// posted by Greg // 03.31.2008 at 3:27 pm //

Spying 2.0 - Wikis and Google Aid CIA Espionage Efforts

Yesterday I wrote that we need to critically evaluate the ability of the internet to enhance democracy. I suggested that for three reasons we need reconsider the internet as a uniformly democratic technology:

1. Ease of surveillance
2. The net’s culturally homogenizing effects
3. The net’s military origins.
Today the San Fransisco Chronicle has published an article highlighting a relatively small collaboration between Google and the United States intelligence community.

Before I begin it is important to distance myself from the conspiracy theories which suggest a broad, secretive, and sinister collaboration between Google and the U.S. federal government. I find these theories to be over-broad, unsupported and frankly ridiculous. But the Google contract with the CIA, NSA, FBI and others does bring up important topics which do call into question principles of democracy and the internet. According to the SF Chronical article, Google has sold several federal intelligence agencies servers and search tools for storing and searching intelligence documents. They have further helped to create a device called intellipedia which functions as a type of Wikipedia for intelligence agents.

Such powerful tools may be extremely useful to our intelligence agencies. Considering the lack of inter-agency information that obscured the 9/11 plot we can imagine that such a collection may be extremal helpful for international security. But as a free and open society we must ask ourselves what potential dangers exist for democracy if such collaborative efforts deepen? Consider the recent illegal tapping of US communications, i.e. the telecom scandal. Do those illegally-gained conversations, web searches, uploads, downloads etc. find their way to intellipedia? Is there any kind of oversight for such a database? The SFC article reports of the Google sales team that “even a lot of people in the federal government don’t know that we exist.” What if your name is John Smith- are you and every other John Smith documented as the same person, and if so who corrects these errors? Is there any jurisprudence for this kind of data collection and its use? Why does the use of Google’s technology have to be bought by government agencies in secret?

All of these unanswered questions tie together the internet, surveillance, and the government. It seems to me that the web has been uncritically welcomed as a democratizing force in the world. Here is just one concrete example of how citizens must question and contextualize the internet to insure that it is a democratizing force.

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