Surveillance Valley

by Yasha Levine

  This mixing of military, police, government, public education, business, and consumer-facing systems—all funneled through Google—continues to raise alarms. Lawyers fret over whether Gmail violates attorney-client privilege.129 Parents wonder what Google does with the information it collects on their kids at school. What does Google do with the data that flow through its system? Is all of it fed into Google’s big corporate surveillance pot? What are Google’s limits and restrictions? Are there any? In response to these questions, Google offers only vague and conflicting answers.130

  Of course, this concern isn’t restricted to Google alone. Under the hood of most other Internet companies we use every day are vast systems of private surveillance that, in one way or another, work with and empower the state.

  eBay built up an internal police division headed by veterans of the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Department of Justice. It is staffed by over a thousand private investigators, who work closely with intelligence and law enforcement agencies in every country where it operates.131 The company runs seminars and training sessions and offers travel junkets to cops around the world.132 eBay is proud of its relationship with law enforcement and boasts that its efforts have led to the arrests of three thousand people around the world—roughly three per day since the division started.133

  Amazon runs cloud computing and storage services for the CIA.134 The initial contract, signed in 2013, was worth $600 million and was later expanded to include the NSA and a dozen other US intelligence agencies.135 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos used his wealth to launch Blue Origin, a missile company that partners with Lockheed Martin and Boeing.136 Blue Origin is a direct competitor of SpaceX, a space company started by another Internet mogul: PayPal cofounder Elon Musk. Meanwhile, another PayPal founder, Peter Thiel, spun off PayPal’s sophisticated fraud-detection algorithm into Palantir Technologies, a major military contractor that provides sophisticated data-mining services for the NSA and CIA.137

  Facebook, too, is cozy with the military. It poached former DARPA head Regina Dugan to run its secretive “Building 8” research division, which is involved in everything from artificial intelligence to drone-based wireless Internet networks. Facebook is betting big on virtual reality as the user interface of the future. The Pentagon is, too. According to reports, Facebook’s Oculus virtual reality headset has already been integrated into DARPA’s Plan X, a $110 million project to build an immersive, fully virtual reality environment to fight cyberwars.138 It sounds like something straight out of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and it seems to work, too. In 2016, DARPA announced that Plan X would be transitioned to operational use by the Pentagon’s Cyber Command within a year.139

  On a higher level, there is no real difference between Google’s relationship with the US government and that of these other Internet companies. It is just a matter of degree. The sheer breadth and scope of Google’s technology make it a perfect stand-in for the rest of the commercial Internet ecosystem.

  Indeed, Google’s size and ambition make it more than a simple contractor. It is frequently an equal partner that works side by side with government agencies, using its resources and commercial dominance to bring companies with heavy military funding to market. In 2008, it launched a private spy satellite called GeoEye-1 in partnership with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.140 It bought Boston Dynamics, a DARPA-seeded robotics company that made experimental robotic pack mules for the military, only to sell it off after the Pentagon determined it would not be putting these robots into active use.141 It has invested $100 million in CrowdStrike, a major military and intelligence cyber defense contractor that, among other things, led the investigation into the alleged 2016 Russian government hacks of the Democratic National Committee.142 And it also runs JigSaw, a hybrid think tank–technology incubator aimed at leveraging Internet technology to solve thorny foreign policy problems, everything from terrorism to censorship and cyberwarfare.143

  Founded in 2010 by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, a twenty-nine-year-old State Department whiz kid who served under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, JigSaw has launched multiple projects with foreign policy and national security implications.144 It ran polling for the US government to help war-torn Somalia draft a new constitution, developed tools to track global arms sales, and worked with a start-up funded by the State Department to help people in Iran and China route around Internet censorship.145 It also built a platform to combat online terrorist recruitment and radicalization, which worked by identifying Google users interested in Islamic extremist topics and diverting them to State Department webpages and videos developed to dissuade people from taking that path.146 Google calls this the “Redirect Method,” a part of Cohen’s larger idea of using Internet platforms to wage “digital counterinsurgency.”147 And, in 2012, as the civil war in Syria intensified and American support for rebel forces there increased, JigSaw brainstormed ways it could help push Bashar al-Assad from power. Among them: a tool that visually maps high-level defections from Assad’s government, which Cohen wanted to beam into Syria as propaganda to give “confidence to the opposition.” “I’ve attached a few visuals that show what the tool will look like,” Cohen wrote to several top aides of Hillary Clinton, who was then secretary of state. “Please keep this very close hold and let me know if there is anything else you think we need to account for or think about before we launch.”148 As leaked emails show, Secretary Clinton was intrigued, telling her aides to print out Cohen’s mockup of the application so she could look at it herself.149

  JigSaw seemed to blur the line between public and corporate diplomacy, and at least one former State Department official accused it of fomenting regime change in the Middle East.150 “Google is getting [White House] and State Dept. support & air cover. In reality, they are doing things the CIA cannot do,” wrote Fred Burton, a Stratfor executive and former intelligence agent of the Diplomatic Security Service, the armed security branch of the State Department.151

  But Google rejected the claims of its critics. “We’re not engaged in regime change,” Eric Schmidt told Wired.152 “We don’t do that stuff. But if it turns out that empowering citizens with smartphones and information causes changes in their country… you know, that’s probably a good thing, don’t you think?”

