I run a web crawling company named Datastreamer where we license data to social media monitoring firms.
We're very white hat... Don't even like to mess around with grey hat areas as we don't want something like the Cambridge Analytica situation coming back to bite us in the ass.
About 1.5 years ago we were contacted by a 3rd party firm which we eventually found out was a cut out for Saudi Arabia.
The deal was at least $350k per year but we never got down to final negotiation. They wanted a LOT of data and also custom support and engineering. It could have easily hit $1M which is a lot of money and would have been a significant percentage of our revenue.
About a month into conversations the questions became a bit disturbing. It was clear to me that they were interested in tracking ethic minorities and trying to track down their physical location.
... you can read between the lines in the RFP.
After finding out what happened to Khashoggi I'm VERY happy about my decision.
They were using this technology to harass him on social media and I'm sure are and were tracking other people.
This quote is interesting in a historic context (WhatsApp uses Moxie's encryption now.):
> More to the point, if you’re in Saudi Arabia (or really anywhere), it might be prudent to think about avoiding insecure communication tools like WhatsApp and Viber
Too bad there are so many people like Manafort who are happy to take on that job for a quick buck. Sure people are being hunted down but check out the ostrich jacket!
Well the depressing part for me is I have seen good friends, extremely smart people who have no sane reason to be working on shady shit, fall down the rabbit hole. And I really haven't found effective ways to do anything about it...
There are two issues at play
1. Not everyone is prepared mentally to turn down big payouts. I have seen this happening up and down the food chain. You only understand how hard this is after you have been in that position. And these day some of the cheques that get waved in your face are insane.
2. People get sucked into a certain kind of "lifestyle" that they get insecure about loosing. And will do whatever it takes to maintain that lifestyle. Once they get "trapped" they are part of this global mega machine of similar folk. Sometimes it feels like watching ants in an anthill. All on autopilot.
The thing is they know they are trapped and convincing them to give it up is not simple.
Evil is more banal than that. I have no ostrich jacket but I’d create a spying tool for an authoritarian government for the right price. For me it would be about $5-10 million.
Perhaps I'm taking the moral high ground here, but you should contact the media or human rights organizations, spill the beans to help them investigate. Anonymously if necessary.
Three years ago I got a similar call to build a user-facing knowledge graph for the region. Effectively replicating Freebase, backed by the regional telecom and the Royal Family. It was likely the same group that approached you because I was approached in precisely the same way.
i dont know how engineers sleep at night who write spyware that track and ultimately contribute to people getting tortured to death, usually political dissidents.
also ppl designing new ways to kill humans. wtf is that shit? real contribution to humanity lol
AFAICT the way Dragonfly utilizing search log to probe Great Fire Wall blacklist and skip them in results was the same way how google.cn (localized Google search in china) worked.
That was a smart but arguable approach, Google was heavily criticized to present those "passively censored" results. However, no one from Google at that time did a #walkout or resign for that. Also notably Google did not quit China for the criticism it received, but for a later government sponsored hack targeting its code and service known as Operation Aurora.
So to compare 8~10 years ago and now, it seems GOOG leadership hasn't change much on what they think they can do (aka "moral compass"); Google employee did become more active on these issues which I think is progressive.
At least according to Sergey at the time, the key issue was "opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent".
> Brin: I don't think it's a question of taking on China. In fact, I am a great admirer of both China and the Chinese government for the progress they have made. It is really opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent, and that's the key issue from our side.
>SPIEGEL: Four years ago, you allowed your service to be censored. Why have you changed your mind now?
>Brin: The hacking attacks were the straw that broke the camel's back. There were several aspects there: the attack directly on Google, which we believe was an attempt to gain access to Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. But there is also a broader pattern we then discovered of simply the surveillance of human rights activists.
I always thought there were two ways to interpret that, and I was never sure which one was correct.
One is that the hack made Google realize it was not a good, stable place to do business, and the other reasons were just a good PR side effect. The other is that the hack gave Google occasion to reevaluate, and they realized being involved in that kind of censorship didn't sit right with them.
> > Brin: I don't think it's a question of taking on China. In fact, I am a great admirer of both China and the Chinese government for the progress they have made. It is really opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent, and that's the key issue from our side.
