{"id":124600,"date":"2018-12-24T12:00:08","date_gmt":"2018-12-24T12:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=124600"},"modified":"2018-12-31T09:46:39","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T09:46:39","slug":"googles-earth-how-the-tech-giant-is-helping-the-state-spy-on-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/12\/googles-earth-how-the-tech-giant-is-helping-the-state-spy-on-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Google\u2019s Earth: How the Tech Giant Is Helping the State Spy on Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

We knew that being connected had a price \u2013 our data. But we didn\u2019t care. Then it turned out that Google\u2019s main clients included the military and intelligence agencies.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Composite: Alamy\/Guardian Design<\/p><\/div>\n

20 Dec 2018 – <\/em>The internet surrounds us. It mediates modern life, like a giant, unseen blob that engulfs the modern world. There is no escape, and, as Larry Page and Sergey Brin so astutely understood when they launched Google in 1998<\/a>, everything that people do online leaves a trail of data. If saved and used correctly, these traces make up a goldmine of information full of insights into people on a personal level as well as a valuable read on larger cultural, economic and political trends.<\/p>\n

Google<\/a> was the first internet company to fully leverage this insight and build a business on the data that people leave behind. But it wasn\u2019t alone for long. It happened just about everywhere, from the smallest app to the most sprawling platform.<\/p>\n

Uber, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Tinder, Apple, Lyft, Foursquare, Airbnb, Spotify, Instagram, Twitter, Angry Birds \u2013 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 net-work. Where we go, what we do, what we talk about, who we talk to, and who we see \u2013 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

They know us intimately, even the things that we hide from those closest to us. 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.<\/p>\n

As the internet expanded, Google grew along with it. No matter what service it deployed or what market it entered, surveillance and prediction were cooked into the business. The amount of data flowing through Google\u2019s systems is staggering. By the end of 2016, Google\u2019s Android was installed on 82% of all new smartphones sold around the world, and by mid-2017 there were more than 2 billion Android users globally.<\/p>\n

Google also handles billions of searches and YouTube plays daily, and has a billion active Gmail users<\/a>, meaning it had access to most of the world\u2019s emails. Some analysts estimate that 25% of all internet traffic in North America goes through Google\u2019s servers. The company isn\u2019t just connected to the internet, it is <\/em>the internet.<\/p>\n

Google has pioneered a whole new type of business transaction. Instead of paying for its services with money, people pay with their data. And the services it offers to consumers are just the lures, used to grab people\u2019s data and dominate their attention \u2013 attention that is contracted out to advertisers. Google has used data to grow its empire. By early 2018, Google\u2019s parent company, Alphabet, had85,050 employees, working out of more than 70 offices in 50 countries. The company had a market capitalisation of $727bn at the end of 2017, making it the second most valuable public company in the world, beaten only by Apple, another Silicon Valley<\/a> giant. Its profits for the first quarter of 2018 were $9.4bn.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Google co-founders Larry Page, left, and Sergey Brin in 2004.
Photograph: Ben Margot\/AP<\/p><\/div>\n

Meanwhile, other internet companies depend on Google for survival. Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Lyft and Uber have all built multi-billion-dollar businesses on top of Google\u2019s ubiquitous mobile operating system. As the gatekeeper, Google benefits from their success as well. The more people who use their mobile devices, the more data it gets on them.<\/p>\n

What does Google know? What can it guess? Well, it seems just about everything. \u201cOne of the things that eventually happens \u2026 is that we don\u2019t need you to type at all,\u201d Eric Schmidt<\/a>, Google\u2019s former CEO, said in a moment of candour in 2010. \u201cBecause we know where you are. We know where you\u2019ve been. We can more or less guess what you\u2019re thinking about.\u201d He later added: \u201cOne 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is a scary thought, considering that Google is no longer a cute startup but a powerful global corporation with its own political agenda and a mission to maximise profits for shareholders. Imagine if Philip Morris, Goldman Sachs or a military contractor like Lockheed Martin had this kind of access.<\/p>\n

