I'd postponed saying anything about Google's withdrawal from the Chinese market because it smacked of being incomplete. Google's official statement earlier this week–we don't want to do business with a regime that tries to hack into its opponents' e-mail accounts–was certainly laudable. But was that the really the whole story?

Now we see another big piece of the puzzle: Google wasn't the only company hacked. According to Juniper and Symantec, Adobe, Yahoo, and other companies were also targets of the same "cyberespionage" incident. Using an Internet Explorer security hole to gain access to Google's and Adobe's internal networks. Given how these companies view their IP, that's about as provocative as trying to defang a tiger.

While there's not enough information to say that, because the server from which these attacks originated was in China, the Chinese government was involved, Google officially is treating the situation as though that were the case. Whatever is really going on here, it's bigger than just two dissidents' Gmail accounts.

[Cross-posted at The Heretech.]