Part 3 : Surveillance Valley..The Secret Military History of the Internet....Surveillance Inc.

Surveillance Valley

The Secret Military History of the Internet

By Yasha Levine

Chapter 5

Surveillance Inc.

The perfect search engine would be like the mind of God. 

—Sergey Brin, in “What’s Next for Google” 

Everyone in America remembers where they were on the morning of September 11, 2001, when two airplanes brought down the World Trade Center. 

I was in the middle of moving my belongings to a room on the south side of the University of California, Berkeley, campus, where I’d just transferred from a community college in San Mateo. I didn’t have a television or a computer, and smartphones didn’t exist. To get the news, I watched CNN all day with a friend in a grimy pizza joint off Telegraph Avenue, nibbling cold slices, drinking beer, and generally feeling confused and helpless. 

Google cofounder Sergey Brin also remembers where he was on 9/11. But unlike most of us, he had the power to do something. Something of consequence. 

That morning, Brin rushed into Google’s headquarters on Bayshore Avenue in Mountain View. He quietly convened a small group of his most trusted engineers and managers and charged them with a top secret assignment: mine Google’s search logs for anything that might help uncover the identity of the people involved in that morning’s attack. 

“Google is big enough at this point that it’s entirely possible the terrorists used it to help plan their attack,” Brin told the antiterror data-mining posse gathered around him. “We can try to identify them based on intersecting sets of search queries conducted during the period prior to the hijackings.” To get them started, he threw together a list of possible search terms, such as “Boeing,” “fuel capacity,” “aviation school.” 1 If they discovered several terror-related keywords coming from the same computer, Brin instructed them to try to reverse-engineer the search to reveal the user’s identity and possibly stop the next attack.

The plan had a good chance of success. 

Three years had passed since Brin and his partner Larry Page used $25 million in venture capital to spin their Stanford graduate project into a lucrative search company. Google wasn’t yet the ubiquitous presence it is today, nor had its name become a synonym for “search” yet. In fact, it was barely making any money. But Google was fast on its way to becoming the world’s most popular search engine, and it sat atop a gold mine of behavioral data. It processed 150 million searches every day. 2 Each of those records contained a search query, the location of its origin, the date and time it was entered, the type of computer that was used, and the search result link the user ultimately clicked. All of this was tied to a tracking “cookie” file that Google placed on every computer that used its services. 

Individually, these search queries were of limited value. But collectively, when mined for patterns of behavior over extended periods of time, they could paint a rich biographical portrait, including details about a person’s interests, work, relationships, hobbies, secrets, idiosyncrasies, sexual preferences, medical ailments, and political and religious views. The more a person typed into Google’s search box, the more refined the picture that emerged. Multiply this by hundreds of millions of people around the world, each using the site all day, and you start to get a sense of the unfathomable stores of data at Google’s disposal.

The richness of the information in Google’s search logs amazed and enchanted the company’s data obsessed engineers. It was like a continuous poll of public interests and preferences, a rolling picture of what people worried about, lusted after, and what kind of flu was spreading in their communities. “Google could be a broad sensor of human behavior,” was how one Google employee described it. 3 

The data could be extremely specific, like a brain tap, allowing Google to profile individuals in unprecedented detail. People treated the search box as an impartial oracle that accepted questions, spat out answers, and moved on. Few realized it recorded everything typed into it, from details about relationship troubles to, Brin hoped, plans regarding future terror attacks.

The crack team of terrorist hunters Brin assembled that morning knew all about the type of information the search logs contained; many of them had spent the past three years building what would soon become a multi-billion-dollar targeted advertising business on top of it. So they went looking for suspects. 

“In a first run, the logs team found about a hundred thousand queries a day that matched some of his criteria,” recalled Douglas Edwards, Google’s first marketing director, in his memoir I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. He was there for the hunt, and he remembered how a deeper analysis of the logs proved disappointing. “The search of our logs for the 9/11 terrorists turned up nothing of interest. The closest we came was a cookie that had searched for both ‘world trade center’ and ‘Egypt air hijack.’ If the terrorists had used Google to plan their attack, they had done so in a way that we couldn’t discover.” 4 

It’s never been clear whether Brin was searching the logs purely on his own initiative or whether it was an off-the-books request from the FBI or another law enforcement agency. But his data-mining effort preceded by more than a month President George W. Bush’s signing of the Patriot Act, which would give the National Security Agency broad authority to extract and mine search-log data in a very similar way. 

“This new law that I sign today will allow surveillance of all communications used by terrorists, including emails, the Internet and cellphones. As of today, we’ll be able to better meet the technological challenges posed by this proliferation of communications technology,” President Bush said on October 26, 2001, the day he signed the act into law. “The American people need to know that we’re collecting a lot of information and we’re spending a great deal of time trying to gather as much intelligence as we possibly can, to chase down every lead, to run down every hint so that we can keep America safe. And it’s happening.” 5 

On one level, Brin’s quest to find terrorists was understandable. It was a terrifying time. America was gripped by a fear that more terrorist attacks were imminent. But given the US government’s hunger for information—any information—on potential terrorists and their accomplices, the effort had a disturbing dimension. Right after 9/11, the CIA grabbed scores of suspected Al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and Pakistan and dumped them in Guantanamo Bay, in many cases acting on second-hand information for which they’d paid million-dollar bounties. In the end, 731 of the 780 detainees, more than 90 percent, were released without being charged. 6 A series of searches like “Boeing,” “fuel capacity,” “aviation school,” and “death to America,” might sound incriminating, but they were hardly proof of complicity in terrorist acts. If a teenager in Islamabad had Googled those terms, and the company had turned that information over to the government, it’s possible he could have found himself black-bagged in the middle of the night and shipped to Guantanamo. [those were just the first terms googled, that could land you in trouble, a whole bunch have been added since 2001 DC]

But was Brin’s vigilante effort effective? What were the net results? 

Not really, and not much. To Douglas Edwards, who related this story in his memoir, the episode served as a cautionary tale. He had been with the company almost from the beginning, but only on September 11 did he finally begin to comprehend how much power Google—and, by extension, the rest of Silicon Valley—had locked in its files. “There was no way to avoid the fact that we were trying to sift out specific users on the basis of their searches. If we found them, we would try to determine their personal information from the data about them in our logs,” wrote Edwards. “We had people’s most intimate thoughts in our log files and, soon enough, people would realize it.” 7 

I first started using Google in 2001, around the time Sergey Brin started hunting for terrorists. For me, as for a lot of people who came of age in the early 2000s, Google was the first Internet company I really trusted. It did not demand money. It did not bombard you with obnoxious ads. It had a clean, white design, centering a simple search box against a blank background. It worked like nothing else on the Internet, helping you navigate through a chaotic and wondrous new world. It put whole libraries at your fingertips, allowed you to translate foreign languages on the fly, let you collaborate in real time with people on the other side of the planet. And you got all of it for free. It seemed to defy the laws of economics. [and as we have come to learn, nothing is free in this world of illusion DC ] 

Even as it expanded into a transnational multi-billion-dollar corporation, Google managed to retain its geekily innocent “Don’t Be Evil” image. It convinced its users that everything it did was driven by a desire to help humanity. That’s the story you’ll find in just about every popular book on Google: a geewhiz tale about two brilliant nerds from Stanford who turned a college project into an epoch-defining New Economy dynamo, a company that embodied every utopian promise of the networked society: empowerment, knowledge, democracy. For a while, it felt true. Maybe this really was the beginning of a new, highly networked world order, where the old structures—militaries, corporations, governments— were helpless before the leveling power of the Internet. As Wired’s Louis Rossetto wrote in 1995, “Everything we know will be different. Not just a change from L.B.J. to Nixon, but whether there will be a President at all.” 8 

Back then, anybody suggesting Google might be the herald of a new kind of dystopia, rather than a techno-utopia, would have been laughed out of the room. It was all but unthinkable. 

Digital Library 

Lawrence Page was a socially awkward child, born and raised around computers. In 1978, when he was five, his father, Carl, spent a year working as a researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The center was an ARPANET site that Google would lease years later as it expanded its corporate campus. 9 Page’s mother, Gloria, taught computer programming at Michigan State University. His older brother, Carl Page Jr., was a pioneering Internet entrepreneur who founded an early message board company later purchased by Yahoo! for nearly half a billion dollars. 

Page grew up programming. 10 When he was twelve, he read a biography of Nikola Tesla, the brilliant Serbian American inventor who had developed everything from the electric motor, radio, and fluorescent lights to alternating current, all before dying in poverty, alone and out of his mind, while writing letters to a pigeon that lived on his windowsill. 11 Page devoured the book, and Tesla has remained an enduring inspiration. Not just Tesla’s inventions obsessed Page but also his repeated failure to monetize his ideas. “He had all these problems commercializing his work. It’s a very sad story. I realized Tesla was the greatest inventor, but he didn’t accomplish as much as he should have,” Page once told journalist John Battelle. “I realized I wanted to invent things, but I also wanted to change the world. I wanted to get them out there, get them into people’s hands so they can use them, because that’s what really matters.” 12 [sure you did, or are you saying you sold langley on your invention, rather than being a front like Z at mugbook? DC ]

Wealth, fame, making a mark on the world—these were the things that the young Page fantasized about. Stanford University, and a research program funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (previously known as ARPA), would allow him to achieve his dreams. 13 

Stanford sits on the edge of the San Francisco Bay, thirty-five miles south of the city. It was founded by Leland Stanford, a local railroad tycoon elected as the state’s governor, then as a senator. 14 When the university opened in 1891, New York’s Mail and Express mocked the project, writing, “the need for another university in California is about as great as that of an asylum for decayed sea captains in Switzerland.” 15 But the institution and the surrounding area flourished in tandem. In the early twentieth century, the Bay Area developed a thriving radio and electronics industry, emerging as the center of vacuum-tube manufacturing. During World War II, the area boomed again, driven by the need for radio technology and advanced vacuum-tube design to support the military’s radar technology. After the war, Stanford University became the West Coast’s answer to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the elite engineering university closely linked to the US military-industrial complex. 16 The area surrounding the campus was the epicenter of computer and microprocessor development. 

William Shockley was an MIT chemist and notorious eugenicist who made his name as part of the Bell Labs team that invented the solid-state transistor. In 1956, he returned to his hometown of Palo Alto to start Shockley Semiconductor inside the university’s Stanford Industrial Park. 17 His company spawned several other microchip companies, including Intel, and gave Silicon Valley its name. Hewlett-Packard, Eastman Kodak, General Electric, Xerox PARC, and Lockheed Martin also set up shop inside Stanford’s Industrial Park around the same time. There was so much military work going on in Silicon Valley that, throughout the 1960s, Lockheed was the biggest employer in the Bay Area. 

ARPA had a huge presence on campus, too. The Stanford Research Institute did counterinsurgency and chemical warfare work for the agency as part of William Godel’s Project Agile. It also housed the Augmentation Research Center, an ARPANET site run by the acid-dropping Douglas Engelbart. Indeed, the ARPANET was part-born at Stanford. 18 

Into the 1990s, Stanford University hadn’t changed all that much. It was still home to cutting-edge computer and networking research and still awash in military cash and cybernetic utopianism. Perhaps the biggest change occurred in the suburbs surrounding the university—Mountain View, Cupertino, San Jose —which became thick with investors and Internet start-ups: eBay, Yahoo!, and Netscape. Stanford was the epicenter of the Bay Area dot-com boom when a young Larry Page parachuted right into the vortex. 

Page started the computer science PhD program at Stanford in the autumn of 1995. He was in his element and immediately started scratching around for a research topic worthy of a dissertation. He toyed with various ideas, including a self-driving car, which Google would later get into in a heavy way. Eventually, he settled on Internet search. 19 

In the mid-1990s, the Internet was growing exponentially. The landscape was chaotic: a jumble of random websites, personal web pages, university sites, news sites, and corporate properties. Pages were popping up all over the place. But there was no good central or authoritative directory that could help people navigate to where they wanted to go or find a particular song, article, or webpage. Search engines and directory portals like Yahoo!, AltaVista, and Excite were crude and sometimes had to be curated by hand. Search algorithms were extremely primitive, matching searches word for word without the ability to find the most relevant results. Despite their primitive technology and awful search results, these early search sites attracted huge amounts of traffic and investment. The young programmers who started them were rich beyond belief. 

In the parlance of Silicon Valley, it was a market ripe for disruption. Finding a way to improve search results not only was intellectually challenging but also could prove to be extremely lucrative. 

With Nikola Tesla’s ghost hanging over him, Page tackled the issue with his laser-guided brain. Page’s tinkering was encouraged by his graduate adviser, Terry Winograd, a pioneer in linguistic artificial intelligence who had done work in the 1970s at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, a part of the bigger ARPANET project. In the 1990s, Winograd was in charge of the Stanford Digital Libraries project, one component of the multi-million-dollar Digital Library Initiative sponsored by seven civilian, military, and law enforcement federal agencies, including NASA, DARPA, the FBI, and the National Science Foundation. 20 

The Internet had grown into a vast and labyrinthine ecosystem spanning every type of computer network and data type imaginable: documents, databases, photographs, sound recordings, text, executable programs, videos, and maps. 21 The purpose of the Digital Library Initiative was to find a way to organize and index this digital mess. Though the project had a broad civilian mandate, it was also linked to the needs of intelligence and law enforcement agencies. More and more, life was taking place online. People were leaving behind trails of digital information: diaries, blogs, forums, personal photographs, videos. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies wanted a better way of accessing this valuable asset. 

It made sense. Back in the 1960s, when the military was dealing with an avalanche of data and needed new tools to digest and analyze the information, ARPA was tasked with finding a solution. Three decades later, the Digital Library Initiative had evolved into an extension of the same project, driven by the same needs. And just like old times, DARPA played a role. 22 Indeed, in 1994, just one year before Page had arrived at Stanford, DARPA’s funding of the Digital Library Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University produced a notable success: Lycos, a search engine named after Lycosidae, the scientific name for the wolf spider family. 23 

Larry Page’s interest in search aligned perfectly with the goals of the Digital Library Initiative, and his research was carried out under its umbrella. 24 When he finally published his first research paper in 1998, it bore the familiar disclosure: “funded by DARPA.” The agency that had created the Internet remained a central player. 

Larry Page met Sergey Brin on his first day at Stanford, at graduate orientation. The two were at once similar and polar opposites. They fast became friends. 

Page was withdrawn and quiet; some people thought maybe he was a bit autistic. He spoke with a strange lisp that some people mistook for an Eastern European accent. 25 Brin was the opposite. He was social and talkative, and into sports. When fellow students recall his time at Stanford, they remember Brin rollerblading through the halls and constantly dropping by the offices of his professors to chew the fat. Unlike Page, Brin was an actual Eastern European. One overarching activity united the two future billionaires: their early experimentation with computers and the Internet. 

