9 ms·

Google and the NSA: Who’s holding the ‘shit-bag’ now?

285 points by r0h1n 13y ago

vignesh_vs_in 13y ago
All i can view is, Your access to this site has been limited Your access to this service has been temporarily limited. Please try again in a few minutes. (HTTP response code 503) Reason: Access from your area has been temporarily limited for security reasons Important note for site admins: If you are the administrator of this website note that your access has been limited because you broke one of the Wordfence firewall rules. The reason you access was limited is: "Access from your area has been temporarily limited for security reasons". Did they block an entire country?
- goombastic 13y ago
  Looks like it. What a bunch of morons. Wordfence, pretty lofty name.
- zerohp 13y ago
  It has been revealed today, thanks to Edward Snowden, that Google and other US tech companies received millions of dollars from the NSA for their compliance with the PRISM mass surveillance system. So just how close is Google to the US securitocracy? Back in 2011 I had a meeting with Eric Schmidt, the then Chairman of Google, who came out to see me with three other people while I was under house arrest. You might suppose that coming to see me was gesture that he and the other big boys at Google were secretly on our side: that they support what we at WikiLeaks are struggling for: justice, government transparency, and privacy for individuals. But that would be a false supposition. Their agenda was much more complex, and as we found out, was inextricable from that of the US State Department. The full transcript of our meeting is available online through the WikiLeaks website. The pretext for their visit was that Schmidt was then researching a new book, a banal tome which has since come out as The New Digital Age. My less than enthusiastic review of this book was published in the New York Times in late May of this year. On the back of that book are a series of pre-publication endorsements: Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Michael Hayden (former head of the CIA and NSA) and Tony Blair. Inside the book Henry Kissinger appears once again, this time given pride of place in the acknowledgements. Schmidt’s book is not about communicating with the public. He is worth $6.1 billion and does not need to sell books. Rather, this book is a mechanism by which Google seeks to project itself into Washington. It shows Washington that Google can be its partner, its geopolitical visionary, who will help Washington see further about America’s interests. And by tying itself to the US state, Google thereby cements its own security, at the expense of all competitors. Two months after my meeting with Eric Schmidt, WikiLeaks had a legal reason to call Hilary Clinton and to document that we were calling her. It’s interesting that if you call the front desk of the State Department and ask for Hillary Clinton, you can actually get pretty close, and we’ve become quite good at this. Anyone who has seen Doctor Strangelove may remember the fantastic scene when Peter Sellers calls the White House from a payphone on the army base and is put on hold as his call gradually moves through the levels. Well WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison, pretending to be my PA, put through our call to the State Department, and like Peter Sellers we started moving through the levels, and eventually we got up to Hillary Clinton’s senior legal advisor, who said that we would be called back. Shortly afterwards another one of our people, WikiLeaks’ ambassador Joseph Farrell, received a call back, not from the State Department, but from Lisa Shields, the then girlfriend of Eric Schmidt, who does not formally work for the US State Department. So let’s reprise this situation: The Chairman of Google’s girlfriend was being used as a back channel for Hillary Clinton. This is illustrative. It shows that at this level of US society, as in other corporate states, it is all musical chairs. That visit from Google while I was under house arrest was, as it turns out, an unofficial visit from the State Department. Just consider the people who accompanied Schmidt on that visit: his girlfriend Lisa Shields, Vice President for Communications at the CFR; Scott Malcolmson, former senior State Department advisor; and Jared Cohen, advisor to both Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, a kind of Generation Y Kissinger figure — a noisy Quiet American as the author Graham Greene might have put it. Google started out as part of Californian graduate student culture around San Francisco’s Bay Area. But as Google grew it encountered the big bad world. It encountered barriers to its expansion in the form of complex political networks and foreign regulations. So it started doing what big bad American companies do, from Coca Cola to Northrop Grumman. It started leaning heavily on the State Department for support, and by doing so it entered into the Washington DC system. A recently released statistic shows that Google now spends even more money than Lockheed Martin on paid lobbyists in Washington. Jared Cohen was the co-writer of Eric Schmidt’s book, and his role as the bridge between Google and the State Department speaks volumes about how the US securitocracy works. Cohen used to work directly for the State Department and was a close advisor to both Condolezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. But since 2010 he has been Director of Google Ideas, its in-house ‘think/do’ tank. Documents published last year by WikiLeaks obtained from the US intelligence contractor Stratfor, show that in 2011 Jared Cohen, then (as he is now) Director of Google Ideas, was off running secret missions to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan. In these internal emails, Fred Burton, Stratfor’s Vice President for Intelligence and a former senior State Department official, describes Google as follows: “Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do…[Cohen] is going to get himself kidnapped or killed. Might be the best thing to happen to expose Google’s covert role in foaming up-risings, to be blunt. The US Gov’t can then disavow knowledge and Google is left holding the shit-bag” In further internal communication, Burton subsequently clarifies his sources on Cohen’s activities as Marty Lev, Google’s director of security and safety and.. Eric Schmidt. WikiLeaks cables also reveal that previously Cohen, when working for the State Department, was in Afghanistan trying to convince the four major Afghan mobile phone companies to move their antennas onto US military bases. In Lebanon he covertly worked to establish, on behalf of the State Department, an anti-Hezbollah Shia think tank. And in London? He was offering Bollywood film executives funds to insert anti-extremist content into Bollywood films and promising to connect them to related networks in Hollywood. That is the Director of Google Ideas. Cohen is effectively Google’s director of regime change. He is the State Department channeling Silicon Valley. That Google was taking NSA money in exchange for handing over people’s data comes as no surprise. When Google encountered the big bad world, Google itself got big and bad.
  - greenyoda 13y ago
