushing back into China with a search app that enforces the regime’s censorship rules. So much for that “Don’t be evil” slogan.

Gallagher cites internal memos, surely leaked by an insider, about the “Dragonfly” project to write an app for Android phones that could launch within months. The app will automatically suppress references to “anticommunist,” “dissidents,” the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, “Animal Farm,” “1984” and on and on and on.

Any “sensitive queries” on the regime’s blacklist will yield a “no results shown.”

Google knows how bad this looks: The project’s been restricted to a few hundred employees, Gallagher reports, “planned by a handful of top executives and managers . . . with no public scrutiny.”

Of course, Google has played footsie with Beijing before, running a censor-friendly search engine in China from 2006 to 2010. When it quit, it cited a wake of cyberattacks from China, “attempts over the last year to further limit free speech on the Web in China” and state surveillance of dissidents’ Gmail accounts.

Censorship in China is worse than ever, yet Google is headed back. In fact, CEO Sundar Pichai announced back in 2016, “We want to be in China serving Chinese users.”

It’s a huge market, with vast potential for profit. So what if you have to empower the “forces of totalitarianism,” as Google cofounder Sergey Brin put it in 2010?

Hmm. In June, after 3,000 of its workers asked “that neither Google nor its contractors ... ever build warfare technology,” Google bowed out of a Pentagon contract. Shouldn’t those scruples apply to the perversion of Google’s tech for

Saying no to China would leave a lot more cash on the table, but Google is enormously profitable — earning big-time off of content it does nothing to create.

And if so large a player kowtows to China’s commissars, it’ll be even easier for smaller fry to pull the same cynical sellout.

There’s still time to stand up for free thought, free speech and a free Internet.