Sergey Brin’s family had emigrated from Moscow to the United States in the 1970s and very successfully integrated into the engineering-academic world. His mother, Eugenia, was a NASA scientist. His father, Michael, was a tenured mathematics professor at the University of Maryland. 

Brin was a math prodigy. When he was nine, he discovered the early Internet and spent his time hanging out in chat rooms and playing multi user dungeon games, or MUDs. 26 He spent hours immersed in this new communication technology, souring on it when he realized that it was full of people just like him, “ten-year-old boys trying to talk about sex.” 27 

Brin finished high school in 1990, a year early, and enrolled at the University of Maryland with a dual major in math and computer science. He graduated with honors in 1993 and moved to Palo Alto to continue his studies at Stanford under a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. 28 At Stanford, he became interested in data mining: building computer algorithms that could predict what people would do on the basis of their past actions. What would they buy? What movies would they like? 29 He even founded a student group called MIDAS: “Mining Data at Stanford.” In later years, behavioral data mining would prove to be Google’s Midas touch. But that was well into the future. As Brin grew bored with the narrow focus of his data-mining research, he decided to join a new project with his buddy, Larry Page. “I talked to a lot of research groups, and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry,” Brin recalled in an interview. 30 

The core problem of search was relevance. Some web pages were more important and authoritative than others, but the first search engines couldn’t tell the difference. The key, Page understood, was to find a way to incorporate a ranking system into the search results. It was a simple but powerful idea, cribbed from the world of academia, where the importance of a research paper was measured by how many times it had been cited by other research papers. A paper cited a thousand times was assumed to be more important than a paper cited only ten times. Because of its hyperlinked design—with every web page linking to other pages—the Internet was essentially one giant citation machine. This was Page’s breakthrough. He called the resultant experimental project “PageRank” and with Brin’s help began lashing the thing together. 

They first coded a bot to crawl the entire Internet, scrape its contents, and save it all on their server at Stanford. They then refined and massaged the PageRank algorithm to produce relevant results. Because different links carried different values—a link from a newspaper like the New York Times was much more authoritative than a link from someone’s personal homepage—they tweaked their calculations so that pages were scored by the number of links as well as the scores of those links themselves. In the end, the rank of any given webpage would be the sum total of all the links and their values that pointed to it. Once the values of a few initial webpages entered the PageRank algorithm, new rankings propagated recursively through the whole web. “We converted the entire web into a big equation with several hundred million variables, which are the page ranks of all the web pages,” Brin explained not long after launching Google. 31 It was a dynamic mathematical model of the Internet. If one value changed, then the whole thing would be recomputed. 32 

They folded it into an experimental search engine they called “BackRub” and put it up on Stanford’s internal network. The BackRub logo was creepy: it featured a black-and-white photo of a hand attached to a hairy arm rubbing a nude back. But it didn’t matter. As word spread, students started using it—and they were amazed. This student project was better than any commercial search engine available at the time, such as Excite or AltaVista. The dominant search companies were valued in the billions but did not understand their own business. “They were looking only at text and not considering this other signal,” Page said. 33 

The search engine, which the pair quickly renamed Google, became so popular it overwhelmed the bandwidth of Stanford’s network connection. Brin and Page realized they’d hit on something very special. Google was much bigger than a research project. 

Even at that early stage, they understood that Google’s search algorithm wasn’t just abstract mathematics. It catalogued and analyzed webpages, read their contents, looked at outgoing links, and ranked pages by importance and relevance. Because webpages were written and built by people, the two Google creators understood that their indexing system essentially depended on a kind of surveillance of the public Internet. “The process might seem completely automated, but in terms of how much human input goes into the final product, there are millions of people who spend time designing their webpages, determining who to link to and how, and that human element goes into it,” Brin said. 34 

But there was more. 

Brin was deeply fascinated by the art and science of extracting information from people’s behavior in order to predict their future actions. Cataloguing the contents of the Internet was just the first step. The next was understanding the intent of the person doing the searching. Was it a teenager? A computer scientist? Male, female, or transgender? Where did they live? Where did they shop? If they searched for “cubs,” were they nature lovers or baseball fans? When they typed “buy underwear” were they interested in lacy thongs or boxer shorts? The more Google knew about someone, the better its search results would be. 

As Page and Brin worked on perfecting Google’s relevance algorithm, they began to think about customizing search results to a person’s interests and habits. Some of their initial ideas were rudimentary, including scanning a person’s browser bookmarks or ingesting the contents of their academic homepage, which usually listed personal interests as well as an academic and professional history. “These search engines could save users a great deal of trouble by efficiently guessing a large part of their interests,” the two wrote in the original 1998 paper that described Google’s search methods. 35 

This short sentence would define the future company. Collecting data and profiling users became an obsession for them both. It would make them rich beyond belief and transform Google from a mere search engine into a sprawling global platform designed to capture as much information as possible about the people who came into contact with it.

The Brain Tap 

In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin moved into the garage of a house owned by Susan Wojcicki, the sister of Brin’s future wife, Anne Wojcicki. They had an initial $100,000 check from Andy Bechtolsheim, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems, a powerful computer company that itself had come out of an ARPA funded 1970s computer research program at Stanford University. 36 The initial small investment was followed by a $25 million tranche from two powerful venture capital outfits, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. 37 

Brin and Page couldn’t be happier. Flush with cash, the two young entrepreneurs hired a couple of their Stanford Digital Library Initiative colleagues and plowed their energy into improving Google’s still rudimentary search engine. 

All the early search engine companies, from Lycos to Yahoo!, AltaVista to AOL, realized that they were sitting on something new and magical. “People came to our servers and they’d leave tracks. We could see every day exactly what people thought was important on the Internet,” Tim Koogle, Yahoo’s first CEO, said. 38 “The Net is all about connection.… We sat in the middle, connecting people.” Yahoo! tried leveraging the data to gain insight into consumer demand, but its engineers barely scratched the surface of the valuable data they were amassing. Google’s search logs were no different. What separated the company from the pack was the sophistication and aggressiveness Page and Brin brought to mining and monetizing the data trail. 

Initially, Google’s team focused on mining user behavior to improve the search engine to better guess user intent. “If people type something and then go and change their query, you could tell they aren’t happy. If they go to the next page of results, it’s a sign they’re not happy. You can use those signs that someone’s not happy with what we gave them to go back and study those cases and find places to improve search,” explained one Google engineer. 39 Studying the logs for patterns, Google engineers turned user behavior into a system of crowdsourced free labor. It acted like a feedback loop that taught the search engine to be “smarter.” An auto-suggest spellchecker feature allowed Google to recognize minor but important quirks in the way people used language in order to guess the meaning of what people typed rather than just matching text to text. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that ‘bio’ means ‘biography.’ And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means ‘biological,’” another Google engineer explained. 

Steven Levy, a veteran tech journalist whose early career included a stint at Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Software Catalog in the 1980s, gained unprecedented insider access to write the history of Google. The result was In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, a hagiographic but highly informative story of Google’s rise to dominance. The book demonstrates that Page and Brin understood early on that Google’s success depended on grabbing and maintaining proprietary control over the behavioral data they captured through their services. This was the company’s biggest asset. “Over the years, Google would make the data in its logs the key to evolving its search engine,” wrote Levy. “It would also use those data on virtually every other product the company would develop. It would not only take note of user behavior in its released products but measure such behavior in countless experiments to test out new ideas and various improvements. The more Google’s system learned, the more new signals could be built into the search engine to better determine relevance.” 40 

Improving Google’s usability and relevance helped make it the most popular search engine on the Internet. By the end of 1999, the company was averaging seven million searches daily, a roughly 70,000 percent increase from the previous year. 41 Now that Google dominated the market, it was time to make money. It didn’t take long for the company to figure out how. 

In 2000, right after moving to its new expanded office at 2400 Bayshore in Mountain View, right next to the Ames NASA Center and a short drive from the Stanford campus, Page and Brin launched Google’s first money-maker. It was called AdWords, a targeted advertising system that let Google display ads based on the content of a search query. It was simple but effective: an advertiser selected keywords, and if those keywords appeared in a search string, Google would display the ad alongside search results and would only be paid if a user clicked the link. 

Google’s search logs were vital to AdWords. The company figured out that the better it knew the intention and interests of users when they hit the search button, the more effectively the company could pair users with a relevant advertiser, thus increasing the chance users would click ad links. AdWords was initially rudimentary, matching keyword to keyword. It couldn’t always guess a person’s interests with accuracy, but it was close. With time, Google got better at hitting the target, resulting in more relevant ads, more clicks, and more profits for Google. Multiplied by hundreds of millions of searches a day, even a tiny increase in the probability that a searcher would click an advertising link dramatically boosted company revenue. Over the coming years, Google became hungry for more and more data to refine the efficacy of the ad program. “The logs were money—we billed advertisers on the basis of the data they contained,” explained Douglas Edwards. 42 

Indeed, money began raining from the sky. In 2001, Google hired Sheryl Sandberg, a former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary Larry Summers. She was tasked with developing and running the advertising business side of things, and she succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. With a targeted system based on user behavior, advertising revenue shot up from $70 million in 2001 to $3.14 billion in 2004, the bulk of it resulting from simply showing the right ad at the right time to the right eyeballs. 43 It was like a new form of alchemy: Google was turning useless scraps of data into mountains of gold. 44 

Barbecued Girl Meat 

As Google engineers wrung personal information from their growing millions of users, executives worried the smallest disclosure regarding the operation could trigger a fatal public relations disaster. Page especially realized Google could potentially lose users if people understood the ways the company used their search streams. 45 Guarding this secret became bedrock corporate policy. 46 

Page was incredibly paranoid about disclosing any hint of information. At his insistence, the company’s privacy policy was kept vague and brief, recalled Douglas Edwards in I’m Feeling Lucky. “Larry’s refusal to engage the privacy discussion with the public always frustrated me. I remained convinced we could start with basic information and build an information center that would be clear and forthright about the tradeoffs users made when they entered their queries on Google or any other search engine,” he wrote. “Those who truly cared would see we were being transparent. Even if they didn’t like our policies on data collection or retention, they would know what they were. If they went elsewhere to search, they would be taking a chance that our competitors’ practices were far worse than ours.” 47 

Page didn’t see things this way. 

The founder wanted total secrecy. His paranoia reached such a pitch that he began to worry about a scrolling ticker screen in Google’s Mountain View office lobby that displayed random Google searches from around the world in real time. “Journalists who came to Google stood in the lobby mesmerized by this peek into the global gestalt and later waxed poetical about the international impact of Google and the deepening role search plays in all our lives. Visitors were so entranced that they stared up at the display as they signed in for their temporary badges, not bothering to read the restrictive non-disclosure agreements they were agreeing to,” wrote Edwards. “Larry never cared for the scrolling queries screen. He constantly monitored the currents of public paranoia around information seepage, and the scrolling queries set off his alarm.” Page believed that the rolling marquee gave visitors too much insight into what his company was really doing. 

Ironically, a struggling Internet has been provided the public with a rare and inadvertent glimpse at the kind of intimate data search engines had been storing in their search logs. In August 2006, AOL, the giant prehistoric network provider, released into the public domain a few gigabytes worth of anonymized search logs: 20 million search queries made by 657,000 of its customers over a three-month period. The search results had been powered by Google, which owned 5 percent of AOL and ran the company’s search engine. 48 

Page saw these logs as a lucrative but volatile asset, one that threatened the company’s core business if made public. An AOL research team thought differently: they released the batch of logs as a good deed in the name of furthering social research. As far as the public was concerned, it was a good deed. But for AOL, and by extension Google, the logs were a public relations fiasco, shining light on the massive and systemic privacy intrusion upon which the search economy was based. 

Responding to the uproar, AOL claimed its engineers had anonymized the logs by replacing personally identifying user account information with randomized numbers. But journalists quickly discovered that user identities could easily be reverse-engineered with just a half dozen searches. One such user—known in the logs as “4417749”—was easily unmasked by a pair of enterprising New York Times reporters as a grandmotherly senior in rural Georgia: 

No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from “numb fingers” to “60 single men” to “dog that urinates on everything.” And search by search, click by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There are queries for “landscapers in Lilburn, Ga,” several people with the last name Arnold and “homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett county georgia.” It did not take much investigating to follow that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends’ medical ailments and loves her three dogs. 49 

The AOL log data revealed something else. Many of the search queries were extremely private, humiliating, disturbing, and possibly incriminating. Interspersed with searches on mundane topics like restaurants, television programs, and digital camera reviews were searches for medical ailments and advice on what to do “the morning after being raped” and, in some cases, queries that seemed to show unstable individuals on the verge of doing something violent and dangerous. To fully grasp the personal nature of the now-public searches, here is a sample of the raw logs: 

User 2281868 

“how destroy demons that live in apt above” 

“is hip hop and rap music a form of satanism” 

“are niggers satan or demons or gremlins” 

“animalsex” 

“do niggers have x-ray vision” 

User 6416389 

“girls fattened for butchering” 

“cooked tender flesh of girls” 

“cutting steaks from buttocks of girls” 

“girls strangled and eaten” 

“girls cut up into steaks” 

User 1879967 

“i eat my ejaculate and how long can it stay fresh” 

“livingontheedge” 

“i use my cum as an after shave” 

“is it unhealthy to store up seman or cum in a glass and drink it in a week” 

“i put cum on face as scent to atract girtls” 

I looked through the logs, and one search stream caught my attention. It belonged to user 5342598 and featured multiple queries about an unsolved murder of a woman in San Jose, followed by searches for resources that could help a person determine whether they were a serial killer. Here’s a sample of the stream: 

User 5342598 

“unsolved murders in san jose” 

“tara marowski” 

“unsolved murder of tar a marowski” 

“tara marowski found dead in car” 

“tara found dead in car” 

“unsolved mysteries tara marowski” 

“san jose police departments cold cases” 

“psychological test given to prisoners” 

“test to see if you are a serial killer” 

Did this person murder someone? Was this a serial killer? Was the other searcher a cannibal? Did the other user really believe the neighbors were demons? Or were these people just searching for weird things on the Internet? It is impossible to say. As for the murder searches, they were a matter for law enforcement to figure out, and indeed search logs have become an increasingly important component of criminal investigations. 

One thing was certain in the wake of the AOL release: search logs provided an unadulterated look into the details of people’s inner lives, with all the strangeness, embarrassing quirks, and personal anguish those details divulged. And Google owned it all. 

You Have Spy Mail 

It’s April 2004 and Google is in crisis mode. Sergey Brin and Larry Page set up a war room and bring top executives from across the company together to deal with a dangerous development. They aren’t hunting for terrorists this time, but repelling an attack in progress. 