    Missing piece of context: the author of the above quoted article is Julian Assange.
    - adamnemecek 13y ago
      Yeah, I did not realize that until I got to the house arrest part. The author's name could have been more prominently displayed.
- DigitalSea 13y ago
  Wordfence is a security plugin for Wordpress. Depending on the settings, if the threshold of allowed connections for minute or second is set too low and you breach that, you'll be limited or temporarily banned. Looks like a configuration mistake confusing some requests for a Ddos attack.
cageface 13y ago
I'm still willing to be convinced that Google has some kind of special, voluntary co-operation policy with the NSA but this article doesn't seem to offer much proof of such a thing. It seems to consist mostly of accusations of guilt by association and the questionable inference that Google having a large lobbying budget is indicative of being in government's pocket somehow.
- acchow 13y ago
  Funny, before Google started having a serious lobbying budget, people were begging Google to start fighting for our internet rights in Washington by...lobbying.
  - psbp 13y ago
    I guess google is everyone's scapegoat. But hey, they're free and easy. They were just begging for it.
- JanezStupar 13y ago
  Historically realipolitik works on a quid pro quo basis. If government does something for you, then you are expected to do something for the government. Trading favors is the name of the game. One may argue that lobiying dollars are the favor Google is offering. But one may not realize that dollars are merely the cost of a ticket to participate. It is not the sole price. There are many examples throughout history that this is the way things work. There are two possibilities. Either Google's and governments relationship works the way Assange has described OR US governments in the last fifteen years are completely different (more honorable?) than all the governments throughout the world before that. What do you think is more probable?
  - cageface 13y ago
    What is it exactly that the U.S. government has done for Google? The way things typically work here is that you hire a bunch of lobbyists and put money in the pockets of various government officials in exchange for favors. So the quid is generally just $$$.
hitchhiker999 13y ago
Most people love Google, they offer useful services. I think they'll be one of the bigger 'disappointments' in this whole scene as it fully unravels. The entire system needs to be decentralised, and quickly.
- psbp 13y ago
  It's going to be a herculean effort to simulate google's (and other's) services fast enough to attract loyal users. All these big tech companies' services are extremely valuable and it's hard to convince the general consumer to forfeit convenience for the sake of security, but I guess that was the idea all along. We might as well start now.
  - perlpimp 13y ago
    I think companies can sponsor community projects just the way Apache was sponsored. Replacement for online email, documents and other services - in software. The ones that people can run on their own. I think it is not a pipe dream. Some social and organizing groundwork needs to be done. :)
    - Amadou 13y ago
      I think companies can sponsor community projects just the way Apache was sponsored. Apache provided value to its corporate sponsors. Free software that you run on your system, like your phone, doesn't put money in the pockets of any corporations, except possibly the cell carriers who have not been at all ashamed of their cosy relationship with the NSA.
  - malandrew 13y ago
    I'm hoping that someone sees value in creating and open source business around the CommonCrawl data, with a similar strategy as NodeJitsu, who opened source enough of their work that others could build a parallel business to them. This approach is appropriate where the market will only exist if enough private actors realize that they need to cooperate for the market to exist at all. BitCoin is a perfect example of a similar ecosystem. It's a collective, distributed startup. Search tech beyond what Google is requires a similar cooperative effort. Right now the CommonCrawl data set is so big and the cost of setting up all the infrastructure to work on it is so expensive, that few people have the luxury to explore how search engines might work differently. I don't know how the search algo team does its job at Google, but it would be awesome if the interface made available to them was offered as a service that anyone could build a search business off of. That would be a great first step in allowing specialized search engines for specific verticals/domains to take off.
guelo 13y ago
It is creepy how Google Idea's projects all seem to be military type projects. It gives the impression that Google is actively using its social graph to do police work. http://www.google.com/ideas/projects/ http://www.google.com/ideas/projects/
- ender7 13y ago
  While "Google Ideas" makes it sound like a random VC fund or corporate "vision & innovation" wankery, according to that website: Google Ideas is a think/do tank that explores how technology can enable people to confront threats in the face of conflict, instability or repression. Their list of projects makes much more sense in that light.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Or, you know: "is a think/do tank that explores how technology can enable repression."
    - psbp 13y ago
      In America, repression is freedom.
      - INTPenis 13y ago
        And don't we have relative freedom? We are all free to sit and read news on a website instead of working 6-7 day weeks to support our families. In a sense you can understand the perspectives of some western governments, because they think that we are better off than under-developed nations. And as long as they think that I believe two things will continue to happen. The hegemony will prevail, and its denizes will remain apathetic to its off shore actions.
        coldtea 13y ago
        >We are all free to sit and read news on a website instead of working 6-7 day weeks to support our families. Speak for yourself. Most people would be out of their homes pronto is they didn't work 6-7 day weeks -- and tons of them already are on the streets or trailers...
devx 13y ago
I missed this article at the time by Bruce Schneier and I think a lot more did, too, or didn't pay much attention to it, but according to him, Google already gave NSA a backdoor into Gmail, which is what the Chinese hackers used to hack them then: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.hacking/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.ha...
- cromwellian 13y ago
  That is not an NSA backdoor and I'm shocked Schneier could make such a mistake, it is a system to comply with FBI/local police court orders. The Chinese hackers couldn't run queries on gmail accounts, all they got access to was archives of court ordered material that had already been copied into the system, see here: http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/20/4349236/chinese-hacker-gmail-breach-exposed-thousands-of-court-orders http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/20/4349236/chinese-hacker-gma... Basically, when a company needs to hand over data, they copy it and put it somewhere for law enforcement to pick up, and apparently the Chinese hackers got access to the drop box. "Backdoor" makes it sound like Google built a query page that allows the NSA to enter in an arbitrary account name and just get the data -- on anyone.
