by Yasha Levine
Wired’s impact was not just cultural but also political. The magazine’s embrace of a privatized digital world made it a natural ally of the powerful business interests pushing to deregulate and privatize American telecommunications infrastructure.
Among the pantheon of techno-heroes promoted in the magazine’s pages were right-wing politicians and pundits, telecom tycoons, and corporate lobbyists who swirled around Washington to whip up excitement and push for a privatized, corporate-dominated Internet and telecommunications infrastructure. Republican congressman Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan’s economics guru George Gilder graced the magazine’s cover, their push for a privatized telecommunication system profiled—and their retrograde views on women’s rights, abortion, and civil rights played down and ultimately ignored.99 John Malone, the billionaire cable monopolist at the head of TCI and one of the largest landowners in the United States, made the cut as well. Wired put him on the cover as a punk counterculture rebel for his fight against the Federal Communications Commission, which was putting the brakes on his cable company’s multi-billion-dollar merger with Bell Atlantic, a telephone giant. He is pictured walking down an empty rural highway with a dog by his side, wearing a tattered leather jacket and holding a shotgun. The reference is clear: he was Mel Gibson of Road Warrior, fighting to protect his town from being overrun by a savage band of misfits, which, to extend the metaphor, was the FCC regulators. The reason this billionaire was so cool? He had the guts to say that he’d shoot the head of the FCC if the man didn’t approve his merger fast enough.100
Wired’s promotion of cutthroat telecom businessmen and Republican politicians and players isn’t so surprising. Louis Rossetto was, after all, a Republican-turned-libertarian who believed in the primacy of business and the free market. There was no ideological disagreement here.
One group that frequented Wired’s pages, and one that would later come to mainstream prominence, was the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).101 Founded in San Francisco in 1990 by three millionaires who hung out on Stewart Brand’s The Well messaging board, EFF got its start lobbying for the budding Internet service provider industry.102 In 1993, EFF cofounder Mitch Kapor wrote an article for Wired that laid out his and EFF’s position on the future Internet: “Private, not public… life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community.”103
Wired backed up EFF’s privatized vision, giving the organization space in the magazine to expound its views, while providing fawning coverage of the group’s activities. It compared the lobbying work the EFF was doing on behalf of its powerful telecom donors to the authority-bucking counterculture scene of the 1960s Bay Area. “In some ways, they are the Merry Pranksters, those apostles of LSD, who tripped through the 1960s in a psychedelic bus named Furthur, led by novelist Ken Kesey and chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” wrote Wired journalist Joshua Quittner in a profile of the EFF’s move to Washington, DC.104 “Older and wiser now, they’re on the road again, without the bus and the acid, but dispensing many similar-sounding bromides: Turn on, jack in, get connected. Feed your head with the roar of bits pulsing across the cosmos, and learn something about who you are.”
Writing about corporate lobbyists working on behalf of telecoms to deregulate the Internet as if they were rebels and acid heads? It might seem cynical, even gauche. But Wired was serious and genuine, and it somehow fit, and people believed it. Because in the world Wired constructed for its readers, anything tied to the Internet was different and radical. It made sense. Wired and the EFF were extensions of the same larger business-counterculture-New-Right network and ideology that emerged out of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth. That’s where Wired’s real cultural power lay: using cybernetic ideals of the counterculture to sell corporate politics as a revolutionary act.
Wired magazine was just the hippest, youngest outlet representing a bigger cultural and political trend in American society. In the 1990s, it seemed like wherever you looked—the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the New York Times—pundits, journalists, economists, and politicians predicted an era of abundance where just about everything was going to change.105 Old rules—scarcity, labor, wealth and poverty, political power—no longer applied. Computers and networking technology were ushering in the Information Age, where the human race would be freed at last, freed from overbearing governments and borders, freed even from its very identity.106
In 1996, the same year that the Telecommunications Act was passed, Louis Rossetto made a bold prediction: the Internet was going to change everything. It was even going to make the military obsolete. “I mean, everything—if you have a bunch of preconceived ideas about how the world works, you better reconsider them, because change is instantaneous out there,” he said.107 “And you don’t need, you know, lumbering armies in a global village, you need maybe a police force at the most and you need good will on the part of the inhabitants, but otherwise you don’t need these kinds of structures that have already been built.”
