Surveillance Valley

by Yasha Levine

102. Three months after the start of the war, and just four months after investing in Keyhole, In-Q-Tel announced that the company’s EarthViewer program was already being put to active use in the Iraq War. “Immediately demonstrating the value of Keyhole’s technology to the national security community, [the NGA] used the technology to support United States troops in Iraq,” read the In-Q-Tel press release, touting the speed with which Keyhole had been adopted by the military as a measure of In-Q-Tel’s investment prowess. “In-Q-Tel Announces Strategic Investment in Keyhole,” press release, In-Q-Tel, June 25, 2003, https://www.iqt.org/in-q-tel-announces-strategic-investment-in-keyhole/.

  103. “In-Q-Tel invested in Keyhole because it offers government and commercial users a new capability to radically enhance critical decision making. Through its ability to stream very large geospatial datasets over the Internet and private networks, Keyhole has created an entirely new way to interact with earth imagery and feature data,” explained Gilman Louie, the In-Q-Tel CEO and former video game entrepreneur famous for being the first person to license Tetris from the Soviet Union and release it in the United States. Ibid.

  104. Ratliff, “Whole Earth, Catalogued.”

  105. Ibid.

  106. The transaction continues to exist in a fog of secrecy. My attempts to use a Freedom of Information Act request to force the CIA to divulge the terms of its contract with Google were met with an answer straight out of a Tom Clancy novel. The CIA coolly informed me that it “could not confirm or deny” any of the information I sought. That is: the mere existence or nonexistence of any documents relating to the agency’s involvement in the sale of Keyhole to Google is itself a secret. This is what’s known as a GLOMAR response, named after the agency’s refusal, in the mid-1970s, to confirm or deny the existence of a secret boat called the Glomar Explorer built to retrieve a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine. The CIA won’t talk about the sale, nor will Google. But there are a few things we do know for certain: in 2005, a year after Google went public, In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google stock for $2.18 million—potentially representing the shares it received as part of Google’s buyout of Keyhole.

  107. John Letzing, “Google, Seeking to Diversify, Looks to Uncle Sam,” MarketWatch, March 13, 2008, http://www.marketwatch.com/story/google-seeking-to-diversify-looks-to-government-contracts; Rob Painter’s profile, LinkedIn, accessed February 17, 2016, https://www.linkedin.com/in/ripainter.

  108. Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky, chap. 26.

  109. Some examples: Shannon Sullivan, Head of Defense and Intelligence, Google Enterprise. He graduated from the US Air Force Air University’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, which prides itself on producing “warrior-scholars.” He then served in various signals intelligence capacities in the US Air Force, including overseeing the procurement and acquisition of “command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance” technology. After the air force, he took the revolving door into the private sector—first at BEA Systems and then at Oracle. Then there’s Jim Young, an enterprise manager on the Google DoD sales team, who came out of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, which functioned as the agency’s own ARPA and was responsible for creating In-Q-Tel.

  110. In February 2007, Google held a big event at the Ritz-Carlton in McLean, about five miles away from CIA headquarters, to showcase its products and announce its entry into the field. “The search engine giant showed off its ambition yesterday to expand its business with the federal government, kicking off a two-day sales meeting that attracted nearly 200 federal contractors, engineers and uniformed military members eager to learn more about its technology offerings. Google has ramped up its sales force in the Washington area in the past year to adapt its technology products to the needs of the military, civilian agencies and the intelligence community. Already, agencies use enhanced versions of Google’s 3-D mapping product, Google Earth, to display information for the military on the ground in Iraq and to track airplanes that fight forest fires across the country.” Sara Kehaulani Goo and Alec Klein, “Google Searches for Government Work,” Washington Post, February 28, 2007.

  111. Letzing, “Google, Seeking to Diversify.”

  112. Goo and Klein, “Google Searches for Government Work.”

  113. “Spy agencies are using Google equipment as the backbone of Intellipedia, a network aimed at helping agents share intelligence. Rather than hoarding information, spies and analysts are being encouraged to post what they learn on a secure online forum where colleagues can read it and add comments,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle. “Google supplies the computer servers that support the network, as well as the search software that allows users to sift through messages and data.” Verne Kopytoff, “Google Has Lots to Do with Intelligence,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 30, 2008.