  - jacquesm 13y ago
    > "Backdoor" makes it sound like Google built a query page that allows the NSA to enter in an arbitrary account name and just get the data -- on anyone. Now there's an idea. Now let's hope it's an original thought and nobody has had that idea before you.
  - lawnchair_larry 13y ago
    Note that Google blatantly lied about the motivations of the hackers, shamefully claiming that the intent was to target dissidents. Pretty consistent with the narrative in the article, to say the least.
  - serf 13y ago
    .... so? So some suspects had their data stolen by chinese hackers from a government agency. The intentions behind it matter very little for those whose data is now in someone else's hands.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
On a positive note: Google's massive lobbying effort to undermine EU privacy protections can now be considered dead in the water.
_sabe_ 13y ago
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini
- rhizome 13y ago
  That was 70+ years ago, political structures have become more sophisticated than that trite quote since then. It's like saying a computer is a machine that reads floppy disks.
  - mmariani 13y ago
    Even though computers evolved by great leaps in the past few decades I argue that the human nature has been somewhat stagnated for at least a couple thousand years. In that light, Mussolini's quote is as precise today as it was back in the day it was first said. Sad, yet true.
    - Amadou 13y ago
      In that light, Mussolini's quote is as precise today as it was back in the day it was first said. It also appears to be a false attribution and is basically unsourced. It does have a certain glibness to it that makes it suspicious. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=280606 http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=280606
- perlpimp 13y ago
  well said
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
etherael 13y ago
Google scales just tipped from possibly good to probably bad for me. Did not realise how deep the rabbit hole goes.
tn13 13y ago
Absolutely nothing surprising. Any company can be bullied and all companies have good incentive to crawl when government asks to bend.
- jacquesm 13y ago
  Google has been crawling since their inception.
  - tn13 13y ago
    Thats a good one.
nl 13y ago
For those who aren't aware, this essay isn't really about Google's co-operation (or not) with the NSA regarding wiretaps. This is about potential Google involvement in political activities outside the US, where Assange claims it is acting as a proxy rather than requiring direct US intelligence involvement. While Assange didn't name them, some specific instances of what he is talking about are the "Color revolutions" in Eastern Europe and the Arab Spring. While this seems preposterous on the surface there is enough evidence to make it worth considering. The Georgian "color revolution" obtained significant funds from a body funded by George Soros[1], so private involvement isn't unprecedented. It is also well known that Wael Ghonim (who was instrumental in fueling the Egyptian revolution) was employed by Google at the time[2] although he was acting in a private capacity. OTOH, it isn't at all clear is the US intelligence complex would have wanted the Egyptian revolution to occur at all, and Assange doesn't go deep enough to explain that. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution#Soros_foundation_and_U.S._influence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution#Soros_foundat... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wael_Ghonim http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wael_Ghonim
psbp 13y ago
So who from google is going to try to assuage our concerns and tell us that it's all misdirection that they, and thus we, shouldn't fall prey to? Or is anyone from the company not compromised by a candy-coated exterior?
abalone 13y ago
I don't know about these new accusations about a Google employee doing covert work for the State Dept., but as far as them getting reimbursed for compliance costs, I don't really see that as scandalous. The Guardian strongly implies that this contradicts their earlier denials about knowing anything about PRISM. But PRISM could just be the NSA's internal name for the program that collects data obtained from companies via court order. From the companies' perspective, they're just complying with court orders. Theres nothing in the Guardian's reporting that contradicts that, at least as far as I can see. Assange's implication that getting reimbursed for court costs is some sort of business model for Google ("taking NSA money in exchange for handing over people's data") is absurd. They take advertisers' money for handing over people's data, not the government's. Guardian's report: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-costs-tech-companies-paid http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-costs...
- cromwellian 13y ago
  The guardian is really letting me down with the sheer amount of sensationalist reporting going on. They hit the jackpot with Snowden, but they keep trying to milk it and stretch the story out. Quoting the Gmail class action court filings incorrectly and putting words in Google's mouth was a low point.
  - cromwellian 13y ago
    Downvoted for truth eh? http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/14/google-gmail-users-privacy-email-lawsuit http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/14/google-gma... Guardian had to publish a correction. They also mindlessly copied the press release from Consumer Watchdog and tried to connect the subject to PRISM, which it has nothing to do with (this is about automated Gmail ads). "Consumer Watchdog, the advocacy group that uncovered the filing, called the revelation a "stunning admission." It comes as Google and its peers are under pressure to explain their role in the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance of US citizens and foreign nationals." However, the Consumer Watchdog responsible for the misleading press release is not an advocacy group (there are two of them), it is actually an astroturfer with a heavily anti-Google bias, most likely funded by Microsoft out of a range of such organizations MS runs: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/08/28/microsofts-secret-screw-google-meetings-in-d-c/ http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/08/28/microsofts-secret-scr... And some evidence here: http://techrights.org/2009/05/04/consumer-watchdog-exposed/ http://techrights.org/2009/05/04/consumer-watchdog-exposed/ Point is, the Guardian make a factual error, and at the same time, copy-pasta'ed an astroturfer.
einhverfr 13y ago
Reading this article, one could be pardoned for wondering if Cohen is a NOC agent for some intelligence agency....
selfexperiments 13y ago
