WikiLeaks documents suggest China’s leaders were behind Google hack attack

U.S. State Department cables leaked by WikiLeaks suggest that China’s leadership was behind the hacker attack on Google back in January.

WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to revealing secret documents, released a new trove of 250,000 confidential American diplomatic cables over the weekend. Those cables allegedly reveal all sorts of secret views by the Obama administration of all sorts of foreign incidents, including the attack on Google that spurred the company to reconsider whether it could offer its search services in China.

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One set of documents, obtained by the New York Times, shows that the U.S. was told by a Chinese source that China’s Politburo was behind the intrusion into Google computer system.

The New York Times said the records revealed a “global computer hacking effort.” The newspaper said, “China’s Politburo directed the intrusion into Google’s computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. They have broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002, cables said.”

So far, the report doesn’t offer further details, such as just how credible the Chinese source was believed to be and whether there was other corroborating evidence.