89. China vs Google: The War That Shaped the Internet (Ep 2)

The Rest Is Classified

Goalhanger

History

4.6 • 732 Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When we left the team at Google's headquarters, they were deep inside their "war room," planning the counter-strike against the sophisticated adversary they now knew was coming from China. Their mission: to kick the hackers out permanently. But with the attackers deep inside the corporate network, this required a drastic, company-wide action. Join Gordon and David as they explain why Google - a company that had previously agreed to local censorship in China - made the shocking decision to use the attack to reaffirm their commitment to freedom of speech. This is the story of how an internal security incident escalated to a global geopolitical confrontation. ------------------- Join The Declassified Club: Start your free trial at ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠⁠ - go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, quarterly livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. To sign up to the free newsletter, go to: ⁠⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign-up⁠ ⁠ ------------------- Order a signed edition of Gordon's latest book, The Spy in the Archive, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Email: [email protected] Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@triclassified⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Video Editor: Nathan Copelin Social Producer: Emma Jackson Producer: Becki Hills Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series,
0:09.0	first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books.
0:13.1	Join the declassified club at the rest is classified.com.
0:17.2	Say hello to the next generation of Zendesk AI agents, built to deliver resolutions for everyone. Loved by over 10,000 companies of Zendesk AI agents built to deliver resolutions for everyone loved by over 10,000 companies Zendesk AI agents easily deploy in minutes to resolve 30% of interactions instantly. That's the Zendesk AI effect. Find out more at Zendesst.com.
0:36.3	You know, we have security investigations from time to time.
0:43.6	It's not such an unusual thing.
0:45.6	But we quickly discovered that this was a very sophisticated adversary.
0:49.8	And furthermore, the more troubling thing to me is that we discovered the motivation,
0:53.7	which we believed to be to gain access to Gmail accounts, in particular for Chinese human rights activists.
1:00.7	We have made a statement of intent that we intend to stop censoring, and if we can do that within the confines of Chinese law and policy, we'd love to continue Google.C.N. and all of our operations there. And if we cannot,
1:13.1	then we'll do as much as we can, but we don't want to run a service that's politically censored.
1:18.7	Well, welcome to the rest is classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrara.
1:23.4	And that was Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google.
1:28.1	And he's speaking there just a few weeks after the discovery of a massive hack of Google.
1:34.4	It has been linked to China.
1:35.8	And we are on the second part of our investigation into this cyber attack that has come to be known as Aurora, and that really marks,
1:46.8	I think Gordon, the beginning of a kind of new era of cyber attacks, state-sponsored cyber
1:52.5	attacks and cyber espionage. And we had just left in our last episode, the security team in the
1:58.5	Googleplex in Mountain View, California, sitting out in this
2:02.6	outbuilding, investigating what they now know to be an absolutely massive breach of Google
2:09.9	systems.
2:11.4	And they've just discovered this.
	...

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