Back in 1972, Stewart Brand tried to convince Rolling Stone readers that the young Pentagon contractors holed up in a Stanford lab, playing video games and building powerful computer tools for ARPA, were not really working in the service of war. They were hacking the system, using military computer technology to end the military. “Spacewar serves Earthpeace,” he wrote back then. “So does any funky playing with computers, any computer-pursuit of your own peculiar goals, and especially any use of computers to offset other computers.” Brand saw computers as a path toward a utopian world order where the individual wielded the ultimate power. Everything that came before—militaries, governments, big oppressive corporations—would melt away and an egalitarian system would spontaneously emerge. “When computers become available to everybody, the hackers take over: We are all Computer Bums, all more empowered as individuals and as cooperators.”108
Twenty-four years later, Rossetto channeled the same sentiment, promoting personal computers and the Internet as tools that would radically empower the individual and wink armies out of existence. It was a wide-eyed and, perhaps, self-serving view for a man whose fame and fortune rested on the backing of Nicholas Negroponte, a career military contractor whose MIT Media Lab received funding from DARPA even as Rossetto spoke those words.
Not surprisingly, the future hasn’t quite worked out according to Rossetto’s dream. The village went global, true. But the lumbering armies of the past did not go away; indeed, as time showed, computer networks and the Internet only expanded the power of American military and intelligence agencies, making them global and omnipresent.
Chapter 5
Surveillance Inc.
The perfect search engine would be like the mind of God.
—Sergey Brin, in “What’s Next for Google”
Everyone in America remembers where they were on the morning of September 11, 2001, when two airplanes brought down the World Trade Center.
I was in the middle of moving my belongings to a room on the south side of the University of California, Berkeley, campus, where I’d just transferred from a community college in San Mateo. I didn’t have a television or a computer, and smartphones didn’t exist. To get the news, I watched CNN all day with a friend in a grimy pizza joint off Telegraph Avenue, nibbling cold slices, drinking beer, and generally feeling confused and helpless.
Google cofounder Sergey Brin also remembers where he was on 9/11. But unlike most of us, he had the power to do something. Something of consequence.
That morning, Brin rushed into Google’s headquarters on Bayshore Avenue in Mountain View. He quietly convened a small group of his most trusted engineers and managers and charged them with a top-secret assignment: mine Google’s search logs for anything that might help uncover the identity of the people involved in that morning’s attack.
“Google is big enough at this point that it’s entirely possible the
terrorists used it to help plan their attack,” Brin told the antiterror data-mining posse gathered around him. “We can try to identify them based on intersecting sets of search queries conducted during the period prior to the hijackings.” To get them started, he threw together a list of possible search terms, such as “Boeing,” “fuel capacity,” “aviation school.”1 If they discovered several terror-related keywords coming from the same computer, Brin instructed them to try to reverse-engineer the search to reveal the user’s identity and possibly stop the next attack.
The plan had a good chance of success.
Three years had passed since Brin and his partner Larry Page used $25 million in venture capital to spin their Stanford graduate project into a lucrative search company. Google wasn’t yet the ubiquitous presence it is today, nor had its name become a synonym for “search” yet. In fact, it was barely making any money. But Google was fast on its way to becoming the world’s most popular search engine, and it sat atop a gold mine of behavioral data. It processed 150 million searches every day.2 Each of those records contained a search query, the location of its origin, the date and time it was entered, the type of computer that was used, and the search result link the user ultimately clicked. All of this was tied to a tracking “cookie” file that Google placed on every computer that used its services.
Individually, these search queries were of limited value. But collectively, when mined for patterns of behavior over extended periods of time, they could paint a rich biographical portrait, including details about a person’s interests, work, relationships, hobbies, secrets, idiosyncrasies, sexual preferences, medical ailments, and political and religious views. The more a person typed into Google’s search box, the more refined the picture that emerged. Multiply this by hundreds of millions of people around the world, each using the site all day, and you start to get a sense of the unfathomable stores of data at Google’s disposal.
The richness of the information in Google’s search logs amazed and enchanted the company’s data-obsessed engineers. It was like a continuous poll of public interests and preferences, a rolling picture of what people worried about, lusted after, and what kind of flu was spreading in their communities. “Google could be a broad sensor of human behavior,” was how one Google employee described it.3
The data could be extremely specific, like a brain tap, allowing Google to profile individuals in unprecedented detail. People treated the search box as an impartial oracle that accepted questions, spat out answers, and moved on. Few realized it recorded everything typed into it, from details about relationship troubles to—Brin hoped—plans regarding future terror attacks.
The crack team of terrorist hunters Brin assembled that morning knew all about the type of information the search logs contained; many of them had spent the past three years building what would soon become a multi-billion-dollar targeted advertising business on top of it. So they went looking for suspects.
“In a first run, the logs team found about a hundred thousand queries a day that matched some of his criteria,” recalled Douglas Edwards, Google’s first marketing director, in his memoir I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. He was there for the hunt, and he remembered how a deeper analysis of the logs proved disappointing. “The search of our logs for the 9/11 terrorists turned up nothing of interest. The closest we came was a cookie that had searched for both ‘world trade center’ and ‘Egypt air hijack.’ If the terrorists had used Google to plan their attack, they had done so in a way that we couldn’t discover.”4
It’s never been clear whether Brin was searching the logs purely on his own initiative or whether it was an off-the-books request from the FBI or another law enforcement agency. But his data-mining effort preceded by more than a month President George W. Bush’s signing of the Patriot Act, which would give the National Security Agency broad authority to extract and mine search-log data in a very similar way.
