Google and Big Brother
By Daniel Miessler on June 30th, 2008: Tagged as Google | Government
This isn’t one of those “Google is the NSA” posts. Well, it kind of is.
The way the Government ends up with all our shit is not through some massive raid where we hand over all our passwords against our will. The numbers don’t add up. There’d be too many unhappy people — as in “Malotov” unhappy.
No, the way this works is a gentle but constant relinquishing of our lives. Smart people like to think we’re aware of the game and that we won’t fall for it when it starts. But that’s not true. Or, at least it’s not true for smart Google users.
Google is how the government will get my life. I like Google’s services so much that if someone were to tell me that there’s a 42% chance that the NSA either already took Google over or they are 100% to do so in the near future (in the name of “securitah!”), I’d probably still use them.
Why? Because I’m stupid. And Reader is just really good.
No, really, think about this. This isn’t conspiracy stuff. Look.
- Terrorist event happens (or doesn’t).
- NSA shows up at Google and says, “Plug us in. We live here now.”
- They also say, “If you tell anyone we’ll eat your soul.”
- So they can’t tell anyone, and things continue as normal.
- You hear rumors, but nothing’s confirmed.
But now I’m linking my iPhone’s location-based services and lifecasting and everything else all through Google (it’s a year or two in the future). One minor event and now the government sees everything it wants going through Google. Oh, and it does it to Apple’s MobileMe as well. And Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc.
The point is that the risk of this happening is very real, and people like me know it. But we’ll still use the services because we like them.
This is how they’ll get control. Convenience.
Maybe it’s not such a bad thing. At least we’ll have someone there to protect us.