  114. Shannon Sullivan, “U.S. Army to Cut Costs, Improve Collaboration and Go Mobile with Google Apps,” Google Cloud (blog), October 22, 2013, https://cloud.googleblog.com/2013/10/us-army-to-cut-costs-improve.html.

  115. “NGA has made a significant investment in Google Earth technology through the GEOINT Visualization Services Program on SECRET and TOP SECRET government networks and throughout the world in support of the National System for Geospatial Expeditionary Architecture,” explained the NGA. “The NSG, DoD, and Intelligence Community have made additional investments to support client and application deployment and testing that use the existing Google Earth services provided by NGA.” “Geospatial Visualization Enterprise Services,” Federal Business Opportunities, August 25, 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20170528171729 /https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=482ab868878ecd0bd81d978216718820&tab=core&tabmode=list.

  116. Information on Google’s government work comes from my analysis of two government sources: (1) a list of Google contracts from 2003 through 2014 obtained from the Federal Procurement Data System, https://www.fpds.gov (A copy of the saved data set can be obtained here: https://surveillancevalley.com/content /citations/google-contracts-2003–2014-federal-procurement-data-system.csv.) and (2) Google contract data contained in the federal government spending database USAspending.gov, which shows that the company has been involved in 1,934 federal contracts from 2008 through the first half of 2017, both as a prime contractor and a subcontractor, for a total of $224 million. It is important to note that this amount represents only a part of the work Google does for the federal government; the database excludes classified contracts. USAspending.gov, https://www.usaspending.gov/Pages/AdvancedSearch.aspx?k=google.

  117. Yasha Levine, “Google Distances Itself from the Pentagon, Stays in Bed with Mercenaries and Intelligence Contractors,” Pando Daily, March 26, 2014, https://pando.com/2014/03/26/google-distances-itself-from-the-pentagon-stays-in-bed-with-mercenaries-and-intelligence-contractors/.

  118. Shorrock, Spies for Hire, chap. 1, “But whatever one’s position on outsourcing, there is little doubt that spying for hire has become a way of life in twenty-first-century America…”

  119. Phil Goldstein, “2017 Budget Boosts IT Spending to $89.9 Billion, Expands U.S. Digital Service,” FedTech, February 9, 2016.

  120. Google was perfectly suited to succeed as a government and military contractor. Google Search, which originally came out of a DARPA and federal government research program aimed at finding a better way to organize and find information in the chaos of the Internet, is second to none. Naturally, the CIA, NSA, and other federal agencies would want to use it. It was the same with Google Earth, whose development was carried out under top-secret programs by military and intelligence agencies. As the company broadened its reach, expanding into email, word processing, databases, cloud hosting, mobile platforms, browsers, navigation aids, and cloud-based laptops, military and intelligence agencies bought hardened versions of these tools as well. Indeed, G Suite offers advanced versions of all the collaborative communication tools that J. C. R. Licklider had worked hard to develop as part of his ARPA Command and Control Resear
ch program that gave birth to the ARPANET.

  121. Ellen Nakashima, “Google to Enlist NSA to Help It Ward Off Cyberattacks,” Washington Post, February 4, 2010.

  122. Shane Harris, @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex (New York: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

  123. “NOAA Announces Agency-Wide Move to Cloud-Based Unified Messaging Technology,” press release, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, June 8, 2011, http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110609_cloud technology.html.

  124. Bill Oates, “Boston Moves 76,000 City Employees, Police, Teachers and Students to the Cloud with Google Apps,” Google Cloud (blog), January 6, 2014, https://cloud.googleblog.com/2014/01/boston-moves-76000-city-employees.html.

  125. Kirsty Styles, “New York Has Just Opened a Massive Public Spying Network,” The Next Web, March 22, 2016, https://thenextweb.com/us/2016/03/22 /new-york-just-opened-massive-public-spying-network/#.tnw_1Ahf9OCG.

  126. Ron Demeter, “California Selects Pondera Solutions FDaaS as High-Tech Solution to Prevent Unemployment Insurance Fraud,” Pondera, October 15, 2014, http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/10/prweb12249931.htm.

