My conspiracy theory is that somebody at the CIA (well the NSA really) back in the mid 1990’s said “what are we doing with the internet???”. The NSA runs the computers the networks and the antenna dishes for spying on the Russians during the cold war and everybody else ever since.  At the time they ran things like Echelon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_%28signals_intelligence%29.  They are smart and they a run a billions of dollars of budget (nobody knows for sure but probably more than the CIA and then there is a vast overlap with military intelligence see e.g. http://www.fas.org/irp/commission/budget.htm which might be a decoy as it is given by google :-)).  Anyway, at the time the time the search engine of choice was AltaVista. But it was dying because at the time it was well known that nobody wants to pay for search. Enter Page and Brin with Pagerank. Pagerank is a something really simple: it is just the stationary distribution of the Markov chain of surfers hopping randomly over the weblinks. It always exists and is unique unless there are periodic orbits, quod non for a graph like the web. So if you now think, yea right, I may be internet investor but I am not a fool that is easily impressed by some math mumbo jumbo, you would be just like most venture capitalists in the mid 1990’s. But if you’d work at NSA, you would have about 10000 colleagues who would instantly recognise this as the Perron Frobenius theorem, and as an obviosly sane idea.  And they might actually have read Page and Brin’s paper (http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf)  Incidently, they also state in a paper that we need a free and transparant search engine. But more to the point, it would be no problem for the NSA to fund an upstart company with a few 10’s of millions of dollars to set up a search engine as a cover for spying on the web. Who cares if it loses money, by intelligence standards it is dirt cheap! And the _first_ thing you want to do is track what is linking what, so Pagerank is the perfect cover up, whether it works or not. They will also very quickly have found out that search queries are an intelligence goldmine, and it is information people provide voluntarily so (I may be wrong here) it can also be used to spy on Americans. The kind of analysis you have to do for adsense is also ideally suited to filter out potential intelligence targets: if adsense can find out that you are looking for a nice place for the weekend to drink belgian beer with your middle class friends based on your searching an surfing behaviour, it can also find out that you need a safe house to brew some heavy explosives with your extremist friends.  And ofcourse google actually worked and works, because they know how to run the enormous amounts of equipment and the nasty reallife consequences of buggy document formats all of which the NSA must have had a lot of expertise in. Last not least, google actually makes money so the cover up pays for itself, so it scales! It is like the Pizza Connection, pizzerias set up by the maffia to distribute drugs. I read somewhere that the mob quickly came to realise that selling good Italian Pizza made good money. Apart from the money is money thing, that legal revenue gave them lot of operational freedom. In the same way Google making money, means that you don’t have to go ask for money from nosey and stingey politicians who at the time had only just got woken up to the internet with the exception of Al Gore. 

So is true I don’t know?  Have I learned things that make it look like a silly paranoia theory?  Unfortunately, not at all. In fact it does not matter whether Google,  Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn, or Micrsoft word for that matter are invented by the NSA or not. It is so glaringly obviously useful for an intelligence operation to massively filter and index text and track search queries, that I cannot believe that 10 years on in the war on terror they don’t have access to the information. So what Assange says is completely believable to me. Likewise I am not all surprised that the location information in our phones, and the network connections we make are tracked 24/7. People are very weary for being visually monitored by camera, but If I would run an intelligence operation, and I would have to choose Google data and mobile phone data or a camera in every house I would only hesitate for about a 1 milisecond.

Rogier

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