Surveillance Valley

by Yasha Levine

  Uber, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Tinder, Apple, Lyft, Four-Square, Airbnb, Spotify, Instagram, Twitter, Angry Birds. If you zoom out and look at the bigger picture, you can see that, taken together, these companies have turned our computers and phones into bugs that are plugged in to a vast corporate-owned surveillance network. Where we go, what we do, what we talk about, who we talk to, and who we see—everything is recorded and, at some point, leveraged for value. Google, Apple, and Facebook know when a woman visits an abortion clinic, even if she tells no one else: the GPS coordinates on the phone don’t lie. One-night stands and extramarital affairs are a cinch to figure out: two smartphones that never met before suddenly cross paths in a bar and then make their way to an apartment across town, stay together overnight, and part in the morning. They know us intimately, even the things that we hide from those closest to us. And, as Uber’s Greyball program so clearly shows, no one escapes—not even the police.

  In our modern Internet ecosystem, this kind of private surveillance is the norm. It is as unnoticed and unremarkable as the air we breathe. But even in this advanced data-hungry environment, in terms of sheer scope and ubiquity, Google reigns supreme.

  As the Internet expanded, Google grew along with it. Flush with cash, Google went on a dizzying shopping spree. It bought companies and start-ups, absorbing them into its burgeoning platform. It went beyond search and email, broadened into word processing, databases, blogging, social media networks, cloud hosting, mobile platforms, browsers, navigation aids, cloud-based laptops, and a whole range of office and productivity applications. It could be hard to keep track of them all: Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Maps, Android, Google Play, Google Cloud, YouTube, Google Translate, Google Hangouts, Google Chrome, Google+, Google Sites, Google Developer, Google Voice, Google Analytics, Android TV. It blasted beyond pure Internet services and delved into fiber-optic telecommunication systems, tablets, laptops, home security cameras, self-driving cars, shopping delivery, robots, electric power plants, life extension technology, cyber security, and biotech. The company even launched a powerful in-house investment bank that now rivals Wall Street companies, investing money in everything from Uber to obscure agricultural crop monitoring start-ups, ambitious human DNA sequencing companies like 23andME, and a secretive life extension research center called Calico.88

  No matter what service it deployed or what market it entered, surveillance and prediction were cooked into the business. The data flowing through Google’s system are staggering. By the end of 2016, Google’s Android was installed on 82 percent of all new smartphones sold around the world, with over 1.5 billion Android users globally.89 At the same time, Google handled billions of searches and YouTube plays daily and had a billion active Gmail users, which meant it had access to most of the world’s emails.90 Some analysts estimate that 25 percent of all Internet traffic in North America goes through Google servers.91 The company isn’t just connected to the Internet, it is the Internet.

  Google has pioneered a whole new type of business transaction. Instead of paying for Google’s services with money, people pay with their data. And the services it offers to consumers are just the lures—used to grab people’s data and dominate their attention, attention that is contracted out to advertisers. Google has used data to grow its empire. By 2017, it had $90 billion in revenues and $20 billion in profits, with seventy-two thousand full-time employees working out of seventy offices in more than forty countries.92 It had a market capitalization of $593 billion, making it the second-most-valuable public company in the world—second only to Apple, another Silicon Valley giant.93

  Meanwhile, other Internet companies depend on Google for survival. Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Lyft, and Uber—all have built multi-billion-dollar businesses on top of Google’s ubiquitous mobile operating system. As the gatekeeper, Google benefits from their success as well. The more people use their mobile devices, the more data it gets on them.

  What does Google know? What can it guess? Well, it seems just about everything. “One of the things that eventually happens… is that we don’t need you to type at all,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, said in a moment of candor in 2010. “Because we know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less guess what you’re thinking about.”94 He later added, “One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.”

  It is a scary thought, considering Google is no longer a cute start-up but a powerful global corporation with its own political agenda and a mission to maximize profits for shareholders. Imagine if Philip Morris, Goldman Sachs, or a military contractor like Lockheed Martin had this kind of access.

  Google Government

  Not long after Sergey Brin and Larry Page incorporated Google, they began to see their mission in bigger terms. They weren’t just building a search engine or a targeted advertising business. They were organizing the world’s information to make it accessible and useful for everyone. It was a vision that also encompassed the Pentagon.

  Even as Google grew to dominate the consumer Internet, a second side of the company emerged, one that rarely got much notice: Google the government contractor. As it turns out, the same platforms and services that Google deploys to monitor people’s lives and grab their data could be put to use running huge swaths of the US government, including the military, spy agencies, police departments, and schools. The key to this transformation was a small start-up now known as Google Earth.

