Scroogled: or what Google knows may hurt you.

[MattSh]

Scroogled: or what Google knows may hurt you.


Remember, the following is a work of fiction...or IS it? The second link may make you rethink.....

<snip>

He should have seen it coming, of course. The U.S. government had lavished $15 billion on a program to fingerprint and photograph visitors at the border, and hadn't caught a single terrorist. Clearly, the public sector was not equipped to Do Search Right.

The DHS officer had bags under his eyes and squinted at his screen, prodding at his keyboard with sausage fingers. No wonder it was taking four hours to get out of the god damned airport.

"Evening," Greg said, handing the man his sweaty passport. The officer grunted and swiped it, then stared at his screen, tapping. A lot. He had a little bit of dried food at the corner of his mouth and his tongue crept out and licked at it.

"Want to tell me about June 1998?"

Greg looked up from his Departures. "I'm sorry?"

"You posted a message to alt.burningman on June 17, 1998, about your plan to attend a festival. You asked, 'Are shrooms really such a bad idea?'"

<snip>

The interrogator in the secondary screening room was an older man, so skinny he looked like he'd been carved out of wood. His questions went a lot deeper than shrooms.

"Tell me about your hobbies. Are you into model rocketry?"

"What?"

"Model rocketry."

"No," Greg said, "No, I'm not." He sensed where this was going.

The man made a note, did some clicking. "You see, I ask because I see a heavy spike in ads for rocketry supplies showing up alongside your search results and Google mail."

Greg felt a spasm in his guts. "You're looking at my searches and e-mail?" He hadn't touched a keyboard in a month, but he knew what he put into that search bar was likely more revealing than what he told his shrink.

"Sir, calm down, please. No, I'm not looking at your searches," the man said in a mocking whine. "That would be unconstitutional. We see only the ads that show up when you read your mail and do your searching. I have a brochure explaining it. I'll give it to you when we're through here."

"But the ads don't mean anything," Greg sputtered. "I get ads for Ann Coulter ring tones whenever I get e-mail from my friend in Coulter, Iowa!"

The man nodded. "I understand, sir. And that's just why I'm here talking to you. Why do you suppose model rocket ads show up so frequently?"

Greg racked his brain. "Okay, just do this. Search for 'coffee fanatics.'" He'd been very active in the group, helping them build out the site for their coffee-of-the-month subscription service. The blend they were going to launch with was called Jet Fuel. "Jet Fuel" and "Launch"—that would probably make Google barf up some model rocket ads.

They were in the home stretch when the carved man found the Halloween photos. They were buried three screens deep in the search results for "Greg Lupinski."

"It was a Gulf War–themed party," he said. "In the Castro."

"And you're dressed as...?"

"A suicide bomber," he replied sheepishly. Just saying the words made him wince.

"Come with me, Mr. Lupinski," the man said.

<snip>

"Nothing so simple. Here's the deal: Airport DHS scrutiny is a gating function. It lets the spooks narrow down their search criteria. Once you get pulled aside for secondary at the border, you become a 'person of interest'—and they never, ever let up. They'll scan webcams for your face and gait. Read your mail. Monitor your searches."

"I thought you said the courts wouldn't let them..."

"The courts won't let them indiscriminately Google you. But after you're in the system, it becomes a selective search. All legal. And once they start Googling you, they always find something. All your data is fed into a big hopper that checks for 'suspicious patterns,' using deviation from statistical norms to nail you."

Greg felt like he was going to throw up. "How the hell did this happen? Google was a good place. 'Don't be evil,' right?" That was the corporate motto, and for Greg, it had been a huge part of why he'd taken his computer science Ph.D. from Stanford directly to Mountain View.

Maya replied with a hard-edged laugh. "Don't be evil? Come on, Greg. Our lobbying group is that same bunch of crypto-fascists that tried to Swift-Boat Kerry. We popped our evil cherry a long time ago."

more here.....http://www.radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/2007/09/google_fiction_evil_dangerous_surveillance_control_1.php


Or, is it REALLY fiction?

There is nothing more perilous at a border crossing than a Google-happy border guard. Over the past year, two Canadians reported they were denied entry into the U.S. after a border guard Googled their names and decided, based on the search results, that they were undesirables.

Substances and abuse

Andrew Feldmar, a B.C. psychotherapist, was prevented from crossing to the U.S. when a border guard Googled his name and hit upon an article he’d written that described an Aldous-Huxley-like experiment involving hallucinogens he took 40 years ago.

