Google’s Earth: how the tech giant is helping the state spy on us
Google’s
Earth: how the tech giant is helping the state spy on us
We knew that being connected had a
price – our data. But we didn’t care. Then it turned out that Google’s main
clients included the military and intelligence agencies.
Google has pioneered a whole new type of
business transaction. Instead of paying for its services with money, people pay
with their data. And the services it offers to consumers are just the lures,
used to grab people’s data and dominate their attention – attention that is
contracted out to advertisers. Google has used data to grow its empire. By
early 2018, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, had 85,050 employees, working
out of more than 70 offices in 50 countries. The company had a market
capitalisation of $727bn at the end of 2017, making it the second most valuable
public company in the world, beaten only by Apple, another Silicon Valley giant. Its profits for
the first quarter of 2018 were $9.4bn.
What does Google
know? What can it guess? Well, it seems just about everything. “One of the
things that eventually happens … is that we don’t need you to type at
all,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s former
CEO, said in a moment of candour in 2010. “Because we know where you are. We
know where you’ve been. We can more or less guess what you’re thinking about.”
He later added: “One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just
try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we
stopped doing that.”
It is a scary thought, considering
that Google is no longer a cute startup but a powerful global corporation with
its own political agenda and a mission to maximise profits for shareholders.
Imagine if Philip Morris, Goldman Sachs or a military contractor like Lockheed
Martin had this kind of access.
Not long after Brin and Page incorporated Google, they began to
see their mission in bigger terms. They weren’t just building a search engine
or a targeted advertising business. They were organising the world’s information
to make it accessible and useful for everyone. It was a vision that also
encompassed the Pentagon.
Even as Google grew to dominate
the consumer internet, a second side of the company emerged, one that rarely
got much notice: Google the government contractor. As it turns out, the same
platforms and services that Google deploys to monitor people’s lives and grab
their data could be put to use running huge swaths of the US government,
including the military, spy agencies, police departments and schools. The key
to this transformation was a small startup now known as Google Earth.
In 2003, a San Francisco company
called Keyhole Incorporated was on the ropes. With a name recalling the CIA’s
secret 1960s “Keyhole” spy satellite programme, the company had been launched
two years earlier as a spinoff from a videogame outfit. Its CEO, John Hanke,
told journalists that the inspiration for his company came from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a
cult science-fiction novel in which the hero taps into a programme created by
the “Central Intelligence Corporation” called Planet Earth, a virtual reality
construct designed, as the book describes, to “keep track of every bit of
spatial information that it owns – all the maps, weather data, architectural
plans, and satellite surveillance stuff”.
Keyhole had its roots in videogame
technology, but deployed it in the real world, creating a programme that
stitched satellite images and aerial photographs into seamless 3D computer
models of the Earth that could be explored as if they were in a virtual reality
game world. It was a groundbreaking product that allowed anyone with an
internet connection to virtually fly over anywhere in the world. The only
problem was Keyhole’s timing: it was a bit off. It launched just as the dotcom
bubble blew up in Silicon Valley’s face. Funding dried up, and Keyhole found
itself struggling to survive. Luckily, the company was saved just in time by
the very entity that inspired it: the CIA.
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In 1999, at the peak of the dot-com boom, the CIA had launched
In-Q-Tel, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund whose mission was to invest in
start-ups that aligned with the agency’s intelligence needs. Keyhole seemed a
perfect fit.
The CIA poured an unknown amount
of money into Keyhole. The investment was finalised in early 2003, and it was
made in partnership with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a major
intelligence organisation with 14,500 employees and a $5bn budget, whose job
was to deliver satellite-based intelligence to the CIA and the Pentagon. Known
as the NGA, the spy agency’s motto was: “Know the Earth … Show the Way …
Understand the World.”
The CIA and NGA were not just
investors; they were also clients, and they involved themselves in customising
Keyhole’s virtual map product to meet their own needs. Months after In-Q-Tel’s
investment, Keyhole software was already integrated into operational service
and deployed to support US troops during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the
shock-and-awe campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Intelligence officials were
impressed with the “videogame-like” simplicity of its virtual maps. They also
appreciated the ability to layer visual information over other intelligence.
The possibilities were limited only by what contextual data could be fed and
grafted on to a map: troop movements, weapons caches, real-time weather and
ocean conditions, intercepted emails and phone call intel, and mobile phone
locations.
