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Cory Doctorow's Fiction About An Evil Google
ahem writes "I saw a link on Valleywag to a story written by Cory Doctorow about what would happen if Google got in bed with the Dept. of Homeland Security. Chilling, well written, but the ending was a bit anti-climactic for my tastes."
Could it really have ended any other way?
John
How do we even know Google isn't already in bed with the government? Under the PATRIOT act, they wouldn't be able to disclose it under certain circumstances.
"....if Google got in bed with the Dept. of Homeland Security."
The resulting offspring would spend all their time searching themselves for terrorists.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Imagine if AT&T got in bed with the NSA
Or if Exxon Mobile influenced energy policy
Or if Pfizer wrote Medicaid Drug Rules
Or if draft dodgers led the US Military
Or if a Horse Commissioner was in charge of FEMA
Oh look OJ Simpson is robbing Brittney Spears Stomach Fat I got to go
what would happen if Google got in bed with the Dept. of Homeland Security.
Well, DHS loves performing cavity searches, and Google's the best search engine out there right now. You do the math.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Chilling? Maybe if your name is Daniel Brandt, but back here in the real world this stays most definitely in the real of fiction.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Granted, I'm not a great fan of fiction outside of Hemmingway, but damn, could you pick a more lame and boring subject?
I think I'll write a fictional story about what would happen if my neighbor took a shit.. Wanna read it?
It's just another dystopic Big Brother Is Watching You story, except the ominous corporation's name is Google. There's nothing new here except a vague possibility.
You know, the NSA is much more established the google. They knew about the insecurity of DES encryption for DECADES before anyone else did. They even convinced IBM to keep quiet about it when they found out. I'm quite sure anything Google could do they are already doing in some cases ( albeit to non US citizens, except when directed to by the executive branch).
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I had just assumed they were, or at least that they were spying on each other.
I'm one of the biggest conspiracy nuts you could ever run into. But I have never once thought of Google as bad, invasive or in any way "in bed" with the evil government. Google is fucking awesome, it has made the internet useable! Now recent events do set off alarm bells (Google Desktop, no fuckin way; and their selling themselves to Wall Street) but Google overall seems, by my gut instinct, benevolent and valuable. The DHS is none of these things. My gut feeling says "trust Google" but I'm always suspicious, always.
Harry Shearer, host of le show, made some jokes about an evil google. He said, "You know our corporate slogan? We want to take one word out, and it isn't evil."
You like GMail's interface and integrated chat/calendar/documents. You like Google Reader. What are you supposed to do now that you know you've been sucked into it all? And where do you go that's more secure, knowing that DOJ owns your ISP anyway?
Seriously, somebody Doctorow me up some answers.
I have no doubt that Google has already been approached by intelligence agencies. I have little doubt that they have already complied with numerous requests for datamined extracts from the gigantic Google database. Why is it so hard to believe that Google could be actively working with DHS right now?
;-)
Are you questioning their patriotism?
Google IS evil.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
Is it not blindingly obvious that Google is the commercial arm of the NSA's Echelon technology ?
(cf. recent demonstration of hacking up a 4xFPGA dictionary computer from an old graphics workstation.)
I automatically assume any data that finds it's way to their servers will be stored forever and used against me in whatever way possible be it to make money or to help the government in it's "war on terror". It's safer to just assume google is currently and has always rolled over for the government when they request information. That's why if it's something that I am even remotely worried about, I use other channels that bypass their systems, or at least allow me to stay anonymous in my interactions with them. There are plenty of things I do online, that, although not illegal per se now, I would never want to be attached to my real identity.
I consume a number of Google services, and bare no grudge against them. However, tend to assume that all big companies with access to a lot of user data is in bed with the US government. Frankly, I don't know why one would assume otherwise. Simply act accordingly when using the services of such companies.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
If putting your email, pictures and search data "out there" isn't enough , the folks at mint will happily store your financial records and access information automatically for you.
Of course, it may just be sooo handy that it's irresistible .
