Tech news headlines have quickly turned political after China angrily denied allegations from the US that it was behind a high-level breach of Google Gmail accounts. US officials continued to investigate the episode that hit senior government and military personnel accounts.

It raises issues about how much freedom the nation's leaders should have on the Web, given that their rush to embrace the hottest new gadgets and internet services could be making them easy targets for those who want access to sensitive data. Unfortunately, the trade-off for the efficiency of internet technology is that there is often less security wrapped around it. Google said that the breach was targeted and that it was part of a phishing scam that tricked users into giving their user names and passwords to hackers in the eastern Chinese city of Jinan. The hackers were then able to monitor users' correspondence and forward e-mails from the affected accounts to another account.