{"id":7116,"date":"2014-05-15T16:27:39","date_gmt":"2014-05-15T20:27:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/home\/?p=7116"},"modified":"2014-06-11T14:11:42","modified_gmt":"2014-06-11T18:11:42","slug":"orwells-nightmare-the-nsa-and-google-big-brother-meets-big-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/orwells-nightmare-the-nsa-and-google-big-brother-meets-big-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Orwell\u2019s Nightmare: The NSA and Google\u2014Big Brother Meets Big Business"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"GoogleNSA\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Google services and apps that we interact with on a daily basis aren\u2019t the company\u2019s main product: They are the harvesting machines that dig up and process the stuff that Google really sells: for-profit intelligence.\u201d\u2014Journalist Yasha Levine<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know where you are. We know where you\u2019ve been. We can more or less know what you\u2019re thinking about.\u201d\u2014former Google CEO Eric Schmidt<\/p>\n

What would happen if the most powerful technology company in the world and the largest clandestine spying agency in the world joined forces?<\/p>\n

No need to wonder. Just look around you. It\u2019s happened already. Thanks to an insidious partnership between Google and the National Security Agency (NSA) that grows more invasive and more subtle with every passing day, \u201cwe the people\u201d have become little more than data consumer commodities to be bought, sold and paid for over and over again.<\/p>\n

With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases\u2014whether at the grocer\u2019s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store, and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we\u2019re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s worse, this for-profit surveillance scheme, far larger than anything the NSA could capture just by tapping into our phone calls, is made possible by our consumer dollars and our cooperation. All those disclaimers you scroll though without reading them, the ones written in minute font, only to quickly click on the \u201cAgree\u201d button at the end so you can get to the next step\u2014downloading software, opening up a social media account, adding a new app to your phone or computer: those signify your written consent to having your activities monitored, recorded and shared.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just the surveillance you consent<\/em> to that\u2019s being shared with the government, however. It\u2019s the very technology you happily and unquestioningly use which is being hardwired to give the government easy access to your activities.<\/p>\n

In this way, Congress can pass all the legislation it wants\u2014it will have no real effect on the NSA\u2019s activities\u2014because the NSA no longer needs to dirty its hands by spying on Americans\u2019 phone, email and internet activities, and the government can absolve itself of any direct wrongdoing. They can go straight to the source, as evidenced by a Freedom of Information Act request detailing the close relationship between Google higher-ups Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin and NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander. With Google in its hip pocket, the NSA can just bypass any legislative restrictions dreamed up to appease the electorate and buy their way into a surveillance state.<\/p>\n

The government\u2019s motives aren\u2019t too difficult to understand\u2014money, power, control\u2014but what do corporate giants like Google stand to gain from colluding with Big Brother? Money, power, control. As privacy and security expert Bruce Schneier observed, \u201cThe main focus of massive Internet companies and government agencies both still largely align: to keep us all under constant surveillance. When they bicker, it\u2019s mostly role-playing designed to keep us blas\u00e9 about what\u2019s really going on.\u201d<\/p>\n

While one billion people use Google every day, none of them pay to utilize Google\u2019s services. However, there\u2019s a good reason that Google doesn\u2019t charge for its services, and it has nothing to do with magnanimity, generosity, altruism, or munificence. If as the old adage warns, there\u2019s no such thing as a free lunch, then what does Google get out of the relationship? Simple: Google gets us.<\/p>\n

It turns out that we<\/em> are Soylent Green. The 1973 film of the same name, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, is set in 2022 in an overpopulated, polluted, starving New York City whose inhabitants depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation for survival. Heston plays a policeman investigating a murder, who then discovers the grisly truth about what the wafer, soylent green\u2014the principal source of nourishment for a starved population\u2014is really made of. \u201cIt\u2019s people. Soylent Green is made out of people,\u201d declares Heston\u2019s character. \u201cThey\u2019re making our food out of people. Next thing they\u2019ll be breeding us like cattle for food.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oh, how right he was. Soylent Green is indeed people, or in our case, Soylent Green is our own personal data, repossessed, repackaged and used by corporations and the government to entrap us. In this way, we\u2019re being bred like cattle but not for food\u2014rather, we\u2019re being bred for our data. That\u2019s the secret to Corporate America\u2019s success.<\/p>\n

Google, for example, has long enjoyed a relationship with clandestine agencies such as the CIA and NSA, which use Google\u2019s search-technology for scanning and sharing various intelligence. The technology leviathan turns a profit by processing, trading, and marketing products based upon our personal information, including our relationships, daily activities, personal beliefs, and personalities. Thus, behind the pleasant glow of the computer screen lies a leviathan menace, an intricate system of data collection which transforms all Americans into a string of data, to be added, manipulated, or deleted based upon the whims of those in control.<\/p>\n