Not long after Brin and Page incorporated Google, they began to see their mission in bigger terms. They weren\u2019t just building a search engine or a targeted advertising business. They were organising the world\u2019s information to make it accessible and useful for everyone. It was a vision that also encompassed the Pentagon.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 startup now known as Google Earth.<\/p>\n

In 2003, a San Francisco company called Keyhole Incorporated was on the ropes. With a name recalling the CIA\u2019s secret 1960s \u201cKeyhole\u201d spy satellite programme, the company had been launched two years earlier as a spinoff from a videogame outfit. Its CEO, John Hanke, told journalists that the inspiration for his company came from Neal Stephenson\u2019s Snow Crash<\/a>, a cult science-fiction novel in which the hero taps into a programme created by the \u201cCentral Intelligence Corporation\u201d called Planet Earth, a virtual reality construct designed, as the book describes, to \u201ckeep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns \u2013 all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff\u201d.<\/p>\n

Keyhole had its roots in videogame technology, but deployed it in the real world, creating a programme that stitched satellite images and aerial photographs into seamless 3D 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\u2019s timing: it was a bit off. It launched just as the dotcom bubble blew up in Silicon Valley\u2019s face. Funding dried up, and Keyhole found itself struggling to survive. Luckily, the company was saved just in time by the very entity that inspired it: the CIA<\/a>.<\/p>\n

More: Google at 20: how two ‘obnoxious’ students changed the internet<\/a> <\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u2019s intelligence needs. Keyhole seemed a perfect fit.<\/p>\n

The CIA poured an unknown amount of money into Keyhole. The investment was finalised in early 2003, and it was made in partnership with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a major intelligence organisation with 14,500 employees and a $5bn budget, whose job was to deliver satellite-based intelligence to the CIA and the Pentagon. Known as the NGA, the spy agency\u2019s motto was: \u201cKnow the Earth \u2026 Show the Way \u2026 Understand the World.\u201d<\/p>\n

The CIA and NGA were not just investors; they were also clients, and they involved themselves in customising Keyhole\u2019s virtual map product to meet their own needs. Months after In-Q-Tel\u2019s investment, Keyhole software was already integrated into operational service and deployed to support US troops during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the shock-and-awe campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Intelligence officials were impressed with the \u201cvideogame-like\u201d simplicity of its virtual maps. They also appreciated the ability to layer visual information over other intelligence. The possibilities were limited only by what contextual data could be fed and grafted on to a map: troop movements, weapons caches, real-time weather and ocean conditions, intercepted emails and phone call intel, and mobile phone locations.<\/p>\n

Keyhole gave intelligence analysts, field commanders, air force pilots and others the kind of capabilities we take for granted today when we use digital mapping services on our computers and smartphones to look up restaurants, cafes, museums, traffic or subway routes.<\/p>\n

Military commanders weren\u2019t the only ones who liked Keyhole. So did Sergey Brin. He liked it so much that he insisted on personally demoing the app for Google executives. According to an account published in Wired<\/a>, he barged in on a company meeting, punched in the address of every person present, and used the programme to virtually fly over their homes.<\/p>\n

In 2004, the same year Google went public, Brin and Page bought the company outright, CIA investors and all. They then absorbed the company into Google\u2019s growing internet applications platform. Keyhole was reborn as Google Earth.<\/p>\n

The purchase of Keyhole was a 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 defence firms, among them Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. 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\u2019s headquarters in Langley. His job was to help Google grab a slice of the lucrative military-intelligence contracting market. Or, as Painter described in contractor-bureaucratese, \u201cevangelising and implementing Google Enterprise solutions for a host of users across the intelligence and defence communities\u201d.<\/p>\n