  In 2003, a San Francisco company called Keyhole Incorporated was on the ropes. Named like the CIA’s secret 1960s “Keyhole” spy satellite program, the company had been launched two years earlier as a spinoff from a video game outfit. Its CEO, John Hanke, hailed from Texas and had worked for a time in the US Embassy in Myanmar. He told journalists that the inspiration for his company came from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a cult sci-fi novel in which the hero taps into a program created by the “Central Intelligence Corporation” called Planet Earth, a virtual reality construct designed to “keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns—all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.”95

  Life would imitate art.96

  Keyhole derived from video game technology but deployed it in the real world, creating a program that stitched satellite images and aerial photographs into seamless three-dimensional computer models of the earth that could be explored as if they were in a virtual reality game world. It was a groundbreaking product that allowed anyone with an Internet connection to virtually fly over anywhere in the world. The only problem was Keyhole’s timing; it was a bit off. It launched just as the dot-com bubble blew up in Silicon Valley’s face. Funding dried up, and Keyhole found itself struggling to survive.97 Luckily, the company was saved just in time by the very entity that inspired it: the Central Intelligence Agency.

  In 1999, at the peak of the dot-com boom, the CIA had launched In-Q-Tel, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund whose mission was to invest in start-ups that aligned with the agency’s intelligence needs.98 Keyhole seemed a perfect fit.99

  The CIA poured an unknown amount of money into Keyhole; the exact number remains classified. The investment was finalized in early 2003, and it was made in partnership with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a major intelligence organization with 14,500 employees and a $5 billion budget whose job was to deliver satellite intelligence to the CIA and the Pentagon. Known by its alphabet-soup acronym “NGA,” the spy agency’s motto was: “Know the Earth… Show the Way… Understand the World.”100

  The CIA and NGA were not just investors; they were also clients, and they involved themselves in customizing Keyhole’s virtual map product to meet their own needs.101 Months after In-Q-Tel’s investment, Keyhole software was already integrated into operational service and deployed to support American troops during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the shock-and-awe campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein.102 I
ntelligence officials were impressed with the “video game-like” simplicity of its virtual maps. They also appreciated the ability to layer visual information over other intelligence.103 The possibilities were limited only by what contextual data could be fed and grafted onto a map: troop movements, weapons caches, real-time weather and ocean conditions, intercepted emails and phone call intel, cell phone locations. Keyhole gave an intelligence analyst, a commander in the field, or an air force pilot up in the air the kind of capability that we now take for granted: using digital mapping services on our computers and mobile phones to look up restaurants, cafes, museums, traffic conditions, and subway routes. “We could do these mashups and expose existing legacy data sources in a matter of hours, rather than weeks, months, or years,” an NGA official gushed a few years later.104

  Military commanders weren’t the only ones who liked Keyhole. So did Sergey Brin. He liked it so much he insisted on personally demo-ing the app for Google executives. In an account published in Wired, he barged in on a company meeting, punched in the address of every person present, and used the program to virtually fly over their homes.105

  In 2004, the same year Google went public, Brin and Page bought the company outright, CIA investors and all.106 They then absorbed the company into Google’s growing Internet applications platform. Keyhole was reborn as Google Earth.

  The purchase of Keyhole was a major milestone for Google, marking the moment the company stopped being a purely consumer-facing Internet company and began integrating with the US government. When Google bought Keyhole, it also acquired an In-Q-Tel executive named Rob Painter, who came with deep connections to the world of intelligence and military contracting, including US Special Operations, the CIA, and major defense firms like Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin.107 At Google, Painter was planted in a new dedicated sales and lobbying division called Google Federal, located in Reston, Virginia, a short drive from the CIA’s headquarters in Langley. His job at Google was to help the company grab a slice of the lucrative military-intelligence contracting market. Or, as Painter described in contractor-bureaucratese, “evangelizing and implementing Google Enterprise solutions for a host of users across the Intelligence and Defense Communities.”

  Google had closed a few previous deals with intelligence agencies. In 2003, it scored a $2.1 million contract to outfit the NSA with a customized search solution that could scan and recognize millions of documents in twenty-four languages, including on-call tech support in case anything went wrong. In 2004, as it was dealing with the fallout over Gmail email scanning, Google landed a search contract with the CIA. The value of the deal isn’t known, but the CIA did ask Google’s permission to customize the CIA’s internal Google search page by placing the CIA’s seal in one of the Google Os. “I told our sales rep to give them the okay if they promised not to tell anyone. I didn’t want it spooking privacy advocates,” Douglas Edwards wrote in I’m Feeling Lucky.108 Deals like these picked up pace and increased in scope after Google’s Keyhole acquisition.

  In 2006, Painter’s Google Federal went on a hiring spree, snapping up managers and salespeople from the army, air force, CIA, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin.109 It beefed up its lobbying muscle and assembled a team of Democratic and Republican operatives. Google even grabbed ARPA’s old show pony: Vint Cerf, who, as Google’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist, served as a symbolic bridge between Google and the military.

  While Google’s public relations team did its best to keep the company wrapped in a false aura of geeky altruism, company executives pursued an aggressive strategy to become the Lockheed Martin of the Internet Age.110 “We’re functionally more than tripling the team each year,” Painter said in 2008.111 It was true. With insiders plying their trade, Google’s expansion into the world of military and intelligence contracting took off.