DES was actually quite strong, it is only in the past 10 years or so that certain attacks that reduced its strength became public, but its main weakness was being only 56 bit encryption which was fine when it was designed but by the late 90s computing power had increased by a dozen orders of magnitude and it wasn't good enough even if there were no attacks.
The most interesting thing is that when IBM drafted DES and the NSA was given the draft for their comments, they suggested certain changes. For many years conspiracy theorists believed the changes were to make it easier for the NSA to crack it, when in fact the changes prevented certain types of attacks that only became public about 20 years later!
That doesn't prove or disprove the conspiracy theories that hold that the NSA either had an attack against DES back then or had the computing power to brute force it (though I think the latter is pretty obviously false on its face given the state of the art in the 70s)
I monitor Google's Execs each and every day for goatees. You can't be too careful.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
This article made me deeply think about about this site and you know, I consider myself a conservative and even gasp a republican. But I find myself more and more fighting the draw into becoming paranoid about big brother. I suspect a lot of the reason I'm becoming that way is because I read slashdot. Is it just me or is there a lot of paranoid discussion on it. Or am I really seeing the light now. I suspect it's a little of both, unfortunately the louder of the two camps controls this site so I'm not sure I can cleanly digest the facts of what's going on in our country while reading this board anymore. I think I need to take a break from /. and try to figure things out without the bias that the "loud" slashdot community has.
I know this is a personal rambling, probably influenced by the many beers I've had but I'm not sure slashdot is where I should be going for "news for nerds, news that matters" anymore.
How abut a story about "Evil Slashdot" that is used as a massive tool for concentrated DDOS attacks? Oh wait...
Just for the sake of argument -
/. so you knew that already
What prevents the NSA, or you or me or Microsoft or the Illuminati, from writing a web spider and cataloging until our servers can't take it anymore? Given Google's got the software / hardware / smarts to do the job right, but it seems like the govt could reach into their vast pool of talent and unlimited resources and data mine for days.
"heck of a map reduce, Brownie"
full disclosure: I didn't RTF story but this is
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
So, people don't value their privacy?
Look at the topmost comment on the first page of the story! Some dude called
Alberto S. Lopez
Lawndale, CA
Email: albertoslopez@gmail.com
Cell: 310.686.1259
explains how he read this story on his iPhone!!!
AhAh AHaAhHAh HAhaHAAHahAHaaa!!
Would it be cheaper for the homeland security to "mimick" google instead of
buying it out? Where is the AAA for knowing that you're using google?
http://ldopa.net/2006/06/04/cory-doctorow-visits-a-radio-shack/
Cory and the rest of boingboing.net truly epitomize the worst excesses of the Blogosphere. Too bad we can't lock them all up in Second Life and feed them to the furries.
Used this way, Google mining would just flag everyone and overwhelm DHS with useless intelligence. That is, unless US government goes on Stalin -like purge and send tens of millions to forced labor. Minimally useful intelligence would look for long lasting patterns of accessing the same kinds of material or for active correspondence with other persons of interest. Your data would then be put under surveillance by a human to rule out benign explanations such as scholar research or interest in popular literature. Only then are you likely to see any questioning by law enforcement in real life.
Yes, I am aware of Gitmo, no fly lists, wiretaps without subpoena. But so are other americans, people are ballistic and some of those things are getting curtailed. There is every reason to think this was a temporary fear-induced mistake and not a long term direction of our society. Even then, the article talking about government going evil, not Google.
The NSA changed the S-boxes without explaining why. When the white world re-invented differential cryptanalysis, it turned out that the NSA had strengthened DES with the changes.
The only realistic weakness in DES was the short key length, which the whole world knew about. To this day, triple DES is an accepted if slow cipher.
Come on, they got similar services AND they more or less owns the desktop.
And the site keeps spoonfeeding its members more and more liberal tinfoil... MMMMmmmmm.... lap it up...