“It was humiliating,” says Feldmar, who has a clean criminal record. He says he has visited the U.S. hundreds of times, and two of his children live there. Last summer, he was stopped randomly at the border, and the madness began when an agent Googled his name. “He turned the monitor toward me and asked if I wrote that article,” he says. “I just wanted to get on my way, I told him I wrote it. He said I used an illegal substance and therefore I was an undesirable.” The guard took Feldmar’s fingerprints and sent him back from the border.

from here.....http://www.montrealmirror.com/2007/070507/news1.html

[Poll_Blind]

1. Excellent post!!! Thank you! K&R! n/t

PB

[backscatter712]

2. This is why I don't fly.

I've already posted enough stuff just here that if a DHS goon googled my name, they'd send me to Gitmo.

It's totally out of control now.

[MelissaB]

3. Oh, God! I'm doomed!

Between helping in the ER forum and "other hobbies"...I'm screwen!

[EVDebs]

4. Ever read Acid Dreams by Martin A Lee ? The CIA's acid party

should make everybody question their sanity. Capt'n Trips indeed !

[leveymg]

5. Half the TSS was tripping in the mid-1960s. Who do you think employed Tim Leary?

Dr. Tim even contributed a psychological profile system, called "The Leary", that was used by the Agency for several decades.

They had some wild-assed cocktail parties for a while.



BTW: Who the hell do you think might first realize GOOGLE's potential for monitoring the political pulse of the world? Just look at the topics people are searching -- that pretty much maps it out.

[EVDebs]

6. Qien es TSS ? Toxic Shock Syndrome ?

http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/TSS

If google gets its info as scrambled and hacked as ChoicePoint we're all in for a ID fiasco.

[leveymg]

8. Technical Services Staff - the "Q"-types who came up with nerve toxins and exploding cigars

The most prominent among them was this merry prankster, Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, who was fascinated with hallucinogens and truth serums. Wike:

Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 – March 7, 1999) was an American military psychiatrist and chemist probably best-known for his involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency's mind control program MKULTRA.

Sidney was born in the Bronx under the name Joseph Schneider . He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. A stutterer from childhood, Gottlieb got a master's degree in speech therapy. He also had a club foot, but this did not stop him from practicing folk dancing, a lifelong passion.

In 1951, Sidney Gottlieb joined the Central Intelligence Agency. As a poison expert, he headed the chemical division of the Technical Services Staff (TSS). Sidney became known as the "Black Sorcerer" and the "Dirty Trickster". He supervised preparations of lethal poisons and experiments in mind control.

Contents
1 MKULTRA
2 Sources
3 References
4 See also
5 External links



MKULTRA
In April 1953 Sidney Gottlieb headed the secret Project MKULTRA which was activated on the order of CIA director Allen Dulles. Gottlieb was known for administration of LSD and other psycho-active drugs to unwitting subjects and for financing psychiatric research and development of "techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything." He sponsored physicians such as Ewen Cameron and Harris Isbell in controversial psychiatric research that used unwitting humans as guinea pigs. Many people suffered serious adverse affects consequent of research financed by Gottlieb and the Rockefeller Foundation.


Dr. Sidney Gottlieb approved of an MKULTRA subproject on LSD in this June 9, 1953 letter.In March 1960, under The Cuban Project, a CIA plan approved by President Eisenhower and under the direction of CIA Directorate for Plans, Richard Bissell, Gottlieb came up with ideas to spray Fidel Castro's television studio with LSD and to saturate Castro's shoes with thallium so that the hair of his beard would fall out. Gottlieb also hatched schemes to assassinate Castro, including the use of a poisoned cigar, a poisoned wetsuit, an exploding conch shell, and a poisonous fountain pen.

He also tried to have Iraq's General Abdul Karim Qassim's handkerchief contaminated with botulinum. Less known was an operation within the CIA's Phoenix Program in Vietnam where a team of CIA psychologists performed mind control experiments on NLF suspects being detained at Bien Hoa Prison outside of Saigon.

Gottlieb is said to have played a role in funding investigation into paranormal phenomena, including remote viewing.

[leveymg]

9. Back to GOOGLE: interesting column in Government Computing News

One can draw any number of conclusions:

http://www.gcn.com/blogs/tech/40864.html

05/26/06 -- 12:46 PM
By Brad Grimes and Joab Jackson

NSA and Google: Separated at birth?

Here at Tech Blog Central, we’ve been following the media outcry over the National Security Agency and the supposed surreptitious perusing of telephone logs. USA Today recently reported on the NSA’s “massive government database containing the phone records of tens of millions of Americans.” Also be sure to check out GCN senior writer Patience Wait’s analysis on what the challenges would be in parsing that much data. Various advocacy groups have charged that the agency is using powerful computers to analyze these telephone call logs in an overbroad attempt to ferret out individuals who may involved in suspicious activities (though whether NSA supposedly copied the data or just somehow has access to it is still unclear). This sort of alleged “fishing expedition,” as the Electronic Frontier Foundation put it, grievously tramples on the rights of U.S. citizens, privacy advocates charge.