About a month earlier, Google had started to roll out the beta version of Gmail, its email service. It was a big deal for the young company, representing its first product offering beyond search. At the beginning, everything was going smoothly. Then events quickly spiraled out of control. 

Gmail aimed to poach users from established email providers such as Microsoft and Yahoo. To do that, Google shocked everyone by offering one gigabyte of free storage space with every account—an incredible amount of space at the time, considering Microsoft’s Hotmail offered just two megabytes of free storage. Naturally, people rushed to sign up. Some were so eager to get their accounts that Gmail’s prepublic release invites were fetching up to $200 on eBay. 50 “One gigabyte changes everything. You no longer live in terror that somebody will send you a photo, thereby exceeding your two-megabyte limit and making all subsequent messages bounce back to their senders,” wrote New York Times tech columnist David Pogue. “In fact, Google argues that with so much storage, you should get out of the habit of deleting messages.” 51 

The Google service seemed too good to be true, once again upending the laws of economics. Why would a company give away something so valuable? It felt like charity. An example of Internet magic at work. Turned out there was a huge upside for Google. 

The search box was a powerful thing. It allowed Google to peer into people’s lives, habits, and interests. But it only worked as long as users stayed on Google’s site. As soon as they clicked a link, they were gone, and their browsing stream vanished. What did people do after they left Google.com? What websites did they visit? How often? When? What were those websites about? To these questions, Google’s search logs offered dead silence. That’s where Gmail came in. 

Once users logged their Internet browser in to their email account, Google was able to track their every movement on the Internet, even if they used multiple devices. People could even use a rival search engine, and Google could keep a bead on them. Gmail gave Google something else as well. 52 

In return for the “free” gigabyte of email storage, users gave the company permission to read and analyze all their email in the same way that the company analyzed their search streams and to display targeted ads based on content. They also gave Google permission to tie their search history and browsing habits to their email address. 

In this sense, Gmail opened up a whole new dimension of behavior tracking and profiling: it captured personal and business correspondence, private documents, postcards, vacation photos, love letters, shopping receipts, bills, medical records, bank statements, school records, and anything else people routinely sent and received by email. Google argued that Gmail would benefit users, allowing the company to show them relevant ads rather than inundate them with spam. 

Not everyone saw it this way. 

Less than a week after Gmail’s public launch, thirty-one privacy and civil liberties organizations, led by the World Privacy Forum, published an open letter addressed to Sergey Brin and Larry Page asking them to immediately suspend the email service. “Google has proposed scanning the text of all incoming emails for ad placement. The scanning of confidential email violates the implicit trust of an email service provider,” the organizations wrote. “Google could—tomorrow—by choice or by court order, employ its scanning system for law enforcement purposes. We note that in one recent case, the Federal Bureau of Investigation obtained a court order compelling an automobile navigation service to convert its system into a tool for monitoring in-car conversations. How long will it be until law enforcement compels Google into a similar situation?” 53 

The press, which until then had nary a negative thing to say about Google, turned critical. The company got bruised by journalists for its “creepy” scanning of emails. One reporter for Canada’s Maclean’s magazine recounted her experience with using Gmail’s targeted ad system: “I discovered recently just how relevant when I wrote an email to a friend using my Gmail account. My note mentioned a pregnant woman whose husband had an affair. The Google ads didn’t push baby gear and parenting books. Rather, Gmail understood that ‘pregnant’ in this case wasn’t a good thing because it was coupled with the word ‘affair.’ So it offered the services of a private investigator and a marriage therapist.” 54 

Showing ads for spy services to betrayed mothers? It wasn’t a good look for a company that still draped itself in a progressive “Don’t Be Evil” image. 

True to Larry Page’s paranoia about letting the privacy “toothpaste out of the tube,” Google stayed tight lipped about the inner workings of its email scanning program in the face of criticism. But a series of profiling and targeted advertising technology patents filed by the company that year offered a glimpse into how Gmail fit into Google’s multiplatform tracking and profiling system. 55 They revealed that all email communication was subject to analysis and parsed for meaning; names were matched to real identities and addresses using third-party databases as well as contact information stored in a user’s Gmail address book; demographic and psychographic data, including social class, personality type, age, sex, personal income, and marital status were extracted; email attachments were scraped for information; even a person’s US residency status was established. All of this was then cross-referenced and combined with data collected through Google’s search and browsing logs, as well as third-party data providers, and added to a user profile. The patents made it clear that this profiling wasn’t restricted to registered Gmail users but applied to anyone who sent email to a Gmail account. 

Taken together, these technical documents revealed that the company was developing a platform that attempted to track and profile everyone who came in touch with a Google product. It was, in essence, an elaborate system of private surveillance.

There was another quality to it. The language in the patent filings—descriptions of using “psychographic information,” “personality characteristics,” and “education levels” to profile and predict people’s interests—bore eerie resemblance to the early data-driven counterinsurgency initiatives funded by ARPA in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, the agency had experimented with mapping the value systems and social relationships of rebellious tribes and political groups, in the hope of isolating the factors that made them revolt and, ultimately, use that information to build predictive models to stop insurgencies before they happened. The aborted Project Camelot was one example. Another was J. C. R. Licklider and Ithiel de Sola Pool’s 1969 ARPA Cambridge Project, which aimed to develop a suite of computer tools that would allow military researchers to build predictive models using complex data, including factors such as “political participation of various countries,” “membership in associations,” “youth movements,” and “peasant attitudes and behavior.”

The Cambridge Project had been an early attempt at the underlying technology that made prediction and analysis possible. Naturally, Google’s predictive system, which arrived thirty years later, was more advanced and sophisticated than ARPA’s crude first-generation database tools. But it was also very similar. The company wanted to ingest search, browsing history, and email data to build predictive profiles capable of guessing the future interests and behavior of its users. There was only one difference: instead of preventing political insurgencies, Google wanted the data to sell people products and services with targeted ads. One was military, the other commercial. But at their core, both systems were dedicated to profiling and prediction. The type of data plugged into them was irrelevant. 

UC Berkeley law professor Chris Hoofnagle, an expert on information privacy law, argued before the California Senate that the difference between military and commercial profiling was illusory. He compared Google’s email scanning to the surveillance and prediction project at DARPA’s then-active Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, a predictive policing technology that was initially funded by DARPA and handed to the National Security Agency after the September 11 terrorist attacks. 56 

A year after Google launched Gmail, Hoofnagle testified at hearings on email and privacy held by California’s Senate Judiciary Committee. “The prospect that a computer could, en masse, view transactional and content data and draw conclusions was the plan of John Poindexter Total Information Awareness,” he said, referring to President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser who, under President George W. Bush, was put in charge of helping DARPA fight terrorism. 57 “TIA proposed to look at a wide array of personal information and make inferences for the prevention of terrorism or general crime. Congress rejected Poindexter’s plan. Google’s content extraction is different than TIA in that it is designed to pitch advertising rather than catch criminals.” To Hoofnagle, Google’s data mining wasn’t just technically similar to what the government was doing; it was a privatized version of the same thing. He predicted that the information collected by Gmail would eventually be tapped by the US government. It was a no-brainer. “Allowing the extraction of this content from e-mail messages is likely to have profound consequences for privacy. First, if companies can view private messages to pitch advertising, it is a matter of time before law enforcement will seek access to detect criminal conspiracies. All too often in Washington, one hears policy wonks asking, ‘if credit card companies can analyze your data to sell your cereal, why can’t the FBI mine your data for terrorism?’” 58 

The language of the patents underscored Hoofnagle’s criticism that there was little difference between commercial and military technology. It also brought the conversation back to the fears of the 1970s, when computer and networking technology was first becoming commonplace. Back then, there was widespread understanding that computers were machines built for spying: gathering data about users for processing and analysis. It didn’t matter if it was stock market data, weather, traffic conditions, or a person’s purchasing history. 59 

To the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Gmail posed both ethical and legal challenges. 60 The organization believed Google’s interception of private digital communication to be a potential violation of California’s wiretapping laws. The organization called on the state’s attorney general to investigate the company. 

Google’s first political challenge came from an unlikely source: California state senator Liz Figueroa, whose district spanned a huge swath of Silicon Valley and included Google HQ in Mountain View. Disturbed by Google’s email scanning, the senator introduced legislation to prohibit email providers from collecting personally identifying information unless they received explicit consent from all parties in an email conversation. Her office described it as a pioneering privacy law for the Internet age: “First-in-the nation legislation would require Google to obtain the consent of every individual before their e-mail messages are scanned for targeted advertising purposes. 

“Telling people that their most intimate and private e-mail thoughts to doctors, friends, lovers, and family members are just another direct marketing commodity isn’t the way to promote e-commerce,” Senator Figueroa explained, when she announced the bill on April 21, 2004. “At minimum, before someone’s most intimate and private thoughts are converted into a direct marketing opportunity for Google, Google should get everyone’s informed consent.” 61 

The proposed law sent Page and Brin into a panic. Just as the two were preparing to take the company public, they faced legislation that threatened their business model. Getting people’s consent—telling them upfront about the invasive way Google tracked them and their every move—was Page’s nightmare scenario of a public disclosure of the company’s data collection practices; it could trigger a public relations disaster and worse. 

Google executives set up a war room to deal with the growing avalanche of criticism. Brin commanded the effort. 62 He was furious at Google’s critics: they were ignorant; they did not understand the technology; they had no clue about anything. “Bastards, bastards!” he yelled. 63 Page made personal calls to sympathetic tech journalists, explaining that there was no privacy problem and that Google didn’t really spy on users. He also organized a face-to-face meeting with Senator Figueroa and her chief of staff. 64 

“We walk into this room, and it’s myself and two of my staff—my chief of staff and one of my attorneys. And across from us was Larry, Sergey, and their attorney,” recounted the senator. Brin immediately launched into a lengthy explanation of the company’s privacy policies, arguing that Figueroa’s criticisms were baseless. 

“Senator, how would you feel if a robot went into your home and read your diary and read your financial records, read your love letters, read everything, but before leaving the house, it imploded? That’s not violating privacy.” 

“Of course it is,” she replied. 

But Sergey persisted: “No, it isn’t. Nothing’s kept. Nobody knows about it.” [that's called lying through your teeth DC ]

“That robot has read everything. Does that robot know if I’m sad or if I’m feeling fear, or what’s happening?” she answered, still defiant and unwilling to bend. 

Brin looked directly at her and answered cryptically: “Oh, no. That robot knows a lot more than that.” 

When Brin’s attempt to talk the senator down didn’t work, the company brought in a team of high powered lobbyists and PR people to massage the message and restore Google’s righteous image. Leading the pack was Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s smooth and smiley chief public relations strategist who would later serve as President Barack Obama’s deputy chief technology officer. He knew exactly how to neutralize Senator Liz Figueroa: Al Gore. “I mobilized the Big Al,” he later bragged. 65 

After losing the 2000 presidential election to George Bush, Vice President Gore pivoted to a lucrative career as a tech venture capitalist. As part of that pivot, he accepted Google’s offer to be a “virtual board member,” meaning that from time to time he used his power and connections to resolve Google’s political problems. Now, at McLaughlin’s request, Gore summoned the prickly senator to his suites at the Ritz Carlton in downtown San Francisco. There he gave her a stern talking to, lecturing her about algorithms and robotic analysis. “He was incredible,” recounted McLaughlin. “He stood up and was drawing charts and did this long analogy to the throw weight of the ICBM, the Minuteman missile.” 66 

Whatever he did in that room, it worked. Senator Figueroa dropped her opposition, and the first legal challenge to Google’s surveillance business model faded. And at least one journalist rejoiced: “The only population likely not to be delighted by Gmail are those still uncomfortable with those computer generated ads. Those people are free to ignore or even bad-mouth Gmail, but they shouldn’t try to stop Google from offering Gmail to the rest of us,” declared New York Times technology journalist David Pogue in May. “We know a good thing when we see it.” 67 [ No David I do not think you do, and there is no I in we DC ]

A few months later, on August 19, 2004, Google went public. When the bell rang that afternoon to close NASDAQ trading, Google was worth $23 billion. 68 Sergey Brin and Larry Page attained oligarch status in the space of a single workday, while hundreds of their employees became instant multimillionaires, including the company cook. 

But concerns about Google’s business model would continue to haunt the company. Time proved Hoofnagle right. There wasn’t very much difference between Google’s approach and the surveillance technology deployed by the NSA, CIA, and Pentagon. Indeed, sometimes they were identical. 

Minority Report 

October 6, 2014. I’m at the office of UCLA professor Jeffrey Brantingham. It’s warm and sunny, and students lounge on the grass outside his windows. Inside, the two of us lean over his computer screen, inspecting an interactive crime map. He zooms in on Venice Beach. 

“This used to be the heroin capital of LA. A lot of heroin trafficking going on here. You can see how it changes,” he says, toggling between day and night crime patterns for West Los Angeles. “Then, if you look farther afield in Pacific, you say what’s going on with some of these other places? Like in here. This is Playa Vista. Up here, Palms.” 69 

Brantingham, willowy and soft-spoken with a short gray beard and spiky gelled hair, is a professor of anthropology. He is also a cofounder of PredPol Inc., a hot new predictive policing start-up that came out of counterinsurgency research funded by the Pentagon to predict and prevent attacks on American soldiers in Iraq. 70 In 2012, the researchers worked with the Los Angeles Police Department to apply their algorithmic modeling to predicting crime. Thus, PredPol was born. 

The company’s name evokes Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, but the company itself boasts a spectacular success rate: cutting crime by up to 25 percent in at least one city that deployed it. 71 It works by ingesting decades of crime data, combining them with data about the local environment—factors such as the location of liquor stores, schools, highway on-ramps—and then running all the variables through a proprietary algorithm that generates hotspots where criminals are most likely to strike next. 

“It was adapted and modified from something that was predicting earthquakes,” Brantingham explains as we sip coffee. “If you think about L.A. and earthquakes, for any given earthquake that happens, you can actually assign where that comes from in a causal sense quite well. After an earthquake happens on one of these faults, you get aftershocks, which occur nearby to where the main shock was and close in time. 

“Crime is exactly the same,” he continues. “Our environment has lots of built features that are crime generators that are not going anywhere. A great example is a high school. High schools are not going anywhere for the most part. It is a built feature of the environment. And what do high schools have? Lots of young men aged fifteen to seventeen or fifteen to eighteen, and no matter where you go on the planet, young men ages fifteen to seventeen get into trouble. They do. It will always be that way, because of testosterone or girls or whatever it is. It’s our primate heritage.” 

