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Clandestine Operations at Google
eldavojohn writes "The San Francisco Chronicle is running an interesting story about Google's involvement with the CIA, NSA, NOAA and several other agencies. This has been speculated before although now Google seems to have several contracts open with several agencies. From the article, "When the nation's intelligence agencies wanted a computer network to better share information about everything from al Qaeda to North Korea, they turned to a big name in the technology industry to supply some of the equipment: Google Inc. The Mountain View company sold the agencies servers for searching documents, marking a small victory for the company and its little-known effort to do business with the government. 'We are a very small group, and even a lot of people in the federal government don't know that we exist,' said Mike Bradshaw, who leads Google's federal government sales team and its 18 employees.""
I agree. Is IKEA evil if they provide the NSA with desks?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Oh no! Google is working with the CIA, the NSA, and the NOAA... wait what?
Almost had the evil government owns Google effect there, unless we are suggesting that Google now controls the weather as well.
Never, ever, in my wildest dreams would I have thought that Google, the company that through their "free" services of e-mail, realtime chat, calendars, spreadsheets, economy, planning, blogging etc. hoards immense amounts of personal data about an enormous group of people would ever deal with agencies with a grande interest in that very same data.
*ring ring*... *ring ring*... oh, there's someone on the FU**ING CLUEPHONE FOR YOU.
but anything in every article has the citation needed tag.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
"Not Evil" my ass -- what do *you* call a weather machine!
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I guess it depends on what the definition of "evil" is. If the NSA can get to Google, I'm sure they can get to Merriam-Webster. Have they redefined "treason" as well?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Shows how much you know. "Heavy thunderstorms expected in the Sierra Nevadas with potential hail" is actually code for "Execute Plan Alpha; bomb Beijing immediately."
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
What a waste of tax dollars. All they have to do is post all their intelligence documents on the public internet, and they can get google search for free!
of course not, the Nazis could have had a perfectly benign use for the Jew-Tracker 5000 for all they knew.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
They're probably too busy smokin pot to finish it up...
that's right, REEFER!
Don't be [REDACTED].
Read my blog.
And what is the internet but a series of linked documents?
What is an identity theft but a stolen set of identity documents?
What is a government spying policy but access to individuals' documents?
Read between the lines - The only part of this article that is NEWS
is the part where they have a business division that markets to the govt.
That part was probably not widely known. The cooperation was known.
"Servers for searching documents."
We went to war over aluminum tubes. Don't trivialize based upon vague quotes.
Personally, I think IKEA is evil regardless of whether or not they supply desks for the NSA, but that's just me...
Google sells a GSA to a large agency that happens to be government. Is it news that they've sold identical hardware to other corporations? OH NOES, THE WORLD IS ENDING!
"I've oft heard the conspiracy theory that Google was set up just to develop better resources for government privacy violations. Has any elaborated version of this ever been formally published?"
I did a search for that on Google, and nothing turned up.
Imagine the ads they show within their search results! Some agent searches for "The Base" and gets margin ads for Kevin Costner flicks.
So what you are saying is that IKEA is EVIL then. :P
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
So when the NSA searches for my personal information, will they get sidebar ads for beer and porn?
Hey, we at NOAA do oceanography too, and we had absolutely nothing to do with those reports of that giant-tentacled rubber-suit-looking creatures that washed up oh excuse me, my boss is trying to tell me someth
Could not resist this. Who sells windows to Microsoft? Lowe's or Home Depot, maybe!!
Its a day early... Practice maybe?
Do away with our corrupt tax code. Support the Fair Tax
http://xkcd.com/250/