Cory Doctorow's Fiction About An Evil Google 182
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."
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."
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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.
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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.
Fiction? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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?
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!!
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Couple this with the fact that people give out their email address and date of birth to anybody (see any social network), and you can have a great time with identity fraud. Weeeeeee!!!!
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Me refusing to use it really doesn't give me, or the cause anything. And hey, it's not like the government will be interested looking at all my "nekked chicks" searches much.
Once again, you may call me stupid, but that's just the way most peop
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Fact is, it's still the best search engine out there. I may be against it in theory, but from a personal perspective...it still gives me what I want.
I'm guessing you're posting from outside China then, and assume you get uncensored results. How would we know if similar firewalls were in place everywhere? There is already the default-on 'SafeSearch' option which amounts to an opt-in great firewall. If changing a safesearch flag unlocks extra content, what other flags and hidden content are there? It is a fine line between giving you what you want and manipulating what you get, and seeing their response to invasive government demands regarding China doe
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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I tend to pride myself with having a self image that's in sync with reality. Why do people need to lie (not give testimony...) to themselves? To feel good about themselves? (groan)
Honestly and bluntly, I don't care. Here's my point of view: Either stick with your spin or shut up. You have nothing to hide? Po
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Except for the email, I have all that too. Its called a phone-book. Most people won't think twice about this because its publicly available information.
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So, one third didn't value the prize you offered enough to make up bogus information, while two thirds wanted a chance at your prize so badly they gave you a throw-away email address.
Seriously, did you try to validate that information? How many of the emails were @spamgourmet.com, or the equivalent?
As others pointed out, phone n
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None. There were a few freemail addresses, though, and about 2/3 of the addresses offered were addresses from local ISPs, in sync with the name (ISPs here usually give you mailaddresses in the style of firstname.lastname@isp.com), so they're most likely genuine. Most of the freemail addresses given were already in our database somewhere, known as genuine.
Also, if you wanted to win, mailaddress and phone number had to be right, or we can't reach
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Why shouldn't google be allowed to charge the government market rates for your pri
Re:Fiction? (Score:4, Funny)
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A wolf in sheep's clothing eats more...
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How exactly do you know that? Because their marketing department told you so?
How exactly do you know that they aren't otherwise working with the government? Because the media didn't tell you they are?
Big business has always sided with the US government, because the US federal government exists primarily to serve the needs of big business. Why are you so sure that Google is somehow different?
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Isn't that rather the point of Cory's story? back up a step or two, and put your mind toward other corporate entities that have not a shred of hesitation about getting in bed with government intrusion. Count the number of them that you certainly wouldn't want to see in this line of work. Now think about how difficult it is to put together search engines and data-mining operations, even if they're not quite as effici
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Which is why they refused to do business in China. Oh wait...
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To you it may be a tired joke, to others, it's a way of life.
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Re:Fiction? (Score:5, Informative)
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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
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That's why NSLs were struck down - any legislation that allows for searches and seizures that bypasses judicial review is unconstituti
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Absolutely. After all, it is not really up to Google. If the government calls, they have to answer. And a fake answer along the lines of "sorry, our search technology is not up to this questions" does not sound very plausible, hm?
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What would happen... (Score:5, Funny)
The resulting offspring would spend all their time searching themselves for terrorists.
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Except in China!
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More than 650,000 offsprings apparently!
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&client=opera&rls=en&hs=CCy&q=google+got+in+bed+with+DHS&btnG=Search [google.com]
And about 510,000 of the offspring seem to be terrorists!!
"Google got in bed with DHS terrorists"
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&client=opera&rls=en&hs=MYd&q=google+got+in+bed+with+DHS+terrorists&btnG=Search [google.com]
70% chance for the offspring t
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I've said too much...
OH SHI~
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.
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Man, making a face: "Good God Bob, was that your stomach?" Bob: "Yeah, I got Googled all morning." Man:"Do you want to go home and lie down?" Bob:"No, I might as well just get it out the Yahoo here."
Chilling? (Score:2)
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I think you meant "realm". Freudian slip?
Nope (Score:2)
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.