  127. Natasha Singer, “How Google Took Over the Classroom,” New York Times, May 13, 2017.

  128. The event was called the “Geospatial Conference of the West” and took place in September 2013.

  129. Martha Neil, “Does Using Gmail Put Attorney-Client Privilege at Risk?” ABA Journal, October 8, 2014.

  130. Google has faced a number of privacy-related investigations and lawsuits over the last decade—for collecting people’s WiFi with its Street View vehicles to accusations that it violated wiretapping laws by scanning emails of non-Gmail users without consent. Many of these lawsuits and investigations have focused attention on the company’s duplicitousness and evasiveness when talking about privacy and data gathering. For example: a 2016 lawsuit by a group of University of California, Berkeley, alumni and students alleged that the company misled them when it made promises that it would not scan educational account emails, but it turned out that Google had been doing it anyway. The company later promised to stop scanning the emails for “advertising purposes,” but the wording of the promise that focused narrowly on “advertising” left the company an opening to nonetheless collect the data for profiling that was not specifically tied to showing ads. At the time of this writing, this lawsuit against Google is still in litigation (Emma Brown, “UC-Berkeley Students Sue Google, Alleging Their Emails Were Illegally Scanned,” Washington Post, February 1, 2016). In another case, in 2017, Mississippi’s attorney general believed he had no other recourse but to take Google to court for the company’s answer to basic questions about how it handled data for students who used its Google Classroom products. “Through this lawsuit, we want to know the extent of Google’s data mining and marketing of student information to third parties,” Jim Hood said. “I don’t think there could be any motivation other than greed for a company to deliberately keep secret how it collects and uses student information” (Benjamin Herold, “Mississippi Attorney General Sues Google over Student-Data Privacy,” Education Week, January 19, 2017).

  131. Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  132. Mark Ames, “Team Omidyar, World Police: eBay Puts User Data on a Silver Platter for Law Enforcement,” Pando Daily, December 14, 2013, https://pando.com/2013/12/14/team-omidar-world-police-ebay-puts-user-data-on-a-silver-platter-for-law-enforcement/.

  133. Bill Brenner, “eBay Security Offensive Leads to 3K Arrests Globally,” CSO, August 6, 2012.

  134. Frank Konkel, “The Details About the CIA’s Deal with Amazon,” The Atlantic, July 17, 2014.

  135. Even before the CIA deal, Amazon had hundreds of government clients, including military agencies. “There have been more than 600 government agencies worldwide that are using AWS. The Navy has put its non-classified information on AWS and is spending half of what it was spending before. NASA JPL uses it for the Mars Exploration Rover. There’s this rover on Mars that is taking pictures and sending them back to JPL to process and assess what else they want pictures of and where they want the rover to go. And that’s all done on AWS. The Obama campaign used AWS, and over 18 months built 200 applications. On election day they built a call center, they built an elaborate database to know where their volunteers were, know the neighborhoods where people appeared not to have voted, so they could go knock on doors and get out the vote,” Andy Jassy, head of Amazon Web Services, told All Things Digital. “Nine Questions for Andy Jassy, Head of Amazon Web Services,” All Things Digital, November 8, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20170528161820/http://allthingsd.com/20131108 /nine-questions-for-andy-jassy-head-of-amazon-web-services/comment-page-1/.

  136. Adi Robertson, “Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Partners with Boeing and Lockheed Martin to Reduce Dependence on Russian Rockets,” The Verge, September 17, 2014, https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/17/6328961/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-partners-with-united-launch-alliance-for-new-rocket.

  137. Andy Greenberg, “How a ‘Deviant’ Philosopher Built Palantir, a CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut,” Forbes, August 14, 2013.

  138. “The genre of people that Cyber Command are working to recruit are fresh out of high school and college. They’re going to grow up with Oculus on their head. We want to adapt to provide that kind of interface,” an excited DARPA program manager told Wired magazine. “You’re not in a two-dimensional view, so you can look around the data. You look to your left, look to your right, and see different subnets of information. With the Oculus you have that immersive environment. It’s like you’re swimming in the internet.” Andy Greenberg, “Darpa Turns Oculus into a Weapon for Cyberwar,” Wired, May 23, 2014.

  139. Ellen Nakashima, “With Plan X, Pentagon Seeks to Spread U.S. Military Might to Cyberspace,” Washington Post, May 30, 2012; “DARPA’s Plan X Gives Military Operators a Place to Wage Cyber Warfare,” DoD News, May 12, 2016.