The interesting part is that there is already a stab at the googlecleaner out there so some people think it is neccesery http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot/
Funny that the title is "scroogled," that's the name of a prominent anti-google site that runs the Scroogle Scraper, so you can search google without having your entries put in your database. It's nice for doing searches that you'd rather not have in your search profile that google keeps for you. If you use their other services like gmail, they can basically know you intimately. I'd rather they didn't, but can't give up gmail. So it's easy to modify firefox to use scroogle instead of google for searching, and if you adblock adsense, and their urchin.js script, or just google-analytics.com/* they can't see what sites you visit either. It's sad that you have to work so hard to hide your movements from a company that "does no evil" but I guess that's the information economy for you.
Seriously you can reduce google's market share by using another search engine occasionally.
As Market Share equates directly to income in the search business you deprive google of money and power by using another search engine.
It would obviously be sinful to use MSN search, but Yahoo! is merely bad taste.
"www.ask.com" is nearly as good as google and has a nice clean interface.
Plus there are some Open Source "SETI at home" type search engines under development that are worth
supporting "grub" and "Majestic-12" are two.
Although as Majestic-12 is based in the UK, and the UK government is currently under the direct control of the US executive it would be easy to give the NSA direct access to everything.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/01/199212 http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=4774 rechecked articles - they are still accessible by 2007-09-21 10:00 UTC
Most SPAM originates from the CIA. In large, ever-increasing volumes that is designed to overwhelm nearly all mail servers and accounts.
The purpose of SPAM is to drive people to use Gmail, (GMAIL is really a CIA operation) thus placating the masses and providing a useful collection and indexing tool for Homeland Security's requirements. The masses are kept 'happy' because their SPAM problem goes away, and they love CIA GMAIL for this. So many people tell me so, emphatically.
Maybe free-mail isn't really free?
So I tell these people what I just told you, and they always reply that they don't care, because they love Gmail so much for solving the SPAM problem for them.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
It's not as simple as, "Fact is, most people do not care about their privacy." The same people who spew "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" all over the place, would sue your arse into oblivion if you were a peeping tom under their window. Or would ostracize you very quickly if you gossipped to their enemies every word they said.
Some time ago I was reading some anthropology books, to figure out how people work. (Since I'm naturally blind to body language or such, so not much chance to figure it out on my own.) One thing that stuck into my head was that there's a _massive_ disconnect between what people say about themselves -- even on a completely anonymous poll -- and what they actually do. What they say is an ideal self image, the self that they'd like to be, not the self that they actually are. And that ideal self has more to do with social acceptability than with anything else.
E.g.,
- a community had this shiny-happy self-image that they help each other all the time, work their fields together, help each other build a house or a barn, etc. And they all answered just that on a poll. Turns out that in practice the last time anyone actually did that was half a century ago.
- a tribal community had this self-image of being brave warriors and hunters, etc. And almost everyone defined themselves as a hunter on a poll. Turns out that in the meantime they were mainly agriculture-based, and most didn't even have a weapon to hunt or fight with. But they still thought of themselves as hunters and warriors.
- on one occasion where meat prices rose, a western community was asked if they eat more or less meat. Almost everyone said some (more polite) version of "fuck that, I'm not paying that much. I'll buy less meat until the prices come down to something sane." Well, funny thing is, they then asked the local supermarkets and actually went through the thrash to see what people throw away. Turns out the meat consumption was actually higher. (I guess some kind of weblen effect.)
Etc.
Plus, even on anonymous polls you have to deal with effects like:
- people trying to pick the answer they think would be more socially acceptable or would please the person polling them. E.g., if one choice has even vague negative conotations, or is phrased to sound that way, people will try to avoid it.
- more people will answer "yes" than "no", presumably because we've all been educated that it's not nice to refuse too much. So professional polls actually switch the question around on half the forms, to average that effect out. E.g., if the question is "should we pull out of Iraq?" half the forms will actually ask the opposite, "should we continue the war in Iraq?" Otherwise you'll have the results skewed.
Now this may sound like a case of "who the heck said anything about polls?" but bear with me. The same effects will be visible in day-to-day conversations, posts, etc. In fact, to a higher extent.
Briefly, just because some people chest-thump that they have nothing to hide, doesn't mean that they actually don't. It just means that their ideal self image is like that, plus it makes them look better to their peers. It doesn't mean that they match their own ideal, though.