One offhand observation: This business of data fishing is also the mainstay of another entity, one we all know and love, or least use quite a bit—-namely Google Inc., of Mountain View, Calif. Like NSA, this company has keeps tabs on vast realms of electronic communication—though in Google’s case, it is the World Wide Web under scrutiny, as well as the searching habits of the company’s own users. And like NSA, it looks to build intelligence from discrete user actions, albeit an intelligence that reveals more about purchasing preferences than terrorist proclivities. Nonetheless, both organizations share the single task of determining an individual's intentions from a mountain of tangential data.

Since it is a slow day for tech news, we decided to do a bit of compare-and-contrast between the two organizations. Using Google, here is what we found:

TYPES OF EMPLOYEES: NSA: “Mathematicians, linguists, engineers, physicists, computer scientists, engineers and other specialists and staff,” according to USA Today. Google: Mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists. For linguistic duties, the company is leaning towards translation technologies .

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: NSA: 30,000. Google: 5,680.

NUMBER OF COMPUTERS: NSA: Undetermined, though someone contributing to Wikipedia claims that NSA is the world’s largest holder of supercomputers. Google: 100,000 Linux-based servers, Wikipedia again ( estimate.)


WORK: NSA: Although agency has a number of missions, one of its chief duties is “signals intelligence,” or the act of analyzing intercepted foreign electronic communications in order to pinpoint potential threats to the country. Google: Google generates revenue by characterizing its users' behaviors and then matching, as closely as possible, the interests of users with the products offered by advertisers, according to the company’s latest annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

BUDGET: NSA:$7.5 billion (as estimated by GlobalSecurity.org). Google:$4.7 billion (estimated from 2005revenue and sales ).

AUTHORITY: NSA: The October 1952 revision of the National Security Council Intelligence Directive No. 9, championed by the President Harry S. Truman, which called for the creation of a central agency that would conduct foreign communications intelligence activities. Google: The terms of service users agree to when using Google or signing up to a Google service, such as Gmail. “Google collects personal information when you register for a Google service or otherwise voluntarily provide such information,” according to Google’s privacy policy. The company may combine multiple sources of information to build up a behavioral profile that may be used to better customize services and advertisements.

COLOR OF HOME PAGE: Google: White . NSA: Black . (Note: Thematic Web site color is more of a function of marketing than any real indicator of intent.)

HEADQUARTERS: NSA: Fort Mead, Md. Google: Mountain View, Calif. (Note: Google cofounder Sergey Brin grew up in Greenbelt, Md., a few miles south of Fort Mead. His father, a mathematician teaches at the University of Maryland).

SNIP

[EVDebs]

12. NSA Key to Windows 1999 article

"Microsoft operating systems have a backdoor entrance for the National Security Agency, a cryptography expert said Friday, but the software giant denied the report and other experts differed on it."

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/03/windows.nsa.02/

I've read James Bamford's books and remember somewhere at FromTheWilderness's website that the govt intentionally uses Apple OS and hardware to keep out the hackers and bad guys.

This is only logical but the vacuum cleaner approach to data collection is inherently going to sweep up the innocent and also create cases of mistaken id. It goes with the territory so to speak. This WILL happen, the question is will it happen with or without Constitutional safeguards.

[NashVegas]

7. Study Privacy / Security Issues, Use Common Sense

All usenet articles that don't contain x no-archive headers get saved; this was standard practice before Google ever existed. As it is, Google has dropped at least some of the stuff from the 1990s on their archives. Things I used to be able to find are gone.


Worried about email security? Try using a paid ISP and use encryption. Don't use free email accounts for anything but web form registrations.

[wuushew]

10. I think that Canadian guy was on Corbert

well worth it if you can find the clip

[sce56]

11. The whole thing stinks here in der fatherland! Heil Bush!

I know they put a lot of people on the watch list due to their political views! I even know of a person who sits on their state bar's board of governors who is on the watch list and get special treatment every time they fly and this person flys a lot! Thnk you Nancy Pelosi for taking off the table

[Pawel K]

13. There is no way they could know what kind of ads google fetches you

Google ads are not based on what pages you personally visit, they are based on the page you are currently on. In addition this information is not stored anywhere but your own personal computer in the form of a cookie. People get way too paranoid about this stuff.

If you are upset about stuff you post showing up in google search results dont post using your real name, should be simple enough to do.