Keyhole gave intelligence
analysts, field commanders, air force pilots and others the kind of
capabilities we take for granted today when we use digital mapping services on
our computers and smartphones to look up restaurants, cafes, museums, traffic
or subway routes.
Military commanders weren’t the
only ones who liked Keyhole. So did Sergey Brin. He liked it so much that he
insisted on personally demoing the app for Google executives. According to an
account published in Wired, he barged in on a
company meeting, punched in the address of every person present, and used the
programme to virtually fly over their homes.
In 2004, the same year Google went
public, Brin and Page bought the company outright, CIA investors and all. They
then absorbed the company into Google’s growing internet applications platform.
Keyhole was reborn as Google Earth.
The purchase of Keyhole was a milestone for Google, marking the
moment the company stopped being a purely consumer-facing internet company and
began integrating with the US government. When Google bought Keyhole, it also
acquired an In-Q-Tel executive named Rob Painter, who came with deep
connections to the world of intelligence and military contracting, including US
Special Operations, the CIA and major defence firms, among them Raytheon,
Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. At Google, Painter was planted in a new
dedicated sales and lobbying division called Google Federal, located in Reston,
Virginia, a short drive from the CIA’s headquarters in Langley. His job was to
help Google grab a slice of the lucrative military-intelligence contracting
market. Or, as Painter described in contractor-bureaucratese, “evangelising and
implementing Google Enterprise solutions for a host of users across the
intelligence and defence communities”.
Google had closed a few previous
deals with intelligence agencies. In 2003, it scored a $2.1m (£1.7m) contract
to outfit the National Security Agency (NSA) with a customised search solution
that could scan and recognise millions of documents in 24 languages, including
on-call tech support in case anything went wrong. In 2004, Google landed a
search contract with the CIA. The value of the deal isn’t known, but the agency
did ask Google’s permission to customise the CIA’s internal Google search page
by placing the CIA’s seal in one of the Google logo’s Os. “I told our sales rep
to give them the OK if they promised not to tell anyone. I didn’t want it
spooking privacy advocates,” wrote Douglas Edwards, Google’s first director of
marketing and brand management, in his 2011 book I’m Feeling Lucky: The
Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. Deals such as these picked up pace
and increased in scope after Google’s acquisition of Keyhole.
In 2006, Google Federal went on a
hiring spree, snapping up managers and salespeople from the army, air force,
CIA, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. It beefed up its lobbying muscle and
assembled a team of Democratic and Republican operatives.
Even as it expanded into a
transnational multi-billion-dollar corporation, Google had managed to retain
its geekily innocent “don’t be evil” image. So while Google’s PR team did its
best to keep the company wrapped in a false aura of altruism, company
executives pursued an aggressive strategy to become the Lockheed Martin of the
internet age. “We’re functionally more than tripling the team each year,”
Painter said in 2008. It was true. With insiders plying their trade, Google’s
expansion into the world of military and intelligence contracting took off.
In 2007, it partnered with
Lockheed Martin to design a visual intelligence system for the NGA that
displayed US military bases in Iraq and marked out
Sunni and Shia neighbourhoods in Baghdad – important information for a region
that had experienced a bloody sectarian insurgency and ethnic cleansing
campaign between the two groups. In 2008, Google won a contract to run the
servers and search technology that powered the CIA’s Intellipedia, an
intelligence database modelled after Wikipedia that was collaboratively edited
by the NSA, CIA, FBI and other federal agencies. Not long after that, Google
contracted with the US army to equip 50,000 soldiers with a customised suite of
mobile Google services.
In 2010, as a sign of just how
deeply Google had integrated with US intelligence agencies, it won an
exclusive, no-bid $27m contract to provide the NGA with “geospatial
visualisation services”, effectively making the company the “eyes” of America’s
defence and intelligence apparatus. Competitors criticised the NGA for not
opening the contract to the customary bidding process, but the agency defended
its decision, saying it had no choice: it had spent years working with Google
on secret and top-secret programmes to build Google Earth technology according
to its needs, and could not go with any other company.
Google has been tight-lipped about
the details and scope of its contracting business. It does not list this
revenue in a separate column in quarterly earnings reports to investors, nor
does it provide the sum to reporters. But an analysis of the federal
contracting data-base maintained by the US government, combined with
information gleaned from Freedom of Information Act requests and published
reports on the company’s military work, reveals that Google has been doing
brisk business selling Google Search, Google Earth and Google Enterprise (now
known as G Suite) products to just about every major military and intelligence
agency, including the state department. Sometimes Google sells directly to the
government, but it also works with established contractors like Lockheed Martin
and Saic (Science Applications International Corporation), a California-based
intelligence mega-contractor which has so many former NSA employees working for
it that it is known in the business as “NSA West”.
