Google Watch - Google Strategy - Is Google a Government Spook?

Is Google a Government Spook?

Written By
Steve Bryant
Steve Bryant
Oct 30, 2006
2 minute read
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A former undercover CIA agent said that Google is secretly working with the spy agency.

According to Robert David Steele, who was once the second highest-ranking civilian in the U.S. Marine Corps, Google is “in bed with” and working in tandem with the CIA. Steele cites his sources within the CIA and his contacts at Google. (Steele also says the World Trade Center buildings collapsed from placed charges, so set your phasers on WTF.)

This isn’t the first time the search giant has been suspected of wrongdoing. The publishers of Alex Jones’ Terror Storm, think that Google intentionally buried their video about the Bush administration’s “Machiavellian Borg Hive drive to burn down the Middle East, usher in total and generational war, trash the Constitution here in America, and build a police state of high tech control.”

Insinuations that Google works with the government aren’t new. And of course, most claims of Google censorship involve the search engine being censored. But Google observer and book author Stephen Arnold of Arnold IT says Google’s technology could be used for everything from tracking terrorist e-mails to decoding trend data.

“Say somebody writes a document about blowing up subways, and all we know is it came through an e-mail, one of those crappy free e-mail programs,” Arnold told me earlier this year. “And they may make a reference to a subway stop near a courthouse, and they make reference to other trains that share the track. There are no explicit geocoding clues there, you see. There are only notions that are shadows of a geocode. So these algorithms that Google is working on can examine and provide a list of cities that have a subway station with multiple trains near a courthouse. You don’t need to name the city of New York or the train or the fact that since 9/11 multiple trains share that courthouse station in lower Manhattan. But these algorithms can recurse and iterate the info in that relaxed neural net to offer a list of candidate cities.”

Google watcher and columnist Paul Strassman, who has worked as a senior information manager for multiple government agencies, including the DOD, said Google’s skill at rapidly deploying prefabricated data centers around the world can and should be ported to the military.

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