"Google has partnered with the United States Department of Defense to help the agency develop artificial intelligence for analyzing drone footage, a move that set off a firestorm among employees of the technology giant when they learned of Google’s involvement." — Gizmodo / March 6, 2018
Gizmodo's report on Google's work for the Pentagon has been making
headlines all day. It's also thrown the normally placid halls of
Google's Mountain View HQ into chaos. Seems that Googlers can't believe
that their awesome company would get involved in something as heinous as
helping the Pentagon increase its drone targeting capability.
But the fact that Google helps the military build more efficient
systems of surveillance and death shouldn't be surprising, especially
not to Google employees. The truth is that Google has spent the last 15
years selling souped-up versions of its information technology to
military and intelligence agencies, local police departments, and
military contractors of all size and specialization — including outfits
that sell predictive policing tech deployed in cities across America
today.
As I outline in my book Surveillance Valley,
it started in 2003 with customized Google search solutions for data
hosted by the CIA and NSA. The company's military contracting work then
began to expand in a major way after 2004, when Google cofounder Sergey
Brin pushed for buying Keyhole, a mapping startup backed by the CIA and
the NGA, a sister agency to the NSA that handles spy satellite
intelligence.
Spooks loved Keyhole because of the "video game-like" simplicity of
its virtual maps. They also appreciated the ability to layer visual
information over other intelligence. The sky was the limit. Troop
movements, weapons caches, real-time weather and ocean conditions,
intercepted emails and phone call intel, cell phone locations — whatever
intel you had with a physical location could be thrown onto a map and
visualized. Keyhole gave an intelligence analyst, a commander in the
field, or an air force pilot up in the air the kind of capability that
we now take for granted: using digital mapping services on our computers
and mobile phones to look up restaurants, cafes, museums, traffic
conditions, and subway routes. "We could do these mashups and expose
existing legacy data sources in a matter of hours, rather than weeks,
months, or years," an NGA official gushed about Keyhole — the company
that we now know as Google Earth.
Military commanders weren’t the only ones who liked Keyhole's ability to mash up data. So did Google cofounder Sergey Brin.
The purchase of Keyhole was a major milestone for Google, marking the
moment the company stopped being a purely consumer-facing Internet
company and began integrating with the US government. While Google’s
public relations team did its best to keep the company wrapped in a
false aura of geeky altruism, company executives pursued an aggressive
strategy to become the Lockheed Martin of the Internet Age. “We’re
functionally more than tripling the team each year,” a Google exec who
ran Google Federal, the company's military sales division, said in 2008.
It was true. With insiders plying their trade, Google’s expansion
into the world of military and intelligence contracting took off.
What kind of work?