Google had closed a few previous deals with intelligence agencies. In 2003, it scored a $2.1m (\u00a31.7m) contract to outfit the National Security Agency (NSA) with a customised search solution that could scan and recognise millions of documents in 24 languages, including on-call tech support in case anything went wrong. In 2004, Google landed a search contract with the CIA. The value of the deal isn\u2019t known, but the agency did ask Google\u2019s permission to customise the CIA\u2019s internal Google search page by placing the CIA\u2019s seal in one of the Google logo\u2019s Os. \u201cI told our sales rep to give them the OK if they promised not to tell anyone. I didn\u2019t want it spooking privacy advocates,\u201d wrote Douglas Edwards, Google\u2019s first director of marketing and brand management, in his 2011 book I\u2019m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. Deals such as these picked up pace and increased in scope after Google\u2019s acquisition of Keyhole.<\/p>\n

In 2006, Google Federal went on a hiring spree, snapping up managers and salespeople from the army, air force, CIA, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. It beefed up its lobbying muscle and assembled a team of Democratic and Republican operatives.<\/p>\n

Even as it expanded into a transnational multi-billion-dollar corporation, Google had managed to retain its geekily innocent \u201cdon\u2019t be evil\u201d image. So while Google\u2019s PR team did its best to keep the company wrapped in a false aura of altruism, company executives pursued an aggressive strategy to become the Lockheed Martin of the internet age. \u201cWe\u2019re functionally more than tripling the team each year,\u201d Painter said in 2008. It was true. With insiders plying their trade, Google\u2019s expansion into the world of military and intelligence contracting took off.<\/p>\n

In 2007, it partnered with Lockheed Martin to design a visual intelligence system for the NGA that displayed US military<\/a> bases in Iraq and marked out Sunni and Shia neighbourhoods in Baghdad \u2013 important information for a region that had experienced a bloody sectarian insurgency and ethnic cleansing campaign between the two groups. In 2008, Google won a contract to run the servers and search technology that powered the CIA\u2019s Intellipedia, an intelligence database modelled after Wikipedia that was collaboratively edited by the NSA, CIA, FBI and other federal agencies. Not long after that, Google contracted with the US army to equip 50,000 soldiers with a customised suite of mobile Google services.<\/p>\n

In 2010, as a sign of just how deeply Google had integrated with US intelligence agencies, it won an exclusive, no-bid $27m contract to provide the NGA with \u201cgeospatial visualisation services\u201d, effectively making the company the \u201ceyes\u201d of America\u2019s defence and intelligence apparatus. Competitors criticised 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 programmes to build Google Earth technology according to its needs, and could not go with any other company.<\/p>\n

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 data-base maintained by the US government, combined with information gleaned from Freedom of Information Act requests and published reports on the company\u2019s 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, including the state department. Sometimes Google sells directly to the government, but it also works with established contractors like Lockheed Martin and Saic (Science Applications International Corporation), a California-based intelligence mega-contractor which has so many former NSA employees working for it that it is known in the business as \u201cNSA West\u201d.<\/p>\n

Google\u2019s 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 $60bn US intelligence budget, 70%, or $42bn, 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. And this isn\u2019t just in the defence sector. By 2017, the federal government was spending $90bn a year on information technology. It\u2019s a huge market \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s 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 NSA. \u201cAccording to officials who were privy to the details of Google\u2019s 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,\u201d wrote defence reporter Shane Harris in @War, a history of warfare. \u201cIt was a quid pro quo, information for information. And from the NSA\u2019s perspective, information in exchange for protection.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Google didn\u2019t 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. In 2014, the city of Boston deployed Google to run the information infrastructure for its 76,000 employees \u2013 from police officers to teachers \u2013 and even migrated its old emails to the Google cloud. The Forest Service and the Federal Highway Administration use Google Earth and Gmail.<\/p>\n

In 2016, New York City tapped Google to install and run free wifi stations across the city. California, Nevada and Iowa, meanwhile, depend on Google for cloud computing platforms that predict and catch welfare fraud. Meanwhile, Google mediates the education of more than half<\/a> of America\u2019s public school students.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

New York City mapped in an early version of Google Earth from 2006.
Photograph: AP<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWhat we really do is allow you to aggregate, collaborate and enable,\u201d explained Scott Ciabattari, a Google Federal sales rep, during a 2013 government contracting conference in Wyoming. He was pitching to a room full of civil servants, telling them that Google was all about getting them \u2013 intelligence analysts, commanders, government managers and police officers \u2013 access to the right information at the right time. 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are getting this request more and more: \u2018Can 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.\u2019 Having that ability on a smartphone, being able to see that information quickly at the right time saves lives,\u201d he said. A few months after this presentation, Ciabattari met with officials from Oakland, California to discuss how Google could help the city build its police surveillance centre.<\/p>\n