It reads to me like: "I really oppose prostitution, but I go to prostitutes anyways"
> Google employee did become more active on these issues which I think is progressive.
Because the world is changing. The concern around privacy and censorship hasn't reached that level back in 2006 (Mainly because most westerners hasn't been effected by it, funny).
The situation today is much different now.
BUT, I don't think this will be a easy battle. Many people on Slashdot don't even believe Google will just stop trying after this.
Seems the reply is not on the thread about log search and find people. It is not what you not see is the problem. It is the question you have asked that may get you if the log is “hacked”, shared or sold ultimately to the state. Or like apple have to relocate their data centre to compile with the laws.
And if you are on the wrong side of the current political regime ....
It is not just freedom to read but the protection of you against a totalitarian regime that worry us. Especially if you think it is safe to ask to google.cn
Also privacy concern of using 265.com data seems nothing but a process issue. Aggregating search log is such a common task for any search engine in US and EU, there has to be a way to achieve that while comply all the privacy/legal concern. Dragonfly lead skipping that is unwise and unnecessary IMHO.
Exactly. It's the same tactic employed with various authoritarian measures such as the DMCA, TPP, SOPA, etc. Unpalatable to the public is a temporary condition. They overplayed their hand this time, but corporations are slaves to the inexorable demands of "shareholder value", and those who stand to profit will ratchet up the pressure, notch by notch. This will be back in a year, and then a year hence, and by the Nth exposure the public will have been sufficiently desensitized to it.
How would that work? A secret search engine? Or Google pretending to give in under pressure from employees, then turn around and tell them (and everyone else) "haha, we lied" and launching it? How would that not create far larger harm than just not giving in in the first place?
Indeed, every part of this story really happened because of Ryan's coverage. His reveal is what brought it to the attention of other Google employees, members of Congress, and human rights groups. And eventually, it appears key information he released is what also led to it's effective closure.
It's a true testament to the power of quality investigative journalism.
You mean, it really happened because a brave Google employee leaked it. If this employee had leaked the same memo to Wikileaks, or the Washington Post, or any other mechanism of widespread dissemination would have been the same.
This is like giving credit to Glenn Greenwald instead of Edward Snowden, or Reality Winner, or Chelsea Manning. The real people who take the risks end up in the back, while the reporters end up with all the prestige on the stage.
Yeah Pichai came across as sneakily dishonest in in the recent congressional hearing. He implied they weren't currently planning to enter Chinese search with a filtered search tool but then admitted they had 100 engineers working on dragonfly. Okay sleazebag so you're not currently planning to enter but you are building the systems that will allow a future plan to happen. Him saying they have no plans to enter prior to that admission indicates that he has flexible morals. Why wouldn't a sleazebag like that continue 'not planning' until the time is right for him to reap his profits?
> Scott Beaumont, Google’s leader in China and a key architect of the Dragonfly project, “did not feel that the security, privacy, and legal teams should be able to question his product decisions,”
If I was more eloquent I'd draw some analogy between Scott Beaumont's behavior and China...
Well it is clearly an authoritarian personality - don't question his decisions and just obey. Sucks to work under but isn't usually quite as bad as an authoritarian government. And really that sort of thing should be a reason to be fired instantly from a tech company - not because of employee morale, expecting people you pay to think not to think being bad management, ethics, or anything like that but just because that it is a massive security liability. If your boss really is the sort to demand to send over all employee records over email or else you are fired that makes everyone far more phishing vulnerable. Of course if it is 'disregard safety procedures both can kill you just the same'.
>And really that sort of thing should be a reason to be fired instantly from a tech company
You will find this type of person throughout all companies, including tech. It’s really unfortunate but if these people get results, their horrible behavior is not only tolerated but rewarded.
Idk probably knew they weren’t breaking any laws and also wanted to hit an aggressive deadline.
That is if any of his engineers had qualms about what they were doing they’d be checked at the door because again it’s all legal according to the law and they had to hit a deadline.
Especially because there’s nothing here that’s technically exceptional other than it runs counter to what we Americans considered ethical.
