THESE ARE ALL FROM A FICTIONAL ARTICLE at Radar – worth reading here are some highlights if you are in a rush….
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.
“We brokered a compromise with the DHS,” she said, reaching for the milk. “They agreed to stop fishing through our search records, and we agreed to let them see what ads got displayed for users.”
This isn’t P.I.I.”—Personally Identifying Information, the toxic smog of the information age—”It’s just metadata. So it’s only slightly evil.”
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.”
“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.”
“Now you’re a person of interest, Greg. You’re Googlestalked. Now you live your life with someone constantly looking over your shoulder. You know the mission statement, right? ‘Organize the World’s Information.’ Everything. Give it five years, we’ll know how many turds were in the bowl before you flushed. Combine that with automated suspicion of anyone who matches a statistical picture of a bad guy and you’re—”
The Stasi put everything about you in a file. Whether they meant to or not, what Google did is no different.
“We call it the Googlecleaner. It goes deep into the database and statistically normalizes you. Your searches, your Gmail histograms, your browsing patterns. All of it. Greg, I can Googleclean you. It’s the only way.”
We have reason to believe you’re in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Specifically, exceeding authorized access, and by means of such conduct having obtained information. Ten years for a first offense. Turns out that what you and your friend did to your Google records qualifies as a felony. And oh, what will come out in the trial…all the stuff you whitewashed out of your profile, for starters.”
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