Quotes from the book:
"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" fil that Google placed on every computer that used its service.
Individually, these search queries were of little 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 personal 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 infomation 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 unprecedents 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." p. 141
"'There was no way to avoid the fact that we were trying to sift out specific users on the basis fo their searches. If we found them, we would try to determine their personal information from the data about them in our logs,' wrote Edwards [author of I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59]. 'We had people's most intimate thoughts in our log files and, soon enough, people would realize it.'" p. 142
"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 its evolving 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.'
Improving Google's usability and relevance helped make it them 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 Goggle dominated the market, it was time to make money. It didn't take long 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 Stanfor 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 an ad alongside search results and would be paid if a user clicked on a 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 the relevant advertiser, thus increasing the chance users would clicka. link. 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 relvant ads, more clicks, and mroe profits for Google. Multiplied by hundreds of millions of searches per 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 advertiser on the basis of teh data they contained,' explained Douglas Edwards.
Indeed, money began raining from the sky. In 2001, Google hired Sheryl Sandberg, a former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton's Treasure 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 $3.24 billion in 2004, the bulk of it resulting from simply showing the right ad at the right time to the right sysballes.43 It was like a new for of alchemy: Google was turning useless scraps of data into mountains of gold." p. 153
"Google had started to roll out the beta version of Gmail, its e-mail 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 quicly spiralled out of control.
Gmail aimed to poach users from established e-mail 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 Google's pre-public release invites were fetching up to $200 on EBay.50" p. 158
"The Google service seemed too good to be true, once again upending the law of economics. Why would a campany 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 workd so ling as users stayed on Google's site. As soon as they clicked a link, they were gone, and their browsing stream vanished. As soon as they clicked a link, they were gone, and their browsing stream vanished. What did peole 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 e-mail 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 tageted advertising based on that content. They also gave Google permission to tie their search history and browsing habits to their e-mail address.
In this sense, Gmail opened up a whole new dimension of behavior tracking and profiling: it captured personal and business coorespondence, 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. Foofle 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 their email service. 'Google has propsed scanning the text of all incoming emails for ad placement. The scanning of confidential email violates the implicit trust of an email serivce 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 ahd 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 targetted ad system: 'I discovered recently just how relevant when I wrote to a friends using my Gmail account. My note mentioned a pregnant woman whose husband was having 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 tightlipped about the inner workings of its email scanning program in the face of criticism. But a series of profiling and targeted advertising 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 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 the 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 an 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 that 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 resemblence 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 rebelious tribes and political groups, in the hope of isolating factors that would make 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. R. C. 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 predivctive 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 unerlying technology that made prediction and analysis possible. Naturally, google's predictive system, which arrived thirty eyars later, was more advanced and sophisticated than ARPA's crude first-generation database tools. But it was also very similar. The company wanted to infest 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 Hoffnagle, an expert on information privcy law, aurgued before the California Senate that the difference between military and commerical profiling was illusory. He compared Google's email scanning to the surveillance and prediction at DARPA's then actice 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 prostpect that a computer could, en masse, view transactional and content data and draw conclusions was the plan of John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness,' he said, referring to President Reagan's national security advisor who, under President George W. Bush, was put in charge of helping DARPA fight terrorism.57 'TIA proposed to look at a wide variety of personal information and make inferences for the prevention of terrorism or general crime. Congress rejected Poindexter's plan. Gooogle's content extraction is different than TIA in that it is designed to pitch advertising rather than cathc 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 extraciton 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 you ceral, 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 computeer and netwroking technollogy was first becoming commonplace. Back then, there was widespread understanding that computers were machins 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 peron's purchasing history.59
To the Electronic Pricavy 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." p. 162
"I'm in this office of UCLA professor Jeffrey Brantingham. [...] Brantingham [...] is a professor of anthropology. He is also the co-founder 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 modelling 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 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, highways, on-ramps--and then running al the variables through a proprietary algorithm that generates hotspots where criminals are most likely to strike next." p. 165
"In short: someone else has to do the hard work of improving society by dealing with root economic and social 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 the many companies competing for a fledgling but rapidly expanding market in predictive technologies.72 Big, established companies like IBM, LexisNexis, and Palantir all offered predictive crime products. 73 PredPol, though small, has raked in contrcts 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 $250,000 a year, depending on a city's population, PredPol seemed like a bargain.