Glad the PR fallout tipped whatever cost-benefit analysis they did by severely damaging the Google brand. Crazy they didn’t consider it up front.
The fallout feels similar to them the release of the Boston Dynamics video. They don’t want to be associated with “job automating” robots.
Interesting. A friend was just telling me about how inside Apple, the privacy and security teams have special powers. They can shut things down if they put customer data at risk, or allow them conditionally based on needed changes, etc. Very different culturally.
Pretty sure that's generally the case at Google too:
> Under normal company protocol, analysis of people’s search queries is subject to tight constraints and should be reviewed by the company’s privacy staff, whose job is to safeguard user rights. But the privacy team only found out about the 265.com data access after The Intercept revealed it, and were “really pissed,” according to one Google source.
I'm sorry, but almost every peace of information about Dragonfly we have is from the intercept, which has for source people who clearly are very biased against the project. So while we can come up with dozens of rumors that shine it in a very bad light, I'm not sure how fair that is, since we're missing the other half of the story.
With enough selective "facts", I can make almost anything look bad.
No, that's not how the quote reads. It reads "If he made a decision about how the product would operate no legal, privacy, or security teams could contradict him."
So, if he says "we will deliberately expose private conversations directly to government agents", that's a product decision.
"Traditional" companies like Amazon, Apple and Oracle heavily punish employees for banding together, freely communicating and protesting like this, so they would never have the opportunity to protest controversial projects like this. I fear the main lesson corporate leaders will take from this is to lockdown on employee freedom.
I think the main lesson from Google was make sure the mainstream media agrees with your point prior to protesting it. If the media does not agree, they will ask for your head(s) and threaten to boycott your employer until it is delivered on a silver platter.
The number of people protesting is inconsequential as platters can be built to accommodate a near infinite number of heads.
It's interesting, because if The Intercept is to be believed, Beaumont has basically gone rogue, carving out his own little empire, aggressively preventing other internal teams from figuring out what he's doing, and engaging in behaviour that violates internal Google rules and policies, as well as which opening Google to significant reputational risk.
I mean, I'll be the first to admit I have made mistakes in my career, but I can't recall ever making a mistake that got my boss called in to testify before Congress, or that got my company prptested by Amnesty International, or that got hundreds of my colleagues to sign a letter of protest! Managing to do all of those at once is...well, honestly it's sort of impressive, but is raises questions.
If The Intercept is just completely wrong, I'd expect to see a categorical denial; after all it would make Google look a lot better if they can convincingly demonstrate that all of this didn't actually happen. If The Intercept is right, I'd expect to see Beaumont fired; that's what happens when people violate internal rules and cause significant damage to their employer as a result.
Since we've seen neither...I guess the logical assumption is that The Intercept was right about what Beaumont was doing, but he...wasn't rogue? That official Google policy was to subvert official Google policy, and hide things from the internal teams charged with stopping that exact thing? Like...is the CEO really having meetings with the privacy team and telling them to be extra vigilant not to let product teams misuse personal data, and then later that afternoon meeting with Beaumont and telling him to be extra careful not to let the privacy team find out that he's misusing personal data to develop a product?
Working off the main campus, on a very sensitive project that the CEO himself likely shielded from other internal parties ... is not that bizarre really. I don't see how he's 'gone rogue' either, rather, this is more like a c-level sanctioned kind of skunkworks.
In a world where the share holder care that should trigger an investigation. I don't want to own shares in a company where management randomly does shitty things completely against the guidelines they've codified.
But, we live in a world where I guess the share holders nod their heads at inappropriate times when growth is on the line.
+1, this is a lot more common than people expect... though the "best practice" I've seen from megacorps doing morally gray things is to form a front/shell company that takes all the heat. Surprised Google didn't take this route.
Then I would expect them to fire Beaumont to at least keep some control over the culture. You can't tell the shareholders "we're too big to know what the hell we're doing, we might be throwing billions of dollars on a project with absolutely no commercial value because it's some executive's pet project all the while the C-level management, the board and the shareholders would be none the wiser. We're a sure thing, by the way, invest in us!"