And finally, note that this isn't necessarily "lying". Most people actually genuinely see themselves as better than they really are. It's really just a combination of selective confirmation (you'll remember the times you acted according to your principles, but forget those times when you did the opposite) and cognitive dissonance (rationalizing something so it fits the rest of your mental model. E.g., honest people don't lie, I'm a honest person, omg I just lied to someone for a petty personal advantage... therefore it wasn't really a lie, now that I think about it.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
How about a story about Google getting in bed with the Communist Chinese government in order to help them limit information to the people of China? Oh, wait, *that actually happened*. Remember what happened if you searched for "Tiananmen Square" from Google.cn? Hope so, because Google turned off our ability to check that, with a quickness. How about a story in which Google could monitor and report terrorist communications but chooses not to? Oh, wait... Well, there's more money to be made in trashing America to its ungrateful and spoiled citizens-by-default. And it's the only one which actually qualifies as fiction.
Flamebait Disclaimer--
So I guess that we will just claim (in fiction, of course, I have my rights) that the agency (however bungling and infuriating) charged with keeping you little pop-culture sasquatch-hugging "I Believe" teen-agers (of whatever age) safe in a real shooting war--is somehow the evil to be fought, and that Google would align itself with the U.S. government at any rate.
Karma to burn. At least I won't actually be beheaded for expressing my views in this country.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
So if Google cooperates with the Chinese government to suppress 'dangerous' speech and (probably) to identify dissidents, that's perfectly ok.
But if they cooperate with the US Department of Homeland Security -- oh no! Look out freedom! Google is now evil!
One of these countries imprisons, tortures, and kills political dissidents. One has annexed a foreign country and has been promising to annex another for fifty years. One destroys "illegal" churches and forces abortions.
But thank goodness that Google is cooperating with the "Good" one.
Well, he(the parent:) IS right - the grandparent couldn't be paranoid if he didn't even for a moment feel conspicious of ANY company.
I find the story wonderful, btw - just the thing to give you some paranoia-induced thought, with, IMHO, the creepy, unhappy ending such a topic calls for:)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Quit trying to put the genie back in the bottle, and just live a life where you don't have embarassing secrets to hide.
It really does make life easier.
Typo.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I think most of the scary ideas Cory wrote about (cameras everywhere, the ability to track enoumous volumes of information, ...) have been giving the upper hand to the citizenry against the government (in defense of liberty) more than the other way around.
The police are finding it harder, not easier, to abuse their vast powers when so many people have cameras and can upload the footage to youtube the same day.
Even in China, you could argue that the internet is working that way also. One person can send an email and inform millions of other people what is going on before the government can act to stop it.
We do not need people giving people in power any more ideas. Any fiction depicting tyranny IS a handbook for tyranny, period.
"Do not imagine that your status or relative secularity can protect you more than the others. For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the community elsewhere and you and your family will perish. And who knows whether you have not attained power for such a time as this?" (Esther 4:13-14 modernized application)
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
I am a grad student in computer science. I have had to (try to) cryptanalyze DES before. It was the torment of the damned. My remarks here are based on that experience. I daresay it's a lot more than you've ever done with it.
DES is not now, nor has it ever been, a weak design except in the very narrow sense of it having only a 56-bit keyspace. During the time it was created, 56 bits of keyspace was really quite good. Nobody was expecting it to remain a government standard for the next 20+ years. When the only way to attack an encryption algorithm is to exhaust its keyspace, that encryption algorithm is generally considered to be pretty well-designed. Even the small keyspace can be fixed with 3DES, a trivial extension that gives somewhere between 112 and 168 bits of keyspace, depending on just how many trillions of dollars you're assuming the attacker is spending.
Insofar as its "weaknesses", all that I can think is that you're talking about how the S-boxes were hardened against differential cryptanalysis after the IBM design team independently discovered the attack. The NSA asked IBM to keep differential cryptanalysis quiet, and IBM did: but I don't see how you go from "it's specifically hardened against differential cryptanalysis" to "it has weaknesses the NSA knows about".
