
Google’s true origin partly lies in gov grants for mass surveillance (2017) - akshaybhalotia
https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/
======
cousin_it
So 1) spend many paragraphs describing the sinister idea of "birds of a
feather" tracking 2) link to a grant that mentions "query flocks", which are
similar to parameterized SQL queries and unrelated to "birds of a feather"
tracking 3) Larry and Sergey got money from that grant as students, though
their eventual result was unrelated to that, as often happens 4) conspiracy
confirmed.

> _Brin’s breakthrough research on page ranking by tracking user queries and
> linking them to the many searches conducted—essentially identifying “birds
> of a feather”_

What is this talking about? I'd love to give the author a quick quiz on
PageRank. (It's about the link structure of websites, not about queries.
Google gave amazing results based on that, long before they had high query
volume, that's how they got successful.)

The older I get, the more I realize how damaging Gell-Mann amnesia is. When
you read an article making big claims, check the part that intersects with
your specialty. If that part is lazy or dishonest, so is the rest of the
article.

~~~
Qu3tzal
Looks like the journalist is trying to convince us that Google is in fact a
company created by the CIA. It's amazing that the CIA had already predicted
that Google would beat Yahoo!, Lycos, Altavista, and Ask.com in 1995.

~~~
conistonwater
They make the CIA sound positively competent.

~~~
dr_dshiv
The belief in competent government would seem to be a logical flaw -- or at
least inconsistency -- in most conspiracy theorizing. I'm sometimes shocked by
how competent people think the government can be -- especially people with so
little faith in government.

~~~
patrec
> The belief in competent government would seem to be a logical flaw

Only to someone ideologically blinkered or completely ignorant of history.
There are countless examples of governments achieving all sorts of highly non-
straightforward things both for good and for bad. Even the CIA, which will
probably not make it onto many shortlists of history's most competent
governmental organizations had its successes.

~~~
Nasrudith
The real qualifer of signficance is depending upon perfect competence. Which
is utterly unrealistic like the "car which runs on water being covered up".
Although that example has ample other logical flaws including the fact that it
would be a great thing for logistics if possible.

------
pwdisswordfish2
The original story makes little difference. Nor is the quality of the search
engine developed of any relevance to the issue raised in this article. The
founders originally told us in their 1990's paper for TREC (text retrieval
conference) that they were making a search engine to help us avoid
advertising. Somewhere along the line, they changed their minds. A database of
users was born. This is the fundamental issue.

The act of compiling an enormous database of individual users through a
massive personal data collection effort, storing it permananently for the
purpose of providing online ad services, is useful to certain parties who have
the capability or legal authority to obtain this data from Google. The data
these parties may want can be just a covert intercept (Snowden revelations) or
subpoena away. The data has been, whether intentionally or not, collected and
stored for their use, when they need it. This is the consequence of what
Google does, vacuuming up all this personal data. The data store exists,
Google created it at their own (and our) expense, and history shows third
parties will get access to it, whether Google or its users like it or not. The
data store is a potential liability for users and an asset for Google, plus
those third parties.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" The data these parties may want can be just a covert intercept (Snowden
revelations) or subpoena away."_

Not just that, but US intelligence agencies (and those of many other
countries) would be absolutely negligent not to have infiltrated Google at the
highest levels.

------
segfaultbuserr
While it's insightful to reevaluate history in a larger background, such the
military-industrial complex, and it's also appropriate to criticize these
driving forces and its culture, but I'm not a fan of framing the entire
development of computing, the Internet and the web as a giant government
conspiracy.

There are certainly some secret projects. But the majority comes from groups
of academic and industrial researchers working on their own projects, and
grants from DARPA, the NSF, the Army or the Navy is how everyone's project is
supported. Even today, the vast majority of papers on infosec and cryptography
are still supported in the same way, and by no means that the researchers are
under total control of these agencies. Developers at the Ballistic Research
Laboratory (where /bin/ping was developed) did hacking on 4.3BSD, just like
how Berkeley researchers did hacking on 4.3BSD.

No conspiracy is needed here, the researchers take advantages of the funding
to do their projects, and the government take advantages of these results they
funded and put them into military and espionage applications. Feel free the
criticize the driving forces and their influences to the projectile of
computing R&D, but remember that it's a complex interplay between different
sectors without clear boundary, rather than a conspiracy planned by a
monolithic governmental entity (which is why it's called the military-
industrial complex, not the military-industrial conspiracy).

------
jacknews
"In the mid 1990s, the intelligence community in America began to realize that
they had an opportunity. The supercomputing community was just beginning to
migrate from university settings into the private sector, led by investments
from a place that would come to be known as Silicon Valley."

Sorry, what?

Silicon valley was already known as silicon valley in the 60s/70s because it
made ... silicon.

If it had only gained it's name in the 90's it would have been known as
'Software Valley' or maybe even 'Grandiose and excited tech salesperson
valley".

------
dvfjsdhgfv
I read the whole article so that the rest of you doesn't have to. It's almost
a non-story. The author likes to point out the fact that of the two grants
they received, they inlude only one of them in the official Google story.
Well, maybe the other one is not significant from the point of view of the
company?

Yes, the NSA and other agencies benefit from Google's activities, and Google
doesn't hide that. But the title of the article is misleading: the company
wasn't created with the intention to track people online.

------
user_agent
Finally that kind of stuff starts landing on the main page of HN.

I highly recommend a unique book: "Surveillance Valley", Yasha Levine.
Although not without cons, the book makes a very strong case for the Internet
to be planned from the very start as a surveillance vehicle of the future. The
founding grounds of some well-known companies are at lest surprising.

The first 50% of the book is about (rather unknown) history of the net
industry, 1950-1990, with focus on three letter agencies and their impact on
tech. The remaining half is about a broader picture regarding what we've found
ourselves in and how the future is going to be like.

Surveillance capitalism is just a tip of an iceberg...

If you're someone who gets that the future by necessity will be both
totalitarian and technocratic and you have a high-level technical ability /
awareness of how one can plan for that, please LEAVE A COMMENT HERE, so I can
at least take a look on your profile, read your entries on HN and follow you
in the future.

It's incredibly hard to try to be a cypherpunk today due to a lot of BS people
tend to recommend. A lot of awareness once quite common in the past has been
forgotten. If you can help in any reasonable way, please do. I still have some
time to make myself knowledgeable enough to be able to operate in that new
world, but the topic is so huge and I truly think that one day my life is
going to depend on that knowledge -- so I'm stressing too much instead of
methodically work on it.

(I'm a web dev, I get some Linux, maybe even more than a little bit, I'm to
some degree knowledgeable about both networking and security, unfortunately
more on the level of enterprise products than fundamentals. I know a little
bit about everything, which is far from thorough understanding of what's going
to be really important in the future, and I have a persistent feeling that
obscure / not well known solutions / tools are going to be a cornerstone of
making it right).

