Brin shaped Google's China stand

* The Wall Street Journal

* TECHNOLOGY
* MARCH 12, 2010

Soviet-Born Brin Has Shaped Google's Stand on China

By BEN WORTHEN

As a boy growing up in the Soviet Union, Sergey Brin witnessed the consequences of censorship. Now the Google Inc. co-founder is drawing on that experience in shaping the company's showdown with the Chinese government.

Mr. Brin has long been Google's moral compass on China-related issues, say people familiar with the matter. He expressed the greatest concern among decision makers, they say, about the compromises Google made when it launched its Chinese-language search engine, Google.cn, in 2006. He is now the guiding force behind Google's decision to stop filtering search results in China, say people familiar with the decision.

Google acknowledged that the call to stop filtering—which was announced in January and set off negotiations with Beijing—could lead to its withdrawal from the fast-growing market.

The move is the clearest manifestation yet of a tension that has always existed at Google.

The Internet company, on one hand, is analytical: It built its core search business on algorithms that determine the relevance of Web sites and has tried to apply quantitative analysis to traditionally subjective parts of a business, such as hiring decisions. On the other hand, Mr. Brin and co-founder Larry Page have passionately touted Google's ability to spread democracy through access to information, and adopted the unofficial and now-famous motto, "Don't Be Evil."

"At its best, Google is data-driven with an ethical trump card," said Larry Brilliant, who headed up the company's philanthropic efforts until 2009. Always it was the founders, Messrs. Brin and Page, who could play that card, he added.

Google declined to make Mr. Brin or any other executives available for an interview.

Mr. Brin was born in Moscow in 1973. He emigrated to the United States with his family in 1979, he has said, in part because of anti-Semitism there before the fall of the Soviet Union. He has said in past interviews that the move and its circumstances had a profound impact on his life.

Mr. Brin was asked about the compromises necessary to do business in China during a 2004 interview with Playboy magazine. "There are difficult questions, difficult challenges," he said. "One thing we know is that people can make better decisions with better information," he said, adding that he was aware of cases where finding information through Google's search engine had saved people's lives.

When Google launched its Chinese site, it agreed to filter out results that the Chinese government found objectionable, including some political speech and pornography.

Mr. Brin wasn't completely comfortable with that decision and would sometimes say Google should never have agreed to Beijing's conditions, a person familiar with his thinking said. But his objections were never enough to reverse Google's policy.

"I actually feel like things really improved" in the first years after Google entered China, Mr. Brin said at a technology conference in February. "We were actually able to censor less and less, and our local competitors there also censored less and less."

But following the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, he said, "there's been a lot more blocking going on."

In December, Google detected cyber attacks that it traced to computers in China. It said some of its intellectual property was stolen, adding that it had evidence that attackers were trying to access the accounts of Chinese human-rights activists on Gmail, Google's email service.

Mr. Brin personally supervised Google's subsequent investigation, even moving his office into the building where Google's security team was operating, said a person familiar with the investigation.

The Wall Street Journal reported in January that in debates over how to respond, Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, argued the company could do more good by keeping its search engine in China. Mr. Brin said Google had already taken that approach. and that it could no longer justify giving in to China's requirements to censor search results.

A Silicon Valley executive who knows Mr. Brin said his Soviet upbringing made him particularly opposed to state use of technology to spy on citizens. This person suspects that the apparent attempts to spy on Gmail users may have been as important in Google's reaction as the issue of censorship. "That tripped Sergey," this person said.

Soviets' Afghan Ordeal Vexed Gates on Troop-Surge Plan

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev also faced a troop-increase request during his first year, for a war he had inherited. Soviet generals in 1985 asked for tens of thousands more soldiers to bolster their 100,000-strong contingent, roughly the same size as the current Western force in Afghanistan.

Mr. Gates, discussing that period in his 1996 memoir "From the Shadows," wrote: "The Soviets had to either reinforce or lose. Because they clearly were not winning." Gen. McChrystal used similar language in his recent warning about possible American "failure" in Afghanistan unless adequate resources are committed. Mr. Gorbachev ended up authorizing a small troop surge; 18 months later, he announced plans for a withdrawal.


