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Google and NSA Forging Cyber-Alliance in Wake of China Hack

by Warren Riddle on February 5, 2010 at 10:10 AM

2009 was an abysmal year in terms of cybersecurity, as cyberattacks and data breaches doubled from 2008. The most publicized event occurred when Google became embroiled in a heated dispute with China over the nation's involvement in a hack on the search engine. Google even threatened to shutter its Google China service because of the incident, which Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair called a "wake-up call."

Blair believes the Google hack may only represent the beginning of a wave cyber-assaults, as he recently predicted a massive attack on U.S. telecommunications and computer networks to occur within the next six months. The federal government and Google aren't going to sit idly by though, and are reacting to the "wake-up call" by forging a cyber-alliance. According to the Washington Post, Google and the National Security Agency are partnering in order to intensely scrutinize the China attack, identify weaknesses, and then take precautionary measures in order to improve cyber-security.

Google's ability to save and store basically everything may inspire just a little bit of public paranoia. To help dispel these inevitable fears, an anonymous source told the Post that an Orwellian Big Google won't be frivolously disclosing anything to the government agents. According to the unnamed insider, "the deal does not mean the NSA will be viewing users' searches or e-mail accounts or that Google will be sharing proprietary data." Despite that plea for public acceptance, the black helicopter crowd should probably start creating dummy accounts and investing heavily in tinfoil. [From: The Washington Post, via Boing Boing]

Tags: China, chinese google, ChineseGoogle, dennis blair, DennisBlair, Google, hacking, hacks, NSA, security, top

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