Orwell’s Nightmare: The
NSA And Google—Big Brother Meets Big Business
George Orwell’s
description of the world of 1984 is as apt a description of today’s world as
I’ve ever seen.
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“The
Google services and apps that we interact with on a daily basis aren’t the
company’s main product: They are the harvesting machines that dig up and
process the stuff that Google really sells: for-profit
intelligence.”—Journalist Yasha Levine
“We know
where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re
thinking about.”—former Google CEO Eric Schmidt
What
would happen if the most powerful technology company in the world and the
largest clandestine spying agency in the world joined forces?
No need
to wonder. Just look around you. It’s 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, “we the people” have
become little more than data consumer commodities to be bought, sold, and paid
for over and over again.
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—whether at the grocer’s, the
yogurt shop, the airlines, or the department store–and
every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re 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.
What’s
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 “Agree” button at the end so you can get to the next step—downloading
software, opening up a social media account, adding a new app to your phone or
computer–signify your written consent to having your activities monitored,
recorded, and shared.
It’s not
just the surveillance you consent to that’s being shared with the
government, however. It’s the very technology you happily and unquestioningly
use that is being hardwired to give the government easy access to your
activities.
In this
way, Congress can pass all the legislation it wants—it will have no real effect
on the NSA’s activities—because the NSA no longer needs to dirty its hands by
spying on Americans’ 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.
The
government’s motives aren’t too difficult to understand—money, power,
control—but what do corporate giants like Google stand to gain from colluding
with Big Brother? Money, power, and control. As privacy and security expert
Bruce Schneier observed, “The main focus of massive Internet companies and
government agencies both still largely align: to keep us all under constant surveillance.
When they bicker, it’s mostly role-playing designed to keep us blasé about
what’s really going on.”
While one
billion people use Google every day, none of them pay to utilize Google’s
services. However, there’s a good reason that Google doesn’t charge for its
services; and it has nothing to do with magnanimity, generosity, altruism, or
munificence. If, as the old adage warns, there’s no such thing as a free lunch,
then what does Google get out of the relationship? Simple: Google gets us.
It turns
out that we 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—the principal
source of nourishment for a starved population—is really made of. “It’s people.
Soylent Green is made out of people,” declares Heston’s character. “They’re
making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle
for food.”
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’re being bred like cattle but not
for food—rather, we’re being bred for our data. That’s the secret to Corporate
America’s success.
Google,
for example, has long enjoyed a relationship with clandestine
agencies such as the CIA and NSA, which use Google’s
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
that transforms all Americans into a string of data, to be added, manipulated,
or deleted based upon the whims of those in control.
Take, for
example, Google’s 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’t realize that the cars were not only taking
pictures of all residential and commercial districts they drove through, but
were also “siphoning loads of personally identifiable data from people’s Wi-Fi
connections all across the world” including emails,
medical records, and any other electronic documents that
were not encrypted.
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:
“All
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’s Gmail address book;
attached documents were scraped for intel — 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…”
Google
then creates profiles on Gmail users, based upon “concepts and topics discussed
in email, as well as email attachments [including] the content of websites that
users have visited; demographic information — including income, sex, race,
marital status; geographic information; psychographic information — 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.”
Even if
one isn’t 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 “people who used Internet
services for communication had ‘no legitimate expectation of privacy’ — and
thus anyone who emailed with Gmail users had given ‘implied consent’ for Google
to intercept and analyze their email exchange.”
What
Google’s 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’s personal beliefs or
associations become fodder for the rising corporate surveillance state.
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 predicts, “The future, in ways we can’t
even begin to imagine, will be Google’s.”
Toward
this end, Google has been working towards what one investor called “a Manhattan
project of AI [artificial intelligence].” 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.
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.
The
question, when all is said and done, is where will all this technology take us?
It’s a conundrum I explore at length in my book
A
Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, 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.
It won’t
be long before we find ourselves, much like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Soylent
Green, looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we
could speak to whom we wanted; buy what we wanted; and 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.
Then
again, George Orwell’s description of the world of 1984 is as apt a
description of today’s world as I’ve ever seen: “You had to live—did live, from
habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was
overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
