Marco.org

Google publicly and famously surrendered the integrity of its searches to Chinese repression in order to do business there, and never provided a good enough rationale for breaking its pledge to do no evil. We have no way of knowing what the company surrendered technologically in its efforts to break into the fastest growing Internet market in the world. If the deal involved giving the Chinese government some level of access to the Chinese activity occurring on Google—as a way of verifying that their censorship deal was being adhered to—then perhaps this access could have been exploited, leading to the security breach.

So it’s not that Google’s cloud computing technology is so easily hackable, it’s that Google’s misguided partnership with a repressive regime is so easily exploitable. My concern—for Google and for us—is that the reason they know it’s the Chinese government behind these attacks is because Google may have inadvertently given them the key.

— Douglas Rushkoff (via azspot), giving an explanation worth considering.