Pedictive 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 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 capitol outfit operating out of 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 the 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 functionaity, including 'building additional bells and whistles and even additional tools for law enforcement.' He was straightforward as to 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 the perfect sales prop--a powerful example of polic departments leveraging Google technology to keep people safe. 'Once of those guys at Google told me 'You complete us,'' Fowler said with an air of satisfaction. p. 168
"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 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 Omyidar'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 as system of 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 require 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 social media platform powered by a Google like 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 make it a favorite of advertising and marketing firms of all kinds.
Political campaigns in particular loved the direct access Facebook offered. Instead of blanketing the airwaves with a single political ad, they could use detailed behavioral profiles to micro-target their messaging, showing ads that appealed specifically individuals and the issues they held dear. Facebook even allowed campaigns to upload lists of potential votres and supporters directly into the comapny'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 tool. A decade after Mark Zuckerberg transfigured teh 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 " p. 170
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 credit card information, phone numbers, locations and movements, and the way that users used the app to identify whether 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 form the app. 87
Uber, Amazon, Facebook Ebay, Tinder, Apple, Lyft, FourSquare, Airbnb, Spotify, Instagram, Twitter, Angry Birds. If you zoom out and look at the bigger picture, you can see that, taken together, these comapnies have turned our computers and phones into bugs that are plugged into a vast corporate-owned suveillance 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, ever if she tells no one else: the GPS coordinates on the phone don't lie." p. 171
"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 its 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, groadened into word processing, databases, blogging, social media netwroks, could hosting, mobile platforms, browsers, navigation aids, could-based laptops, and a whole range of office and productivity applicaitions. 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 telecommunications 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.
No matter what service it deployed or what market it entered, surveillance and prediction were cooked into the business. The data flowing through Goggle's system are staggering. By the end of 2016, Google's Android was installed on 82 percent of all new smartphones sold aorund the world, with over 1.5 billion Android users globally. 89 At the same time, Google handled half a billion searches and YouTube plays daily and had a billion active Gmail users, which mean 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. [...] 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 coutnries. 92 It had a market capitalization of $593 billion, making it the second ost valuable company in the world--second only to Apple, another Silicon Valley giant. 93" p. 172
"Meanwhie, 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 yo to type at all,' Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, said in a moment of candor in 2010. 'Becuse we know where you are, WE know where you've been. We cam 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.'" p. 173
"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 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 [formerly Keyhole Incorporated which was resuscitated by CIA funding during the dot-com bubble bust in the form of In-Q-Tel]." p. 173
"In 1999, at the peak of the dot-com boom, The CIA 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 empoyees 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 clients, and they involved themselves in customizing Keyhole's virtual map product to meet their own needs. 101 Months later 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 virtual maps. Tehy also appreciated the ability to layer visual information over other intelligence. 103 The possibilities were only limited by what contextual data could be fed and grafted onto a map: troop movements, weapons cahces, real-time weather and ocean conditions, intercepted emails and phone call intel, cell phone locations." p. 175
"Military comanders weren't the only ones who likes 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 into a company meeting, punched in the address of every person present, and used to 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 comapny 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 purely a 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, whoe 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 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 it 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 fall-out 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 VIA'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 salepeople from teh 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 agreessive 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 Sunnit 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 CIA's Intellipedia {which bascially could mark the point when they started feeding their own gobshite to themselves, if Wikipedia is anything to go by], 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 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 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 for the customary bidding process, but the agency had defended its desision, saying it ahd no choice: it had spent years woring with Google on secret and top-secret programs to build Google Earth techonology according to its needs and could not go with any other company. 115
