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— GOOGLE AND THE CIA —

BIG BROTHER IS TAKING LIBERTIES

In the first ten years after its launch in 1998, Google conquered the world. It put the internet to work. It changed forever the way people everywhere found the information they wanted. It gave us satellite images of places, street-level views of roads and buildings and instant rough and ready translations from any language to any other. Through its shrewd acquisition of the fledgling YouTube, it gave us video on demand. And, apart from its advertising platforms like AdWords and AdSense, it gave everything free of charge.

Google’s unofficial but widely publicised motto has always been ‘Don’t be evil’. But, for many people, the company seemed to be getting close to the edge a few years ago. It seemed Google was supping with the devil when it agreed to censor searches from China to please the Chinese government. Google executives argued that giving 1.3 billion Chinese access to almost all the riches and information of the internet was better for free speech and human rights than taking a high moral position and refusing to go into China at all.

For several years, Chinese internet users had to place their searches through elgooG (which works perfectly, as long as you type your question back to front, as ‘noitseuq’) or via the Google diversion service that took them to google.com.hk in Hong Kong. But after many Gmail accounts were hacked, presumably by the Chinese government, in early 2010, Google regained its virtue by announcing that it was no longer prepared to censor its results.

From its base in Mountain View, California, Google has built a global empire while maintaining a convincing image of creativity and helpfulness, largely by its actions, rather than its words. Yet it is far from the hippy-ish, pizza-and-pinball nerds corner that is sometimes portrayed. In recruiting staff, for example, it can be obsessively risk-averse. One brilliant young Cambridge entrepreneur and artificial intelligence expert, Ben Coppin, found himself turned down for a job with the company after the ninth interview, which must be some kind of record.

The main conspiracy accusations against Google tend to revolve around the sheer volume of information it holds about individuals and their preferences. People have been worried that Google may not be strong enough to fend off future US government demands for data and user information, particularly in the context of terrorism investigations, though its past record has been fairly impressive. Other high-tech companies like Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft have surrendered user records when put under heavy political and legal pressure, but Google has shown stubborn resistance so far.

For the true conspiracy theorists, though, the Google conspiracy is already here. They believe Google is already intimately involved with the CIA.

REASONS TO DOUBT

The ‘Don’t be evil’ touchstone has held up surprisingly well over more than 12 years of growth and commercial cut and thrust. Apart from the China issue, where Google was damned if it did and damned if it didn’t, it has been able to keep its hands unusually clean.

Even the 2010 wi-spy affair caused remarkably little damage to Google’s Teflon reputation. An international row blew up after revelations that Google’s little Street View camera cars had been hoovering up snippets of email traffic, passwords and other information from people’s wireless networks as they drove past homes in more than 30 countries. But the scandal never really caught fire. Though the company initially denied it had captured any ‘payload information’, it soon came back, very obviously embarrassed, and admitted that fragments of real content had been recorded. Senior managers confessed that a big mistake had been made, blamed a single programmer for inserting the relevant code into the software and vowed that they never did and never would do anything with the personal data that was collected.

Journalists and campaign groups had some fun at Google’s expense, especially when America’s Consumer Watchdog used similar equipment to go sniffing outside the home of Jane Harman, chair of the US Congress Homeland Security Committee’s Intelligence Subcommittee. Sure enough, Harman’s house had an unencrypted wireless network from which potentially sensitive information could easily be gathered. Government agencies in Germany, the UK, Ireland, Spain and South Korea have come down hard on Google for breaching privacy and data protection laws. Yet there seems to be a general acceptance that these offences were committed accidentally, rather than as part of an evil master plan.

Everybody at the company has repeatedly promised that identifiable personal information will never be abused or sold on. And, coming from Google, this is broadly regarded as credible. It may be the biggest player on the internet but it has invested more heavily than most in building consumer confidence and trust. As a result, it has raised the stakes and given hostages to fortune.

Any evidence of sharp practice or double-dealing at Google would have a devastating effect on its benign corporate image, its share price and – most important of all – its ability to get away with sailing close to the wind on issues of privacy and confidentiality.

There have been real controversies over the intrusiveness of Street View and serious copyright issues around the Google Books Library Project. But Google still has a reservoir of goodwill.

REASONS TO BELIEVE

Cynics – and competitors – have long thought Google looks too good to be true. From the competitors’ point of view, any opportunity to tarnish the company’s golden reputation or call its motives into question is obviously welcome. But, other than people’s vague unease that Google simply knows too much, there have been remarkably few openings to exploit.

The accusation that Google is already ‘in bed with the CIA’ has been bubbling around for years. But it gained a lot of exposure and some credibility when a maverick ex-CIA agent, Robert Steele, began spelling it out to the world.

Steele is not everybody’s idea of the perfect witness, despite his genuine CIA background. He is an arch-conspiracist, enthusiastically joining all the dots to link the CIA and Google, the bankers and the US military/industrial complex, the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers in one big plot to profit from depressions, wars, terrorism and genocide. But he does have connections from several years in US Marine Corps Intelligence and as a clandestine services case officer for the CIA. Steele claims the CIA provided early-stage investment funding to help Google when it was starting up. ‘They’ve been together for quite a while,’ he says.

Steele believes it is ‘very, very wrong’ of Google to have the cosy relationship he alleges with his ex-employers at the CIA. ‘I think that Google has made a very important strategic mistake in dealing with the secret elements of the US government. I’m hoping they’ll work their way out of it and basically cut that relationship off.’

Others who see Google as deeply implicated in CIA activities point to the fact that it has supplied the search technology for Intellipedia, an ‘internal Wikipedia’ that pools the knowledge of 37,000 CIA agents and other US intelligence personnel.

They are quick to remind you that Google Earth springs from technology developed by Keyhole Inc, a start-up funded by the CIA through its In-Q-Tel venture capital firm and eventually acquired by Google in 2004. And they like to draw attention to the career of Rob Painter, Director of Technology Assessment at In-Q-Tel, who jumped straight across to spend the next four years in senior ‘federal technology’ roles at Google.

In July 2010, Wired magazine revealed that the spooks and the don’t-be-evilers were both putting investment money into a tiny 16-person artificial intelligence company in Massachusetts that monitors websites and social networks in real time and then links scraps of information together in an attempt to predict future events. Combining this kind of technology with Google’s huge networks and computing firepower, plus the fact that most internet users perform searches many times a day, presents obvious potential for serious intrusion, abuse and breaches of privacy.

Both Google and In-Q-Tel now have directors on the board of the software company, Recorded Future, which, according to its CEO, Christopher Ahlberg, brings new techniques to the art of sifting the mass of publicly available information. Smart ‘data mining’ enables it to plot the chatter of mentions on the internet to spot the online momentum around a given event.

‘The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,’ says Ahlberg. ‘We’re right there when it happens. We can actually assemble real-time dossiers on people.’

That kind of talk may be good for business for Recorded Future. It may make the CIA confident that its investment money is well spent. But it worries some observers a lot (see bit.ly/ciagoogle). And it does nothing to dispel the idea that the helpful idealists from Mountain View are starting to get very close to the sort of people we’ve learned we can’t trust and the sort of high-tech Big Brotherdom we should all be worried about.