Surveillance Valley

by Yasha Levine

  28. Brenna McBride, “The Ultimate Search,” College Park Magazine (University of Maryland), Spring 2000.

  29. Sergey Brin’s Home Page, Stanford University, accessed June 11, 2004, http://www-db.stanford.edu:80/~sergey/.

  30. Battelle, The Search, 73.

  31. John Ince, “The Lost Google Tapes,” January 2000, quoted in Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators, chap. 11.

  32. “It’s all recursive. It’s all a big circle,” Larry Page later explained at a computer forum a few years after launching Google. “Navigating Cyberspace,” PC forum held in Scottsdale, AZ, 2001, quoted in Steven Levy’s In the Plex, 21.

  33. John Battelle, “The Birth of Google,” Wired, August 1, 2005.

  34. Ince, “The Lost Google Tapes,” quoted in Isaacson, The Innovators, chap. 11.

  35. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, “The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web,” Stanford University InfoLab, January 29, 1998, http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf.

  36. Steering Committee on the Changing Nature of Telecommunications/Information Infrastructure, National Research Council, The Changing Nature of Telecommunications/Information Infrastructure (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1995).

  37. David A. Vise, The Google Story (New York: Delacorte Press, 2005).

  38. Battelle, The Search, 62.

  39. Levy, In the Plex, 47.

  40. Ibid., 48.

  41. Alex Chitu, “Google in 2000,” Google System, December 28, 2007, https://googlesystem.blogspot.ru/2007/12/google-in-2000.html#gsc.tab=0.

  42. Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky, chap. 11.

  43. “Google’s Revenue Worldwide from 2002 to 2016 (in Billion U.S. Dollars),” Statista, April 11, 2017, https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-global-revenue/.

  44. “Google Advertising Revenue, Billions of Dollars,” Vox, accessed July 6, 2017, https://apps.voxmedia.com/at/vox-google-advertising-revenue/.

  45. Sergey Brin and Larry Page also understood that Google was going to change—and in fact needed to change—people’s expectations of privacy. As Page told Levy: “There’s going to be large changes in the world because of all this stuff.… People will have to think before when they publish something online, ‘This might be here forever associated with me.’ Because Google exists.” Levy, In the Plex, 173.

  46. Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky, chap. 24, “To Larry the risks were too high…”

  47. Ibid., chap. 24.

  48. David A. Vise, “Google to Buy 5% of AOL for $1 Billion,” Washington Post, December 17, 2005.

  49. Michael Barbaro and Tom Zeller Jr., “A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749,” New York Times, August 9, 2006.

  50. “Gmail Invites Auctioned on eBay,” Geek.com, March 5, 2004, https://www.geek.com/news/gmail-invites-auctioned-on-ebay-556690/.

  51. David Pogue, “State of the Art; Google Mail: Virtue Lies in the In-Box,” New York Times, May 13, 2004.

  52. Initially, to placate privacy fears, Google said that it would not combine users’ search history with their email data, but the company backtracked on its promise. Today, all Google data—from email, search, and other services—are combined into one profile. Cecilia Kang, “Google Tracks Consumers’ Online Activities across Products, and Users Can’t Opt Out,” Washington Post, January 24, 2012.

  53. “Thirty-One Privacy and Civil Liberties Organizations Urge Google to Suspend Gmail,” Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, April 6, 2004, updated April 19, 2004, https://www.privacyrights.org/blog/thirty-one-privacy-and-civil-liberties-organizations-urge-google-suspend-gmail.

  54. Sarah Elton, “Got a Date Friday? Google Knows,” Maclean’s 119, no. 34 (2006): 56.

  55. Krishna Bharat, Stephen Lawrence, Mehran Sahami, and Amit Singhal, “Serving Advertisements Using User Request Information and User Information,” EP1634206 A4, patent application, Google Inc., June 1, 2004, https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2004111771; Jeffrey Dean, Georges Harik, and Paul Buchheit, “Serving Advertisements Using Information Associated with E-mail,” US20040059712 A1, patent application, Google Inc., June 2, 2003, https://www.google.com/patents/US20040059712.

  56. “Testimony of Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Director, Electronic Privacy Information Center West Coast Office, Privacy Risks of E-mail Scanning,” California Senate Judiciary Committee, March 15, 2005, http://web.archive.org/web/20170527221053/https://epic.org/privacy/gmail/casjud3.15.05.html.