  140. The satellite was launched on September 6, 2008, from Vandenberg Air Force Base, sixty miles north of Santa Barbara, California. The Lockheed Martin missile carrying it into orbit featured a Google logo (“GeoEye-1 Launch,” GeoEye Inc., September 6, 2008, https://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/sh/95c0825e-f4ff-4aa1-a006-3fee03b906bb/6762d77427700979). The Lockheed Martin missile carried a 4,300-pound private spy satellite called GeoEye-1, a three-way between Google, a satellite military contractor called GeoEye, and the NGA. GeoEye-1 was a novel venture between the Pentagon and the private sector. Half financed by the government, it was the most accurate commercial imaging satellite on the market. It would provide high-resolution satellite photos for the exclusive use of the NGA, while giving slightly lower quality versions of the same images to Google. “We’re commercializing a technology that was once only in the hands of the governments,” a GeoEye spokesman told the press. “Just like the internet, just like GPS, just like telecom [were] all invented by the government. And now we are on the front end of the spear that is commercializing this technology” (Brian X. Chen, “Google’s Super Satellite Captures First Image,” Wired, October 8, 2008).

  141. John Markoff, “Google Adds to Its Menagerie of Robots,” New York Times, December 14, 2013; Alex Hern, “Alphabet Sells Off ‘BigDog’ Robot Maker Boston Dynamics to Softbank,” Guardian, June 9, 2017.

  142. Yasha Levine, “From Russia, with Panic: Cozy Bears, Unsourced Hacks—and a Silicon Valley Shakedown,” The Baffler, March 2017, https://thebaffler.com/salvos/from-russia-with-panic-levine.

  143. Started as Google Ideas in 2010, it was rebranded as JigSaw in 2016. Eric Schmidt described its mission when announcing the name change. “Jigsaw will be investing in and building technology to expand access to information for the world’s most vulnerable populations and to defend against the world’s most challenging security threats.” Eric Schmidt, “Google Ideas Becomes Jigsaw,” @jigsaw, Medium, February 16, 2016.

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p; 144. Jared Cohen got his start in foreign policy under President George W. Bush, when he served as an adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as part of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff (Christina Larson, “State Department Innovator Goes to Google,” Foreign Policy, September 7, 2010, http://foreign policy.com/2010/09/07/state-department-innovator-goes-to-google/). Under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Cohen was charged with handling the “21st Century Statecraft” portfolio, figuring out how Silicon Valley and the Internet could be brought to bear on American foreign policy (Jesse Lichtenstein, “Condi’s Party Starter,” The New Yorker, November 5, 2007). Cohen’s first big moment in digital diplomacy took place in 2009: a sustained wave of youth protests was taking place in Tehran at the time in response to the country’s presidential elections, and Twitter was being used by protesters to organize and coordinate their activities. In the midst of the protests, Twitter announced that it planned to take the site down for scheduled maintenance. The State Department wanted to keep those lines of communication open, hoping that this was finally the mass movement that would topple the Islamic Republic of Iran. Cohen dropped Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, a note: “It appears Twitter is playing an important role at a crucial time in Iran. Could you keep it going?” Dorsey said sure, and Twitter put its scheduled maintenance on hold while protests in Iran continued. The New York Times got wind of this exchange and published a story, writing, “The episode demonstrates the extent to which the administration views social networking as a new arrow in its diplomatic quiver. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton talks regularly about the power of e-diplomacy, particularly in places where the mass media are repressed” (“Washington Taps into a Potent New Force in Diplomacy,” New York Times, June 16, 2009).

  145. Fiscal Year 2015 Congressional Budget Request (Washington, DC: Broadcasting Board of Governors, 2014), https://www.bbg.gov/wp-content/media/2014/03 /FY-2015-BBG-Congressional-Budget-Request-FINAL-21-March-2014.pdf; “Google Ideas Develops Citizen Engagement Pilot Project for Somalia,” Google Open Source (blog), June 11, 2012, https://opensource.googleblog.com/2012/06 /google-ideas-develops-citizen.html. “Google Ideas collaborated with a State Department–funded startup on the development of a VPN proxy network called uProxy that masks the identities of internet users in oppressive countries by swapping their IP addresses with users in the West,” according to the Google Transparency Project. “Google’s Support for Hillary Clinton,” Google Transparency Project, November 28, 2016, http://www.googletransparencyproject.org/articles /googles-support-hillary-clinton.