Ever met someone who gives a great first impression and says all the right words but later betrays your trust? I've mostly had the experience with politicians, but Google is in a position to really hurt people. People need to get as far away from Google as possible. I think they're going to show a nasty side to their personality soon.
cromwellian 13y ago
Google doesn't need the paltry revenue from the NSA for their bottom line, Assange plays guilt by association, but doesn't address motives. I have no doubt that Google is trying to stay on Congress's good side, after all, Microsoft funded an array of lobbyist organizations trying to get the government to shakedown Google, and their increase in lobbying spending is no doubt a response. It's pretty clear how this game works with regulatory capture, Congress threatens to regulate your business, you in turn, are forced to donate to their re-election campaign for 'protection'. Less clear is whether playing nice with the State Department buys you anything. Assange makes it sound like Chomsky's conspiracy theories over pipelines, that Google has fruit plantations or oil pipelines abroad that need State Department protection, and somehow the State Department has some quid pro quo. But what can the State Department actually offer Google? They have no control over some of Google's biggest foreign issues: Chinese and Russian markets, foreign taxes. At best, the executive branch could back off investigations or approve mergers. But the evidence is mixed. Obama just veto'ed the Samsung ban on Apple, but allowed Apple's ITC ban on some Motorola devices to continue. And what to make of the Cohen thing. So, Google is supposedly being contracted by the State Department or CIA to cause foreign uprisings now? Isn't it far more likely that the social, economic, and culture conditions that are fueling these uprisings have been boiling for years and that Google had little to do with them? Google, Facebook, and Twitter basically want users, and to promote digital media, and these uprisings which heavily used their services actually was good PR for social media overall. I dislike the way many people analyze the motivations of those in other nations so as to remove local agency. Those same people will tell you, how dare you, look down on people in these countries, at the same time, viewing all local politics and local agendas as really being driven by the plans of external actors. If Cohen was meeting with people in Iran and Azerbaijan, why does it have to be for some ominous CIA purpose. Couldn't it have been for existing projects Google Ideas already had? Google has been going all over the developing world evangelizing use of things like Google Maps for tracking local issues, like human, gun, or drug trafficking, environmental degradation, or even vanishing languages. Cohen's previous job would have given him the right contacts to make foreign connections in foreign governments, and is the perfect reason why Silicon Valley companies would hire people from the State Department who have foreign service experience. How many MBA grads working in Silicon Valley actually have any experience navigating say, foreign government officials in Kenya? For the same reason, the government hires Silicon Valley workers to work on government IT projects, because you go where the experience is. (e.g. data.gov) None of this disproves anything, but I find the dots being connected here to be very tenuous.
anxiousest 13y ago
None of it is convincing. There is nothing extraordinary about the government showing interest when even a private citizen is contacting and meeting to interview someone who is wanted by said government on national security grounds. Google's increased lobbying was dues to their big antirust battle a short while back, these tend to be expensive. Besides this is American and lobbying is a way of life here. I'm not sure what Cohen was doing in Azerbaijan but is it really strange that he was getting support in a potentially hostile territory. As for what ostensibly triggered this post, the "revelations" that firms get reimbursed for their troubles enabling surveillance, it's not new, nor is it a money making endeavor, it's basically the only concession by the government made in these wiretap laws, if they are to inconvenience entities with their surveillance they will at least have to pay for it http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/us/nsa-said-to-have-paid-e-mail-providers-millions-to-cover-costs-from-court-ruling.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/us/nsa-said-to-have-paid-e... Also some targeted surveillance might be necessary the problem is with the dragnet sort, and these revelations don't make a distinction between the two which doesn't automatically mean that it's the worst case scenario. Assange might not have been pleased with his interview with Schmidt but suggesting that Google started the Arab spring is absurd.
logn 13y ago
For those who haven't read them, these posts by Steve Blank bring this all into focus. Spend a couple hours and read this: http://steveblank.com/secret-history/ http://steveblank.com/secret-history/ and then this http://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-valley/ http://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-val... . History is fascinating when told by a good historian.
mladenkovacevic 13y ago
I like to analyze potential motives that the elites might have for doing whatever it is they do: Industrial sector elite: control of resources Intelligence elite: control over people Google elite: I don't know if they know yet but they are probably trying to find their place in the future. Maybe control of data? Either way you can see how they all might be able to help each other out.
spinchange 13y ago
Schmidt personally seems to have political-power aspirations and has been practically transparent about using the chairmanship of Google to that end for himself and as a proxy for the company. The motivation for all this freelance diplomacy doesn't even need to be for specific favors - it can be to raise his and Google's stature with the world's political power machinery. Consider that, while it doesn't make it any less troubling, they might even have good intentions in what they're doing. I'm not trying to be an apologist for it, just thinking about what would motivate a company like Google -or rather, people at the top- to do stuff like this.
depa 13y ago
Mirror: http://thestringer.com.au.nyud.net/google-and-the-nsa-whos-holding-the-shit-bag-now/#.UhjdKhKJB-M http://thestringer.com.au.nyud.net/google-and-the-nsa-whos-h...
engrenage 13y ago
It sounds as if wikileaks has evidence. If they do, they should show it, although I guess it makes sense for them to set the context first so it isn't so easily ignored. There seem to be a lot of people here determined to argue that google is innocent based on innuendo.
- jlgaddis 13y ago
  Perhaps they've decided to go about it the way The Guardian did: make some outrageous accusations and back them up with just a bit of proof, let the accused come out and publicly deny the accusations, then publicize the proof that shows that a) you were right, and b) the accused was straight up lying in their denial.
  - engrenage 13y ago
    I strongly hope so.
yuhong 13y ago
Wrote this on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078124