The future of the war in Afghanistan was on the line as Gen. Stanley McChrystal met with Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a secret rendezvous at a Belgian airbase in August. Gen. McChrystal, the top Western commander in Afghanistan, pushed for more U.S. troops to roll back the spreading Taliban-led insurgency. Mr. Gates, officials say, was skeptical.

A quarter-century ago, he was a top Central Intelligence Agency officer aiding the anti-Soviet rebels in Afghanistan, and he remembered how a 1985 decision by the Soviet Union to widen that earlier war had failed to turn the tide.

The Soviets left Afghanistan, their southern neighbor, with their collective tail dragging the ground, defeated.

Few American officials know the Soviets' bitter Afghan predicament better than Mr. Gates. In the 1980s, he was the deputy director of the CIA, overseeing a massive U.S. effort to fund, train and equip the Islamic insurgents, called mujahedeen, who fought the Soviet army to a standstill.

Now some of the most prominent of these insurgents, such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, are allied against America with the Taliban and al Qaeda. Almost daily their men are killing Western troops, who often operate from former Soviet bases and use Soviet-drawn military maps with faint Cyrillic markings.

Irony of history?

"It's an eerie sense of deja vu," said Bruce Riedel, a Brookings Institution scholar who headed the Obama administration's Afghan policy review in the spring and who in the 1980s worked under Mr. Gates as a CIA officer in the region. "America," he said, "is in the rare position of fighting the same war twice in one generation, from opposite sides. And it's easier to be the insurgents."

That point is not discussed often: the US is fighting the same war, and this second time it is the object of, not the supporter of, insurgents. Heck, Osama bin Laden was supported by the CIA.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev also faced a troop-increase request during his first year, for a war he had inherited. Soviet generals in 1985 asked for tens of thousands more soldiers to bolster their 100,000-strong contingent, roughly the same size as the current Western force in Afghanistan.

Mr. Gates, discussing that period in his 1996 memoir "From the Shadows," wrote: "The Soviets had to either reinforce or lose. Because they clearly were not winning." Gen. McChrystal used similar language in his recent warning about possible American "failure" in Afghanistan unless adequate resources are committed. Mr. Gorbachev ended up authorizing a small troop surge; 18 months later, he announced plans for a withdrawal.

Eerie parallel, or mere coincidence?

In Afghanistan's dusty capital, dotted with blast barriers, talk of democracy is hard to square with widespread ballot-stuffing during Mr. Karzai's recent re-election. As for rebuilding, the middle classes here still aspire to live in Soviet-built neighborhoods of decayed housing blocks that would be an eyesore elsewhere but are luxurious by Afghan standards. Despite billions in U.S. aid since 2001 spent on roads, clinics and schools, there is little comparably prominent evidence of American reconstruction.

To us, perhaps things are fixed and fine now, but, what about Afghans?

"What have the Americans done so far? They're only busy building their own military bases," said Mohammad Nassim, a 40-year-old Kabul resident, airing a frequently heard opinion.

The Karzai government fully controls only Kabul, the provincial capitals and a few other areas. Even the main supply roads north and south of Kabul are studded with Taliban checkpoints. All over the country, the Taliban run shadow local administrations, collecting taxes and dispensing justice. "There is a total lack of government authority in rural Afghanistan, which is similar to Soviet times," said Haroun Mir, director of the Afghanistan Center for Research and Policy Studies.

I'm reminded of the South Vietnamese government.

Against all predictions, after the last Soviet soldier left in February 1989, Mr. Najibullah's government, instead of collapsing, went on the offensive. Scoring key victories against the rebels, it outlived the Soviet Union, unraveling only when Russian-supplied food and weapons ran out. Absent continuing American aid for the guerrillas, it could have remained in power much longer, many former mujahedeen say.

Consider the sources, but, nonetheless, the US was quite complicit in the chaos.