I scratch my head, nodding in agreement. It still doesn’t make much sense to me. Surely, one has to account for the fact that humans have free will. Surely, they would resist being treated like giant slabs of floating lava rock violently rubbing against one another? Weren’t there deeper social and political causes of crime beyond simple infrastructure—things like poverty and drug addiction? On the topic of high schools and kids being kids, shouldn’t there be other ways of dealing with teenage troublemakers than criminalization and concentrated policing? 

Brantingham counters that PredPol isn’t trying to fix society, just help cops prevent crime. “PredPol is not about fighting the root causes of crime,” he says. “PredPol is all about getting that officer the tool to make it harder for that crime to occur, and not about saying we don’t need to fix meth addiction. We do need to fix meth addiction.” In short: someone else has to do the hard work of improving society by dealing with root social and economic causes of crime. PredPol is simply in the business of helping cops more efficiently contain the mess that exists today. 

In 2014, PredPol was one of many companies competing for a fledgling but rapidly expanding market in predictive policing technologies. 72 Big, established companies like IBM, LexisNexis, and Palantir all offered predictive crime products. 73 PredPol, though small, has raked in contracts with police departments across the country: Los Angeles; Orange County in central Florida; Reading, Pennsylvania; Tacoma, Washington. Local newspapers and television stations loved PredPol’s story: the high-tech miracle cure cash-strapped police departments had been waiting for. It enabled law enforcement officers to reduce crime at low cost. With a price tag of $25,000 to $250,000 a year, depending on a city’s population, PredPol seemed like a bargain. 

Predictive policing was young, but already it was criticized by activists and social scientists who saw it as a rebranding of the age-old tactic of racial and economic profiling spiffed up with an objective, data driven sheen. 74 Wealthy areas and individuals never seemed to be targeted for predictive policing, nor did the technique focus on white-collar criminals. Journalists and criminologists blasted PredPol, in particular for making claims that it simply could not back up. 75 

Despite these knocks, PredPol had supporters and backers in Silicon Valley. Its board of directors and advisory board included serious heavy hitters: executives from Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay, as well as a former managing director of In-Q-Tel, the CIA venture capital outfit operating in Silicon Valley. 76 

Back in his office, Brantingham offers little about the company’s ties to these Internet giants. Another PredPol executive informed me that, behind the scenes, Google was one of PredPol’s biggest boosters and collaborators. “Google actually came to us,” Donnie Fowler, PredPol’s director of business development, told me by phone. 77 “This is not the case of a little, tiny company going to a big behemoth like Google and saying that the only way we’ll survive is if we piggyback on you. It is a very mutually beneficial relationship.” 

He bragged that, unlike other companies, PredPol did more than simply license Google’s technology to render the mapping system embedded in its product, but also worked with Google to develop customized functionality, including “building additional bells and whistles and even additional tools for law enforcement.” He was straightforward about why Google was so proactive about working with his company. “Their last frontier is to sell their technology to governments. They’ve done consumers. They’ve done business.” And PredPol was a perfect sales prop—a powerful example of police departments leveraging Google technology to keep people safe. “One of those Google guys told me: ‘You complete us,’” Fowler said with an air of satisfaction. 

Cops? Government contractors? Data-driven counterinsurgency technology? Crime prediction powered by a ubiquitous Internet platform? Was he talking about Google? Or was it one of those Cold War cybernetic counterinsurgency systems the Pentagon dreamed about for so long? Was there a difference? 

I shake Brantingham’s hand and leave his office. As I walk across UCLA’s campus to my car, I think about our conversation. Based on what I have already found investigating Silicon Valley’s private surveillance business, I am not that surprised to learn that Google is in bed with a crime prediction startup spun off from counterinsurgency research. 

The Internet has come a long way since Larry Page and Sergey Brin converted Google from a Stanford PhD project to a multi-billion-dollar company. But in a lot of ways it hasn’t changed much from its ARPANET days. It’s just gotten more powerful. 

Development on the consumer front was the most dramatic. The commercial Internet we know today formed in the early 1990s, when the National Science Foundation privatized the NSFNET. Within the space of two decades, the network grew from a simple data and telecommunications medium into a vast global internetwork of computers, smartphones, apps, fiber-optic cables, cellular networks, and warehouse data centers so large they could fit entire Manhattan neighborhoods inside them. Today, the Internet surrounds us. It mediates modern life. We read books and newspapers on the Internet; bank, shop, and play video games on the Internet. We talk on the phone, attend college, find jobs, flirt, work, listen to music and watch movies, make dentist appointments, and get psychological counseling on the Internet. Air conditioners, phones, watches, pet food dispensers, baby monitors, cars, refrigerators, televisions, light bulbs—they all connect to the Internet, too. The world’s poorest places may lack plumbing and electricity, but they, sure enough, have access to the Internet. 

The Internet is like a giant, unseen blob that engulfs the modern world. There is no escape, and, as Page and Brin so astutely understood when they launched Google, everything that people do online leaves a trail of data. If saved and used correctly, these traces make up a gold mine of information full of insights into people on a personal level as well as a valuable read on macr0 cultural, economic, and political trends. 

Google was the first Internet company to fully leverage this insight and build a business on the data people leave behind. But it wasn’t alone for long. Something in technology pushed other companies in the same direction. It happened just about everywhere, from the smallest app to the most sprawling platform. [they have become like the bankers, making money from another's sweat. they are nothing more than thieving liars, DC ] 

Netflix monitored the films people watched to suggest other films but also to guide the licensing of content and the production of new shows. 78 

Angry Birds, the game out of Finland that went viral, grabbed data from people’s smartphones to build profiles, with data points like age, gender, household income, marital status, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and even political alignment, and to transmit them to third party targeted advertising companies. 79 

Executives at Pandora, the music streaming service, built a new revenue stream by profiling their seventy-three million listeners, grabbing their political beliefs, ethnicity, income, and even parenting status, then selling the info to advertisers and political campaigns. 80 

Apple mined data on people’s devices—photos, emails, text messages, and locations—to help organize information and anticipate users’ needs. In its promotional materials, it touted this as a kind of digital personal assistant that could “make proactive suggestions for where you’re likely to go.” 

Pierre Omidyar’s eBay, the world’s biggest online auction site, deployed specialized software that monitored user data and matched them with information available online to unmask fraudulent sellers. 81 

Jeff Bezos dreamed of building his online retailer Amazon into the “everything store,” a global sales platform that would anticipate users’ every need and desire and deliver products without being asked. 82 

To do that, Amazon deployed a system for monitoring and profiling. It recorded people’s shopping habits, their movie preferences, the books they were interested in, how fast they read books on their Kindles, and the highlights and margin notes they made. It also monitored its warehouse workers, tracking their movements and timing their performance. 83 

Amazon requires incredible processing power to run such a massive data business, a need that spawned a lucrative side business of renting out space on its massive servers to other companies. Today, the company is not just the world’s biggest retailer but also the world’s biggest Internet hosting company, bringing in $10 billion a year from storing other firms’ data. 84 

Facebook, which started out as a “hot or not” rating game at Harvard, grew into a global social media platform powered by a Google-like targeted advertising model. The company gobbled up everything its users did: posts, texts, photos, videos, likes and dislikes, friend requests accepted and rejected, family connections, marriages, divorces, locations, political views, and even deleted posts that had never been published. All of it was fed into Facebook’s secret profiling algorithm that turned the details of private lives into private commodities. The company’s ability to link people’s opinions, interests, and group and community affiliations made it a favorite of advertising and marketing firms of all kinds. 

Political campaigns in particular loved the direct access Facebook offered. Instead of blanketing airwaves with a single political ad, they could use detailed behavioral profiles to micro-target their messaging, showing ads that appealed specifically to individuals and the issues they held dear. Facebook even allowed campaigns to upload lists of potential voters and supporters directly into the company’s data system, and then use those people’s social networks to extrapolate other people who might be supportive of a candidate. 85 It was a powerful and profitable tool. A decade after Mark Zuckerberg transfigured the company from a Harvard project, 1.28 billion people worldwide used the platform daily, and Facebook minted $62 in revenue for every one of its users in America. 86 

Uber, the Internet taxi company, deployed data to evade government regulation and oversight in support of its aggressive expansion into cities where it operated illegally. To do this, the company developed a special tool that analyzed user credit card information, phone numbers, locations and movements, and the way that users used the app to identify whether or not they were police officers or government officials who might be hailing an Uber only to ticket drivers or impound their cars. If the profile was a match, these users were silently blacklisted from the app. 87 

Uber, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Tinder, Apple, Lyft, Four-Square, Airbnb, Spotify, Instagram, Twitter, Angry Birds. If you zoom out and look at the bigger picture, you can see that, taken together, these companies have turned our computers and phones into bugs that are plugged in to a vast corporate-owned surveillance network. Where we go, what we do, what we talk about, who we talk to, and who we see— everything is recorded and, at some point, leveraged for value. 

Google, Apple, and Facebook know when a woman visits an abortion clinic, even if she tells no one else: the GPS coordinates on the phone don’t lie. One-night stands and extramarital affairs are a cinch to figure out: two smartphones that never met before suddenly cross paths in a bar and then make their way to an apartment across town, stay together overnight, and part in the morning. They know us intimately, even the things that we hide from those closest to us. And, as Uber’s Greyball program so clearly shows, no one escapes—not even the police. 

In our modern Internet ecosystem, this kind of private surveillance is the norm. It is as unnoticed and unremarkable as the air we breathe. But even in this advanced data-hungry environment, in terms of sheer scope and ubiquity, Google reigns supreme. 

As the Internet expanded, Google grew along with it. Flush with cash, Google went on a dizzying shopping spree. It bought companies and start-ups, absorbing them into its burgeoning platform. It went beyond search and email, broadened into word processing, databases, blogging, social media networks, cloud hosting, mobile platforms, browsers, navigation aids, cloud-based laptops, and a whole range of office and productivity applications. It could be hard to keep track of them all: Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Maps, Android, Google Play, Google Cloud, YouTube, Google Translate, Google Hangouts, Google Chrome, Google+, Google Sites, Google Developer, Google Voice, Google Analytics, Android TV. It blasted beyond pure Internet services and delved into fiber-optic telecommunication systems, tablets, laptops, home security cameras, self-driving cars, shopping delivery, robots, electric power plants, life extension technology, cyber security, and biotech. The company even launched a powerful in-house investment bank that now rivals Wall Street companies, investing money in everything from Uber to obscure agricultural crop monitoring start-ups, ambitious human DNA sequencing companies like 23andME, and a secretive life extension research center called Calico. 88 

No matter what service it deployed or what market it entered, surveillance and prediction were cooked into the business. The data flowing through Google’s system are staggering. By the end of 2016, Google’s Android was installed on 82 percent of all new smartphones sold around the world, with over 1.5 billion Android users globally. 89 At the same time, Google handled billions of searches and YouTube plays daily and had a billion active Gmail users, which meant it had access to most of the world’s emails. 90 Some analysts estimate that 25 percent of all Internet traffic in North America goes through Google servers. 91 The company isn’t just connected to the Internet, it is the Internet. 

Google has pioneered a whole new type of business transaction. Instead of paying for Google’s services with money, people pay with their data. And the services it offers to consumers are just the lures —used to grab people’s data and dominate their attention, attention that is contracted out to advertisers. Google has used data to grow its empire. By 2017, it had $90 billion in revenues and $20 billion in profits, with seventy-two thousand full-time employees working out of seventy offices in more than forty countries. 92 It had a market capitalization of $593 billion, making it the second-most-valuable public company in the world—second only to Apple, another Silicon Valley giant. 93 

Meanwhile, other Internet companies depend on Google for survival. Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Lyft, and Uber—all have built multi-billion-dollar businesses on top of Google’s ubiquitous mobile operating system. As the gatekeeper, Google benefits from their success as well. The more people use their mobile devices, the more data it gets on them. 

What does Google know? What can it guess? Well, it seems just about everything. “One of the things that eventually happens… is that we don’t need you to type at all,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, said in a moment of candor in 2010. “Because we know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less guess what you’re thinking about.” 94 He later added, “One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.” 

It is a scary thought, considering Google is no longer a cute start-up but a powerful global corporation with its own political agenda and a mission to maximize profits for shareholders. Imagine if Philip Morris, Goldman Sachs, or a military contractor like Lockheed Martin had this kind of access.

Google Government 

Not long after Sergey Brin and Larry Page incorporated Google, they began to see their mission in bigger terms. They weren’t just building a search engine or a targeted advertising business. They were organizing the world’s information to make it accessible and useful for everyone. It was a vision that also encompassed the Pentagon. 

Even as Google grew to dominate the consumer Internet, a second side of the company emerged, one that rarely got much notice: Google the government contractor. As it turns out, the same platforms and services that Google deploys to monitor people’s lives and grab their data could be put to use running huge swaths of the US government, including the military, spy agencies, police departments, and schools. The key to this transformation was a small start-up now known as Google Earth. 

In 2003, a San Francisco company called Keyhole Incorporated was on the ropes. Named like the CIA’s secret 1960s “Keyhole” spy satellite program, the company had been launched two years earlier as a spinoff from a video game outfit. Its CEO, John Hanke, hailed from Texas and had worked for a time in the US Embassy in Myanmar. He told journalists that the inspiration for his company came from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a cult sci-fi novel in which the hero taps into a program created by the “Central Intelligence Corporation” called Planet Earth, a virtual reality construct designed to “keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns—all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.” 95 

Life would imitate art. 96 

Keyhole derived from video game technology but deployed it in the real world, creating a program that stitched satellite images and aerial photographs into seamless three-dimensional computer models of the earth that could be explored as if they were in a virtual reality game world. It was a groundbreaking product that allowed anyone with an Internet connection to virtually fly over anywhere in the world. The only problem was Keyhole’s timing; it was a bit off. It launched just as the dot-com bubble blew up in Silicon Valley’s face. Funding dried up, and Keyhole found itself struggling to survive. 97 Luckily, the company was saved just in time by the very entity that inspired it: the Central Intelligence Agency. 