285 points by r0h1n 13y ago

All i can view is, Your access to this site has been limited Your access to this service has been temporarily limited. Please try again in a few minutes. (HTTP response code 503) Reason: Access from your area has been temporarily limited for security reasons Important note for site admins: If you are the administrator of this website note that your access has been limited because you broke one of the Wordfence firewall rules. The reason you access was limited is: "Access from your area has been temporarily limited for security reasons". Did they block an entire country?

goombastic 13y ago
Looks like it. What a bunch of morons. Wordfence, pretty lofty name.
zerohp 13y ago
It has been revealed today, thanks to Edward Snowden, that Google and other US tech companies received millions of dollars from the NSA for their compliance with the PRISM mass surveillance system. So just how close is Google to the US securitocracy? Back in 2011 I had a meeting with Eric Schmidt, the then Chairman of Google, who came out to see me with three other people while I was under house arrest. You might suppose that coming to see me was gesture that he and the other big boys at Google were secretly on our side: that they support what we at WikiLeaks are struggling for: justice, government transparency, and privacy for individuals. But that would be a false supposition. Their agenda was much more complex, and as we found out, was inextricable from that of the US State Department. The full transcript of our meeting is available online through the WikiLeaks website. The pretext for their visit was that Schmidt was then researching a new book, a banal tome which has since come out as The New Digital Age. My less than enthusiastic review of this book was published in the New York Times in late May of this year. On the back of that book are a series of pre-publication endorsements: Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Michael Hayden (former head of the CIA and NSA) and Tony Blair. Inside the book Henry Kissinger appears once again, this time given pride of place in the acknowledgements. Schmidt’s book is not about communicating with the public. He is worth $6.1 billion and does not need to sell books. Rather, this book is a mechanism by which Google seeks to project itself into Washington. It shows Washington that Google can be its partner, its geopolitical visionary, who will help Washington see further about America’s interests. And by tying itself to the US state, Google thereby cements its own security, at the expense of all competitors. Two months after my meeting with Eric Schmidt, WikiLeaks had a legal reason to call Hilary Clinton and to document that we were calling her. It’s interesting that if you call the front desk of the State Department and ask for Hillary Clinton, you can actually get pretty close, and we’ve become quite good at this. Anyone who has seen Doctor Strangelove may remember the fantastic scene when Peter Sellers calls the White House from a payphone on the army base and is put on hold as his call gradually moves through the levels. Well WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison, pretending to be my PA, put through our call to the State Department, and like Peter Sellers we started moving through the levels, and eventually we got up to Hillary Clinton’s senior legal advisor, who said that we would be called back. Shortly afterwards another one of our people, WikiLeaks’ ambassador Joseph Farrell, received a call back, not from the State Department, but from Lisa Shields, the then girlfriend of Eric Schmidt, who does not formally work for the US State Department. So let’s reprise this situation: The Chairman of Google’s girlfriend was being used as a back channel for Hillary Clinton. This is illustrative. It shows that at this level of US society, as in other corporate states, it is all musical chairs. That visit from Google while I was under house arrest was, as it turns out, an unofficial visit from the State Department. Just consider the people who accompanied Schmidt on that visit: his girlfriend Lisa Shields, Vice President for Communications at the CFR; Scott Malcolmson, former senior State Department advisor; and Jared Cohen, advisor to both Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, a kind of Generation Y Kissinger figure — a noisy Quiet American as the author Graham Greene might have put it. Google started out as part of Californian graduate student culture around San Francisco’s Bay Area. But as Google grew it encountered the big bad world. It encountered barriers to its expansion in the form of complex political networks and foreign regulations. So it started doing what big bad American companies do, from Coca Cola to Northrop Grumman. It started leaning heavily on the State Department for support, and by doing so it entered into the Washington DC system. A recently released statistic shows that Google now spends even more money than Lockheed Martin on paid lobbyists in Washington. Jared Cohen was the co-writer of Eric Schmidt’s book, and his role as the bridge between Google and the State Department speaks volumes about how the US securitocracy works. Cohen used to work directly for the State Department and was a close advisor to both Condolezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. But since 2010 he has been Director of Google Ideas, its in-house ‘think/do’ tank. Documents published last year by WikiLeaks obtained from the US intelligence contractor Stratfor, show that in 2011 Jared Cohen, then (as he is now) Director of Google Ideas, was off running secret missions to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan. In these internal emails, Fred Burton, Stratfor’s Vice President for Intelligence and a former senior State Department official, describes Google as follows: “Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do…[Cohen] is going to get himself kidnapped or killed. Might be the best thing to happen to expose Google’s covert role in foaming up-risings, to be blunt. The US Gov’t can then disavow knowledge and Google is left holding the shit-bag” In further internal communication, Burton subsequently clarifies his sources on Cohen’s activities as Marty Lev, Google’s director of security and safety and.. Eric Schmidt. WikiLeaks cables also reveal that previously Cohen, when working for the State Department, was in Afghanistan trying to convince the four major Afghan mobile phone companies to move their antennas onto US military bases. In Lebanon he covertly worked to establish, on behalf of the State Department, an anti-Hezbollah Shia think tank. And in London? He was offering Bollywood film executives funds to insert anti-extremist content into Bollywood films and promising to connect them to related networks in Hollywood. That is the Director of Google Ideas. Cohen is effectively Google’s director of regime change. He is the State Department channeling Silicon Valley. That Google was taking NSA money in exchange for handing over people’s data comes as no surprise. When Google encountered the big bad world, Google itself got big and bad.
- greenyoda 13y ago
  Missing piece of context: the author of the above quoted article is Julian Assange.
  - adamnemecek 13y ago
    Yeah, I did not realize that until I got to the house arrest part. The author's name could have been more prominently displayed.
DigitalSea 13y ago
Wordfence is a security plugin for Wordpress. Depending on the settings, if the threshold of allowed connections for minute or second is set too low and you breach that, you'll be limited or temporarily banned. Looks like a configuration mistake confusing some requests for a Ddos attack.