  57. Jeffrey Rosen, “The Year in Ideas; Total Information Awareness,” New York Times, December 15, 2002.

  58. “Testimony of Chris Jay Hoofnagle.”

  59. “Now, what does information processing technology have to do with surveillance? A great deal? However, to my knowledge very little information processing technology has been researched and developed as surveillance technology per se,” Paul Armer, a scientist at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, explained during congressional hearings on surveillance technology in 1976. “Rather, it has been developed with other motives in mind, like improving business data processing or guiding missiles or getting men to the moon. But surveillance is an information-processing task just as much as a payroll application is. If you improve the efficiency of information-processing technology for payrolls, you improve it for surveillance. Often systems that are put up for other reasons… can also serve surveillance.” “Surveillance Technology,” Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Comm. on the Judiciary and the Special Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Commerce of the Comm. on Commerce, United States Senate, 94th Cong., 1st sess. (June 23, September 9 and 10, 1975).

  60. EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which emerged as one of Google’s fiercest critics, was concerned that Google did not restrict its email surveillance solely to its registered user base but was intercepting and analyzing the private communication of anyone who exchanged email with a Gmail user. As Gmail use skyrocketed, that meant Google was monitoring the email communication of a significant percentage of the world’s Internet population. “Gmail violates the privacy rights of non-subscribers. Non-subscribers who e-mail a Gmail user have ‘content extraction’ performed on their e-mail even though they have not consented to have their communications monitored, nor may they even be aware that their communications are being analyzed,” EPIC warned. The organization pointed out that this practice almost certainly violated California wiretapping statutes, which expressly criminalized the interception of electronic communication without consent of all parties involved. Because Google intercepts the private communication of anyone who emails a Gmail user, the company’s surveillance reach went beyond just those people who signed up for its service. Gmail Privacy FAQ, Electronic Privacy Information Center, accessed July 6, 2017, https://epic.org/privacy/gmail/faq.html.

  61. “Figueroa Introduces Bill to Stop Google from Secretly ‘Oogling’ Private E-mails,” Senator Liz Figueroa Press Room, April 21, 2004, http://web.archive.org/web/20041010082011/http://democrats.sen.ca.gov/servlet/gov.ca.senate.democrats.pub.members.memDisplayPress?district=sd10&ID=2102.

  62. Levy, In the Plex, 176.

  63. Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky, chap. 8. “‘Bastards!’ Larry would exclaim when a blogger raised concerns about user privacy. ‘Bastards!’ they would say about the press, the politicians, or the befuddled users who couldn’t grasp the obvious superiority of the technology behind Google’s products.”

  64. Michael Kirk and Mike Wiser, “United States of Secrets (Part One): The Program,” directed by Michael Kirk, Frontline (Arlington, VA: PBS, May 13, 2014), short film, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/united-states-of-secrets/.

  65. Levy, In the Plex, 177.

  66. Ibid., 177–178.

  67. Pogue, “Google Mail: Virtue Lies in the In-Box.”

  68. “Google Goes Public,” New York Times, August 20, 2004. In documents Google filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission prior to its IPO, the comp
any admitted that people’s concerns with privacy posed a danger to its business model. “Our business depends on a strong brand, and if we are not able to maintain and enhance our brand, our business and operating results would be harmed,” Google warned potential investors. “People have in the past expressed, and may in the future express, objections to aspects of our products. For example, people have raised privacy concerns relating to the ability of our recently announced Gmail email service to match relevant ads to the content of email messages.… Aspects of our future products may raise similar public concerns. Publicity regarding such concerns could harm our brand.” Final Prospectus, Google, Securities and Exchange Commission, August 18, 2004, 8, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504143377/d424b4.htm.

  69. Jeff Brantingham, interview with author conducted at University of California, Los Angeles, October 6, 2014.

  70. Erik Lewis, George Mohler, P. Jeffrey Brantingham, and Andrea L. Bertozzi, “Self-Exciting Point Process Models of Civilian Deaths in Iraq,” US Army Research Office, 2011, http://www.math.ucla.edu/~bertozzi/papers/iraq.pdf; Andrea L. Bertozzi, Laura M. Smith, Matthew S. Keegan, Todd Wittman, and George O. Mohler, “Systems and Methods for Data Fusion Mapping Estimation” (patent application), US Patent and Trademark Office, November 29, 2011, http://web.archive.org/web/20170528111833/http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi /nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN/8938115.