  Mediating Everything and Everyone

  JigSaw’s work with the State Department has raised eyebrows, but its function is a mere taste of the future if Google gets its way. As the company makes new deals with the NSA and continues its merger with the US security apparatus, its founders see it playing an even greater role in global society.

  “The societal goal is our primary goal. We’ve always tried to say that with Google. Some of the most fundamental questions which people are not thinking about, there’s the question of how do we organize people, how do we motivate people. It’s a really interesting problem, how do we organize our democracies?” ruminated Larry Page during a rare interview in 2014 with the Financial Times. He looked a hundred years into the future and saw Google at the center of progress. “We could probably solve a lot of the issues we have as humans.”153

  Spend time listening to and reading the words of Google executives, and you quickly realize they see no hard line separating government and Google. They look into the future and see Internet companies morphing into operating systems for society. To them, the world is too big, and moves too quickly, for traditional governments to keep up.154 The world needs the help of Google to lead the way, to provide ideas, investment, and technical knowledge. And, anyway, there is no stopping the spread of technology.155 Transportation, entertainment, power plants and power grids, police departments, jobs, public transportation, health care, agriculture, housing, elections and political systems, war, and even space exploration—it is all plugged into the Internet, and companies like Google can’t help but be at the center. There is no escape.

  Some people at Google talk about building a new city from the “Internet up,” using Google’s d
ata architecture as the foundation, unencumbered by government regulations that restrict innovation and progress.156 This brave new world, wired thick with Google biosensors and blinking with nonstop data flows, is really just the old cyber-libertarian dream world as first seen in the Whole Earth Catalog and Richard Brautigan’s utopian poetry, a world where “mammals and computers / live together in mutually / programming harmony… a cybernetic forest… where deer stroll peacefully / past computers… and all watched over by machines of loving grace.” Except in Google’s version of this future, the machines of loving grace aren’t a benevolent abstraction but a powerful global corporation.157

  The parallel does not inspire confidence. Back in the 1960s, many of Brand’s New Communalists built microcommunities based on cybernetic ideas, believing that flat hierarchies, social transparency, and radical interconnectedness between individuals would abolish exploitation, hierarchy, and power. In the end, the attempt to replace politics with technology was the fatal flaw: without organized protection for the weak, these would-be utopias devolved into cults controlled by charismatic and dominant leaders who ruled their fiefdoms through bullying and intimidation. “There was constantly a background of fear in the house—like a virus running in the background. Like spyware. You know it’s there, but you don’t know how to get rid of it,” recalled a member of a New Mexico commune that had descended into a nightmare world of sexual abuse and exploitation.

  Spyware running in the background.

  It is a curious choice of words to explain what it felt like to live in a 1970s cybernetic utopia gone bad. It is also an accurate description of the world Google and the Internet have made today.

  Chapter 6

  Edward Snowden’s Arms Race

  A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.

  —Timothy C. May, The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, 1988

  In June 2013, headlines flashed across the world: an employee of the National Security Agency had fled the country with a huge cache of top-secret documents and was blowing the whistle on America’s global surveillance apparatus. At first the identity of this NSA leaker remained shrouded in mystery. Journalists descended on Hong Kong, scouring hotel lobbies desperately hunting for leads. Finally, a photograph emerged: a thin, pale young man with disheveled hair, wire-rim glasses, and a gray shirt open at the collar sitting on a hotel room sofa—calm but looking like he hadn’t slept for days.

  His name was Edward Snowden—“Ed,” as he wanted people to call him. He was twenty-nine years old. His résumé was a veritable treasure trove of spook world subcontracting: Central Intelligence Agency, US Defense Intelligence Agency, and, most recently, Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense contractor that ran digital surveillance operations for the National Security Agency.1

  Sitting in his room at the five-star Hotel Mira in Hong Kong, Snowden told journalists from the Guardian that watching the global surveillance system operated by NSA had forced his hand and compelled him to become a whistleblower. “The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything,” he said in a calm, measured voice during a videotaped interview that first introduced the leaker and his motives to the world. “I don’t want to live in a society that does these sorts of things.… I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”2

  Over the next few months, a small group of journalists reviewed and reported on the documents Snowden had taken from the NSA. The material backed up his claims, no doubt about it. The US government was running a vast Internet surveillance program, hacking mobile phones, splicing into undersea fiber-optic cables, subverting encryption protocols, and tapping just about every major Silicon Valley platform and company—Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon. Even mobile games like Angry Birds didn’t escape the spy agency’s notice. Nothing seemed to be off limits.