cageface 13y ago

I'm still willing to be convinced that Google has some kind of special, voluntary co-operation policy with the NSA but this article doesn't seem to offer much proof of such a thing. It seems to consist mostly of accusations of guilt by association and the questionable inference that Google having a large lobbying budget is indicative of being in government's pocket somehow.

acchow 13y ago
Funny, before Google started having a serious lobbying budget, people were begging Google to start fighting for our internet rights in Washington by...lobbying.
- psbp 13y ago
  I guess google is everyone's scapegoat. But hey, they're free and easy. They were just begging for it.
JanezStupar 13y ago
Historically realipolitik works on a quid pro quo basis. If government does something for you, then you are expected to do something for the government. Trading favors is the name of the game. One may argue that lobiying dollars are the favor Google is offering. But one may not realize that dollars are merely the cost of a ticket to participate. It is not the sole price. There are many examples throughout history that this is the way things work. There are two possibilities. Either Google's and governments relationship works the way Assange has described OR US governments in the last fifteen years are completely different (more honorable?) than all the governments throughout the world before that. What do you think is more probable?
- cageface 13y ago
  What is it exactly that the U.S. government has done for Google? The way things typically work here is that you hire a bunch of lobbyists and put money in the pockets of various government officials in exchange for favors. So the quid is generally just $$$.

hitchhiker999 13y ago

Most people love Google, they offer useful services. I think they'll be one of the bigger 'disappointments' in this whole scene as it fully unravels. The entire system needs to be decentralised, and quickly.

psbp 13y ago
It's going to be a herculean effort to simulate google's (and other's) services fast enough to attract loyal users. All these big tech companies' services are extremely valuable and it's hard to convince the general consumer to forfeit convenience for the sake of security, but I guess that was the idea all along. We might as well start now.
- perlpimp 13y ago
  I think companies can sponsor community projects just the way Apache was sponsored. Replacement for online email, documents and other services - in software. The ones that people can run on their own. I think it is not a pipe dream. Some social and organizing groundwork needs to be done. :)
  - Amadou 13y ago
    I think companies can sponsor community projects just the way Apache was sponsored. Apache provided value to its corporate sponsors. Free software that you run on your system, like your phone, doesn't put money in the pockets of any corporations, except possibly the cell carriers who have not been at all ashamed of their cosy relationship with the NSA.
- malandrew 13y ago
  I'm hoping that someone sees value in creating and open source business around the CommonCrawl data, with a similar strategy as NodeJitsu, who opened source enough of their work that others could build a parallel business to them. This approach is appropriate where the market will only exist if enough private actors realize that they need to cooperate for the market to exist at all. BitCoin is a perfect example of a similar ecosystem. It's a collective, distributed startup. Search tech beyond what Google is requires a similar cooperative effort. Right now the CommonCrawl data set is so big and the cost of setting up all the infrastructure to work on it is so expensive, that few people have the luxury to explore how search engines might work differently. I don't know how the search algo team does its job at Google, but it would be awesome if the interface made available to them was offered as a service that anyone could build a search business off of. That would be a great first step in allowing specialized search engines for specific verticals/domains to take off.

guelo 13y ago

It is creepy how Google Idea's projects all seem to be military type projects. It gives the impression that Google is actively using its social graph to do police work. http://www.google.com/ideas/projects/ http://www.google.com/ideas/projects/

ender7 13y ago
While "Google Ideas" makes it sound like a random VC fund or corporate "vision & innovation" wankery, according to that website: Google Ideas is a think/do tank that explores how technology can enable people to confront threats in the face of conflict, instability or repression. Their list of projects makes much more sense in that light.
- coldtea 13y ago
  Or, you know: "is a think/do tank that explores how technology can enable repression."
  - psbp 13y ago
    In America, repression is freedom.
    - INTPenis 13y ago
      And don't we have relative freedom? We are all free to sit and read news on a website instead of working 6-7 day weeks to support our families. In a sense you can understand the perspectives of some western governments, because they think that we are better off than under-developed nations. And as long as they think that I believe two things will continue to happen. The hegemony will prevail, and its denizes will remain apathetic to its off shore actions.
      - coldtea 13y ago
        >We are all free to sit and read news on a website instead of working 6-7 day weeks to support our families. Speak for yourself. Most people would be out of their homes pronto is they didn't work 6-7 day weeks -- and tons of them already are on the streets or trailers...

devx 13y ago

I missed this article at the time by Bruce Schneier and I think a lot more did, too, or didn't pay much attention to it, but according to him, Google already gave NSA a backdoor into Gmail, which is what the Chinese hackers used to hack them then: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.hacking/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.ha...