  71. George Mohler, “SacBee Online—PredPol Results in Dramatic Crime Reduction,” PredPol, October 16, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web /20170528112408/http://www.predpol.com/sacbee-online-predpol-results-in-dramatic-crime-reduction/.

  72. Jamiles Lartey, “Predictive Policing Practices Labeled as ‘Flawed’ by Civil Rights Coalition,” Guardian, August 31, 2016.

  73. David Robinson and Logan Koepke, Stuck in a Pattern: Early Evidence on “Predictive Policing” and Civil Rights (Washington, DC: Upturn, August 2016).

  74. Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, and Lauren Kirchner, “Machine Bias: There’s Software Used across the Country to Predict Future Criminals. And It’s Biased against Blacks,” ProPublica, May 23, 2016, https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing.

  75. Darwin Bond-Graham and Ali Winston, two tenacious investigative journalists from the Bay Area, cast serious doubts about PredPol’s claims that its predictive analytics lowered crime rates. Their exposé in the SF Weekly showed that the company’s biggest achievement was its aggressive marketing strategy: forcing police departments that signed up to use their product to promote PredPol in public. Darwin Bond-Graham and Ali Winston, “All Tomorrow’s Crimes: The Future of Policing Looks a Lot Like Good Branding,” SF Weekly, October 30, 2013.

  76. Board of Directors, PredPol, March 20, 2014, http://web.archive.org/web/20140320163346/http://www.predpol.com:80/about/board-of-directors-advisors/; David Ignatius, “The CIA as Venture Capitalist,” Washington Post, September 29, 1999.

  77. Fowler had worked in the Clinton administration and had been involved in several Democratic presidential campaigns, including that of Barack Obama. Donnie Fowler, interview with author, May 5, 2014.

  78. That’s how it decided to create its hit original show House of Cards. “In any business, the ability to see into the future is the killer app, and Netflix may be getting close with ‘House of Cards,’” reported the New York Times. “Netflix, which has 27 million subscribers in the nation and 33 million worldwide, ran the numbers. It already knew that a healthy share had streamed the work of Mr. Fincher, the director of ‘The Social Network,’ from beginning to end. And films featuring Mr. Spacey had always done well, as had the British version of ‘House of Cards.’ With those three circles of interest, Netflix was able to find a Venn diagram intersection that suggested that buying the series would be a very good bet on original programming.” David Carr, “Giving Viewers What They Want,” New York Times, February 24, 2013.

  79. Jeff Larson, James Glanz, and Andrew W. Lehren, “Spy Agencies Probe Angry Birds and Other Apps for Personal Data,” ProPublica, January 27, 2014, https://www.propublica.org/article/spy-agencies-probe-angry-birds-and-other-apps-for-personal-data.

  80. Elizabeth Dwoskin, “Pandora Thinks It Knows If You Are a Republican,” Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2014.

  81. One of the early pieces of software eBay used was developed by a law-enforcement contractor called InfoGlide. It expanded when eBay bought PayPal. Tom Fowler, “Infoglide Will Be Ebay’s Cop,” Austin Business Journal, January 7, 2000.

  82. Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Boston: Little, Brown, 2013); Jennifer Wills, “7 Ways Amazon Uses Big Data to Stalk You,” Investopedia, September 7, 2016, http://www.investopedia.com/articles /insights/090716/7-ways-amazon-uses-big-data-stalk-you-amzn.asp; Greg Bensinger, “Amazon Wants to Ship Your Package Before You Buy It,” Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2014.

  83. Hal Bernton and Susan Kelleher, “Amazon Warehouse Jobs Push Workers to Physical Limit,” Seattle Times, April 3, 2012.

  84. Dan Frommer, “Amazon Web Services Is Approaching a $10 Billion-a-Year Business,” Recode, April 28, 2016, https://www.recode.net/2016/4/28/11586526 /aws-cloud-revenue-growth.