That's what you're saying as a CEO when you're letting rogue executives do projects that bypasses company guidelines, deceives other managers and costs boat loads in resources and PR without any sort of consequences. Or, you're totally fine with what he did because it's a silent approval if you're a manager and you let unethical behavior go unpunished. Nobody told Mr. Pichai being in charge was going to be easy.
I agree completely, but I'm not sure I see how this is a cultural issue, or related to some differences in culture within different parts of Google.
If it turns out that the trading desk at a bank has been violating internal rules and conspiring to hide their trading activity from the risk management committee, we don't say "oh, this is a cultural issue; the commodities desk just has a different culture than the risk management committee", we normally say "you're fired, security will escort you from the building now".
Clearly this is a different situation! But in what way?
Never really understood why Google running a search engine in China is controversial, it wouldn't be the first US company doing business there, nor the first to censor due to local laws (Apple censors their app store etc) and it's not like tiananmen square queries will be the bulk of their traffic.
According to the rumors, Dragonfly goes far beyond censorship, in that it has provisions to identify specific people from search queries. So it's not just that searching for "Tiananmen Square" wouldn't give any useful results, but it'd also let the Big Brother know who was inappropriately curious.
Combine this with their upcoming social credit system, and you can easily see how this is proactively helping build an authoritarian panopticon dystopia.
> but it'd also let the Big Brother know who was inappropriately curious.
This changed my opinion. I thought the controversy was unwarranted; after all it's what many people in China wants. It's good that Google doesn't follow through.
It's what all companies there are required to do and the Chinese people accept it, and a lot of them welcome the social credit system (according to reporting on the program) it's arrogant to to presume we know what's best for them.
It's controversial because Google made such a big deal of not running a search engine in China, and built their corporate brand on top of that conviction.
Moral of the story: never try to be a good guy, because you'll be held to a higher standard than anyone else and crucified while your competitors, who never claimed to be anything other than malignant stains on humanity, fly under the radar and laugh. How disappointing.
Maybe I'm lacking in morality but I don't understand how serving censored content to people that already live in a society where the content is censored is considered evil.
But not understanding something is not a valid argument against it. It says more about you than about the issue. It may seem like a trivial point to counter you on, but I do think this line of (non-) reasoning is overused or at best just very poorly worded, and should be confronted as such.
There are reasons. For example, it would be desirable for Google to avoid being complicit in human rights violations.
It seems Google has now strayed far from the "don't be evil" path. First came the illegal agreement not to hire from other tech companies, then the "say nothing to no one" employment agreement all employees have to sign and now this product the help Mr. Xi put the jack boot to every neck in China. I've probably missed a few, please fill in the blanks if you can.
To a large extent Google's business, like Enron's before it, depends largely on the trust of its users. Once it begins to wobble, head for the hills.
Less colored than your take, but;
Each time they cancel a beta, a vast amount of engineering work gets laid to waste. These engineers could be making the world a better place in other industries.
Other industries cancel products too. Something like 80% of all drugs that start being test never make it to market, for example. Other industries will have multiple draft proposals being drawn up, often at great cost, only to dismiss all except one.
Google's business depends largely on technologies and useful tools for the users and customers. The trust is somewhat involved too - users think Google won't do horrible things with their data - and Google won't (selling the data to the advertising industry is not considered horrible by Google' users). Customers think Google won't do horrible things to them too, as do shareholders, and they are obviously right. So a reasonable amount of trust involved, but it's not about China.
Well, 'horrible' is subjective.
Nobody really talks about the google agenda of
replacing all the 'old, unsafe, inferior' tech and
methodologies with their own versions and methods.
Google wants a world they build and they don't really
think anything could be better or as good.
That is horrifying to me.
Readit News
I run a web crawling company named Datastreamer where we license data to social media monitoring firms.
We're very white hat... Don't even like to mess around with grey hat areas as we don't want something like the Cambridge Analytica situation coming back to bite us in the ass.
About 1.5 years ago we were contacted by a 3rd party firm which we eventually found out was a cut out for Saudi Arabia.
The deal was at least $350k per year but we never got down to final negotiation. They wanted a LOT of data and also custom support and engineering. It could have easily hit $1M which is a lot of money and would have been a significant percentage of our revenue.
