The Story of Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder:

The story of Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder:

"The war room [trying to resolve the Chinese government's h*ck of Google] quickly became something of a curiosity to other Googlers, particularly as Sergey Brin, the company’s energetic cofounder, became a regular presence on their floor. Brin, who spent his spare time performing as a trapeze artist, was hard to miss. Often he’d come speeding into the office on Rollerblades or clownish outdoor elliptical bikes, wearing full-body luge racing suits or, at a minimum, neon slippers. 

Brin, a Russian-Jewish émigré, had taken a personal interest in the attack. He was a picklock. As a student at Stanford, he’d experimented with various lock-picking techniques. He also happened to be one of the world’s foremost experts in data mining, extracting meaningful patterns from mountains of data. This kind of forensic pursuit was in many ways what Brin did best. But he also began to take the assault personally. Brin’s identity—and, one could argue, Google’s corporate identity too—was inextricably linked with his family’s escape from the Soviet Union in the late 1970s.

In Brin’s mind, what the Chinese had done attacking Google was essentially the same thing China had done to Yahoo. The only difference was that they hadn’t bothered to ask Google for access to its users’ information. The h*ck reeked of the totalitarianism of Brin’s Soviet upbringing, and he took it as a personal affront. 

Brin was born in Moscow and grew up under Soviet oppression. As a matter of policy, the Soviet Union was not anti-Semitic. But in practice, Jews were banned from Russia’s prestigious universities and upper professional ranks. They were forced to take university entrance exams in separate rooms—dubbed “gas chambers”—and graded on a steeper curve. 

Brin’s father had to forfeit his dream of becoming an astronomer because Jews were expressly forbidden from enrolling in physics departments at Moscow’s prestigious universities. The Soviets didn’t trust them with their nuclear rocket research, and the state deemed astronomy a subset of physics. 

Brin’s parents escaped to the United States in the late 1970s to spare young Sergey the same fate. Now Brin was among the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, and richest men. He was not about to roll over to another authoritarian regime now."

~ Nicole Perlroth's "This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race"