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Cory Doctorow's Fiction About An Evil Google
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu Sep 20, 2007 11:23 PM
from the government-search-engines dept.
from the government-search-engines dept.
ahem writes "I saw a link on Valleywag to a story written by Cory Doctorow about what would happen if Google got in bed with the Dept. of Homeland Security. Chilling, well written, but the ending was a bit anti-climactic for my tastes."
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The ending (Score:3, Insightful)
Could it really have ended any other way?
Re:The ending (Score:5, Funny)
"If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot stamping a human face... forever."
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Cory Doctorow visits a Radio Shack (Score:4, Funny)
Cory and the rest of boingboing.net truly epitomize the worst excesses of the Blogosphere. Too bad we can't lock them all up in Second Life and feed them to the furries.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Uh-Oh.
The Great Corius is gonna get mad at you and hold a grudge for years .
You can forget ever registering an account to leave comments on the new BoingBoing 2.pi, because he knows people at both Google and the DHS.
Re:The ending (Score:5, Informative)
Could it really have ended any other way?
No, it couldn't. For those who missed the significance, the basic structure of the story was copied from 1984.
Parent
Fiction? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:2)
Re:Fiction? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google Rebuffs Government Subpoena [pbs.org] -- Google went to court many times to stop the government from getting search queries. Yahoo and MSN gave the government what it wanted almost immediately.
Think about it -- Google requires users' trust to create new services. You wouldn't use Google Mail if you knew Google would sell you up the river for nothing. Whatever new service comes next I'm sure the same thing will be true; their market is all about collecting data and interconnecting it, but you won't give them that data unless you trust them. They have every incentive in the world to fight the government on your behalf so that they can keep the trust of their users.
Parent
Re:Fiction? (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? Sure, they would lose you and me as their customer, but how about the "nothing to hide" crowd? Look around and realize that people simply don't value their privacy, at least their online privacy, to any kind of extent, or do you think our politicians would spew forth laws like the ones currently getting rushed through for warrantless online search and search pattern recognition if they thought people did care? If people cared, do you think this wouldn't be a topic in the election race?
Fact is, most people do not care about their privacy. They spew their private information like candy. Offer them a chance to win a T-Shirt and they will give you whatever private information you want, even if you tell them you'll sell it to whoever wants it. Try it, you'll be amazed. We did. Out of 3000 possible participants, a few more than 2000 entered. I now have email, phone number, home address and name of more than 2000 people who wanted to win a ticket worth approximately 20 bucks. No, they didn't get a ticket for 20 each. They all have a chance to win ONE. And I could (if I wanted, but I won't) sell that info to whoever I please, there isn't any kind of agreement that would keep me from doing so.
Now you know the value of privacy to your average person. Do you really think Google would get any kind of backlash from violating the privacy of its users?
Parent
Great commenter on TFA page!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
So, people don't value their privacy?
Look at the topmost comment on the first page of the story [radaronline.com]! Some dude called
Alberto S. Lopez
Lawndale, CA
Email: albertoslopez@gmail.com
Cell: 310.686.1259
explains how he read this story on his iPhone!!!
AhAh AHaAhHAh HAhaHAAHahAHaaa!!
Parent
It's not that simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Some time ago I was reading some anthropology books, to figure out how people work. (Since I'm naturally blind to body language or such, so not much chance to figure it out on my own.) One thing that stuck into my head was that there's a _massive_ disconnect between what people say about themselves -- even on a completely anonymous poll -- and what they actually do. What they say is an ideal self image, the self that they'd like to be, not the self that they actually are. And that ideal self has more to do with social acceptability than with anything else.
E.g.,
- a community had this shiny-happy self-image that they help each other all the time, work their fields together, help each other build a house or a barn, etc. And they all answered just that on a poll. Turns out that in practice the last time anyone actually did that was half a century ago.
- a tribal community had this self-image of being brave warriors and hunters, etc. And almost everyone defined themselves as a hunter on a poll. Turns out that in the meantime they were mainly agriculture-based, and most didn't even have a weapon to hunt or fight with. But they still thought of themselves as hunters and warriors.
- on one occasion where meat prices rose, a western community was asked if they eat more or less meat. Almost everyone said some (more polite) version of "fuck that, I'm not paying that much. I'll buy less meat until the prices come down to something sane." Well, funny thing is, they then asked the local supermarkets and actually went through the thrash to see what people throw away. Turns out the meat consumption was actually higher. (I guess some kind of weblen effect.)
