IV. Google Government
Quis custodiet custodes ipsos (who watches the watchers)?
In part II, I held Alphabet’s arm up and rang the bell, declaring it the winner of the “Map Wars” with its acquisition of Waze taken together with the already entrenched success of Google Maps. The world learned a lot in the year 2013, and one of those things is that the real winners of geo-locational services are forces at the helm of the military-industrial complex. As the world’s sole remaining superpower, the US government is the expert in winning any type of war. This piece will venture into this complex fog, where it turns out Alphabet remains the World Champ, more tied in with Top Dog than we ever realized. Business and government intertwine and paint a picture that is perhaps more complicated than a dichotomy between privacy and security, allies and adversaries. The truth is always somewhere in between.
Former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has stated in an interview, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” One might retort, “Because the government gets to define what’s wrong, and they keep changing the definition.”
As Google increasingly came to dominate the consumer internet in the early 2000s, a different side of the company picked up momentum in the shadows: Google Government. It turns out that the same platforms and services Google uses to monitor people’s lives and mine their data can be deployed to run huge swaths of the authorities that rule over our land, including the military, spy agencies and police departments. At the peak of the first big tech boom, the CIA launched something called In-Q-Tel, a Bay Area venture capital fund whose mission it was to invest in start-ups that aligned with the agency’s intelligence needs. A company called Keyhole would be saved from bankruptcy just as the dot-com bubble burst when the CIA poured an unknown amount of money into it, partnering with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a major intelligence organization whose job was to deliver satellite-based intelligence to the Pentagon. In 2004, the same year Google went public, the Mountain View monolith bought Keyhole outright, CIA investors and all. It then absorbed the company into Google’s growing internet applications platform. Keyhole was transformed and reborn as Google Earth.
An analysis of the federal contracting database maintained by the US government, combined with information gleaned from Freedom of Information Act requests and published reports on the company’s military work, reveals that Google has been doing brisk business selling Google Search, Google Earth and Google Enterprise (known as G Suite) products to just about every major military and intelligence agency. In 2003, it scored a 2.1 million dollar contract to outfit the National Security Agency with a customized search solution that could scan and recognize millions of documents Sometimes Google sells directly to the government, but it also works with established contractors like Lockheed Martin and the Science Applications International Corporation, a California-based intelligence contractor known as “NSA West,” thanks to the fact that many of its employees formerly worked at NSA East (the original).
In 2010, following a disastrous intrusion into its system by what the company believes was a group of Chinese government hackers (an event that has been dubbed “Operation Aurora”), Google entered into an additional secretive agreement with the NSA on top of the one it had signed 7 years before. Defense reporter Shane Harris writes in his book @War, “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. It was a quid pro quo, information for information. And from the NSA’s perspective, information in exchange for protection.” Chinese Intellectual Property theft has been in the news again recently in the case of Huawei’s CEO being detained in North America after it appears spying capabilities have been hardcoded into the company’s phones and 5G network.
Our intelligence services gather billions of individual pieces of data every day. Almost all of the dots don’t connect. This dredging of so much information suffers from the curse of dimensionality. Often the fact that we are able to successfully spy on someone is a bigger secret than the information we learn from that spying. During World War II, the British were able to break the Enigma encryption machine and eavesdrop on German military communications. However, the Allies could only act on information they learned when there was another plausible way they would have learned it. They even occasionally manufactured plausible explanations. It wasn’t worth the risk of tipping the Germans off that their encryption machines’ code had been broken. The NSA’s belief that more data is better, and that it’s worth doing anything in order to collect it, is flawed: there are diminishing returns. The Boston marathon bomber left a flagrantly obvious trail of red flags that weren’t picked up on. In Data Science, when you are studying a dataset with too many features, you need to perform what’s called a Principal Component Analysis, and perhaps a similar sort of adjustment would cause fewer occurrences like what happened in Parkland and Las Vegas.
Another famous instance of security at the expense of privacy was the occurrences at San Bernadino and the standoff between the FBI and Apple. The graph below indicates surprisingly strong support for giving up autonomy to feel safe, but the publicity of this case belies the power that the government truly has. Apple still stands out for its tendency to respect privacy, a trend which will be revisited in the next installment in this series.
The technology beneath the hood of many other internet companies hide vast systems of private surveillance that work with and empower the state, and that might not be as bad of a thing as it sounds. We have been lied to over and over, to the point of becoming numb to the grey workings of the government and technology companies that represent us. Yes, government agencies cloak programs in multiple code names to obscure their full extent and capabilities, just as for-profit businesses will nest themselves in as many Matryoshka doll shells as required to minimize the tax levied against them. This is embedded in the very nature of government, or business (or both at once!). We’re being played, but we’re being played in a way that isn’t utterly inimical to our existence.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, it is shocking that we surveil our own country more than the former USSR. Other adversaries, like Iran, are understandably red hot with surveillance. The map above is from 2007, and since that time the world’s first digital weapon, Stuxnet, was deployed, and tensions have only continued to build around the Strait of Hormuz. However, attempts at data acquisition on the national level are not just something that occurs between adversaries. For all the solidarity we expressed to our longtime defensive allies in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo shooting and massacre in Paris, we shouldn’t be so naive as to let our economic guard down: a look into French industrial espionage in the US is the first item linked below. We are allies in defense but economic competitors. Notably, in Europe, Germany has been subjected to not insignificant amounts of surveillance. In part VI, the unintended consequences of such snooping will be examined in greater detail.
Works Consulted:
A Case Study in French Espionage: Renaissance Software
Google’s Earth: How the Tech Giant is Helping the State Spy On Us
How Americans Were Deceived About Cell-Phone Location Data