Take, for example, Google\u2019s Street View program, which gives a fully immersive street level view of towns across the world. The program was constructed by Google Street View cars outfitted with 360 degree cameras, which seemed a neat idea to many people, most of whom didn\u2019t realize that the cars were not only taking pictures of all residential and commercial districts which they drove through, but were also \u201csiphoning loads of personally identifiable data from people\u2019s Wi-Fi connections all across the world,\u201d including emails, medical records, and any other electronic documents that were not encrypted.<\/p>\n

Even the most seemingly benign Google program, Gmail, has been one of the most astoundingly successful surveillance programs ever concocted by a state or corporate entity. Journalist Yasha Levine explains:<\/p>\n

\u201cAll communication was subject to deep linguistic analysis; conversations were parsed for keywords, meaning, and even tone; individuals were matched to real identities using contact information stored in a user\u2019s Gmail address book; attached documents were scraped for intel \u2014 that info was then cross-referenced with previous email interactions and combined with stuff gleaned from other Google services, as well as third-party sources\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Google then creates profiles on Gmail users, based upon \u201cconcepts and topics discussed in email, as well as email attachments [including] the content of websites that users have visited; demographic information \u2014 including income, sex, race, marital status; geographic information; psychographic information \u2014 personality type, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyle interests; previous searches users have made; information about documents a user viewed and or edited by the users; browsing activity; previous purchases.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even if one isn\u2019t using Gmail themselves, but merely contacting a Gmail user, that person is subject to this mass collection and analysis of personal data. Google has gone so far as to disingenuously argue that \u201cpeople who used Internet services for communication had \u2018no legitimate expectation of privacy\u2019 \u2014 and thus anyone who emailed with Gmail users had given \u2018implied consent\u2019 for Google to intercept and analyze their email exchange.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Google\u2019s vast acquisition and analysis of information indicates is that we are entering what some have called an age of infopolitics, in which the human person is broken down into data sets to be collated and analyzed, and used for a variety of purposes, including marketing, propaganda, and the squelching of dissent. As philosopher Colin Koopman notes, we may soon find ourselves in a more efficient version of the McCarthy era, in which one\u2019s personal beliefs or associations become fodder for the rising corporate surveillance state.<\/p>\n

Email, social media, and GPS are just the tip of the iceberg, however. Google has added to its payroll the best and brightest minds in the fields of military defense, robotics (including humanoid robotics), defense, surveillance, machine learning, artificial intelligence, web-controlled household appliances (such as Nest thermostats), and self-driving cars. As journalist Carole Cadwalladr\u2019s predicts, \u201cThe future, in ways we can\u2019t even begin to imagine, will be Google\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n

Toward this end, Google has been working towards what one investor called \u201ca Manhattan project of AI [artificial intelligence].\u201d For those who remember their history, the Manhattan Project was a top-secret, multi-agency, multi-billion-dollar, military-driven government project aimed at building the first atom bombs. This project not only spawned the nuclear bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it also ushered in a nuclear arms race that, to this day, puts humanity on the brink of annihilation.<\/p>\n

No less powerful and potentially destructive to the human race are modern-day surveillance and robotic technologies, manufactured by corporations working in tandem with government agencies. These are the building blocks of the global electronic concentration camp encircling us all, and Google, in conjunction with the NSA, has set itself up as a formidable warden.<\/p>\n

The question, when all is said and done, is where will all this technology take us? It\u2019s a conundrum I explore at length in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State<\/em><\/span><\/a>, which looks to film, fiction and art as indicators of the police state that now surrounds us, brought about with the help of the government and its corporate partners.<\/p>\n

It won\u2019t be long before we find ourselves, much like Edward G. Robinson\u2019s character in Soylent Green<\/em>, looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.<\/p>\n

Then again, George Orwell\u2019s description of the world of 1984<\/em> is as apt a description of today\u2019s world as I\u2019ve ever seen: \u201cYou had to live\u2014did live, from habit that became instinct\u2014in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.\u201d<\/p>\n

WC: 2054<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe Google services and apps that we interact with on a daily basis aren\u2019t the company\u2019s main product: They are the harvesting machines that dig up and process the stuff that Google really sells: for-profit intelligence.\u201d\u2014Journalist Yasha Levine \u201cWe know where you are. We know where you\u2019ve been. We can more or less know what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":7118,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,214,226,212],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7116"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7116"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7197,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7116\/revisions\/7197"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}