  The revelations triggered a scandal of global proportions. Privacy, surveillance, and data gathering on the Internet were no longer considered fringe matters relegated mostly to the margins but important subjects that won Pulitzers and deserved front-page treatment in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. And Snowden himself, on the run from the US government, became the stuff of legend, his story immortalized on the big screen: an Academy Award–winning documentary and a Hollywood film directed by Oliver Stone, his role played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

  Following Snowden’s disclosures, people were suddenly appalled and outraged that the US government would use the Internet for surveillance. But given the Internet’s counterinsurgency origins, its role in spying on Americans going back to the 1970s, and the close ties between the Pentagon and such companies as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, this news should not have come as a surprise. That it did shock so many is a testament to the fact that the military history of the Internet had been flushed from society’s collective memory.

  The truth is that the Internet came out of a Pentagon project to develop modern communication and information systems that would allow the United States to get the drop on its enemies, both at home and abroad. That effort was a success, exceeding all expectations. So, of course, the US government leveraged the technology it had created, and keeps leveraging it to the max. How could it not?

  Plug ‘n Play

  Governments have been spying on telecommunications systems for as long as they’ve been around, going back to the days of the telegraph and the early phone systems. In the nineteenth century, President Abraham Lincoln gave his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, broad powers over the country’s telegraph network, allowing him to spy on communications and to control the spread of unwanted information during the Civil War. In the early twentieth century, the Federal Bureau of Investigation tapped phone systems with impunity, spying on bootleggers, labor activists, civil rights leaders, and anyone J. Edgar Hoover considered a subversive and a threat to America. In the twenty-first century, the Internet opened up whole new vistas and possibilities.3

  The ARPANET was first used to spy on Americans in 1972, when it was employed to transfer surveillance files on antiwar protesters and civil rights leaders that the US Army had collected. Back then, the network was just a tool to let the Pentagon quickly and easily share data with other agencies.4 To actually spy on people, the army first had to gather the information. That meant sending agents into the world to watch people, interview neighbors, bug phones, and spend nights staking out targets. It was a laborious process and, at one point, the army had set up its own fake news outfit so that agents could film and interview antiwar protesters more easily. The modern Internet changed the need for all these elaborate schemes.

  Email, shopping, photo and video sharing, dating, social media, smartphones—the world doesn’t just communicate via the Internet, it lives on the Internet. And all of this living leaves a trail. If the platforms run by Google, Facebook, and Apple could be used to spy on users in order to serve them targeted ads, pinpoint movie preferences, customize news feeds, or guess where people will go for dinner, why couldn’t they also be used to fight terrorism, prevent crime, and keep the world safe? The answer is: Of course they can.

  By the time Edward Snowden appeared on the scene, police departments from San Francisco to Miami were using social media platforms to infiltrate and watch political groups and monitor protests. Investigators created fake accounts and ingratiated themselves into their mark’s social network, then filed warrants to access private messages and other underlying data not available publicly. Some, like the New York Police Department, launched specialized divisions that used social media as a central investigative tool. Detectives could spend years monitoring suspects’ Internet activity, compiling posts from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, mapping social relationships, deciphering slang, tracking movements, and then correlating them with possible crimes.5 Others, like the state of Maryland, built custom solutions that included facial recognition software so that police officers could
identify people photographed at protests by matching the images scraped off Instagram and Facebook to those in the state’s driver’s license database.6 A publishing industry that taught cops how to conduct investigations using the Internet flourished, with training manual titles like The Poor Cops Wiretap: Turning a Cell Phone into a Surveillance Tool Using Free Applications and Google Timeline: Location Investigations Involving Android Devices; it was a popular genre.7

  Naturally, federal intelligence agencies were pioneers in this space.8 The Central Intelligence Agency was a big and early fan of what it called “open source intelligence”—information that it could grab from the public Web: videos, personal blogs, photos, and posts on platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google+.9 In 2005, the agency partnered with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to launch the Open Source Center, dedicated to building open-source collection tools and sharing them with other federal intelligence agencies.10 Through its In-Q-Tel venture capital fund, the CIA invested in all sorts of companies that mined the Internet for open-source intelligence.11 It invested in Dataminr, which bought access to Twitter data and analyzed people’s tweets to spot potential threats.12 It backed “a social media intelligence” company called PATHAR that monitored Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts for signs of Islamic radicalization. And it supported a popular product called Geofeedia, which allowed its clients to display social media posts from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram from specific geographic locations, down to the size of a city block. Users could watch in real time or wind the clock back to earlier times.13 In 2016, Geofeedia had five hundred police departments as clients and touted its ability to monitor “overt threats”: unions, protests, rioting, and activist groups.14 All these CIA-backed companies paid Facebook, Google, and Twitter for special access to social media data—adding another lucrative revenue stream to Silicon Valley.15