Etc.
Plus, even on anonymous polls you have to deal with effects like:
- people trying to pick the answer they think would be more socially acceptable or would please the person polling them. E.g., if one choice has even vague negative conotations, or is phrased to sound that way, people will try to avoid it.
- more people will answer "yes" than "no", presumably because we've all been educated that it's not nice to refuse too much. So professional polls actually switch the question around on half the forms, to average that effect out. E.g., if the question is "should we pull out of Iraq?" half the forms will actually ask the opposite, "should we continue the war in Iraq?" Otherwise you'll have the results skewed.
Now this may sound like a case of "who the heck said anything about polls?" but bear with me. The same effects will be visible in day-to-day conversations, posts, etc. In fact, to a higher extent.
Briefly, just because some people chest-thump that they have nothing to hide, doesn't mean that they actually don't. It just means that their ideal self image is like that, plus it makes them look better to their peers. It doesn't mean that they match their own ideal, though.
And finally, note that this isn't necessarily "lying". Most people actually genuinely see themselves as better than they really are. It's really just a combination of selective confirmation (you'll remember the times you acted according to your principles, but forget those times when you did the opposite) and cognitive dissonance (rationalizing something so it fits the rest of your mental model. E.g., honest people don't lie, I'm a honest person, omg I just lied to someone for a petty personal advantage... therefore it wasn't really a lie, now that I think about it.)
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Re:Fiction? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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A wolf in sheep's clothing eats more...
Re:Fiction? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As for a legal requirement that Google provide information the US patriot act would not had much of an effect compared to the laws in effect before it was passed. The US PATRIOT act made it easier to get a NSL, by bypassing a judicial requirement, and added terrorism
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That's why NSLs were struck down - any legislation that allows for searches and seizures that bypasses judicial review is unconstituti
What would happen... (Score:5, Funny)
The resulting offspring would spend all their time searching themselves for terrorists.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Except in China!
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imagine a ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or if Exxon Mobile influenced energy policy
Or if Pfizer wrote Medicaid Drug Rules
Or if draft dodgers led the US Military
Or if a Horse Commissioner was in charge of FEMA
Oh look OJ Simpson is robbing Brittney Spears Stomach Fat I got to go
uhm.... yeah (Score:5, Funny)
Well, DHS loves performing cavity searches, and Google's the best search engine out there right now. You do the math.
Chilling? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I think you meant "realm". Freudian slip?
Google vs NSA (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Google vs NSA (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the one thing the NSA doesn't have is all of the data that Google has (or maybe they do? ok, the tinfoil hat is off now). If Google gave up their data, the NSA would have more than a bunch of search queries. Think of the queries themselves. Those might cough up a lot of insight into how people think.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I take the point of the story to be that the federal government could, in the right legal climate, use private industry to do a lot of dirty work, which is why it isn't safe for us to allow Google to acquire all of our infor
DES (Score:3, Informative)
The only realistic weakness in DES was the short key length, which the whole world knew about. To this day, triple DES is an accepted if slow cipher.
Re:DES (Score:4, Informative)
Other people have noticed that the "technical suggestions" involved the NSA sending back DES hardware with rewired S-boxes, and assumed the IBM DES crew simply used the NSA's new S-boxes without understanding what was going on. Quite the opposite: the IBM team refused to use anything they didn't understand, and thus independently discovered differential cryptanalysis by reverse-engineering the NSA's changed S-boxes.
Once they understood differential cryptanalysis, they came up with their own S-boxes.
Parent
What are you talking about? (Score:5, Interesting)
DES is not now, nor has it ever been, a weak design except in the very narrow sense of it having only a 56-bit keyspace. During the time it was created, 56 bits of keyspace was really quite good. Nobody was expecting it to remain a government standard for the next 20+ years. When the only way to attack an encryption algorithm is to exhaust its keyspace, that encryption algorithm is generally considered to be pretty well-designed. Even the small keyspace can be fixed with 3DES, a trivial extension that gives somewhere between 112 and 168 bits of keyspace, depending on just how many trillions of dollars you're assuming the attacker is spending.
Insofar as its "weaknesses", all that I can think is that you're talking about how the S-boxes were hardened against differential cryptanalysis after the IBM design team independently discovered the attack. The NSA asked IBM to keep differential cryptanalysis quiet, and IBM did: but I don't see how you go from "it's specifically hardened against differential cryptanalysis" to "it has weaknesses the NSA knows about".