  85. Went on a buck-hunting trip with your grandson? A Republican candidate could target you for gun-rights ads. Belong to an evangelical Bible study group? Maybe the candidate will show you something about fighting abortion instead. Facebook allowed politicians to target voters with laser precision on the basis of information they had never been able to collect before. This profiling system was so powerful that Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign hired Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes to run its Internet division, and in the end it helped Obama win the presidency. The company had such an impact on the race that pundits took to calling 2008 the “Facebook Election,” although now every election is a Facebook election. “There’s a level of precision that doesn’t exist in any other medium,” Crystal Patterson, a Facebook employee who works with government and politics customers, told the New York Times. “It’s getting the right message to the right people at the right time.” Ashley Parker, “Facebook Expands in Politics, and Campaigns Find Much to Like,” New York Times, July 29, 2015.

  86. By the end of 2016, more than half of American adults logged into Facebook every day. Robinson Meyer, “Facebook Is America’s Favorite Media Product,” The Atlantic, November 11, 2016; Alexei Oreskovic, “Facebook Now Gets Almost $20 from Each US and Canadian User, Compared to under $5 at Its IPO,” Business Insider, February 1, 2017.

  87. “Uber’s use of Greyball was recorded on video in late 2014, when Erich England, a code enforcement inspector in Portland, [Oregon,] tried to hail an Uber car downtown in a sting operation against the company. But unknown to Mr. England and other authorities, some of the digital cars they saw in the app did not represent actual vehicles. And the Uber drivers they were able to hail also quickly canceled. That was because Uber had tagged Mr. England and his colleagues—essentially Greyballing them as city officials—based on data collected from the app and in other ways. The company then served up a fake version of the app, populated with ghost cars, to evade capture.” Mike Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide,” New York Times, March 3, 2017.

  88. Antonio Regalado, “Google’s Long, Strange Life-Span Trip,” MIT Technology Review, December 15, 2016.

  89. James Vincent, “99.6 Percent of New Smartphones Run Android or iOS,” The Verge, February 16, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/16/14634656 /android-ios-market-share-blackberry-2016; James Vincent, “Android Is Now Used by 1.4 Billion People,” The Verge, September 29, 2015, https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/29/9409071/google-android-stats-users-downloads-sales.

  90. Ross Miller, “Gmail Now Has 1 Billion Monthly Active Users,” The Verge, February 1, 2016, https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10889492 /gmail-1-billion-google-alphabet.

  91. Jacob Kastr
enakes, “Google Reportedly Accounts for 25 Percent of North American Internet Traffic,” The Verge, July 22, 2013, https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/22/4545304/google-represents-quarter-web-traffic-deepfield-analysis.

  92. About 87 percent of Google revenue (or about $79.4 billion) came from advertising. Alphabet Inc., “Form 10-K for the Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2016,” https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2016_google_annual_report.pdf.

  93. Jonathan Taplin, “Is It Time to Break Up Google?” New York Times, April 22, 2017; “Google’s Revenue Worldwide from 2002 to 2016 (in Billion U.S. Dollars),” Statista, April 11, 2017, https://www.statista.com/statistics /266206/googles-annual-global-revenue/; “Google Advertising Revenue, Billions of Dollars,” Vox, accessed January 5, 2017, https://apps.voxmedia.com/at /vox-google-advertising-revenue/.

  94. Derek Thompson, “Google’s CEO: The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists,” The Atlantic, October 1, 2010.

  95. Par Po Bronson, The Nudist on the Lateshift and Other Tales of Silicon Valley (New York: Random House, 1999); Evan Ratliff, “The Whole Earth, Catalogued,” Wired, July 2007.

  96. Avi Bar-Zeev, “Notes on the Origin of Google Earth,” Reality Prime, July 24, 2006, http://www.realityprime.com/blog/2006/07/notes-on-the-origin-of-google-earth/.

  97. Jerome S. Engel, ed., Global Clusters of Innovation: Entrepreneurial Engines of Economic Growth Around the World (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elger, 2014), 57.

  98. John T. Reinert, “In-Q-Tel: The Central Intelligence Agency as Venture Capitalist,” Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business 33, no. 3 (Spring 2013).

  99. David Ignatius, “The CIA as Venture Capitalist,” Washington Post, September 29, 1999.

  100. Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008).

  101. “CIA’s Impact on Technology,” Central Intelligence Agency, published July 23, 2012, updated February 18, 2014, https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/cia-museum /experience-the-collection/text-version/stories/cias-impact-on-technology.html.