cromwellian 13y ago
That is not an NSA backdoor and I'm shocked Schneier could make such a mistake, it is a system to comply with FBI/local police court orders. The Chinese hackers couldn't run queries on gmail accounts, all they got access to was archives of court ordered material that had already been copied into the system, see here: http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/20/4349236/chinese-hacker-gmail-breach-exposed-thousands-of-court-orders http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/20/4349236/chinese-hacker-gma... Basically, when a company needs to hand over data, they copy it and put it somewhere for law enforcement to pick up, and apparently the Chinese hackers got access to the drop box. "Backdoor" makes it sound like Google built a query page that allows the NSA to enter in an arbitrary account name and just get the data -- on anyone.
- jacquesm 13y ago
  > "Backdoor" makes it sound like Google built a query page that allows the NSA to enter in an arbitrary account name and just get the data -- on anyone. Now there's an idea. Now let's hope it's an original thought and nobody has had that idea before you.
- lawnchair_larry 13y ago
  Note that Google blatantly lied about the motivations of the hackers, shamefully claiming that the intent was to target dissidents. Pretty consistent with the narrative in the article, to say the least.
- serf 13y ago
  .... so? So some suspects had their data stolen by chinese hackers from a government agency. The intentions behind it matter very little for those whose data is now in someone else's hands.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

On a positive note: Google's massive lobbying effort to undermine EU privacy protections can now be considered dead in the water.

_sabe_ 13y ago

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini

rhizome 13y ago
That was 70+ years ago, political structures have become more sophisticated than that trite quote since then. It's like saying a computer is a machine that reads floppy disks.
- mmariani 13y ago
  Even though computers evolved by great leaps in the past few decades I argue that the human nature has been somewhat stagnated for at least a couple thousand years. In that light, Mussolini's quote is as precise today as it was back in the day it was first said. Sad, yet true.
  - Amadou 13y ago
    In that light, Mussolini's quote is as precise today as it was back in the day it was first said. It also appears to be a false attribution and is basically unsourced. It does have a certain glibness to it that makes it suspicious. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=280606 http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=280606
perlpimp 13y ago
well said

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

etherael 13y ago

Google scales just tipped from possibly good to probably bad for me. Did not realise how deep the rabbit hole goes.

tn13 13y ago

Absolutely nothing surprising. Any company can be bullied and all companies have good incentive to crawl when government asks to bend.

jacquesm 13y ago
Google has been crawling since their inception.
- tn13 13y ago
  Thats a good one.

nl 13y ago

For those who aren't aware, this essay isn't really about Google's co-operation (or not) with the NSA regarding wiretaps. This is about potential Google involvement in political activities outside the US, where Assange claims it is acting as a proxy rather than requiring direct US intelligence involvement. While Assange didn't name them, some specific instances of what he is talking about are the "Color revolutions" in Eastern Europe and the Arab Spring. While this seems preposterous on the surface there is enough evidence to make it worth considering. The Georgian "color revolution" obtained significant funds from a body funded by George Soros[1], so private involvement isn't unprecedented. It is also well known that Wael Ghonim (who was instrumental in fueling the Egyptian revolution) was employed by Google at the time[2] although he was acting in a private capacity. OTOH, it isn't at all clear is the US intelligence complex would have wanted the Egyptian revolution to occur at all, and Assange doesn't go deep enough to explain that. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution#Soros_foundation_and_U.S._influence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution#Soros_foundat... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wael_Ghonim http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wael_Ghonim

psbp 13y ago

So who from google is going to try to assuage our concerns and tell us that it's all misdirection that they, and thus we, shouldn't fall prey to? Or is anyone from the company not compromised by a candy-coated exterior?

abalone 13y ago

I don't know about these new accusations about a Google employee doing covert work for the State Dept., but as far as them getting reimbursed for compliance costs, I don't really see that as scandalous. The Guardian strongly implies that this contradicts their earlier denials about knowing anything about PRISM. But PRISM could just be the NSA's internal name for the program that collects data obtained from companies via court order. From the companies' perspective, they're just complying with court orders. Theres nothing in the Guardian's reporting that contradicts that, at least as far as I can see. Assange's implication that getting reimbursed for court costs is some sort of business model for Google ("taking NSA money in exchange for handing over people's data") is absurd. They take advertisers' money for handing over people's data, not the government's. Guardian's report: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-costs-tech-companies-paid http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-costs...

cromwellian 13y ago
The guardian is really letting me down with the sheer amount of sensationalist reporting going on. They hit the jackpot with Snowden, but they keep trying to milk it and stretch the story out. Quoting the Gmail class action court filings incorrectly and putting words in Google's mouth was a low point.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  Downvoted for truth eh? http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/14/google-gmail-users-privacy-email-lawsuit http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/14/google-gma... Guardian had to publish a correction. They also mindlessly copied the press release from Consumer Watchdog and tried to connect the subject to PRISM, which it has nothing to do with (this is about automated Gmail ads). "Consumer Watchdog, the advocacy group that uncovered the filing, called the revelation a "stunning admission." It comes as Google and its peers are under pressure to explain their role in the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance of US citizens and foreign nationals." However, the Consumer Watchdog responsible for the misleading press release is not an advocacy group (there are two of them), it is actually an astroturfer with a heavily anti-Google bias, most likely funded by Microsoft out of a range of such organizations MS runs: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/08/28/microsofts-secret-screw-google-meetings-in-d-c/ http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/08/28/microsofts-secret-scr... And some evidence here: http://techrights.org/2009/05/04/consumer-watchdog-exposed/ http://techrights.org/2009/05/04/consumer-watchdog-exposed/ Point is, the Guardian make a factual error, and at the same time, copy-pasta'ed an astroturfer.

einhverfr 13y ago

Reading this article, one could be pardoned for wondering if Cohen is a NOC agent for some intelligence agency....

selfexperiments 13y ago

Ever met someone who gives a great first impression and says all the right words but later betrays your trust? I've mostly had the experience with politicians, but Google is in a position to really hurt people. People need to get as far away from Google as possible. I think they're going to show a nasty side to their personality soon.