Google has been tightlipped about the details and scope of its contracting business. It does not list theis revenue in a separate column in quarterly earnings report to investors, nor does it provide the sum to reporters. But an analysis of the federal contracting databse maintained by the US government, combined with information gleaned from the Freedom of Information Act requests and published periodic reports on teh 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, DAPRA, NSA, FBI, DEA, CIA, NGA, and the State Department. 116 SOmetimes Google sells directly to the government, but is 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 empoyees 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, Booeing, Betchel, 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 has become in 2010, following a disastrous intrusion into its syste by what the government believes was Chinese government hackers, Google entered into a secretive agreement with the National Security Agency. 121 'According to official who were privy to the details of Google's arrangements with the NSA, the company agreed to provide information about traffic on its netwroks 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, inormation for information. And from teh NSA's perscpective, information exchanged for protection.' 122
This made perfect sense. Google servers suppplied 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 Maerican society. It needed to be protected, too." p. 178
"Amazon runs cloud computing and storage services for teh CIA. 135 The initial contract, signed in 2013, was worth $600 million and was later expanded to include the NSA and a doxen other US intelligence agencies. 135 Amazon foudner 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 with SpaceX, a spance company started by another internet mogul: PayPal cofounder Elon Musk. Meanwhile, another PayPal founder, Peter thiel, spon off PayPal's sophisticated fraud-detection algorithm into Palantir Technologies, a major military contractor that provides sophsiticated data-mining services for the NSA and CIA. 137
Facebook, too, is cozy with the miliary. It poached former DARPA head Regina Dugan to run its secretive 'Building 8' research division, which is involved in everything from artifical intelligence to drone-based wireless Internet netwroks. 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" p. 181
"Indeed, Google's size and ambition make it more than a simple contractor. It is frequently an equal partner with government agencies, using its resources and commercial domination to bring companies with heavy military funding to market. In 2008, it launched a private spy satellite called GeoEye-r in partnership with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. 140 It bought Boston Dynamics, a DARPA-seeded robotics company that make 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. 140 It hase invested $100 million in Crowdstrike, a major military and intelligence cyber-defense contractor that, among other things, led the investigation into the alleged 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 cyberwarfare. 143" p. 181
"The Arab Srping had arrived.
In Tunisia and Egypt, these protest movements toppled long-standing dictatorships from withint. In Libya, oppositin forces deposed and savagely killed Muammar Gaddafi, knifing himin the anus, after extensive bombing campaigns from NATO forces. In Syria, protests were met with a brutal crackdown from Bashar Assad's government, and let to a protracted war that would claim hundreds of thousands of lies and trigger the worst refugee crisis in recent history, pulling in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel, the CIA, the Russiaqn Air Force and special operations teams, Al-Qaeda, and ISIL. Arab Spring turned into a long bloody winter.
The underlying causes of these opposition movements were deep, complex, and varied from country to country. Youth unemployment, corruption, drought, and related high food prices, political repression, economic stagnation, and longstanding geopolitical aspirations were just a few of the factors. To a young and digitally savvy crop of State Department officials and foreign policy planners, these political movements had one thing in common: they arose because of the democratizing power of the Internet. They saw social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as democratic multipliers that allowed people to get around state-controlled information sources and organize political movements quickly and efficiently.
'The Che Guevara of the 21st Century is the network,' Alec Ross, a State Department official in charge of digital politcy under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gushed in the NATO Review, the official magazine of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. His Che reference smacks of hypocrisy and perhaps ignorance; Che, after all, was executed by Bolivian forces backed by teh United States, in particular, by the CIA.
The idea that social media could be weaponized against countries and governments deemed hostile to US interests wasn't a surprise. For years the State Department, in partnership with the Broadcasting Board of Governors and companies like Facebook and Google, had worked to train activists from around the world on how to use Internet tools and social media to organize opposition political movements. Countries like Asia, the MIddle East, and Latin America as well as former Soviet States like the Ukraine and Belarus were all on the list. INdeed, the New York Times reproted that many of the activists, who played leading roles in the Arab Spring - from Egypt to Syria to Yemen - had to take part in these training sessions.