Few in Kabul expect the Karzai government would display similar longevity should Western forces go home. "Najibullah had the support of a strong and well-equipped Afghan army, air force and intelligence, and of a strong party," said Mohammed Mohaqeq, a powerful former mujahedeen commander who is a parliament member and a Karzai supporter. "I don't think we can even compare these two governments to each other."

Karzai's government is a straw man. And we are committed to supporting it. A holy mess.

Soviet agent moved among Hollywood elite

SVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence Service) - Elizaveta Mukasei posed for decades as a housewife while pursuing her real job as a Soviet spy. She died Sept. 19 at age 97.





With a radio transmitter hidden in her vacuum cleaner and a homey fire burning in the living room to destroy incriminating documents, Elizaveta Mukasei posed for decades as a housewife while pursuing her real job as a Soviet spy.

Known by code names of Zephyr and Elza, the couple did undercover work that has been trumpeted in recent years by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. While the Mukaseis described their spying exploits in a memoir published in 2004, many details about her life are difficult to verify independently. From 1939 to 1943, the couple were posted to Los Angeles, where Mikhail was vice consul at the Soviet Consulate. From their diplomatic perch, the couple gained access to elite Hollywood circles, aided in part by sympathy for America's wartime ally.

The Mukaseis befriended celebrities in the movie industry, Ms. Mukasei wrote in the memoir, though it isn't clear how the couple used these relationships in their intelligence-gathering. Charlie Chaplin became close to the Mukaseis, she wrote, and they plied him with vodka and presented him with a Russian bear cub on behalf of the Soviet state. Ms. Mukasei also claimed the couple befriended such luminaries as the conductor Leopold Stokowski, the writer Theodore Dreiser and others who they believed were politically connected in Washington.

Uncle Joe, the Czar, or the Empress

In the land of Czars, an online poll turns up interesting results.

In the land of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky, an online poll to identify Russian history's "greatest heroes" has two early front-runners: autocratic Czar Nicholas II and dictator Josef Stalin.
That in itself is interesting: both were strongmen, arbitrary rulers with absolute power, and both, clearly, are objects of nostalgic longing for how things used to be. Of course, the dark side of their rules is forgotten, glossed over, or ignored. Under Nicholas many Russians were serfs, under Stalin many Russians were dead.

Catherine the Great, Yuri Gagarin, Czar Nicolas, Stalin.

But this is interesting: "He's like a brand. It's like Coca-Cola," says Alexander Lyubimov, a senior executive with Rossiya TV, the state-controlled broadcaster behind the "Name of Russia" contest.

A brand? As in 'things go better with Uncle Joe'? Oy vay.
The vote has fired people's imagination at a time when the Kremlin is trying to reclaim parts of its Soviet and Czarist past to forge a new nationalism. But as early results have shown, finding suitable historical heroes in a country with a centuries-old tradition of authoritarianism is complex. Elsewhere, the task was less fraught. In the U.S., a similar contest chose Ronald Reagan; in Britain, Winston Churchill; and in South Africa, Nelson Mandela.

Just goes to show how short-sighted and forgetful Americans can be.

Nicholas II's narrow lead comes as monarchists prepare to mark the 90th anniversary of his execution by the Bolsheviks. Mr. Lyubimov says Russia's last czar is unlikely to win. Though Nicholas II is revered by the Orthodox Church, which canonized him, his detractors say his reign was marred by anti-Semitic pogroms, two disastrous wars, a civilian massacre and the near-collapse of the country.

Seems ole Nick wasn't adept at ruling his nation.

And this summary: For much of the Soviet period, there was little examination of the darker side of his rule. This only began in earnest in the twilight days of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev and in the early 1990s when human-rights groups began talking about Stalin's millions of victims.

Sort of a sound-bit interpretation of history: Khrushchev began the exposure of Stalin's horrors, Solzhenitsyn wrote a great deal about those horrors, and Sakharov and other dissidents continued the movement, yet it is all ascribed to Gorbachev. Too simple.