Google’s entry into this market
makes sense. By the time Google Federal went online in 2006, the Pentagon was
spending the bulk of its budget on private contractors. That year, of the $60bn
US intelligence budget, 70%, or $42bn, went to corporations. That means that,
although the government pays the bill, the actual work is done by Lockheed
Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Bechtel, Booz Allen Hamilton and other powerful
contractors. And this isn’t just in the defence sector. By 2017, the federal
government was spending $90bn a year on information technology. It’s a huge
market – one in which Google seeks to maintain a strong presence. And its
success has been all but guaranteed. Its products are the best in the business.
Here’s a sign of how vital Google
has become to the US government: in 2010, following a disastrous intrusion into
its system by what the company believes was a group of Chinese government
hackers, Google entered into a secretive agreement with the NSA. “According to
officials who were privy to the details of Google’s arrangements with the NSA,
the company agreed to provide information about traffic on its networks in
exchange for intelligence from the NSA about what it knew of foreign hackers,”
wrote defence reporter Shane Harris in @War, a history of warfare. “It was a
quid pro quo, information for information. And from the NSA’s perspective,
information in exchange for protection.”
This made perfect sense. Google
servers supplied critical services to the Pentagon, the CIA and the state
department, just to name a few. It was part of the military family and
essential to American society. It needed to be protected, too.
Google didn’t just work with intelligence and military agencies,
but also sought to penetrate every level of society, including civilian federal
agencies, cities, states, local police departments, emergency responders,
hospitals, public schools and all sorts of companies and nonprofits. In 2011,
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that
researches weather and the environment, switched over to Google. In 2014, the
city of Boston deployed Google to run the information infrastructure for its
76,000 employees – from police officers to teachers – and even migrated its old
emails to the Google cloud. The Forest Service and the Federal Highway
Administration use Google Earth and Gmail.
In 2016, New York City tapped
Google to install and run free wifi stations across the city. California,
Nevada and Iowa, meanwhile, depend on Google for cloud computing platforms that
predict and catch welfare fraud. Meanwhile, Google mediates the education
of more than half of
America’s public school students.
“What we really do is allow you to aggregate, collaborate and
enable,” explained Scott Ciabattari, a Google Federal sales rep, during a 2013
government contracting conference in Wyoming. He was pitching to a room full of
civil servants, telling them that Google was all about getting them –
intelligence analysts, commanders, government managers and police officers –
access to the right information at the right time. He ran through a few
examples: tracking flu outbreaks, monitoring floods and wildfires, safely
serving criminal warrants, integrating surveillance cameras and face
recognition systems, and even helping police officers respond to school
shootings.
“We are getting this request more
and more: ‘Can you help us publish all the floor plans for our school district?
If there is a shooting disaster, God forbid, we want to know where things are.’
Having that ability on a smartphone, being able to see that information quickly
at the right time saves lives,” he said. A few months after this presentation,
Ciabattari met with officials from Oakland, California to discuss how Google
could help the city build its police surveillance centre.
This mixing of military, police,
government, public education, business and consumer-facing systems – all
funnelled through Google – continues to raise alarms. Lawyers fret over whether
Gmail violates attorney-client privilege. Parents wonder what Google does with
the information it collects on their kids at school. What does Google do with
the data that flows through its systems? 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.
Of course, this concern isn’t
restricted to Google. 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. On a higher level, there is no real difference
between Google’s relationship with the US government and that of these other
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, a
private spy satellite called GeoEye-1 was launched in partnership with the
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; Google’s logo was on the launch rocket
and the company secured exclusive use of the satellite’s data for use in its
online mapping. Google also bought Boston Dynamics, a 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. It has invested $100m in
CrowdStrike, a major military and intelligence cyber defence contractor that,
among other things, led the investigation into the alleged 2016 Russian
government hacks of the Democratic National Committee. And it also runs
Jigsaw, a hybrid thinktank/technology incubator aimed at leveraging internet
technology to solve thorny foreign policy problems – everything from terrorism
to censorship and cyberwarfare.
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