In 1999, at the peak of the dot-com boom, the CIA had launched In-Q-Tel, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund whose mission was to invest in start-ups that aligned with the agency’s intelligence needs. 98 Keyhole seemed a perfect fit. 99 

The CIA poured an unknown amount of money into Keyhole; the exact number remains classified. The investment was finalized in early 2003, and it was made in partnership with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, a major intelligence organization with 14,500 employees and a $5 billion budget whose job was to deliver satellite intelligence to the CIA and the Pentagon. Known by its alphabet-soup acronym “NGA,” the spy agency’s motto was: “Know the Earth… Show the Way… Understand the World.” 100 

The CIA and NGA were not just investors; they were also clients, and they involved themselves in customizing Keyhole’s virtual map product to meet their own needs. 101 Months after In-Q-Tel’s investment, Keyhole software was already integrated into operational service and deployed to support American troops during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the shock-and-awe campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein. 102 Intelligence officials were impressed with the “video game-like” simplicity of its virtual maps. They also appreciated the ability to layer visual information over other intelligence. 103 The possibilities were limited only by what contextual data could be fed and grafted onto a map: troop movements, weapons caches, real-time weather and ocean conditions, intercepted emails and phone call intel, cell phone locations. Keyhole gave an intelligence analyst, a commander in the field, or an air force pilot up in the air the kind of capability that we now take for granted: using digital mapping services on our computers and mobile phones to look up restaurants, cafes, museums, traffic conditions, and subway routes. “We could do these mashups and expose existing legacy data sources in a matter of hours, rather than weeks, months, or years,” an NGA official gushed a few years later. 104 

Military commanders weren’t the only ones who liked Keyhole. So did Sergey Brin. He liked it so much he insisted on personally demo-ing the app for Google executives. In an account published in Wired, he barged in on a company meeting, punched in the address of every person present, and used the program to virtually fly over their homes. 105 

In 2004, the same year Google went public, Brin and Page bought the company outright, CIA investors and all. 106 They then absorbed the company into Google’s growing Internet applications platform. Keyhole was reborn as Google Earth. 

The purchase of Keyhole was a major milestone for Google, marking the moment the company stopped being a purely consumer-facing Internet company and began integrating with the US government. When Google bought Keyhole, it also acquired an In-Q-Tel executive named Rob Painter, who came with deep connections to the world of intelligence and military contracting, including US Special Operations, the CIA, and major defense firms like Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin. 107 At Google, Painter was planted in a new dedicated sales and lobbying division called Google Federal, located in Reston, Virginia, a short drive from the CIA’s headquarters in Langley. His job at Google was to help the company grab a slice of the lucrative military-intelligence contracting market. Or, as Painter described in contractor-bureaucratese, “evangelizing and implementing Google Enterprise solutions for a host of users across the Intelligence and Defense Communities.” 

Google had closed a few previous deals with intelligence agencies. In 2003, it scored a $2.1 million contract to outfit the NSA with a customized search solution that could scan and recognize millions of documents in twenty-four languages, including on-call tech support in case anything went wrong. In 2004, as it was dealing with the fallout over Gmail email scanning, Google landed a search contract with the CIA. The value of the deal isn’t known, but the CIA did ask Google’s permission to customize the CIA’s internal Google search page by placing the CIA’s seal in one of the Google Os. “I told our sales rep to give them the okay if they promised not to tell anyone. I didn’t want it spooking privacy advocates,” Douglas Edwards wrote in I’m Feeling Lucky. 108 Deals like these picked up pace and increased in scope after Google’s Keyhole acquisition. 

In 2006, Painter’s Google Federal went on a hiring spree, snapping up managers and salespeople from the army, air force, CIA, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin. 109 It beefed up its lobbying muscle and assembled a team of Democratic and Republican operatives. Google even grabbed ARPA’s old show pony: Vint Cerf, who, as Google’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist, served as a symbolic bridge between Google and the military. 

While Google’s public relations team did its best to keep the company wrapped in a false aura of geeky altruism, company executives pursued an aggressive strategy to become the Lockheed Martin of the Internet Age. 110 “We’re functionally more than tripling the team each year,” Painter said in 2008. 111 It was true. With insiders plying their trade, Google’s expansion into the world of military and intelligence contracting took off. 

In 2007, it partnered with Lockheed Martin to design a visual intelligence system for the NGA that displayed US military bases in Iraq and marked out Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad— important information for a region that had experienced a bloody sectarian insurgency and ethnic cleansing campaign between the two groups. 112 

In 2008, Google won a contract to run the servers and search technology that powered the CIA’s Intellipedia, an intelligence database modeled after Wikipedia that was collaboratively edited by the NSA, CIA, FBI, and other federal agencies. 113 Not long after that, Google contracted with the US Army to equip fifty thousand soldiers with a customized suite of mobile Google services. 114 

In 2010, as a sign of just how deeply Google had integrated with US intelligence agencies, it won a no-bid exclusive $27 million contract to provide the NGA with “geospatial visualization services,” effectively making the Internet giant the “eyes” of America’s defense and intelligence apparatus. Competitors criticized the NGA for not opening the contract to the customary bidding process, but the agency defended its decision, saying it had no choice: it had spent years working with Google on secret and top-secret programs to build Google Earth technology according to its needs and could not go with any other company. 115 

Google has been tight lipped about the details and scope of its contracting business. It does not list this revenue in a separate column in quarterly earnings reports to investors, nor does it provide the sum to reporters. But an analysis of the federal contracting database maintained by the US government, combined with information gleaned from Freedom of Information Act requests and published periodic reports on the company’s military work, reveals that Google has been doing brisk business selling Google Search, Google Earth, and Google Enterprise (now known as G Suite) products to just about every major military and intelligence agency: navy, army, air force, Coast Guard, DARPA, NSA, FBI, DEA, CIA, NGA, and the State Department. 116 

Sometimes Google sells directly to the government, but it also works with established contractors like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation), a California-based intelligence mega-contractor that has so many former NSA employees working for it that it is known in the business as “NSA West.” 117 

Google’s entry into this market makes sense. By the time Google Federal went online in 2006, the Pentagon was spending the bulk of its budget on private contractors. That year, of the $60 billion US intelligence budget, 70 percent, or $42 billion, went to corporations. That means that, although the government pays the bill, the actual work is done by Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Bechtel, Booz Allen Hamilton, and other powerful contractors. 118 And this isn’t just in the defense sector. By 2017, the federal government was spending $90 billion a year on information technology. 119 It’s a huge market—one in which Google seeks to maintain a strong presence. And its success has been all but guaranteed. Its products are the best in the business. 120 

A sign of how vital Google has become to the US government: in 2010, following a disastrous intrusion into its system by what the company believes was a group of Chinese government hackers, Google entered into a secretive agreement with the National Security Agency. 121 “According to officials who were privy to the details of Google’s arrangements with the NSA, the company agreed to provide information about traffic on its networks in exchange for intelligence from the NSA about what it knew of foreign hackers,” wrote defense reporter Shane Harris in @War, a history of warfare. “It was a quid pro quo, information for information. And from the NSA’s perspective, information in exchange for protection.” 122 

This made perfect sense. Google servers supplied critical services to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department, just to name a few. It was part of the military family and essential to American society. It needed to be protected, too. 

Google didn’t just work with intelligence and military agencies but also sought to penetrate every level of society, including civilian federal agencies, cities, states, local police departments, emergency responders, hospitals, public schools, and all sorts of companies and nonprofits. In 2011, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that researches weather and the environment, switched over to Google. 123 

In 2014, the city of Boston deployed Google to run the information infrastructure for its eighty thousand employees—from police officers to teachers—and even migrated its old emails to the Google cloud. 124 The Forest Service and the Federal Highway Administration use Google Earth and Gmail. 

In 2016, New York City tapped Google to install and run free Wi-Fi stations across the city. 125 California, Nevada, and Iowa, meanwhile, depend on Google for cloud computing platforms that predict and catch welfare fraud. 126 Meanwhile, Google mediates the education of more than half of America’s public school students. 127 

“What we really do is allow you to aggregate, collaborate and enable,” explained Scott Ciabattari, a Google Federal sales rep, during a 2013 government contracting conference in Laramie, Wyoming. He was pitching a room full of civil servants, telling them that Google was all about getting them— intelligence analysts, commanders, government managers, and police officers—access to the right information at the right time. 128 He ran through a few examples: tracking flu outbreaks, monitoring floods and wildfires, safely serving criminal warrants, integrating surveillance cameras and face recognition systems, and even helping police officers respond to school shootings. “We are starting to see, unfortunately, with some of the incidents that happen with schools, the ability to do a floor plan,” he said. “We are getting this request more and more. ‘Can you help us publish all the floorplans for our school district. If there is a shooting disaster, God forbid, we want to know where things are.’ Having that ability on a smart phone. Being able to see that information quickly at the right time saves lives.” A few months after this presentation, Ciabattari met with Oakland officials to discuss how Google could help the California city build its police surveillance center. 

This mixing of military, police, government, public education, business, and consumer-facing systems —all funneled through Google—continues to raise alarms. Lawyers fret over whether Gmail violates attorney-client privilege. 129 Parents wonder what Google does with the information it collects on their kids at school. What does Google do with the data that flow through its system? Is all of it fed into Google’s big corporate surveillance pot? What are Google’s limits and restrictions? Are there any? In response to these questions, Google offers only vague and conflicting answers. 130 

Of course, this concern isn’t restricted to Google alone. Under the hood of most other Internet companies we use every day are vast systems of private surveillance that, in one way or another, work with and empower the state. 

eBay built up an internal police division headed by veterans of the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Department of Justice. It is staffed by over a thousand private investigators, who work closely with intelligence and law enforcement agencies in every country where it operates. 131 The company runs seminars and training sessions and offers travel junkets to cops around the world. 132 eBay is proud of its relationship with law enforcement and boasts that its efforts have led to the arrests of three thousand people around the world—roughly three per day since the division started. 133 

Amazon runs cloud computing and storage services for the CIA. 134 The initial contract, signed in 2013, was worth $600 million and was later expanded to include the NSA and a dozen other US intelligence agencies. 135 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos used his wealth to launch Blue Origin, a missile company that partners with Lockheed Martin and Boeing. 136 Blue Origin is a direct competitor of SpaceX, a space company started by another Internet mogul: PayPal co-founder Elon Musk.

Meanwhile, another PayPal founder, Peter Thiel, spun off PayPal’s sophisticated fraud-detection algorithm into Palantir Technologies, a major military contractor that provides sophisticated data-mining services for the NSA and CIA. 137 

Facebook, too, is cozy with the military. It poached former DARPA head Regina Dugan to run its secretive “Building 8” research division, which is involved in everything from artificial intelligence to drone-based wireless Internet networks. Facebook is betting big on virtual reality as the user interface of the future. The Pentagon is, too. According to reports, Facebook’s Oculus virtual reality headset has already been integrated into DARPA’s Plan X, a $110 million project to build an immersive, fully virtual reality environment to fight cyberwars. 138 It sounds like something straight out of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and it seems to work, too. In 2016, DARPA announced that Plan X would be transitioned to operational use by the Pentagon’s Cyber Command within a year. 139 

On a higher level, there is no real difference between Google’s relationship with the US government and that of these other Internet companies. It is just a matter of degree. The sheer breadth and scope of Google’s technology make it a perfect stand-in for the rest of the commercial Internet ecosystem. 

Indeed, Google’s size and ambition make it more than a simple contractor. It is frequently an equal partner that works side by side with government agencies, using its resources and commercial dominance to bring companies with heavy military funding to market. In 2008, it launched a private spy satellite called GeoEye-1 in partnership with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. 140 It bought Boston Dynamics, a DARPA-seeded robotics company that made experimental robotic pack mules for the military, only to sell it off after the Pentagon determined it would not be putting these robots into active use. 141 

It has invested $100 million in CrowdStrike, a major military and intelligence cyber defense contractor that, among other things, led the investigation into the alleged 2016 Russian government hacks of the Democratic National Committee. 142 And it also runs JigSaw, a hybrid think tank–technology incubator aimed at leveraging Internet technology to solve thorny foreign policy problems, everything from terrorism to censorship and cyber warfare. 143 

Founded in 2010 by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, a twenty-nine-year-old State Department whiz kid who served under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, JigSaw has launched multiple projects with foreign policy and national security implications. 144 It ran polling for the US government to help war-torn Somalia draft a new constitution, developed tools to track global arms sales, and worked with a start-up funded by the State Department to help people in Iran and China route around Internet censorship. 145 

It also built a platform to combat online terrorist recruitment and radicalization, which worked by identifying Google users interested in Islamic extremist topics and diverting them to State Department web pages and videos developed to dissuade people from taking that path. 146 Google calls this the “Redirect Method,” a part of Cohen’s larger idea of using Internet platforms to wage “digital counterinsurgency.” 147 And, in 2012, as the civil war in Syria intensified and American support for rebel forces there increased, JigSaw brainstormed ways it could help push Bashar al-Assad from power. 

Among them: a tool that visually maps high-level defections from Assad’s government, which Cohen wanted to beam into Syria as propaganda to give “confidence to the opposition.” “I’ve attached a few visuals that show what the tool will look like,” Cohen wrote to several top aides of Hillary Clinton, who was then secretary of state. “Please keep this very close hold and let me know if there is anything else you think we need to account for or think about before we launch.” 148 As leaked emails show, Secretary Clinton was intrigued, telling her aides to print out Cohen’s mockup of the application so she could look at it herself. 149 

JigSaw seemed to blur the line between public and corporate diplomacy, and at least one former State Department official accused it of fomenting regime change in the Middle East. 150 “Google is getting [White House] and State Dept. support & air cover. In reality, they are doing things the CIA cannot do,” wrote Fred Burton, a Stratfor executive and former intelligence agent of the Diplomatic Security Service, the armed security branch of the State Department. 151 

But Google rejected the claims of its critics. “We’re not engaged in regime change,” Eric Schmidt told Wired. 152 “We don’t do that stuff. But if it turns out that empowering citizens with smartphones and information causes changes in their country… you know, that’s probably a good thing, don’t you think?” 104S

Mediating Everything and Everyone 

JigSaw’s work with the State Department has raised eyebrows, but its function is a mere taste of the future if Google gets its way. As the company makes new deals with the NSA and continues its merger with the US security apparatus, its founders see it playing an even greater role in global society. 

“The societal goal is our primary goal. We’ve always tried to say that with Google. Some of the most fundamental questions which people are not thinking about, there’s the question of how do we organize people, how do we motivate people. It’s a really interesting problem, how do we organize our democracies?” ruminated Larry Page during a rare interview in 2014 with the Financial Times. He looked a hundred years into the future and saw Google at the center of progress. “We could probably solve a lot of the issues we have as humans.” 153 

Spend time listening to and reading the words of Google executives, and you quickly realize they see no hard line separating government and Google. They look into the future and see Internet companies morphing into operating systems for society. To them, the world is too big, and moves too quickly, for traditional governments to keep up. 154 The world needs the help of Google to lead the way, to provide ideas, investment, and technical knowledge. And, anyway, there is no stopping the spread of technology. 155 Transportation, entertainment, power plants and power grids, police departments, jobs, public transportation, health care, agriculture, housing, elections and political systems, war, and even space exploration—it is all plugged into the Internet, and companies like Google can’t help but be at the center. There is no escape. [classic fascism/nazism DC ]

Some people at Google talk about building a new city from the “Internet up,” using Google’s data architecture as the foundation, unencumbered by government regulations that restrict innovation and progress. 156 This brave new world, wired thick with Google biosensors and blinking with nonstop data flows, is really just the old cyber-libertarian dream world as first seen in the Whole Earth Catalog and Richard Brautigan’s utopian poetry, a world where “mammals and computers / live together in mutually / programming harmony… a cybernetic forest… where deer stroll peacefully / past computers… and all watched over by machines of loving grace.” Except in Google’s version of this future, the machines of loving grace aren’t a benevolent abstraction but a powerful global corporation. 157 

The parallel does not inspire confidence. Back in the 1960s, many of Brand’s New Communalists built micro-communities based on cybernetic ideas, believing that flat hierarchies, social transparency, and radical interconnectedness between individuals would abolish exploitation, hierarchy, and power. In the end, the attempt to replace politics with technology was the fatal flaw: without organized protection for the weak, these would-be utopias devolved into cults controlled by charismatic and dominant leaders who ruled their fiefdoms through bullying and intimidation. “There was constantly a background of fear in the house—like a virus running in the background. Like spyware. You know it’s there, but you don’t know how to get rid of it,” recalled a member of a New Mexico commune that had descended into a nightmare world of sexual abuse and exploitation. 