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Actually, if I were the NSA/FBI/CIA/DIA/etc. I'd be VERY interested in the Slashdot community - and this means you.
This community is very technical, they know how to do things like make bombs, viruses, trojans, pirate software, steal identities, etc. They know how to do research. And they tend to be anti-government, pro-privacy. The way things are going now you're probably a suspected terrorist or "person of interest' just by being here.
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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
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In line with the "do no evil" mentality, I'm curious if Google has any kind of Order 66 for their data servers, something to eliminate / "lose" the data in the event of an attempted takeover. That would be one hell of an interesting internal document. Because an organization of this kind, of this supposed benign attitude, must possess something of the sort.
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.
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.
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They strengthened the algorithm to keep the competition out, and lowered the number of bits so that you have the ability to break an occasional key.
It was a back door based on wealth and manpower, but still a backdoor.
There's no fiction (Score:2)
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Some people might have passions they'd rather not were public knowledge, so they create an online identity they use when in an online community of like-minded souls. (As I do here, my name is not actually "1u3hr".) Google though knows all your identities, either because you told them directly to sign up for GMail, Blogger, etc, or they can deduce them from the linkages. If you didn
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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 .
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Thanks for the link
That's why... (Score:5, Funny)
How about evil Slashdot? (Score:5, Funny)
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why do they need the verb? (Score:2)
What prevents the NSA, or you or me or Microsoft or the Illuminati, from writing a web spider and cataloging until our servers can't take it anymore? Given Google's got the software / hardware / smarts to do the job right, but it seems like the govt could reach into their vast pool of talent and unlimited resources and data mine for days.
"heck of a map reduce, Brownie"
full disclosure: I didn't RTF story but this is
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You wouldn't give you information voluntarily to any of them, but Google has access to what you-
* Read : Search engine, google reader (RSS)
* See : YouTube & web/image search
* Think : Blogspot
* Say : Web & YouTube
* Connect: GMail and GTalk
* Write : Search, youtube, blogspot, GTalk, GMail
* Habits : Googe cookie with millions of adsense partners who display the ads and from whose site
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Avoidable with a sufficient level of paranoia but who is going to bother except the actual bad guys
The NSA could also be scanning all voice traffic and travel info, which combined with my cookies, browser cache and email would reveal how boring I am.
ouch
Overblown (Score:2)
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The student recently tasered was white. Jena 6 teenagers were beating a white student after he already passed out, an action that may well kill.
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.
Former Agent Says Google and CIA in Partnership (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Folks, there is no privacy anymore (Score:2)
It really does make life easier.
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It really does make life easier.
And INCREDIBLY boring.
I'll keep my embarrassing secrets, thanks.
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.
Kinda defeats itself, huh? (Score:2)
The Google representative in the story admitted that everyone had something to hide, and
Its getting fscking tired (Score:2)
1. We like Bush
2. We will do whatever we can to force you to be a Christian
2a. We will do ANYTHING to force to to do/don't do things YOU think "make" you Christian
3. We like Christian music
4. We want the whole United States to be a big megachurch
its getting to the point where the open hatred of Christians as a group is at least as accepted as the hatred of other groups in the past.
Your hatred makes you ugly.
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 :)
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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]!
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> I think I'll wait for the movie
They're already making a sequel to Transformers, you'll barely be able to tell the difference.
Re:This is fiction? (Score:4, Informative)
Cory was actually commissioned [craphound.com] to write a story on this topic.
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I personally despise cams in the way they are used in the UK and now in NY, but was trying to point out the bias of this site in that there is data that was missing from the article and some weird amounts of money thrown around. All of this should have been caught by the editors before it was published.
It's a work of fiction, it's allowed to have fictional data and fictional amounts of money thrown around. It is an interesting and insightful short story in that most fiction about the pervasiveness of these technologies puts their dissemination in government hands, not corporations that later fall under government pressures. The former is familiar, eg. Orwells 1984 whilst the latter is a relatively unexplored yet seemingly easily achievable dire vision of the future.
Then again, this is one of the few art
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Warning: Don't go over that half-hour.