cromwellian 13y ago

Google doesn't need the paltry revenue from the NSA for their bottom line, Assange plays guilt by association, but doesn't address motives. I have no doubt that Google is trying to stay on Congress's good side, after all, Microsoft funded an array of lobbyist organizations trying to get the government to shakedown Google, and their increase in lobbying spending is no doubt a response. It's pretty clear how this game works with regulatory capture, Congress threatens to regulate your business, you in turn, are forced to donate to their re-election campaign for 'protection'. Less clear is whether playing nice with the State Department buys you anything. Assange makes it sound like Chomsky's conspiracy theories over pipelines, that Google has fruit plantations or oil pipelines abroad that need State Department protection, and somehow the State Department has some quid pro quo. But what can the State Department actually offer Google? They have no control over some of Google's biggest foreign issues: Chinese and Russian markets, foreign taxes. At best, the executive branch could back off investigations or approve mergers. But the evidence is mixed. Obama just veto'ed the Samsung ban on Apple, but allowed Apple's ITC ban on some Motorola devices to continue. And what to make of the Cohen thing. So, Google is supposedly being contracted by the State Department or CIA to cause foreign uprisings now? Isn't it far more likely that the social, economic, and culture conditions that are fueling these uprisings have been boiling for years and that Google had little to do with them? Google, Facebook, and Twitter basically want users, and to promote digital media, and these uprisings which heavily used their services actually was good PR for social media overall. I dislike the way many people analyze the motivations of those in other nations so as to remove local agency. Those same people will tell you, how dare you, look down on people in these countries, at the same time, viewing all local politics and local agendas as really being driven by the plans of external actors. If Cohen was meeting with people in Iran and Azerbaijan, why does it have to be for some ominous CIA purpose. Couldn't it have been for existing projects Google Ideas already had? Google has been going all over the developing world evangelizing use of things like Google Maps for tracking local issues, like human, gun, or drug trafficking, environmental degradation, or even vanishing languages. Cohen's previous job would have given him the right contacts to make foreign connections in foreign governments, and is the perfect reason why Silicon Valley companies would hire people from the State Department who have foreign service experience. How many MBA grads working in Silicon Valley actually have any experience navigating say, foreign government officials in Kenya? For the same reason, the government hires Silicon Valley workers to work on government IT projects, because you go where the experience is. (e.g. data.gov) None of this disproves anything, but I find the dots being connected here to be very tenuous.

anxiousest 13y ago

None of it is convincing. There is nothing extraordinary about the government showing interest when even a private citizen is contacting and meeting to interview someone who is wanted by said government on national security grounds. Google's increased lobbying was dues to their big antirust battle a short while back, these tend to be expensive. Besides this is American and lobbying is a way of life here. I'm not sure what Cohen was doing in Azerbaijan but is it really strange that he was getting support in a potentially hostile territory. As for what ostensibly triggered this post, the "revelations" that firms get reimbursed for their troubles enabling surveillance, it's not new, nor is it a money making endeavor, it's basically the only concession by the government made in these wiretap laws, if they are to inconvenience entities with their surveillance they will at least have to pay for it http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/us/nsa-said-to-have-paid-e-mail-providers-millions-to-cover-costs-from-court-ruling.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/us/nsa-said-to-have-paid-e... Also some targeted surveillance might be necessary the problem is with the dragnet sort, and these revelations don't make a distinction between the two which doesn't automatically mean that it's the worst case scenario. Assange might not have been pleased with his interview with Schmidt but suggesting that Google started the Arab spring is absurd.

logn 13y ago

For those who haven't read them, these posts by Steve Blank bring this all into focus. Spend a couple hours and read this: http://steveblank.com/secret-history/ http://steveblank.com/secret-history/ and then this http://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-valley/ http://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-val... . History is fascinating when told by a good historian.

mladenkovacevic 13y ago

I like to analyze potential motives that the elites might have for doing whatever it is they do: Industrial sector elite: control of resources Intelligence elite: control over people Google elite: I don't know if they know yet but they are probably trying to find their place in the future. Maybe control of data? Either way you can see how they all might be able to help each other out.

spinchange 13y ago

Schmidt personally seems to have political-power aspirations and has been practically transparent about using the chairmanship of Google to that end for himself and as a proxy for the company. The motivation for all this freelance diplomacy doesn't even need to be for specific favors - it can be to raise his and Google's stature with the world's political power machinery. Consider that, while it doesn't make it any less troubling, they might even have good intentions in what they're doing. I'm not trying to be an apologist for it, just thinking about what would motivate a company like Google -or rather, people at the top- to do stuff like this.

depa 13y ago

Mirror: http://thestringer.com.au.nyud.net/google-and-the-nsa-whos-holding-the-shit-bag-now/#.UhjdKhKJB-M http://thestringer.com.au.nyud.net/google-and-the-nsa-whos-h...

engrenage 13y ago

It sounds as if wikileaks has evidence. If they do, they should show it, although I guess it makes sense for them to set the context first so it isn't so easily ignored. There seem to be a lot of people here determined to argue that google is innocent based on innuendo.

jlgaddis 13y ago
Perhaps they've decided to go about it the way The Guardian did: make some outrageous accusations and back them up with just a bit of proof, let the accused come out and publicly deny the accusations, then publicize the proof that shows that a) you were right, and b) the accused was straight up lying in their denial.
- engrenage 13y ago
  I strongly hope so.

yuhong 13y ago

Wrote this on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078124