Spyware running in the background. 

It is a curious choice of words to explain what it felt like to live in a 1970s cybernetic utopia gone bad. It is also an accurate description of the world Google and the Internet have made today.

NEXT

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/08/part-4-surveillance-valley-secret.html

Snowden's Arms Race

footnotes

Chapter 5 

1. The story of Sergey Brin’s search for terrorists in Google’s logs comes from I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, an amazing insider account by former Google employee Douglas Edwards. All direct quotes of Edwards in this chapter come from his book. 

2. Vivian Marino, “Searching the Web, Searching the Mind,” New York Times, December 23, 2001. 

3. Google engineer Amit Patel, quoted in Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 46. 

4. Douglas Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), chap. 16. 

5. President George W. Bush, “Remarks on Improving Counterterrorism Intelligence,” the American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, February 14, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=62559.

6. “Guantanamo: Facts and Figures,” Human Rights Watch, March 30, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/videophotos/interactive/2017/03/30/guantanamo-facts-and-figures. 

7. Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky, chaps. 16, 24. 

8. Quoted in John Cassidy, Dot.Con (New York: Perfect Bound/HarperCollins, 2009), 44. 

9. Sean Hollister, “Welcome to Googletown,” The Verge, February 26, 2014, https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/26/5444030/company-townhow-google-is-taking-over-mountain-view. 

10. Richard L. Brand, The Google Guys: Inside the Brilliant Minds of Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin (New York: Portfolio, 2011). 

11. Marc Seifer, Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (New York: Citadel, 1996). 

12. John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (New York: Portfolio, 2005). 

13. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) went through several minor name changes over the years. The last one took place in 1996, when it gained a D and became the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 

14. Aside from founding the university, Stanford’s biggest mark on history was Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific, a lawsuit that his railroad took to the Supreme Court and that yielded the infamous decision endowing corporations—legal fictions granted by the state—with all the Constitutional rights of actual people. 

15. Michael S. Malone, The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley (New York: Doubleday, 1985). 

16. Frederick Terman, the influential head of Stanford’s engineering department, was the driving force behind the university’s engineering might. He had led MIT’s Radio Research Laboratory during World War II and stewed in the same rarified corporate-military-academic brew that schooled and brought up many of the personalities who would later head over to ARPA and create the Internet and the modern computer industry. At Stanford, Terman worked hard to re-create that world. Thanks to him, the university carved out the Stanford Industrial Park from hundreds of adjacent acres and invited computer companies to set up shop. 

17. Wolfgang Saxon, “William B. Shockley, 79, Creator of Transistor and Theory on Race,” New York Times, August 14, 1989. 

18. The first ARPANET segment that went online in 1969 connected Stanford University to UCLA. 

19. Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). 

20. Scott J. Simon, “Information Architecture for Digital Libraries,” First Monday 13, no. 12 (December 2008); Digital Libraries Initiative, homepage, National Science Foundation, 1999, http://web.archive.org/web/20000815090028/http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/; Terry Winograd’s Stanford homepage, 1998, http://web.archive.org/web/19981206032336/http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/~winograd/. 

21. Stanford University Digital Libraries Project, homepage, Stanford University, 1998, http://web.archive.org/web/19980124140522/http://www-diglib.stanford.edu/diglib/; Human Computer Interaction Group, homepage, Stanford University, 1998, http://web.archive.org/web/19980126230453/http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/html/diglibbodyresearch.html. 

22. Other universities that took part in the Digital Libraries Initiative include UCLA, University of California at Santa Barbara, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and University of Michigan. At Berkeley, researchers searched and analyzed photographs. Carnegie Mellon University set up the Informedia Project, where researchers focused on getting computers to automatically understand and transcribe video content, with the goal of analyzing video broadcasts on the fly—all of which had uses in education and health care but also “defense intelligence,” according to Carnegie Mellon (Informedia Project homepage, Carnegie Mellon University, http://wayback.archive.org/web/20040602113005/http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu:80/). One such digital library project, which was funded in part by the navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems, sought to create searchable databases of foreign media sources (Multilingual Informedia, Carnegie Mellon University, http://wayback.archive.org/web/20040603071038/http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu:80/mli/index.html). 

23. “Lycos was created in May 1994 by CMU’s Dr. Michael Mauldin, working under a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Like its predecessors, Lycos deployed a spiderlike crawler to index the Web, but it used more sophisticated mathematical algorithms to determine the meaning of a page and answer user queries.” Battelle, The Search, 53. 

24. David Hart, “On the Origins of Google,” National Science Foundation, August 17, 2004, https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660. 

25. “Page was not a social animal—those who interacted with him often wondered if there were a dash of Asperger’s in the mix—and he could unnerve people by simply not talking,” writes Google biographer Steve Levy in In the Plex, 11. 

26. Interestingly, multiuser dungeon games, or MUDs, emerged, somewhat unintentionally, from the ARPANET when an ARPA contractor named Will Crowther developed them in his off time while going through a divorce. Dennis G. Jerz, “Somewhere Nearby Is Colossal Cave,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 1, no. 2 (2007). 

27. Quoted in Isaacson, The Innovators, 452. 

28. Brenna McBride, “The Ultimate Search,” College Park Magazine (University of Maryland), Spring 2000. 

29. Sergey Brin’s Home Page, Stanford University, accessed June 11, 2004, http://www-db.stanford.edu:80/~sergey/. 

30. Battelle, The Search, 73. 

31. John Ince, “The Lost Google Tapes,” January 2000, quoted in Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators, chap. 11. 

32. “It’s all recursive. It’s all a big circle,” Larry Page later explained at a computer forum a few years after launching Google. “Navigating Cyberspace,” PC forum held in Scottsdale, AZ, 2001, quoted in Steven Levy’s In the Plex, 21. 

33. John Battelle, “The Birth of Google,” Wired, August 1, 2005. 

34. Ince, “The Lost Google Tapes,” quoted in Isaacson, The Innovators, chap. 11. 

35. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, “The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web,” Stanford University InfoLab, January 29, 1998, http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf. 

36. Steering Committee on the Changing Nature of Telecommunications/Information Infrastructure, National Research Council, The Changing Nature of Telecommunications/Information Infrastructure (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1995). 

37. David A. Vise, The Google Story (New York: Delacorte Press, 2005). 

38. Battelle, The Search, 62.

39. Levy, In the Plex, 47. 

40. Ibid., 48. 

41. Alex Chitu, “Google in 2000,” Google System, December 28, 2007, https://googlesystem.blogspot.ru/2007/12/google-in2000.html#gsc.tab=0. 

42. Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky, chap. 11. 

43. “Google’s Revenue Worldwide from 2002 to 2016 (in Billion U.S. Dollars),” Statista, April 11, 2017, https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-global-revenue/. 

44. “Google Advertising Revenue, Billions of Dollars,” Vox, accessed July 6, 2017, https://apps.voxmedia.com/at/vox-google-advertisingrevenue/. 

45. Sergey Brin and Larry Page also understood that Google was going to change—and in fact needed to change—people’s expectations of privacy. As Page told Levy: “There’s going to be large changes in the world because of all this stuff.… People will have to think before when they publish something online, ‘This might be here forever associated with me.’ Because Google exists.” Levy, In the Plex, 173. 

46. Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky, chap. 24, “To Larry the risks were too high…” 

47. Ibid., chap. 24. 

48. David A. Vise, “Google to Buy 5% of AOL for $1 Billion,” Washington Post, December 17, 2005.

49. Michael Barbaro and Tom Zeller Jr., “A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749,” New York Times, August 9, 2006. 

50. “Gmail Invites Auctioned on eBay,” Geek.com, March 5, 2004, https://www.geek.com/news/gmail-invites-auctioned-on-ebay-556690/. 

51. David Pogue, “State of the Art; Google Mail: Virtue Lies in the In-Box,” New York Times, May 13, 2004. 

52. Initially, to placate privacy fears, Google said that it would not combine users’ search history with their email data, but the company backtracked on its promise. Today, all Google data—from email, search, and other services—are combined into one profile. Cecilia Kang, “Google Tracks Consumers’ Online Activities across Products, and Users Can’t Opt Out,” Washington Post, January 24, 2012. 

53. “Thirty-One Privacy and Civil Liberties Organizations Urge Google to Suspend Gmail,” Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, April 6, 2004, updated April 19, 2004, https://www.privacyrights.org/blog/thirty-one-privacy-and-civil-liberties-organizations-urge-google-suspend-gmail. 

54. Sarah Elton, “Got a Date Friday? Google Knows,” Maclean’s 119, no. 34 (2006): 56. 

55. Krishna Bharat, Stephen Lawrence, Mehran Sahami, and Amit Singhal, “Serving Advertisements Using User Request Information and User Information,” EP1634206 A4, patent application, Google Inc., June 1, 2004, https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf? docId=WO2004111771; Jeffrey Dean, Georges Harik, and Paul Buchheit, “Serving Advertisements Using Information Associated with Email,” US20040059712 A1, patent application, Google Inc., June 2, 2003, https://www.google.com/patents/US20040059712. 

56. “Testimony of Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Director, Electronic Privacy Information Center West Coast Office, Privacy Risks of E-mail Scanning,” California Senate Judiciary Committee, March 15, 2005, http://web.archive.org/web/20170527221053/https://epic.org/privacy/gmail/casjud3.15.05.html. 

57. Jeffrey Rosen, “The Year in Ideas; Total Information Awareness,” New York Times, December 15, 2002. 

58. “Testimony of Chris Jay Hoofnagle.” 

59. “Now, what does information processing technology have to do with surveillance? A great deal? However, to my knowledge very little information processing technology has been researched and developed as surveillance technology per se,” Paul Armer, a scientist at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, explained during congressional hearings on surveillance technology in 1976. “Rather, it has been developed with other motives in mind, like improving business data processing or guiding missiles or getting men to the moon. But surveillance is an information-processing task just as much as a payroll application is. If you improve the efficiency of information-processing technology for payrolls, you improve it for surveillance. Often systems that are put up for other reasons… can also serve surveillance.” “Surveillance Technology,” Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Comm. on the Judiciary and the Special Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Commerce of the Comm. on Commerce, United States Senate, 94th Cong., 1st sess. (June 23, September 9 and 10, 1975). 

60. EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which emerged as one of Google’s fiercest critics, was concerned that Google did not restrict its email surveillance solely to its registered user base but was intercepting and analyzing the private communication of anyone who exchanged email with a Gmail user. As Gmail use skyrocketed, that meant Google was monitoring the email communication of a significant percentage of the world’s Internet population. “Gmail violates the privacy rights of non-subscribers. Non-subscribers who e-mail a Gmail user have ‘content extraction’ performed on their e-mail even though they have not consented to have their communications monitored, nor may they even be aware that their communications are being analyzed,” EPIC warned. The organization pointed out that this practice almost certainly violated California wiretapping statutes, which expressly criminalized the interception of electronic communication without consent of all parties involved. Because Google intercepts the private communication of anyone who emails a Gmail user, the company’s surveillance reach went beyond just those people who signed up for its service. Gmail Privacy FAQ, Electronic Privacy Information Center, accessed July 6, 2017, https://epic.org/privacy/gmail/faq.html. 

61. “Figueroa Introduces Bill to Stop Google from Secretly ‘Oogling’ Private E-mails,” Senator Liz Figueroa Press Room, April 21, 2004, http://web.archive.org/web/20041010082011/http://democrats.sen.ca.gov/servlet/gov.ca.senate.democrats.pub.members.memDisplayPress? district=sd10&ID=2102. 

62. Levy, In the Plex, 176. 

63. Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky, chap. 8. “‘Bastards!’ Larry would exclaim when a blogger raised concerns about user privacy. ‘Bastards!’ they would say about the press, the politicians, or the befuddled users who couldn’t grasp the obvious superiority of the technology behind Google’s products.” 

64. Michael Kirk and Mike Wiser, “United States of Secrets (Part One): The Program,” directed by Michael Kirk, Frontline (Arlington, VA: PBS, May 13, 2014), short film, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/united-states-of-secrets/. 

65. Levy, In the Plex, 177. 

66. Ibid., 177–178. 

67. Pogue, “Google Mail: Virtue Lies in the In-Box.” 

68. “Google Goes Public,” New York Times, August 20, 2004. In documents Google filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission prior to its IPO, the company admitted that people’s concerns with privacy posed a danger to its business model. “Our business depends on a strong brand, and if we are not able to maintain and enhance our brand, our business and operating results would be harmed,” Google warned potential investors. “People have in the past expressed, and may in the future express, objections to aspects of our products. For example, people have raised privacy concerns relating to the ability of our recently announced Gmail email service to match relevant ads to the content of email messages.… Aspects of our future products may raise similar public concerns. Publicity regarding such concerns could harm our brand.” Final Prospectus, Google, Securities and Exchange Commission, August 18, 2004, 8, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504143377/d424b4.htm.

69. Jeff Brantingham, interview with author conducted at University of California, Los Angeles, October 6, 2014. 

70. Erik Lewis, George Mohler, P. Jeffrey Brantingham, and Andrea L. Bertozzi, “Self-Exciting Point Process Models of Civilian Deaths in Iraq,” US Army Research Office, 2011, http://www.math.ucla.edu/~bertozzi/papers/iraq.pdf; Andrea L. Bertozzi, Laura M. Smith, Matthew S. Keegan, Todd Wittman, and George O. Mohler, “Systems and Methods for Data Fusion Mapping Estimation” (patent application), US Patent and Trademark Office, November 29, 2011, http://web.archive.org/web/20170528111833/http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi /nph-Parser? Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN/8938115. 

71. George Mohler, “SacBee Online—PredPol Results in Dramatic Crime Reduction,” PredPol, October 16, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web /20170528112408/http://www.predpol.com/sacbee-online-predpol-results-in-dramatic-crime-reduction/. 