Please do not fearmonger with crypto when you don't even have the facts right.
Parent
There's no fiction (Score:2)
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I just assume that they are (Score:5, Insightful)
mint.com (Score:2)
Of course, it may just be sooo handy that it's irresistible .
That's why... (Score:5, Funny)
How about evil Slashdot? (Score:5, Funny)
Scroogle.org (Score:3, Informative)
You dont have to use Google (Score:4, Informative)
As Market Share equates directly to income in the search business you deprive google of money and power by using another search engine.
It would obviously be sinful to use MSN search, but Yahoo! is merely bad taste.
"www.ask.com" is nearly as good as google and has a nice clean interface.
Plus there are some Open Source "SETI at home" type search engines under development that are worth
supporting "grub" and "Majestic-12" are two.
Although as Majestic-12 is based in the UK, and the UK government is currently under the direct control of the US executive it would be easy to give the NSA direct access to everything.
Never Mind Google.cn and "Jihoogle" (Score:3, Insightful)
How about a story about Google getting in bed with the Communist Chinese government in order to help them limit information to the people of China? Oh, wait, *that actually happened*. Remember what happened if you searched for "Tiananmen Square" from Google.cn? Hope so, because Google turned off our ability to check that, with a quickness. How about a story in which Google could monitor and report terrorist communications but chooses not to? Oh, wait... Well, there's more money to be made in trashing America to its ungrateful and spoiled citizens-by-default. And it's the only one which actually qualifies as fiction.
Flamebait Disclaimer--
So I guess that we will just claim (in fiction, of course, I have my rights) that the agency (however bungling and infuriating) charged with keeping you little pop-culture sasquatch-hugging "I Believe" teen-agers (of whatever age) safe in a real shooting war--is somehow the evil to be fought, and that Google would align itself with the U.S. government at any rate.
Karma to burn. At least I won't actually be beheaded for expressing my views in this country.
Wait ... (Score:5, Insightful)
So if Google cooperates with the Chinese government to suppress 'dangerous' speech and (probably) to identify dissidents, that's perfectly ok.
But if they cooperate with the US Department of Homeland Security -- oh no! Look out freedom! Google is now evil!
One of these countries imprisons, tortures, and kills political dissidents. One has annexed a foreign country and has been promising to annex another for fifty years. One destroys "illegal" churches and forces abortions.
But thank goodness that Google is cooperating with the "Good" one.
cameras everywhere has hurt gov more than helped i (Score:5, Interesting)
The police are finding it harder, not easier, to abuse their vast powers when so many people have cameras and can upload the footage to youtube the same day.
Even in China, you could argue that the internet is working that way also. One person can send an email and inform millions of other people what is going on before the government can act to stop it.
Don't think this should be on Slashdot. (Score:3, Interesting)
But Slashdot is about -news- for nerds...
My only problem with this is that real life is scary enough. We don't need to be thinking about what -could- happen -if- Google got even deeper into bed with DHS. I don't need those nightmares. I have enough nightmares of my own, traveling internationally for the first time in Novemeber in order to film a documentary. I'm not looking forward to explaining that the $500 Sennheiser wireless microphone is NOT a bomb trigger, or that the pipes that are in my carry-on bags are part of a homemade stabilizer and NOT a "pipe-bomb."
I'm very scared of what this country is coming to. I don't need more "what-if" conspiracy scenarios, my mind is more than capable of coming up with them on my own.
This story would undoubtedly be linked to from BoingBoing, which is also a top blog where it fits in. I think Slashdot should stick to news - that's all.
Re:This is fiction? (Score:4, Funny)
I think I'll write a fictional story about what would happen if my neighbor took a shit.. Wanna read it?
I think I'll wait for the movie :)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I think I'll write a fictional story about what would happen if my neighbor took a shit.. Wanna read it?
I think I'll wait for the movie
Movie's out, complete with a dorkass who laughs at his own reflection on the video! But hey, don't listen to me, check it out fer yourself [youtube.com]!
Re:This is fiction? (Score:4, Informative)
Cory was actually commissioned [craphound.com] to write a story on this topic.
Parent
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It really does make life easier.
And INCREDIBLY boring.
I'll keep my embarrassing secrets, thanks.