'The money spent on these programs was minute compared with efforts led by the Pentagon,' reported the New York Times in April 2011. 'But as American officials and others look back at the uprisings of teh Arab Spring, they are seeing that the United States' democracy-building campaigns played a bigger role in fomenting protests than was previously known, with key leaders of the movements having been trained by the Americans in campaigning, organizing through new media tools and monitoring elections.' The tranings were politically charged and were seen as a threat by Egypt, Yemen, and Bahrain - all of which lodged complaints with the State Department to stop meddling in their domestic affairs, and even barred US officials from entering their countries.
An Egyptian youth political leader who attended State Department training sessions and then went out to lead protests in Cairo told the New York Times. 'We learn how to organize and build coalitions. This certinaly helped during the revolution.' A different youth activist, who had participated in Yemen's uprising, was equally enthusiastic about the State Depertment media training: 'It helped me very much because I used to think that change only takes place by force and by weapons.'
Staff from the Tor Project played a role in some of these trainings, taking part in a series of Arab Blogger sessions in Yemen,Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, and Bahrain, where Jacob Appelbaum taught opposition activists how to use Tor to get around government censorship. 'Today was fantastic...really a fantastic meeting of minds in the Arab World! It's enlightening and humbling to have been invited. [....]' Appelbaum tweeted after an Arab Bloggers training event in 2009, adding: 'If you'd like to help Tor please sign up and help translate Tor software into Arabic.'
Activists later put the skills taught at these training sessions to use during the Arab Spring, routing around Internet blocks that their governments threw up to prevent them from using social media to orgainize protests. 'There would be no access to Twitter or Facebook in some of these places if you didn't have Tor. All of a sudden you had all these dissidents exploding under their noses, and then down the road you ahve a revolution,' Nasser Wedaddy, a prominent Arab Spring activist from Mauritania, later told Rolling Stone. Weddady, who had taken part in teh Tor Project's traning sessions and who had translated a widely circulated guide on how to use the tool into Arabic, credited it with helping keep the Arab Spring uprisings alive. 'Tor rendered the government's efforts completely futile. They simply didn't have the know-how to counter that move.'
From a higher vantage point, the Tor project was a wild success. It had matured into a powerful foreign policy tool - a soft-power cypber weapong with multiple uses and benefits. It hid spies and military agents on teh Internet, enabling them to carry out their missions without leaving a trace. It was used by the US Government as a persuasive regime-change weapong, a digital crowbar that prevented countries from exercising sovereign control over their own Internet infrastructure. Counterintuitively, Tor also emerged as a focal point for antigovernment privacy activists and organizations, a huge cultural success that made Tor that much more effective for its own government backers by drawing fans and helping shiled projects from scrutiny.
And Tor was just the beginning.
The Arab Spring provided the US governemnt with the confirmation it was looking for. Social media, combined with technologies like Tor, could be tapped to bring huge masses of people onto the streets and could even trigger revolutions. Diplomats in Washington called it 'democracy promotion.' Critics called it regime change. But it didn't matter what you called it. The US government saw that it couldn't leverage the INternet to sow discord and inflame political instability in countries it considered hostile to US interests. Good or bad, it could weaponize social media and use it for insurgency. And it wanted more.
In the wake of the Arab Spring, the US government directed even more resources to INternet Freedom techonologies. The plan was to go beyond the Tor Project and launch all sorts of crypto tools to leverage the power of social media to help foreign activists build political movements and oraganize protests: encypted chat apps and ultrasecure operating systems designed to prevent governments from spying on activists, anonymous whistle-blowing platforms that could help expose government corruption, and wireless networks that could be deployed instantly anywhere in the world to keep activists connected even if their government turned off the internet.
Strangely enough, these efforts were about to get a major credibility boost from an unlikely source an NSA contractor by the name of Edward Snowden." - p. 248
"Take Signal, the encrypted app Edward Snowden said he used every day. Marketed as a secure communication tool for political activists, the app had strange features built in from the very beginning. It required that users link their active mobile phone number and uplaod their entire address book into Signal's servers - both questionable features of a tool designed to protect political activists from law enforcement in authoritarian countries. IN most cases, a person's phone number was effectively that person's identity, tied to a bank account and home address. Meanwhile, a person's address book contained that user's friends, colleagues, fellow political activists, and organizers, virtually the person's entire social network.