This mixing of military, police, government, public education, business and consumer-facing systems \u2013 all funnelled through Google \u2013 continues to raise alarms. Lawyers fret over whether Gmail violates attorney-client privilege. Parents wonder what Google does with the information it collects on their kids at school. What does Google do with the data that flows through its systems? Is all of it fed into Google\u2019s big corporate surveillance pot? What are Google\u2019s limits and restrictions? Are there any? In response to these questions, Google offers only vague and conflicting answers.<\/p>\n

Of course, this concern isn\u2019t restricted to Google. 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. On a higher level, there is no real difference between Google\u2019s relationship with the US government and that of these other companies. It is just a matter of degree. The sheer breadth and scope of Google\u2019s technology make it a perfect stand-in for the rest of the commercial internet ecosystem.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Google\u2019s 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, a private spy satellite called GeoEye-1 was launched in partnership with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; Google\u2019s logo was on the launch rocket and the company secured exclusive use of the satellite\u2019s data for use in its online mapping. Google also bought Boston Dynamics, a robotics company that made experimental robotic pack mules for the military, only to sell it off after the Pentagon determined<\/a> it would not be putting these robots into active use. It has invested $100m in CrowdStrike, a major military and intelligence cyber defence contractor that, among other things, led the investigation into the alleged 2016 Russian government hacks of the Democratic National Committee. And it also runs Jigsaw, a hybrid think<\/a>tank\/technology incubator<\/a> aimed at leveraging internet technology to solve thorny foreign policy problems \u2013 everything from terrorism to censorship and cyberwarfare.<\/p>\n

Founded in 2010 by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, a 29-year-old state department whizz-kid who served under both George W Bush and Barack Obama, Jigsaw has launched multiple projects with foreign policy and national security implications. 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 startup funded by the state department to help people in Iran and China route around internet censorship.<\/p>\n

It also built a platform to combat online terrorist recruitment and radicalisation, which worked by identifying Google users interested in Islamic extremist topics and diverting them to state department webpages and videos developed to dissuade people from taking that path. Google calls this the \u201credirect method<\/a>\u201d, a part of Cohen\u2019s larger idea of using internet platforms to wage \u201cdigital counterinsurgency\u201d. 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\u2019s government, which Cohen wanted to beam into Syria as propaganda to give \u201cconfidence to the opposition\u201d.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cGoogle is getting [White House] and state department support and air cover. In reality, they are doing things the CIA cannot do,\u201d wrote Fred Burton, an executive at global intelligence platform Stratfor and a former intelligence agent at the security branch of the state department.<\/p>\n

But Google rejected the claims of its critics. \u201cWe\u2019re not engaged in regime change,\u201d Eric Schmidt told Wired<\/a>. \u201cWe don\u2019t do that stuff. But if it turns out that empowering citizens with smartphones and information causes changes in their country \u2026 you know, that\u2019s probably a good thing, don\u2019t you think?\u201d<\/p>\n

Jigsaw\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe societal goal is our primary goal. We\u2019ve always tried to say that with Google. Some of the most fundamental questions people are not thinking about \u2026 how do we organise people, how do we motivate people? It\u2019s a really interesting problem \u2013 how do we organise our democracies?\u201d Larry Page ruminated during a rare interview<\/a> in 2014 with the Financial Times. He looked a hundred years into the future and saw Google at the centre of progress. \u201cWe could probably solve a lot of the issues we have as humans.\u201d<\/p>\n

__________________________________________________<\/p>\n

This is an edited extract from <\/em>Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet by Yasha Levine, which will be published by Icon on 3 January, and is available to preorder at guardianbookshop.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Yasha Levine<\/em>\u00a0is a Russian-American investigative journalist and author.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theguardian.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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