“This new law that I sign today will allow surveillance of all communications used by terrorists, including emails, the Internet and cellphones. As of today, we’ll be able to better meet the technological challenges posed by this proliferation of communications technology,” President Bush said on October 26, 2001, the day he signed the act into law. “The American people need to know that we’re collecting a lot of information and we’re spending a great deal of time trying to gather as much intelligence as we possibly can, to chase down every lead, to run down every hint so that we can keep America safe. And it’s happening.”5
On one level, Brin’s quest to find terrorists was understandable. It was a terrifying time. America was gripped by a fear that more terrorist attacks were imminent. But given the US government’s hunger for information—any information—on potential terrorists and their accomplices, the effort had a disturbing dimension. Right after 9/11, the CIA grabbed scores of suspected Al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and Pakistan and dumped them in Guantanamo Bay, in many cases acting on second-hand information for which they’d paid million-dollar bounties. In the end, 731 of the 780 detainees, more than 90 percent, were released without being charged.6 A series of searches like “Boeing,” “fuel capacity,” “aviation school,” and “death to America,” might sound incriminating, but they were hardly proof of complicity in terrorist acts. If a teenager in Islamabad had Googled those terms, and the company had turned that information over to the government, it’s possible he could have found himself black-bagged in the middle of the night and shipped to Guantanamo.
But was Brin’s vigilante effort effective? What were the net results?
Not really, and not much. To Douglas Edwards, who related this story in his memoir, the episode served as a cautionary tale. He had been with the company almost from the beginning, but only on September 11 did he finally begin to comprehend how much power Google—and, by extension, the rest of Silicon Valley—had locked in its files. “There was no way to avoid the fact that we were trying to sift out specific users on the basis of their searches. If we found them, we would try to determine their personal information from the data about them in our logs,” wrote Edwards. “We had people’s most intimate thoughts in our log files and, soon enough, people would realize it.”7
I first started using Google in 2001, around the time Sergey Brin started hunting for terrorists. For me, as for a lot of people who came of age in the early 2000s, Google was the first Internet company I really trusted. It did not demand money. It did not bombard you with obnoxious ads. It had a clean, white design, centering a simple search box against a blank background. It worked like nothing else on the Internet, helping you navigate through a chaotic and wondrous new world. It put whole libraries at your fingertips, allowed you to translate foreign languages on the fly, let you collaborate in real time with people on the other side of the planet. And you got all of it for free. It seemed to defy the laws of economics.
Even as it expanded into a transnational multi-billion-dollar corporation, Google managed to retain its geekily innocent “Don’t Be Evil” image. It convinced its users that everything it did was driven by a desire to help humanity. That’s the story you’ll find in just about every popular book on Google: a gee-whiz tale about two brilliant nerds from Stanford who turned a college project into an epoch-defining New Economy dynamo, a company that embodied every utopian promise of the networked society: empowerment, knowledge, democracy. For a while, it felt true. Maybe this really was the beginning of a new, highly networked world order, where the old structures—militaries, corporations, governments—were helpless before the leveling power of the Internet. As Wired’s Louis Rossetto wrote in 1995, “Everything we know will be different. Not just a change from L.B.J. to Nixon, but whether there will be a President at all.”8
Back then, anybody suggesting Google might be the herald of a new kind of dystopia, rather than a techno-utopia, would have been laughed out of the room. It was all but unthinkable.
Digital Library
Lawrence Page was a soci
ally awkward child, born and raised around computers. In 1978, when he was five, his father, Carl, spent a year working as a researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The center was an ARPANET site that Google would lease years later as it expanded its corporate campus.9 Page’s mother, Gloria, taught computer programming at Michigan State University. His older brother, Carl Page Jr., was a pioneering Internet entrepreneur who founded an early message board company later purchased by Yahoo! for nearly half a billion dollars.
Page grew up programming.10 When he was twelve, he read a biography of Nikola Tesla, the brilliant Serbian American inventor who had developed everything from the electric motor, radio, and fluorescent lights to alternating current, all before dying in poverty, alone and out of his mind, while writing letters to a pigeon that lived on his windowsill.11 Page devoured the book, and Tesla has remained an enduring inspiration. Not just Tesla’s inventions obsessed Page but also his repeated failure to monetize his ideas. “He had all these problems commercializing his work. It’s a very sad story. I realized Tesla was the greatest inventor, but he didn’t accomplish as much as he should have,” Page once told journalist John Battelle. “I realized I wanted to invent things, but I also wanted to change the world. I wanted to get them out there, get them into people’s hands so they can use them, because that’s what really matters.”12