~~~
segfaultbuserr
I just checked your book recommendation, the writing is much better than this
article. Although it's still trying to create an impression that everything is
a giant government conspiracy (which I don't agree, I'd rather see it as a
complex interplay between groups with shared interests, and it's probably why
you are being downvoted), but the book is concretely based on history and
evidences with reasonable citations. Already added to my read list, thanks.

~~~
user_agent
I don't care that much about my HN rank, but truth is a very important value
in my life. The book I've recommended is a unique one (although I was able to
point to a couple of misinterpretations the author made, but nothing
critical), in a sense that it has a lot of that kind of information in one
place (and I think it might be the only one book of that kind available; I
have a dedicated book shelf on the topic, so I'm more or less aware of what's
on the market).

I'm not going to make anyone here to change his mind. People have their own
right to decide. Moreover, I think that's the only way we can reasonably
coexist with each other.

What I don't like and I won't accept is people acting-out their negative
emotions when challenged with a point of view that they don't like. We aren't
children anymore. Either something is a fact or a logical extension of
thereof, or it's a BS. I refuse to pay attention to inappropriately configured
emotional "processors" in case of some individuals. Consider that the book
offers only unpleasant kind of information. The one that makes you think that
maybe you should change your approach toward matters you've been associating
yourself with. It derails you. The one that says: ups, shit hits the fan, and
there's going to be a lot of work regarding making it right again. I'm also a
psychologist and the mentioned phenomena is well know to me. I expected
nothing else. But I'll keep my expectations regarding maturity and logical
integrity if one wants to get into a discussion with me. But I also guarantee
that the book does all of that for a good reason and not without one.

I would never recommend someone a piece of knowledge not in line with the
truth, or one that hasn't been well checked by myself. It's a matter of honor
to me. What I'd like to ask people to do is to assess an importance of a given
advice / recommendation by the actual importance of the topic itself first,
even before one is going to move to fact checking. In other words: we should
be vigilant when confronted with something of utmost importance and we should
inspect the topic in that spirit. This is how one makes proper risk assessment
BTW. For people who can't transcendent themselves when challenged with reality
- there's no hope. Would anyone be interested what position a hopeless person
takes regarding anything? I guess that's a rhetorical question.

OK, whining mode off ;) Thank you for your encouragement and you're welcome.

PS: I completely agree on your "I'd rather see it as a complex interplay
between groups with shared interests". We might be differently approaching the
conclusions / predictions, though. That's not a big issue. But I must say I'm
rather on the be prepared side and I consider the potential technocratic
future to be a very real scenario at this point. One thing is sure: the
phenomena discussed can't be ignored by a thoughtful individual. That would be
against facts.

------
Melting_Harps
Who is genuinely surprised? Most all the FAANG are the same with a similar
business model, Netflix probably being the most insipid of them all, but is
still a huge aggregator of personal information/watching habits.

~~~
nelaboras
Oh no, the government knows which movies and series from a very limited and
pre-filtered catalogue i have legally watched. Assuming Netflix has anything
to do with mass surveillance seems rather absurd; or maybe I just haven't
found the terror training section yet.

~~~
mcshay79
Mass surveillance is ubiquitous. Personal data is a goldmine. Every actor who
has the ability to spy on you is doing so and selling your data to
corporations and government agencies. Your personal interest in entertainment
on Netflix is no different from this. You are being profiled by every online
action you take. You are filmed in public and your location is being tracked.