  In 2007, it partnered with Lockheed Martin to design a visual intelligence system for the NGA that displayed US military bases in Iraq and marked out Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad—important information for a region that had experienced a bloody sectarian insurgency and ethnic cleansing campaign between the two groups.112 In 2008, Google won a contract to run the servers and search technology that powered the CIA’s Intellipedia, an intelligence database modeled after Wikipedia that was collaboratively edited by the NSA, CIA, FBI, and other federal agencies.113 Not long after that, Google contracted with the US Army to equip fifty thousand soldiers with a customized suite of mobile Google services.114

  In 2010, as a sign of just how deeply Google had integrated with US intelligence agencies, it won a no-bid exclusive $27 million contract to provide the NGA with “geospatial visualization services,” effectively making the Internet giant the “eyes” of America’s defense and intelligence apparatus. Competitors criticized the NGA for not opening the contract to the customary bidding process, but the agency defended its decision, saying it had no choice: it had spent years working with Google on secret and top-secret programs to build Google Earth technology according to its needs and could not go with any other company.115

  Google has been tightlipped about the details and scope of its contracting business. It does not list this revenue in a separate column in quarterly earnings reports to investors, nor does it provide the sum to reporters. But an analysis of the federal contracting database maintained by the US government, combined with information gleaned from Freedom of Information Act requests and published periodic reports on the company’s military work, reveals that Google has been doing brisk business selling Google Search, Google Earth, and Google Enterprise (now known as G Suite) products to just about every major military and intelligence agency: navy, army, air force, Coast Guard, DARPA, NSA, FBI, DEA, CIA, NGA, and the State Department.116 Sometimes Google sells directly to the government, but it also works with established contractors like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation), a California-based intelligence mega-contractor that has so many former NSA employees working for it that it is known in the business as “NSA West.”117

  Google’s entry into this market makes sense. By the time Google Federal went online in 2006, the Pentagon was spending the bulk of its budget on private contractors. That year, of the $60 billion US intelligence budget, 70 percent, or $42 billion, went to corporations. That means that, although the government pays the bill, the actual work is done by Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Bechtel, Booz Allen Hamilton, and other powerful contractors.118 And this isn’t just in the defense sector. By 2017, the federal government was spending $90 billion a year on information technology.119 It’s a huge market—one in which Google seeks to maintain a strong presence. And its success has been all but guaranteed. Its products are the best in the business.120

  A sign of how vital Google has become to the US government: in 2010, following a disastrous intrusion into its system by what the company believes was a group of Chinese government hackers, Google entered into a secretive agreement with the National Security Agency.121 “According to officials who were privy to the details of Google’s arrangements with the NSA, the company agreed to provide information about traffic on its networks in exchange for intelligence from the NSA about what it knew of foreign hackers,” wrote defense reporter Shane Harris in @War, a history of warfare. “It was a quid pro quo, information for information. And from the NSA’s perspective, information in exchange for protection.”122

  This made perfect sense. Google servers supplied critical services to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department, just to name a few. It was part of the military family and essential to American society. It needed to be protected, too.

  Google didn’t just work with intelligence and military agencies but also sought to penetrate every level of society, including civilian federal agencies, cities, states, local police departments, emergency responders, hospitals, public schools, and all sorts of companies and nonprofits. In 2011, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminis
tration, the federal agency that researches weather and the environment, switched over to Google.123 In 2014, the city of Boston deployed Google to run the information infrastructure for its eighty thousand employees—from police officers to teachers—and even migrated its old emails to the Google cloud.124 The Forest Service and the Federal Highway Administration use Google Earth and Gmail. In 2016, New York City tapped Google to install and run free Wi-Fi stations across the city.125 California, Nevada, and Iowa, meanwhile, depend on Google for cloud computing platforms that predict and catch welfare fraud.126 Meanwhile, Google mediates the education of more than half of America’s public school students.127

  “What we really do is allow you to aggregate, collaborate and enable,” explained Scott Ciabattari, a Google Federal sales rep, during a 2013 government contracting conference in Laramie, Wyoming. He was pitching a room full of civil servants, telling them that Google was all about getting them—intelligence analysts, commanders, government managers, and police officers—access to the right information at the right time.128 He ran through a few examples: tracking flu outbreaks, monitoring floods and wildfires, safely serving criminal warrants, integrating surveillance cameras and face recognition systems, and even helping police officers respond to school shootings. “We are starting to see, unfortunately, with some of the incidents that happen with schools, the ability to do a floor plan,” he said. “We are getting this request more and more. ‘Can you help us publish all the floorplans for our school district. If there is a shooting disaster, God forbid, we want to know where things are.’ Having that ability on a smart phone. Being able to see that information quickly at the right time saves lives.” A few months after this presentation, Ciabattari met with Oakland officials to discuss how Google could help the California city build its police surveillance center.