Cybersecurity

Google Inc. has a rap sheet longer than any Googler’s arm. See it here. It shows:

• 142 incidents in 13 countries and the EU, involving 6 continents;
• 34 official actions against Google: 1 criminal, 7 fraud, 4 theft, 11 antitrust, and 11 privacy;
• 6 near-record fines in 3 countries;
• 11 nations and the EU have Google under antitrust investigation;
• 11 official privacy sanctions in multiple countries;
• 12 different industries have sued Google for theft; and
• 20+ cyber-security lapses have surfaced in the last 2 years.

This evidence shows Google to be the worst corporate scofflaw in modern American history.

It is timely and relevant given that America’s Attorneys General are meeting in Boston June 18^th to discuss Google’s alleged aiding and abetting of criminal activity broadly. Google CEO Larry Page and General Counsel Kent Walker have been invited to the closed meeting to discuss the matter.

Google is the only company with a mission to organize the world’s public and private information, and it is also unique in having developed more ways, to monitor more people’s behavior, more intimately than any entity ever.

Please see this one page graphic summary to get a big picture view of the almost unimaginable scale and scope of the intimate private information that Google routinely records and analyzes. 

Since all other companies have much more narrow and focused businesses and missions than Google’s unbounded ambitions, they represent a fraction or slice of the whole public and private data pie that Google collects, stores, and analyzes.

Other than Google, only an Orwellian “Big Brother” state would aspire to collect and store indefinitely all private, intimate information on everyone online like Google is doing.

We know information is power.

The problem with Google becoming Big Brother Inc., is that if a state were to combine its state powers with Google’s unique information monopoly, unaccountability, and surveillance powers, it creates huge natural temptations for corruption and abuse in the absence of meaningful competition, strong checks and balances, and real public accountability.

Every system has a most vulnerable point, an Achilles heel. The overwhelming evidence below indicates that Google is America’s cybersecurity Achilles heel.

While America faces a plethora of serious cybersecurity vulnerabilities, Google’s unique scale, scope, tracking, and centralization puts Google alone at the pinnacle of America’s cybersecurity vulnerabilities, in a class all by itself.

Simply, hackers understand Google is by far the world’s single most-comprehensive source of intimate surveillance information on people and their behaviors, while also being the major entity that is least-committed culturally to protecting people’s security, privacy, and property.

Ever wonder why there are so many never ending tech policy and political battles?

Why there are so many recurring:

• Content battles over copyright and anti-piracy enforcement?
• Software battles over open source versus proprietary software and the legitimacy of software patents?

• Broadband battles over net neutrality, data caps, and spectrum allocations?

• General battles over online privacy, surveillance, cybersecurity, and hacking?

Ever wonder why so many of the same people and entities are involved in the same tech policy and political battles over and over again?

The answer is it is an ideological struggle, but not the 20^th century kind with which most people are familiar, for example like progressive vs. conservative, or republican vs. democrat. This is a new and different kind of ideological struggle between realspace and cyberspace that is unique to the 21^st century and to the Internet Age.

To understand why Google owns the single worst privacy record over the last decade of any Global 2000 corporation, listen to what Google’s leadership says about privacy-related matters in their own words. Then compare what Google Says about privacy below, with Google’s Privacy Rap Sheet – current up to June 4, 2012.  

Google's Global Privacy Counsel, Peter Fleischer, cheered Singapore in his blog for passing a "modern privacy law" as a way of denouncing the EU's "out of date" privacy law and its recent threat to enforce it against Google.

Fully exhibiting a couple of the most common Google PR traits, a lack of self-awareness and an instinct for political polarization, Mr. Fleischer effectively lectured the world that it should emulate the privacy lawmaking of a hybrid-authoritarian regime, Singapore, as he denounced and belittled the privacy lawmaking of European democracies. How Orwellian this is, to praise the politically authoritarian treatment of the Singaporean people as "modern," and to denounce the democratic concern for the individual liberties of EU citizens as "bizarre" and "out of date."

We learn about Google's culture-of-unaccountability from Google itself. Google's leaders have repeatedly indicated their hostility to accountability of most any type.

Listen to Google's own words to learn about their unique and unabashed corporate culture-of-unaccountability.

"New investors will fully share in Google's long-term economic future but will have little ability to influence its strategic decisions through their voting rights." Google's 2004 IPO letter to prospective shareholders from co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Count me as totally perplexed how the supposedly-security-minded U.S. State Department could decide to adopt security-challenged Google's Chrome browser for worldwide use by the State Department. What are they thinking?

Chrome is a consumer-grade, ad-supported, tracking-driven browser. By design Chrome has an advertising default omni-tracking capability inappropriate for Federal Government secret classified work. For the first time only last week, Google begrudgingly committed to offering a voluntary do-not-track capability for Chrome by the end of 2012 as part of the White House brokered Online Privacy Bill of Rights. However, will Google respect the State Department's right to secrecy? That's a very fair question given that…

Since Privacy International ranked Google worst in the world for Privacy in its 2007 privacy survey for its unique “comprehensive consumer surveillance & entrenched hostility to privacy,” Google has had at least 24 more public scandals/controversies over privacy/security.

(Note: The text in quotations are verbatim quotes from Google via a Politico post. The italics in [ ] is a satirical translation of what Google really is saying.)

“Google’s Rachel Whetstone, senior vice president for Communications and Public Policy issued the following statement to POLITICO regarding a WSJ report that the company has been bypassing the privacy settings of Apple's Web browser on iPhones and computers:”

“The Journal mischaracterizes what happened and why.”

• [Translation: What we really did is we hacked Apple. In an open Internet Apple has no right to use a walled garden to protect Apple users’ privacy from Google's omnipresent tracking. We hacked Apple to liberate private data that users and Apple were withholding from the world.]

“We used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled.”