About a month into conversations the questions became a bit disturbing. It was clear to me that they were interested in tracking ethic minorities and trying to track down their physical location.
... you can read between the lines in the RFP.
After finding out what happened to Khashoggi I'm VERY happy about my decision.
They were using this technology to harass him on social media and I'm sure are and were tracking other people.
> More to the point, if you’re in Saudi Arabia (or really anywhere), it might be prudent to think about avoiding insecure communication tools like WhatsApp and Viber
There are two issues at play
1. Not everyone is prepared mentally to turn down big payouts. I have seen this happening up and down the food chain. You only understand how hard this is after you have been in that position. And these day some of the cheques that get waved in your face are insane.
2. People get sucked into a certain kind of "lifestyle" that they get insecure about loosing. And will do whatever it takes to maintain that lifestyle. Once they get "trapped" they are part of this global mega machine of similar folk. Sometimes it feels like watching ants in an anthill. All on autopilot.
The thing is they know they are trapped and convincing them to give it up is not simple.
some companies/individuals would've jumped on it.
i dont know how engineers sleep at night who write spyware that track and ultimately contribute to people getting tortured to death, usually political dissidents.
also ppl designing new ways to kill humans. wtf is that shit? real contribution to humanity lol
Dead Comment
That was a smart but arguable approach, Google was heavily criticized to present those "passively censored" results. However, no one from Google at that time did a #walkout or resign for that. Also notably Google did not quit China for the criticism it received, but for a later government sponsored hack targeting its code and service known as Operation Aurora.
So to compare 8~10 years ago and now, it seems GOOG leadership hasn't change much on what they think they can do (aka "moral compass"); Google employee did become more active on these issues which I think is progressive.
> Brin: I don't think it's a question of taking on China. In fact, I am a great admirer of both China and the Chinese government for the progress they have made. It is really opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent, and that's the key issue from our side.
>SPIEGEL: Four years ago, you allowed your service to be censored. Why have you changed your mind now?
>Brin: The hacking attacks were the straw that broke the camel's back. There were several aspects there: the attack directly on Google, which we believe was an attempt to gain access to Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. But there is also a broader pattern we then discovered of simply the surveillance of human rights activists.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/google-co-found...
One is that the hack made Google realize it was not a good, stable place to do business, and the other reasons were just a good PR side effect. The other is that the hack gave Google occasion to reevaluate, and they realized being involved in that kind of censorship didn't sit right with them.
I suppose it could also be some of both.
It reads to me like: "I really oppose prostitution, but I go to prostitutes anyways"
Because the world is changing. The concern around privacy and censorship hasn't reached that level back in 2006 (Mainly because most westerners hasn't been effected by it, funny).
The situation today is much different now.
BUT, I don't think this will be a easy battle. Many people on Slashdot don't even believe Google will just stop trying after this.
The harm is done, Google.
Because Slashdot is a good source for unbiased opinions :-)
And if you are on the wrong side of the current political regime ....
It is not just freedom to read but the protection of you against a totalitarian regime that worry us. Especially if you think it is safe to ask to google.cn
The fact that Pichai refused to say they wouldn't re-enter China shows this is probably just a pause until things die down.
Exactly. It's the same tactic employed with various authoritarian measures such as the DMCA, TPP, SOPA, etc. Unpalatable to the public is a temporary condition. They overplayed their hand this time, but corporations are slaves to the inexorable demands of "shareholder value", and those who stand to profit will ratchet up the pressure, notch by notch. This will be back in a year, and then a year hence, and by the Nth exposure the public will have been sufficiently desensitized to it.
The unfortunate thing is that the headline of this article should probably be "Google's Secret China Project Now Even More Secret."
It's a true testament to the power of quality investigative journalism.
This is like giving credit to Glenn Greenwald instead of Edward Snowden, or Reality Winner, or Chelsea Manning. The real people who take the risks end up in the back, while the reporters end up with all the prestige on the stage.
It's a pragmatic response, not Machiavellian.
Times change. Situations evolve. It'd be imprudent for G to say they are never going into China.
Xi could change his mind, he could retire, or maybe there's a gaping loophole of some kind in the firewall.