72. Jamiles Lartey, “Predictive Policing Practices Labeled as ‘Flawed’ by Civil Rights Coalition,” Guardian, August 31, 2016. 

73. David Robinson and Logan Koepke, Stuck in a Pattern: Early Evidence on “Predictive Policing” and Civil Rights (Washington, DC: Upturn, August 2016). 

74. Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, and Lauren Kirchner, “Machine Bias: There’s Software Used across the Country to Predict Future Criminals. And It’s Biased against Blacks,” ProPublica, May 23, 2016, https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-riskassessments-in-criminal-sentencing. 

75. Darwin Bond-Graham and Ali Winston, two tenacious investigative journalists from the Bay Area, cast serious doubts about PredPol’s claims that its predictive analytics lowered crime rates. Their exposé in the SF Weekly showed that the company’s biggest achievement was its aggressive marketing strategy: forcing police departments that signed up to use their product to promote PredPol in public. Darwin BondGraham and Ali Winston, “All Tomorrow’s Crimes: The Future of Policing Looks a Lot Like Good Branding,” SF Weekly, October 30, 2013. 

76. Board of Directors, PredPol, March 20, 2014, http://web.archive.org/web/20140320163346/http://www.predpol.com:80/about/board-ofdirectors-advisors/; David Ignatius, “The CIA as Venture Capitalist,” Washington Post, September 29, 1999. 

77. Fowler had worked in the Clinton administration and had been involved in several Democratic presidential campaigns, including that of Barack Obama. Donnie Fowler, interview with author, May 5, 2014. 

78. That’s how it decided to create its hit original show House of Cards. “In any business, the ability to see into the future is the killer app, and Netflix may be getting close with ‘House of Cards,’” reported the New York Times. “Netflix, which has 27 million subscribers in the nation and 33 million worldwide, ran the numbers. It already knew that a healthy share had streamed the work of Mr. Fincher, the director of ‘The Social Network,’ from beginning to end. And films featuring Mr. Spacey had always done well, as had the British version of ‘House of Cards.’ With those three circles of interest, Netflix was able to find a Venn diagram intersection that suggested that buying the series would be a very good bet on original programming.” David Carr, “Giving Viewers What They Want,” New York Times, February 24, 2013. 

79. Jeff Larson, James Glanz, and Andrew W. Lehren, “Spy Agencies Probe Angry Birds and Other Apps for Personal Data,” ProPublica, January 27, 2014, https://www.propublica.org/article/spy-agencies-probe-angry-birds-and-other-apps-for-personal-data. 

80. Elizabeth Dwoskin, “Pandora Thinks It Knows If You Are a Republican,” Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2014. 

81. One of the early pieces of software eBay used was developed by a law-enforcement contractor called InfoGlide. It expanded when eBay bought PayPal. Tom Fowler, “Infoglide Will Be Ebay’s Cop,” Austin Business Journal, January 7, 2000. 

82. Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Boston: Little, Brown, 2013); Jennifer Wills, “7 Ways Amazon Uses Big Data to Stalk You,” Investopedia, September 7, 2016, http://www.investopedia.com/articles /insights/090716/7-ways-amazon-usesbig-data-stalk-you-amzn.asp; Greg Bensinger, “Amazon Wants to Ship Your Package Before You Buy It,” Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2014. 

83. Hal Bernton and Susan Kelleher, “Amazon Warehouse Jobs Push Workers to Physical Limit,” Seattle Times, April 3, 2012. 

84. Dan Frommer, “Amazon Web Services Is Approaching a $10 Billion-a-Year Business,” Recode, April 28, 2016, https://www.recode.net/2016/4/28/11586526 /aws-cloud-revenue-growth. 

85. Went on a buck-hunting trip with your grandson? A Republican candidate could target you for gun-rights ads. Belong to an evangelical Bible study group? Maybe the candidate will show you something about fighting abortion instead. Facebook allowed politicians to target voters with laser precision on the basis of information they had never been able to collect before. This profiling system was so powerful that Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign hired Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes to run its Internet division, and in the end it helped Obama win the presidency. The company had such an impact on the race that pundits took to calling 2008 the “Facebook Election,” although now every election is a Facebook election. “There’s a level of precision that doesn’t exist in any other medium,” Crystal Patterson, a Facebook employee who works with government and politics customers, told the New York Times. “It’s getting the right message to the right people at the right time.” Ashley Parker, “Facebook Expands in Politics, and Campaigns Find Much to Like,” New York Times, July 29, 2015. 

86. By the end of 2016, more than half of American adults logged into Facebook every day. Robinson Meyer, “Facebook Is America’s Favorite Media Product,” The Atlantic, November 11, 2016; Alexei Oreskovic, “Facebook Now Gets Almost $20 from Each US and Canadian User, Compared to under $5 at Its IPO,” Business Insider, February 1, 2017. 

87. “Uber’s use of Greyball was recorded on video in late 2014, when Erich England, a code enforcement inspector in Portland, [Oregon,] tried to hail an Uber car downtown in a sting operation against the company. But unknown to Mr. England and other authorities, some of the digital cars they saw in the app did not represent actual vehicles. And the Uber drivers they were able to hail also quickly canceled. That was because Uber had tagged Mr. England and his colleagues—essentially Greyballing them as city officials—based on data collected from the app and in other ways. The company then served up a fake version of the app, populated with ghost cars, to evade capture.” Mike Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide,” New York Times, March 3, 2017. 

88. Antonio Regalado, “Google’s Long, Strange Life-Span Trip,” MIT Technology Review, December 15, 2016. 

89. James Vincent, “99.6 Percent of New Smartphones Run Android or iOS,” The Verge, February 16, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/16/14634656 /android-ios-market-share-blackberry-2016; James Vincent, “Android Is Now Used by 1.4 Billion People,” The Verge, September 29, 2015, https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/29/9409071/google-android-stats-users-downloads-sales. 

90. Ross Miller, “Gmail Now Has 1 Billion Monthly Active Users,” The Verge, February 1, 2016, https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10889492 /gmail-1-billion-google-alphabet. 

91. Jacob Kastrenakes, “Google Reportedly Accounts for 25 Percent of North American Internet Traffic,” The Verge, July 22, 2013, https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/22/4545304/google-represents-quarter-web-traffic-deepfield-analysis. 

92. About 87 percent of Google revenue (or about $79.4 billion) came from advertising. Alphabet Inc., “Form 10-K for the Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2016,” https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2016_google_annual_report.pdf. 

93. Jonathan Taplin, “Is It Time to Break Up Google?” New York Times, April 22, 2017; “Google’s Revenue Worldwide from 2002 to 2016 (in Billion U.S. Dollars),” Statista, April 11, 2017, https://www.statista.com/statistics /266206/googles-annual-global-revenue/; “Google Advertising Revenue, Billions of Dollars,” Vox, accessed January 5, 2017, https://apps.voxmedia.com/at /vox-google-advertising-revenue/. 

94. Derek Thompson, “Google’s CEO: The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists,” The Atlantic, October 1, 2010. 

95. Par Po Bronson, The Nudist on the Lateshift and Other Tales of Silicon Valley (New York: Random House, 1999); Evan Ratliff, “The Whole Earth, Catalogued,” Wired, July 2007. 

96. Avi Bar-Zeev, “Notes on the Origin of Google Earth,” Reality Prime, July 24, 2006, http://www.realityprime.com/blog/2006/07/notes-onthe-origin-of-google-earth/. 

97. Jerome S. Engel, ed., Global Clusters of Innovation: Entrepreneurial Engines of Economic Growth Around the World (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elger, 2014), 57. 

98. John T. Reinert, “In-Q-Tel: The Central Intelligence Agency as Venture Capitalist,” Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business 33, no. 3 (Spring 2013). 

99. David Ignatius, “The CIA as Venture Capitalist,” Washington Post, September 29, 1999. 

100. Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008). 

101. “CIA’s Impact on Technology,” Central Intelligence Agency, published July 23, 2012, updated February 18, 2014, https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/cia-museum /experience-the-collection/text-version/stories/cias-impact-on-technology.html. 

102. Three months after the start of the war, and just four months after investing in Keyhole, In-Q-Tel announced that the company’s EarthViewer program was already being put to active use in the Iraq War. “Immediately demonstrating the value of Keyhole’s technology to the national security community, [the NGA] used the technology to support United States troops in Iraq,” read the In-Q-Tel press release, touting the speed with which Keyhole had been adopted by the military as a measure of In-Q-Tel’s investment prowess. “In-Q-Tel Announces Strategic Investment in Keyhole,” press release, In-Q-Tel, June 25, 2003, https://www.iqt.org/in-q-tel-announces-strategic-investment-inkeyhole/. 

103. “In-Q-Tel invested in Keyhole because it offers government and commercial users a new capability to radically enhance critical decision making. Through its ability to stream very large geospatial datasets over the Internet and private networks, Keyhole has created an entirely new way to interact with earth imagery and feature data,” explained Gilman Louie, the In-Q-Tel CEO and former video game entrepreneur famous for being the first person to license Tetris from the Soviet Union and release it in the United States. Ibid. 

104. Ratliff, “Whole Earth, Catalogued.” 

105. Ibid. 

106. The transaction continues to exist in a fog of secrecy. My attempts to use a Freedom of Information Act request to force the CIA to divulge the terms of its contract with Google were met with an answer straight out of a Tom Clancy novel. The CIA coolly informed me that it “could not confirm or deny” any of the information I sought. That is: the mere existence or nonexistence of any documents relating to the agency’s involvement in the sale of Keyhole to Google is itself a secret. This is what’s known as a GLOMAR response, named after the agency’s refusal, in the mid-1970s, to confirm or deny the existence of a secret boat called the Glomar Explorer built to retrieve a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine. The CIA won’t talk about the sale, nor will Google. But there are a few things we do know for certain: in 2005, a year after Google went public, In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google stock for $2.18 million—potentially representing the shares it received as part of Google’s buyout of Keyhole. 

107. John Letzing, “Google, Seeking to Diversify, Looks to Uncle Sam,” MarketWatch, March 13, 2008, http://www.marketwatch.com/story/google-seeking-to-diversify-looks-to-government-contracts; Rob Painter’s profile, LinkedIn, accessed February 17, 2016, https://www.linkedin.com/in/ripainter. 

108. Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky, chap. 26. 

109. Some examples: Shannon Sullivan, Head of Defense and Intelligence, Google Enterprise. He graduated from the US Air Force Air University’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, which prides itself on producing “warrior-scholars.” He then served in various signals intelligence capacities in the US Air Force, including overseeing the procurement and acquisition of “command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance” technology. After the air force, he took the revolving door into the private sector— first at BEA Systems and then at Oracle. Then there’s Jim Young, an enterprise manager on the Google DoD sales team, who came out of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, which functioned as the agency’s own ARPA and was responsible for creating In-Q-Tel. 

110. In February 2007, Google held a big event at the Ritz-Carlton in McLean, about five miles away from CIA headquarters, to showcase its products and announce its entry into the field. “The search engine giant showed off its ambition yesterday to expand its business with the federal government, kicking off a two-day sales meeting that attracted nearly 200 federal contractors, engineers and uniformed military members eager to learn more about its technology offerings. Google has ramped up its sales force in the Washington area in the past year to adapt its technology products to the needs of the military, civilian agencies and the intelligence community. Already, agencies use enhanced versions of Google’s 3-D mapping product, Google Earth, to display information for the military on the ground in Iraq and to track airplanes that fight forest fires across the country.” Sara Kehaulani Goo and Alec Klein, “Google Searches for Government Work,” Washington Post, February 28, 2007. 

111. Letzing, “Google, Seeking to Diversify.” 

112. Goo and Klein, “Google Searches for Government Work.” 

113. “Spy agencies are using Google equipment as the backbone of Intellipedia, a network aimed at helping agents share intelligence. Rather than hoarding information, spies and analysts are being encouraged to post what they learn on a secure online forum where colleagues can read it and add comments,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle. “Google supplies the computer servers that support the network, as well as the search software that allows users to sift through messages and data.” Verne Kopytoff, “Google Has Lots to Do with Intelligence,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 30, 2008. 

114. Shannon Sullivan, “U.S. Army to Cut Costs, Improve Collaboration and Go Mobile with Google Apps,” Google Cloud (blog), October 22, 2013, https://cloud.googleblog.com/2013/10/us-army-to-cut-costs-improve.html. 

115. “NGA has made a significant investment in Google Earth technology through the GEOINT Visualization Services Program on SECRET and TOP SECRET government networks and throughout the world in support of the National System for Geospatial Expeditionary Architecture,” explained the NGA. “The NSG, DoD, and Intelligence Community have made additional investments to support client and application deployment and testing that use the existing Google Earth services provided by NGA.” “Geospatial Visualization Enterprise Services,” Federal Business Opportunities, August 25, 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20170528171729 /https://www.fbo.gov/index? s=opportunity&mode=form&id=482ab868878ecd0bd81d978216718820&tab=core&tabmode=list. 

116. Information on Google’s government work comes from my analysis of two government sources: (1) a list of Google contracts from 2003 through 2014 obtained from the Federal Procurement Data System, https://www.fpds.gov (A copy of the saved data set can be obtained here: https://surveillancevalley.com/content /citations/google-contracts-2003–2014-federal-procurement-data-system.csv.) and (2) Google contract data contained in the federal government spending database USAspending.gov, which shows that the company has been involved in 1,934 federal contracts from 2008 through the first half of 2017, both as a prime contractor and a subcontractor, for a total of $224 million. It is important to note that this amount represents only a part of the work Google does for the federal government; the database excludes classified contracts. USAspending.gov, https://www.usaspending.gov/Pages/AdvancedSearch.aspx?k=google. 

117. Yasha Levine, “Google Distances Itself from the Pentagon, Stays in Bed with Mercenaries and Intelligence Contractors,” Pando Daily, March 26, 2014, https://pando.com/2014/03/26/google-distances-itself-from-the-pentagon-stays-in-bed-with-mercenaries-andintelligence-contractors/. 

118. Shorrock, Spies for Hire, chap. 1, “But whatever one’s position on outsourcing, there is little doubt that spying for hire has become a way of life in twenty-first-century America…” 

119. Phil Goldstein, “2017 Budget Boosts IT Spending to $89.9 Billion, Expands U.S. Digital Service,” FedTech, February 9, 2016. 