Then there was the fact that Signal ran on Amazon's servers, which meant that all its data were available to a partner in teh NSA's PRISM surveillance program. Equally problematic, Signal needed Apple and Google to install and run the app on people's mobile phones. Both comapnies were, and as far as we now still are, partners in PRISM as well. 'Google usually has root access to the pohone, there's the issue of integrity,' writes Sander Venema, a respected developer and secure-technology trainer, in a blog post explaining why he no longer recognized Signal for encypted chat. 'Google is still cooperating with the NSA and other intelligence agencies. PRISM is also still a thing. I'm pretty sure that Google could serve a specially modified update version or version of Signal to specific targets of surveillance, and they would be none the wiser that they installed malware on their phones.'
Equally weird was the way the app was designed to make it easy for anyone monitoring Internet traffic to flag people using Signal to communicate. All teh FBI, or, say, Egyptian or Russian security services ahd to do was watch for the mobile phones that pinged a particular Amazon server used by Signal, and it was trivial to isolate activists from the general smartphone population. So, although the app encrypted the content of people's messages, it also marked them with a flashing red sign: 'Follow Me. I Have Something To Hide." (Indeed, activists protesting the Democratic Natinal Convention in Philadelphia in 2016 told me that they were bewildered by the fact that police seemed to know and anticipate every move despite having used Signal to organize.)
Debate about Signal's technical design was moot anyway. Snowden's leaks showed teh NSA had developed tools that could grab everything people did on their smartphones, which presumably included texts sent and recieved by Signal. In early March 2017, Wikileaks published a cache of CIA hacking tools that confirmed the inevitable. The agency worked with the NSA as well as other 'cyber arms conctractors' to develop hacking tools that targeted smartphones, allowing it to bypass the encryption of Signal and any other encrypted chat apps, including Facebook's WhatsApp.
The CIA's Mobile Devices Branch (MDB) developed numberous attacks to remotely hack and control popular smart phones. Infected phones ca be instructed to send CIA the user's geolocation, audio and text communications as well as covertly activate the phone's camer5a and microphone,' explained a Wikileaks press release. 'These techniques permit the CIA to bypass encryption of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Wiebo, Confide and Cloackman by hacking the 'smart' phones that they run on and collecting audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.' " - p 265
"It you take a big picture view, Silicon Valley's support for INternet Freedom makes sense as well. Companies like Google and Facebook first supported it as a part of a geopolitical business strategy, a way of subtly pressuring countries that closed their networks and markets to Western technology companies. But after Edawrd Snowden revelations exposed the industry's rampant private surveillance practices to the public, Internet Freedom offered another powerful benefit.
For years public opinion has been stacked firmly against Silicon Valley's underlying business model. IN poll after poll, Americans have voiced their opposition to corporate surveillance and have signalled support for increased regulation of industry. This has always been a deal breaker for Silicon Valley. FOr many INternet comanpies, including Goggle and Facebook, surveillance is the business model. It is the base on which their corporate and ecnonomic power rests. Disentagnle surveillance and profit, and these companies would collapse. Limit data collection, and the companies would see investors flee and their stock prices plummet.
Silicon Valley fears a political solution to privacy. Internet Freedom and crypto offer an acceptable alternative. Tools like Signal and Tor provide a false solution to the privacy problem, focusing people's attention on government surveillance and distracting them from the private spying carried out by the Internet companizes they use every day." - p. 268
"In that sense, Edward Snowden is like the branded face of an Internet consumerism-as-rebellion lifestyle campaign, like the old Apple ad about shaterring Big Brother or the Nike spot set to the Beatles' 'Revolution'. While Internet billionaires like Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg slam government surveillance, talk up freedom, and embrace Snowden and crypto privacy culture, their companies still cut deals with the Pentagon, work with the NSA and CIA, and continue to track and profile people for profit. It is the same old split scenes marketing trick: the public branding and the behind-the-scenes reality." - p. 269