Please do not fearmonger with crypto when you don't even have the facts right.
Creative commons, FSF take your pick.
Plus I disagree with your views on his writing but that's just my opinion.
I made a .lit version so that I could read it on the go.
http://simonmacdonald.blogspot.com/2007/09/cory-doctorows-short-story-scroogled.html
Simon
I keep reading this kind of stories,about all "what if?"s.
Maybe do some searching on google, others on live and yahoo?
A website that spits out news for nerds with a evil corporate person named cowboy neal .... oh wait thats true
Geoff "mandrake" harrison for President!
Now, I like Cory Doctorow. I think that he's written some great books - I have three of them myself. And I think the story's a good one.
But Slashdot is about -news- for nerds...
My only problem with this is that real life is scary enough. We don't need to be thinking about what -could- happen -if- Google got even deeper into bed with DHS. I don't need those nightmares. I have enough nightmares of my own, traveling internationally for the first time in Novemeber in order to film a documentary. I'm not looking forward to explaining that the $500 Sennheiser wireless microphone is NOT a bomb trigger, or that the pipes that are in my carry-on bags are part of a homemade stabilizer and NOT a "pipe-bomb."
I'm very scared of what this country is coming to. I don't need more "what-if" conspiracy scenarios, my mind is more than capable of coming up with them on my own.
This story would undoubtedly be linked to from BoingBoing, which is also a top blog where it fits in. I think Slashdot should stick to news - that's all.
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
As most of us are aware; many are what they say they are not. I for one will not be surprised when Google is eventually found to be evil. It is a business collecting, storing and analyzing vast amounts and will eventually reach a point where it has collected more data than all intelligence services. With such a data store, Google becoming evil is as inevitable as death and taxes as the bottom-line is; humans run the show.
After reading about the flawed nature of search results and targeted advertising for identifying someone, you'd think that such hurdles would make such data next to worthless. It's like the story is trying to have its cake and eat it too. The data can either be accurate and reasonably represent the truth, or it can be faulty (like it is in the story), completely misrepresent events, and ultimately be useless to the DHS.
The Google representative in the story admitted that everyone had something to hide, and it seemed that everyone with something to hide were classified as suspect and treated like second class citizens. It seems completely implausible that a democracy would be able oppress a group that would be in the majority.
Finally, the move of Google servers to China was somehow meant to initiate the slide into "evil". It gets light on detail there, saying only that Google started censoring results, and full surveillance doesn't really seem to follow on with that. If anything, the tone of the piece seemed to be geared more towards gathering more sensitive data, rather than censoring the data accessible people.
Anyway, it's a fine read and a nice piece of government corruption fiction, but I wouldn't call it prophetic...
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Seriously, I wonder if he has massive ulcers and nervous conditions. Everything I've read by him has been about ominous, bleak, oppressive violations of people's rights. It's like Kafka writing for Wired magazine... ...which is not to say he isn't good at writing, just a little predictable. Ok, a lot predictable.
just because someone is a Christian, it does not mean
1. We like Bush
2. We will do whatever we can to force you to be a Christian
2a. We will do ANYTHING to force to to do/don't do things YOU think "make" you Christian
3. We like Christian music
4. We want the whole United States to be a big megachurch
its getting to the point where the open hatred of Christians as a group is at least as accepted as the hatred of other groups in the past.
Your hatred makes you ugly.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Seriously, just how lame and irrelevant DO you have to be to get ignored by Slashdot? Cory Doctorow? I thought Slashdot was my refuge, on the tech blogosphere, away from idiotic, pretentious, know-nothing, wannabe hipsters.
A paranoid rant, with characters behaving in absurd ways. But we're supposed to believe that all this could really happen because mumblemubmlehalliburtonmumblejena6patriotactnumblemumble... *yawn*
The police are finding it harder, not easier, to abuse their vast powers when so many people have cameras and can upload the footage to youtube the same day.
Those are cameras accessible by regular citizens, that is, cell phone cameras and such.
Why the hell would the government provide footage from its OWN surveillance cameras to undermine itself?