Or maybe China literally opens up the firewall and does some kind of different filtering of their own.
It'd be simply unwise to draw any long term conclusions from it all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
http://fortune.com/2017/10/08/eli-attia-lawsuit-google-racke...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-go...
If I was more eloquent I'd draw some analogy between Scott Beaumont's behavior and China...
You will find this type of person throughout all companies, including tech. It’s really unfortunate but if these people get results, their horrible behavior is not only tolerated but rewarded.
That is if any of his engineers had qualms about what they were doing they’d be checked at the door because again it’s all legal according to the law and they had to hit a deadline.
Especially because there’s nothing here that’s technically exceptional other than it runs counter to what we Americans considered ethical.
Glad the PR fallout tipped whatever cost-benefit analysis they did by severely damaging the Google brand. Crazy they didn’t consider it up front.
The fallout feels similar to them the release of the Boston Dynamics video. They don’t want to be associated with “job automating” robots.
> Under normal company protocol, analysis of people’s search queries is subject to tight constraints and should be reviewed by the company’s privacy staff, whose job is to safeguard user rights. But the privacy team only found out about the 265.com data access after The Intercept revealed it, and were “really pissed,” according to one Google source.
With enough selective "facts", I can make almost anything look bad.
Do you have specific issues with their reporting? Or do you just want to baselessly cast aspersions on what they are saying?
You could be just as likely to draw the analogy with the USA.
So, if he says "we will deliberately expose private conversations directly to government agents", that's a product decision.
You are inventing your conclusion from nothing.
The number of people protesting is inconsequential as platters can be built to accommodate a near infinite number of heads.
I mean, I'll be the first to admit I have made mistakes in my career, but I can't recall ever making a mistake that got my boss called in to testify before Congress, or that got my company prptested by Amnesty International, or that got hundreds of my colleagues to sign a letter of protest! Managing to do all of those at once is...well, honestly it's sort of impressive, but is raises questions.
If The Intercept is just completely wrong, I'd expect to see a categorical denial; after all it would make Google look a lot better if they can convincingly demonstrate that all of this didn't actually happen. If The Intercept is right, I'd expect to see Beaumont fired; that's what happens when people violate internal rules and cause significant damage to their employer as a result.
Since we've seen neither...I guess the logical assumption is that The Intercept was right about what Beaumont was doing, but he...wasn't rogue? That official Google policy was to subvert official Google policy, and hide things from the internal teams charged with stopping that exact thing? Like...is the CEO really having meetings with the privacy team and telling them to be extra vigilant not to let product teams misuse personal data, and then later that afternoon meeting with Beaumont and telling him to be extra careful not to let the privacy team find out that he's misusing personal data to develop a product?
What a bizarre situation.
But, we live in a world where I guess the share holders nod their heads at inappropriate times when growth is on the line.
That's what you're saying as a CEO when you're letting rogue executives do projects that bypasses company guidelines, deceives other managers and costs boat loads in resources and PR without any sort of consequences. Or, you're totally fine with what he did because it's a silent approval if you're a manager and you let unethical behavior go unpunished. Nobody told Mr. Pichai being in charge was going to be easy.
If it turns out that the trading desk at a bank has been violating internal rules and conspiring to hide their trading activity from the risk management committee, we don't say "oh, this is a cultural issue; the commodities desk just has a different culture than the risk management committee", we normally say "you're fired, security will escort you from the building now".
Clearly this is a different situation! But in what way?
Combine this with their upcoming social credit system, and you can easily see how this is proactively helping build an authoritarian panopticon dystopia.
This changed my opinion. I thought the controversy was unwarranted; after all it's what many people in China wants. It's good that Google doesn't follow through.
It associates every query with a phone number, not sure what it does for desktops, street address maybe.
It's all just out of proportion somehow.
https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
There are reasons. For example, it would be desirable for Google to avoid being complicit in human rights violations.
To a large extent Google's business, like Enron's before it, depends largely on the trust of its users. Once it begins to wobble, head for the hills.
Google wants a world they build and they don't really think anything could be better or as good. That is horrifying to me.
Dead Comment