According to Alex Jones' website prisonplanet.tv and this online video, Google has clandestine ties with US intelligence agencies. It's difficult to imagine, in fact, a company the size of Google not having relations with the intelligence agencies.
While I have no evidence to support my worries, it seems to me that Google is the closest that you could come to a mechanism for controlling the Internet. Let me explain:
- Every conceivable piece of information is available on the Internet, at least, information which is not highly commercially valuable
- Much of this information is of the sort that governments would prefer to have censored, consider the "Great Firewall of China", for example
- Information on the Internet only becomes visible if it turns up in search results. That is, if a webpage containing information damning to the government is buried on page 11,000,000 of your search results or is not present at all, you'll never see it.
- Google is offering a lot of things for free that their competitors can't seem to figure out how to offer for free. If data storage is really so cheap or so easily subsidized by search results or targeted advertising, how come Yahoo or MSN can't offer similar levels of free data storage as Gmail?? Just today, Google has announced a "free, public DNS service". No other for-profit company is offering free DNS services... how can Google afford to?
Given these considerations, I can imagine the government colluding with Google in the following way. One of the clandestine services allocates a fairly significant black budget to subsidize Google. Google uses these subsidy revenues to offer "free" services to lure in users of the email, DNS and other services that yield lots of personal information. In exchange, Google provides a highly secret "back door" that allows the clandestine service to basically log in with read-only rights and peruse Google's servers at will. Additionally, Google could add in some classified code that only top-level individuals at the company can see that can suppress or manipulate specific search results for political or operational goals of the clandestine agencies. The NSA or CIA could raise sufficient budget (billions $) to do something like this.
Please note that Google has access to almost every type of data which the government could wish its intelligence agencies had access to, but which they could never get their hands on due to the political problems it would cause. So, rather than trying to gather this information "in-house", ala the "Total Information Awareness" program, they just let Google do the collecting in the course of doing ordinary business. Then, they just comb through the servers for data that they are interested in, as needed. If you're NSA and you want to find Ahmed al-Qaida, you just peruse the Gmail servers for his name or that of any of his contacts or mosques he's attended, Imams with whom he is associated. You peruse Google's search records for the same data. If you get a hit, you look up the IP address from which the search or email originated or, if you're lucky, you pull up the associated Google account information if the individual happened to be logged in. Then, you continue the investigation through other channels (digitally wiretapping the ISP or serving them with a gagging NSL, etc.)
I'm not saying this is the case due to insufficient evidence but something like this surely could be the case. Never underestimate the audacity of the state in waging war against its citizenry.
While I have no evidence to support my worries, it seems to me that Google is the closest that you could come to a mechanism for controlling the Internet. Let me explain:
- Every conceivable piece of information is available on the Internet, at least, information which is not highly commercially valuable
- Much of this information is of the sort that governments would prefer to have censored, consider the "Great Firewall of China", for example
- Information on the Internet only becomes visible if it turns up in search results. That is, if a webpage containing information damning to the government is buried on page 11,000,000 of your search results or is not present at all, you'll never see it.
- Google is offering a lot of things for free that their competitors can't seem to figure out how to offer for free. If data storage is really so cheap or so easily subsidized by search results or targeted advertising, how come Yahoo or MSN can't offer similar levels of free data storage as Gmail?? Just today, Google has announced a "free, public DNS service". No other for-profit company is offering free DNS services... how can Google afford to?
Given these considerations, I can imagine the government colluding with Google in the following way. One of the clandestine services allocates a fairly significant black budget to subsidize Google. Google uses these subsidy revenues to offer "free" services to lure in users of the email, DNS and other services that yield lots of personal information. In exchange, Google provides a highly secret "back door" that allows the clandestine service to basically log in with read-only rights and peruse Google's servers at will. Additionally, Google could add in some classified code that only top-level individuals at the company can see that can suppress or manipulate specific search results for political or operational goals of the clandestine agencies. The NSA or CIA could raise sufficient budget (billions $) to do something like this.
Please note that Google has access to almost every type of data which the government could wish its intelligence agencies had access to, but which they could never get their hands on due to the political problems it would cause. So, rather than trying to gather this information "in-house", ala the "Total Information Awareness" program, they just let Google do the collecting in the course of doing ordinary business. Then, they just comb through the servers for data that they are interested in, as needed. If you're NSA and you want to find Ahmed al-Qaida, you just peruse the Gmail servers for his name or that of any of his contacts or mosques he's attended, Imams with whom he is associated. You peruse Google's search records for the same data. If you get a hit, you look up the IP address from which the search or email originated or, if you're lucky, you pull up the associated Google account information if the individual happened to be logged in. Then, you continue the investigation through other channels (digitally wiretapping the ISP or serving them with a gagging NSL, etc.)
I'm not saying this is the case due to insufficient evidence but something like this surely could be the case. Never underestimate the audacity of the state in waging war against its citizenry.
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