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."

The ending

Ahem wrote, "... the ending was a bit anti-climactic for my tastes."

Could it really have ended any other way?

Re:The ending

Could it really have ended any other way?

"If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot stamping a human face... forever."

Cory Doctorow visits a Radio Shack

http://ldopa.net/2006/06/04/cory-doctorow-visits-a-radio-shack/ [ldopa.net]

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.

Re:The ending

Ahem wrote, "... the ending was a bit anti-climactic for my tastes."

Could it really have ended any other way?

No, it couldn't. For those who missed the significance, the basic structure of the story was copied from 1984.

Fiction?

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.

Re:Fiction?

Google is the #1 company that has been fighting AGAINST government intrusion into search.

Google Rebuffs Government Subpoena [pbs.org] -- Google went to court many times to stop the government from getting search queries. Yahoo and MSN gave the government what it wanted almost immediately.

Think about it -- Google requires users' trust to create new services. You wouldn't use Google Mail if you knew Google would sell you up the river for nothing. Whatever new service comes next I'm sure the same thing will be true; their market is all about collecting data and interconnecting it, but you won't give them that data unless you trust them. They have every incentive in the world to fight the government on your behalf so that they can keep the trust of their users.

Re:Fiction?

Google requires users' trust to create new services.

Really? Sure, they would lose you and me as their customer, but how about the "nothing to hide" crowd? Look around and realize that people simply don't value their privacy, at least their online privacy, to any kind of extent, or do you think our politicians would spew forth laws like the ones currently getting rushed through for warrantless online search and search pattern recognition if they thought people did care? If people cared, do you think this wouldn't be a topic in the election race?

Fact is, most people do not care about their privacy. They spew their private information like candy. Offer them a chance to win a T-Shirt and they will give you whatever private information you want, even if you tell them you'll sell it to whoever wants it. Try it, you'll be amazed. We did. Out of 3000 possible participants, a few more than 2000 entered. I now have email, phone number, home address and name of more than 2000 people who wanted to win a ticket worth approximately 20 bucks. No, they didn't get a ticket for 20 each. They all have a chance to win ONE. And I could (if I wanted, but I won't) sell that info to whoever I please, there isn't any kind of agreement that would keep me from doing so.

Now you know the value of privacy to your average person. Do you really think Google would get any kind of backlash from violating the privacy of its users?

Great commenter on TFA page!!!

So, people don't value their privacy?

Look at the topmost comment on the first page of the story [radaronline.com]! Some dude called

Alberto S. Lopez
Lawndale, CA
Email: [e-mail]
Cell: 310.686.1259

explains how he read this story on his iPhone!!!

AhAh AHaAhHAh HAhaHAAHahAHaaa!!

It's not that simple

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.)

Re:Fiction?

Google is the #1 company that has been fighting AGAINST government intrusion into search.

Yeah, cuz they don't like the competition.

Re:Fiction?

Section 505, "Miscellaneous national security authorities." Allows for National Security Letters that bypass judicial review. Struck down on April 9th, 2004 by Doe v. Ashcroft. Reauthorized legislation later struck down on September 6th, 2007, by U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero.

What would happen...

"....if Google got in bed with the Dept. of Homeland Security."

The resulting offspring would spend all their time searching themselves for terrorists.

imagine a ...

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

uhm.... yeah

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.

Chilling?

Chilling? Maybe if your name is Daniel Brandt, but back here in the real world this stays most definitely in the real of fiction.

This means nothing.

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.

Google vs NSA

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).

Re:Google vs NSA

DES was 56 bit encryption, and it has been speculated by some that the NSA was capable of brute-forcing that back in the 70's. It's probably a safe bet that the NSA is ahead of the game. They are probably reading this right now, or at least, they would be if they gave a crap about me.

I think the one thing the NSA doesn't have is all of the data that Google has (or maybe they do? ok, the tinfoil hat is off now). If Google gave up their data, the NSA would have more than a bunch of search queries. Think of the queries themselves. Those might cough up a lot of insight into how people think.

Re:DES

According to the IBM design team, this is not so: while the NSA made technical suggestions, not one wire in the S-boxes was dictated by the NSA.

Other people have noticed that the "technical suggestions" involved the NSA sending back DES hardware with rewired S-boxes, and assumed the IBM DES crew simply used the NSA's new S-boxes without understanding what was going on. Quite the opposite: the IBM team refused to use anything they didn't understand, and thus independently discovered differential cryptanalysis by reverse-engineering the NSA's changed S-boxes.

Once they understood differential cryptanalysis, they came up with their own S-boxes.

What are you talking about?

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.

Aren't they?

I had just assumed they were, or at least that they were spying on each other.

Do no Evil

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."

So what do you do?

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.

There's no fiction

Google IS evil. [wordpress.com]

I just assume that they are

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.

mint.com

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 .

That's why...

I monitor Google's Execs [google.com] each and every day for goatees. You can't be too careful.

who I am/was

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 about evil Slashdot?

How abut a story about "Evil Slashdot" that is used as a massive tool for concentrated DDOS attacks? Oh wait...

why do they need the verb?

Just for the sake of argument -
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 /. so you knew that already

Overblown

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.

Scroogle.org

Funny that the title is "scroogled," that's the name of a prominent anti-google site that runs the Scroogle Scraper [scroogle.org], 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.

You dont have to use Google

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.

Former Agent Says Google and CIA in Partnership

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/01/199212 [slashdot.org] http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=4774 [dailytech.com] rechecked articles - they are still accessible by 2007-09-21 10:00 UTC

Most SPAM originates from the CIA...

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.

Never Mind Google.cn and "Jihoogle"

I certainly haven't read the story yet, and not the article (I confess), but the premise sounds a bit like "Flight Plan", wherein the only movie which Hollywood has seen fit to make about airline terrorism since 9/11 features who as the bad guy? Disgruntled American flight attendants. This is ludicrous.

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.

Wait ...

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.

Folks, there is no privacy anymore

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.

cameras everywhere has hurt gov more than helped i

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.

what can we do?

Maybe do some searching on google, others on live and yahoo?

Don't think this should be on Slashdot.

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.

Kinda defeats itself, huh?

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...

Doctorow must be stressed

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.

Its getting fscking tired

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.

Re:This is fiction?

I think I'll write a fictional story about what would happen if my neighbor took a shit.. Wanna read it?

I think I'll wait for the movie :)

Re:This is fiction?

Granted, I'm not a great fan of fiction outside of Hemmingway, but damn, could you pick a more lame and boring subject?

Cory was actually commissioned [craphound.com] to write a story on this topic.