Google’s true origin partly lies in gov grants for mass surveillance (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Google’s true origin partly lies in gov grants for mass surveillance (2017)

qz.com

136 pointsakshaybhalotia28 comments

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.

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.

They make the CIA sound positively competent.

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.

Adam Curtis: Bugger, Maybe The Real State Secret Is That Spies Aren't Very Good At Their Jobs And Don't Know Very Much About The World

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9...

> 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.

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.

I keep seeing this idea of an incompetent government come up repeatedly.

What people don't understand is that it is precisely this incompetence which allows corporations to manipulate the government so well. Laws and regulations do not originate within governments. They originate from lobbyists who are working in the interest of corporations and other large financial interests.

When discussing the economy, some people will keep insisting that capitalism is the most intelligent collective system possible, yet when it comes to politics, they will make it seem like capitalism is the dumbest system in the world, utterly incompetent at implementing perverse economic agendas... So I guess the view must be that capitalism maximizes the extraction of value from every kind of activity except when those activities relate to the government?

Clearly this makes no sense. Why would capitalism's efficiency at leveraging the collective intelligence stop at politics?

I'm not sure if it's original, but the book American Gods had a good joke about this.

"How do you know the CIA didn't kill JFK?"

South Park had an episode where it was revealed that Dick Cheney and other Bush II administration officials were behind a conspiracy to promote 9/11 inside job conspiracy theories in order to convince the world they were actually competent enough to pull such a thing off.

Alternatively, they could simply have invested in every tech company at the time. Today, it's rather well known that some 3 letter agencies have an uncomfortable relationship (sometimes not even a consensual one) with large companies. It's not unthinkable to me that an organization like the CIA could have had a hand in 'supporting' businesses like Google.

On the other hand, I can totally imagine that having some support from the government itself could be a pretty significant advantage. Perhaps even enough of one to become a market leader.

With all that said, I hardly need a grand conspiracy to dislike both Google and organizations like the CIA.

I haven't read the article entirely because it very quickly started to feel like a conspiracy piece by avoiding the topic as long as possible, but I'm sure if any of the other search engines succeeded then we'd be seeing people digging up whatever dirt they could on them.

I'm sure there was some input from american surveillance in the creation of a lot of modern computer tools, but this would be indirect influence at best, and the three letter agencies gambling on already existing technology at worst.

Why? From a government agency perspective, you don't have to predict who will win, you just throw money at all of them.

This article is basically a conspiracy theory

Perhaps the detractors in this thread could comment on this:

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...

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.

"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.

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).

"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".

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.

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).

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.

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.

I disagree with the inevitability - but it does seem to be the future that we are barreling into in some countries - and of course already there in China. @segfaultbuserr is right in that a lot of this is due to blind opportunism, and an apparent inability to see it as the trap that it is. The books looks very interesting - thanks for the recommendation.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Your reaction is exactly what they expect it to be, and why ultimately I don't feel bad when these massive leaks and doxxings happen. Its hard to believe anyone to be so bellicose to privacy but I think that's the demographic FAANG wanted and they finally have it in masse.

Its hard to explain, but if you could put members of the STASI and the KGB in a room in the 50's and told them so many would not only they'd give up this information for a pittance by US Megacorps but they'd do so willingly under the guise of 'services' they'd probably have a serious discussion and revisit the whole 'Socialist' thing in exchange for this desired end.

It's really sad that this isn't even shocking to me anymore but also highlights why we need another Internet entirely.

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