120. Google was perfectly suited to succeed as a government and military contractor. Google Search, which originally came out of a DARPA and federal government research program aimed at finding a better way to organize and find information in the chaos of the Internet, is second to none. Naturally, the CIA, NSA, and other federal agencies would want to use it. It was the same with Google Earth, whose development was carried out under top-secret programs by military and intelligence agencies. As the company broadened its reach, expanding into email, word processing, databases, cloud hosting, mobile platforms, browsers, navigation aids, and cloud-based laptops, military and intelligence agencies bought hardened versions of these tools as well. Indeed, G Suite offers advanced versions of all the collaborative communication tools that J. C. R. Licklider had worked hard to develop as part of his ARPA Command and Control Research program that gave birth to the ARPANET. 

121. Ellen Nakashima, “Google to Enlist NSA to Help It Ward Off Cyberattacks,” Washington Post, February 4, 2010. 

122. Shane Harris, @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex (New York: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). 

123. “NOAA Announces Agency-Wide Move to Cloud-Based Unified Messaging Technology,” press release, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, June 8, 2011, http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110609_cloud technology.html. 

124. Bill Oates, “Boston Moves 76,000 City Employees, Police, Teachers and Students to the Cloud with Google Apps,” Google Cloud (blog), January 6, 2014, https://cloud.googleblog.com/2014/01/boston-moves-76000-city-employees.html. 

125. Kirsty Styles, “New York Has Just Opened a Massive Public Spying Network,” The Next Web, March 22, 2016, https://thenextweb.com/us/2016/03/22 /new-york-just-opened-massive-public-spying-network/#.tnw_1Ahf9OCG. 

126. Ron Demeter, “California Selects Pondera Solutions FDaaS as High-Tech Solution to Prevent Unemployment Insurance Fraud,” Pondera, October 15, 2014, http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/10/prweb12249931.htm. 

127. Natasha Singer, “How Google Took Over the Classroom,” New York Times, May 13, 2017. 

128. The event was called the “Geospatial Conference of the West” and took place in September 2013. 

129. Martha Neil, “Does Using Gmail Put Attorney-Client Privilege at Risk?” ABA Journal, October 8, 2014. 

130. Google has faced a number of privacy-related investigations and lawsuits over the last decade—for collecting people’s WiFi with its Street View vehicles to accusations that it violated wiretapping laws by scanning emails of non-Gmail users without consent. Many of these lawsuits and investigations have focused attention on the company’s duplicitousness and evasiveness when talking about privacy and data gathering. For example: a 2016 lawsuit by a group of University of California, Berkeley, alumni and students alleged that the company misled them when it made promises that it would not scan educational account emails, but it turned out that Google had been doing it anyway. The company later promised to stop scanning the emails for “advertising purposes,” but the wording of the promise that focused narrowly on “advertising” left the company an opening to nonetheless collect the data for profiling that was not specifically tied to showing ads. At the time of this writing, this lawsuit against Google is still in litigation (Emma Brown, “UC-Berkeley Students Sue Google, Alleging Their Emails Were Illegally Scanned,” Washington Post, February 1, 2016). In another case, in 2017, Mississippi’s attorney general believed he had no other recourse but to take Google to court for the company’s answer to basic questions about how it handled data for students who used its Google Classroom products. “Through this lawsuit, we want to know the extent of Google’s data mining and marketing of student information to third parties,” Jim Hood said. “I don’t think there could be any motivation other than greed for a company to deliberately keep secret how it collects and uses student information” (Benjamin Herold, “Mississippi Attorney General Sues Google over Student-Data Privacy,” Education Week, January 19, 2017). 

131. Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 

132. Mark Ames, “Team Omidyar, World Police: eBay Puts User Data on a Silver Platter for Law Enforcement,” Pando Daily, December 14, 2013, https://pando.com/2013/12/14/team-omidar-world-police-ebay-puts-user-data-on-a-silver-platter-for-law-enforcement/. 

133. Bill Brenner, “eBay Security Offensive Leads to 3K Arrests Globally,” CSO, August 6, 2012. 

134. Frank Konkel, “The Details About the CIA’s Deal with Amazon,” The Atlantic, July 17, 2014. 

135. Even before the CIA deal, Amazon had hundreds of government clients, including military agencies. “There have been more than 600 government agencies worldwide that are using AWS. The Navy has put its non-classified information on AWS and is spending half of what it was spending before. NASA JPL uses it for the Mars Exploration Rover. There’s this rover on Mars that is taking pictures and sending them back to JPL to process and assess what else they want pictures of and where they want the rover to go. And that’s all done on AWS. The Obama campaign used AWS, and over 18 months built 200 applications. On election day they built a call center, they built an elaborate database to know where their volunteers were, know the neighborhoods where people appeared not to have voted, so they could go knock on doors and get out the vote,” Andy Jassy, head of Amazon Web Services, told All Things Digital. “Nine Questions for Andy Jassy, Head of Amazon Web Services,” All Things Digital, November 8, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20170528161820/http://allthingsd.com/20131108 /nine-questions-for-andy-jassy-head-of-amazon-web-services/comment-page-1/. 

136. Adi Robertson, “Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Partners with Boeing and Lockheed Martin to Reduce Dependence on Russian Rockets,” The Verge, September 17, 2014, https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/17/6328961/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-partners-with-united-launch-alliance-fornew-rocket. 

137. Andy Greenberg, “How a ‘Deviant’ Philosopher Built Palantir, a CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut,” Forbes, August 14, 2013. 

138. “The genre of people that Cyber Command are working to recruit are fresh out of high school and college. They’re going to grow up with Oculus on their head. We want to adapt to provide that kind of interface,” an excited DARPA program manager told Wired magazine. “You’re not in a two-dimensional view, so you can look around the data. You look to your left, look to your right, and see different subnets of information. With the Oculus you have that immersive environment. It’s like you’re swimming in the internet.” Andy Greenberg, “Darpa Turns Oculus into a Weapon for Cyberwar,” Wired, May 23, 2014. 

139. Ellen Nakashima, “With Plan X, Pentagon Seeks to Spread U.S. Military Might to Cyberspace,” Washington Post, May 30, 2012; “DARPA’s Plan X Gives Military Operators a Place to Wage Cyber Warfare,” DoD News, May 12, 2016. 

140. The satellite was launched on September 6, 2008, from Vandenberg Air Force Base, sixty miles north of Santa Barbara, California. The Lockheed Martin missile carrying it into orbit featured a Google logo (“GeoEye-1 Launch,” GeoEye Inc., September 6, 2008, https://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/sh/95c0825e-f4ff-4aa1-a006-3fee03b906bb/6762d77427700979). The Lockheed Martin missile carried a 4,300-pound private spy satellite called GeoEye-1, a three-way between Google, a satellite military contractor called GeoEye, and the NGA. GeoEye-1 was a novel venture between the Pentagon and the private sector. Half financed by the government, it was the most accurate commercial imaging satellite on the market. It would provide high-resolution satellite photos for the exclusive use of the NGA, while giving slightly lower quality versions of the same images to Google. “We’re commercializing a technology that was once only in the hands of the governments,” a GeoEye spokesman told the press. “Just like the internet, just like GPS, just like telecom [were] all invented by the government. And now we are on the front end of the spear that is commercializing this technology” (Brian X. Chen, “Google’s Super Satellite Captures First Image,” Wired, October 8, 2008). 

141. John Markoff, “Google Adds to Its Menagerie of Robots,” New York Times, December 14, 2013; Alex Hern, “Alphabet Sells Off ‘BigDog’ Robot Maker Boston Dynamics to Softbank,” Guardian, June 9, 2017. 

142. Yasha Levine, “From Russia, with Panic: Cozy Bears, Unsourced Hacks—and a Silicon Valley Shakedown,” The Baffler, March 2017, https://thebaffler.com/salvos/from-russia-with-panic-levine. 

143. Started as Google Ideas in 2010, it was rebranded as JigSaw in 2016. Eric Schmidt described its mission when announcing the name change. “Jigsaw will be investing in and building technology to expand access to information for the world’s most vulnerable populations and to defend against the world’s most challenging security threats.” Eric Schmidt, “Google Ideas Becomes Jigsaw,” @jigsaw, Medium, February 16, 2016. 

144. Jared Cohen got his start in foreign policy under President George W. Bush, when he served as an adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as part of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff (Christina Larson, “State Department Innovator Goes to Google,” Foreign Policy, September 7, 2010, http://foreign policy.com/2010/09/07/state-department-innovator-goes-to-google/). Under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Cohen was charged with handling the “21st Century Statecraft” portfolio, figuring out how Silicon Valley and the Internet could be brought to bear on American foreign policy (Jesse Lichtenstein, “Condi’s Party Starter,” The New Yorker, November 5, 2007). Cohen’s first big moment in digital diplomacy took place in 2009: a sustained wave of youth protests was taking place in Tehran at the time in response to the country’s presidential elections, and Twitter was being used by protesters to organize and coordinate their activities. In the midst of the protests, Twitter announced that it planned to take the site down for scheduled maintenance. The State Department wanted to keep those lines of communication open, hoping that this was finally the mass movement that would topple the Islamic Republic of Iran. Cohen dropped Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, a note: “It appears Twitter is playing an important role at a crucial time in Iran. Could you keep it going?” Dorsey said sure, and Twitter put its scheduled maintenance on hold while protests in Iran continued. The New York Times got wind of this exchange and published a story, writing, “The episode demonstrates the extent to which the administration views social networking as a new arrow in its diplomatic quiver. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton talks regularly about the power of e-diplomacy, particularly in places where the mass media are repressed” (“Washington Taps into a Potent New Force in Diplomacy,” New York Times, June 16, 2009). 

145. Fiscal Year 2015 Congressional Budget Request (Washington, DC: Broadcasting Board of Governors, 2014), https://www.bbg.gov/wp-content/media/2014/03 /FY-2015-BBG-Congressional-Budget-Request-FINAL-21-March-2014.pdf; “Google Ideas Develops Citizen Engagement Pilot Project for Somalia,” Google Open Source (blog), June 11, 2012, https://opensource.googleblog.com/2012/06 /google-ideas-develops-citizen.html. “Google Ideas collaborated with a State Department–funded startup on the development of a VPN proxy network called uProxy that masks the identities of internet users in oppressive countries by swapping their IP addresses with users in the West,” according to the Google Transparency Project. “Google’s Support for Hillary Clinton,” Google Transparency Project, November 28, 2016, http://www.googletransparencyproject.org/articles /googles-support-hillary-clinton. 

146. Andy Greenberg, “Google’s Clever Plan to Stop Aspiring ISIS Recruits,” Wired, September 7, 2016; email from Jared Cohen, “Re: Following-up on the digital counter-insurgency,” August 13, 2015, WikiLeaks, John Podesta Email Archive. 

147. A good roundup of overlap between JigSaw and the State Department was compiled by the Google Transparency Project. “Google’s Support for Hillary Clinton,” November 28, 2016. 

148. Email from Jared Cohen, “Syria,” July 25, 2012, WikiLeaks, Hillary Clinton Email Archive. “Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from… which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition,” Cohen wrote Hillary Clinton’s deputy secretary of state William Joseph Burns in a 2012 email. 

149. As Julian Assange wryly noted in When Google Met WikiLeaks, “If Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi was running a program like [JigSaw], it would draw intense critical scrutiny. But somehow Google gets a free pass.” Julian Assange, When Google Met WikiLeaks (New York: OR Books, 2014). 

150. Yazan al-Saadi, “Strat  for Leaks: Google Ideas Director Involved in ‘Regime Change,’” Al-Akhbar English, March 14, 2012; Doug Bolton, “Google Planned to Help Syria Rebels to Bring Down Assad Regime, Leaked Hillary Clinton Emails Claim,” The Independent, March 22, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk /life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-syria-rebels-defection-hillary-clinton-emails-wikileaksa6946121.html. 

151. Fred Burton was referring to information he got from a Google executive about Jared Cohen’s plan to visit the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, and Turkey as part of his plan to “engage the Iranian community to better understand the challenges faced by Iranians as part of one of our Google Ideas groups on repressive societies.” Burton’s email was just one in a series of letters that referred to Jared Cohen and JigSaw (Google Ideas) as possibly engaging in veiled “regime change” operations—from Iran to Egypt, Syria, and Libya. The emails were leaked following the penetration of Stratfor’s servers by a group that called itself Anonymous. “On Saturday, hackers who say they are members of the collective known as Anonymous claimed responsibility for crashing the Web site of the group, Stratfor Global Intelligence Service, and pilfering its client list, e-mails and credit card information in an operation they say is intended to steal $1 million for donations to charity,” reported the New York Times in December 2011. “Hackers Breach the Web Site of Stratfor Global Intelligence,” New York Times, December 25, 2011. 

152. Andy Greenberg, “Inside Google’s Internet Justice League and Its AI-Powered War on Trolls,” Wired, September 19, 2016. 

153. Richard Waters, “FT Interview with Google Co-founder and CEO Larry Page,” Financial Times, October 31, 2014. 

154. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen saw the role of technology companies as taking over the traditional functions of governments. “Democratic states that have built coalitions of their militaries have the capacity to do the same with their connection technologies. This is not to suggest that connection technologies are going to transform the world alone. But they offer a new way to exercise the duty to protect citizens around the world,” the pair explained in The New Digital Age, a book they cowrote. They didn’t really see a difference between government and Google. They saw all these parts—entertainment, search, office products, military contracting, fighting terrorism, policing—as part of a bigger whole, working together for mutual benefit. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). 

155. Richard Waters, “Google Eyes Better City Life for Billions,” Financial Times, June 11, 2015. 

156. Matt Novak, “Google’s Parent Company (Probably) Wants to Build a City from Scratch,” Gizmodo, April 5, 2016, http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/google-s-parent-company-probably-wants-to-build-a-cit-1769181473. 

157. Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive and a connected-device guru who works as a personal adviser to Larry Page, sketched one vision of a future where Google’s technology benevolently ruled over and mediated everything and everyone in the world. “Tomorrow’s Internet will be everywhere and in everything. It will draw on massive amounts of data to augment our own intelligence. And it will help us make better decisions—from avoiding dangerous drug interactions to diagnosing illnesses to deciding when water skiing might not be the best idea.… Finally, the Internet of the future will go from doing things when we ask to doing things before we ask.” He then drew on a personal story of how he tore his hamstring while water skiing to illustrate how a ubiquitous Google could be used to predict and prevent harm. “In the case of my water-skiing accident, my smartphone could have combined existing information… to predict that I was considering water skiing, calculate the odds of my getting injured, and advise me against it before I even got in the water. Or, if I was stubborn enough to do it anyway, a computer controlling the boat’s throttle could have prevented the engine from pulling me too hard.” Who would write the rules and laws in this hyperconnected future? How would people make their voices heard? Who would own all those sensors and controllers embedded in our hamstrings and boats? Fadell didn’t address these issues. His vision seemed to take for granted that this new world would be kind and safe. Tony Fadell, “Nest CEO Tony Fadell on the Future of the Internet,” Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2015

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