Google as an Arm of the Surveillance State: Google Helps Capture Lawbreaker Through Its Routine Scanning of Email Attachments

Monitors show imagery from security cameras seen at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City.

"There’s a pretty large gap between 'we’ll let the government look at your stuff if they insist' and 'we’ll keep an eye out for stuff that the government might want to see.' The latter, with respect to privacy, represents the top of a very slippery slope. How slippery? Well, consider Google’s interests in 'geolocation' [..] It’s not out of the question that someday as you drive down the road, Google will track you and automatically message the local police department if it notices you’re driving 38 miles per hour in a 35-mph speed zone."


By Thomas L. Knapp
Convicted in 1994 of sexually assaulting a young boy, John Henry Skillern of Texas once again finds himself incarcerated and awaiting trial, this time for possession and production of child pornography. Skillern’s arrest comes courtesy of Google. Few, I expect, will shed tears for Skillern with respect to his alleged sexual predations. Nonetheless his case once more brings Google into the privacy spotlight, this time as an arm of “law enforcement.”

RELATED STORY: Is Google the New Sheriff in Town?

Google makes no secret of the fact that it “analyzes content” in emails sent and received by users of its Gmail service, mostly for purposes of targeting advertising to users most likely to click thru and buy things. That’s how Google makes money — tracking users of its “free” services, watching what they do, selling those users’ eyeballs to paying customers.

It’s also understood by most that Google will, as its privacy policy states, “share personal information … [to] meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.” If the cops come a-knocking with a warrant or some asserted equivalent, Google cooperates with search and seizure of your stored information and records of your actions.

But Google goes farther than that. Their Gmail program policies unequivocally state that, among other things, “Google has a zero-tolerance policy against child sexual abuse imagery. If we become aware of such content, we will report it to the appropriate authorities and may take disciplinary action, including termination, against the Google Accounts of those involved.”

As a market anarchist, my visceral response to the Skillern case is “fair cop – it’s in the terms of service he agreed to when he signed up for a Gmail account.”

But there’s a pretty large gap between “we’ll let the government look at your stuff if they insist” and “we’ll keep an eye out for stuff that the government might want to see.” The latter, with respect to privacy, represents the top of a very slippery slope.

How slippery? Well, consider Google’s interests in “geolocation” (knowing where you are) and in “the Internet of Things” (connecting everything from your toaster to your thermostat to your car to the Internet, with Google as middleman).

It’s not out of the question that someday as you drive down the road, Google will track you and automatically message the local police department if it notices you’re driving 38 miles per hour in a 35-mph speed zone.

Think that can’t happen? Think again. In many locales, tickets (demanding payment of fines) are already automatically mailed to alleged red-light scofflaws caught by cameras. No need to even send out an actual cop with pad and pen. It’s a profit center for government — and for companies that set up and operate the camera systems. In case you haven’t noticed, Google really likes information-based profit centers.

And keep in mind that you are a criminal. Yes, really. At least if you live in the United States. Per Harvey Silverglate’s book Three Felonies a Day, the average American breaks at least three federal laws in every 24-hour period. Want to bet against the probability that evidence of those “crimes” can be detected in your email archive?

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Google Attempts To Justify Looking At Your Email Attachments — Blows Whistle On Man Emailing Child Porn

Last year, a Google director said it was Google's role to see that people sharing certain types of content are caught and prosecuted.

By Salvador Rodriguez
Google's controversial practice of scanning emails and analyzing users' emails for targeted ads reportedly led to the arrest of a 41-year-old Houston man who has been charged with possessing and promoting child pornography.

According to a local TV station news report, Google detected a Houston man using Gmail allegedly to send explicit images of a "young girl" to his friend.

The Mountain View, Calif., tech giant reportedly alerted the authorities, who then allegedly found more child pornography on the suspect's phone and tablet after obtaining a search warrant, KHOU reported.

The suspect, identified as John Henry Skillern, is being held on a $200,000 bond, according to the TV report, which said Skillern is a registered sex offender.

The practice of Google scanning Gmail messages has been controversial and has led to lawsuits that have accused Google of illegally opening and reading emails in violation of federal wiretapping statutes.

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Top 10 Reasons Why Corporate Social Media is Not Your Friend, and Dark Social Media Is: Corporate Social Media Sites Are 'Crippled' On Purpose

The t-shirt and jeans are meant to give you that "he's not really
a manipulative, greedy billionaire" feeling. (Mark Zuckerberg, a
co-founder of Facebook: Photo by TechCrunch)

Social media sites like Facebook are deliberately "crippled" by their programmers to keep you from your friends, serve you up to advertisers and rob your money.  Did you know that only 7-8% of your Facebook friends can see your posts and that you have to pay Facebook a "promotion" fee so that 92 - 93% of your Facebook friends can actually see what you posts? In addition, only 3% of those who "like" your business or non-profit page are kept up to date with your posts, the rest are kept in the dark: unless you pay Facebook a fee, of course.  Happen to know a friend or family member is on Facebook and you would like to find them? Try searching for them using the "search" engine inside of Facebook. Unless they are already "friends of a friend" your chances of ever finding them through Facebook is virtually nil.—Ronald David Jackson

By Bruce A. Dixon, BlackAgendaReport
For a long time now, we've all been told, and have told each other, that corporate social media is the way to build businesses, audiences and brands. What if this is about as true as the old saw about real estate prices only going up? What is “dark social media” and how is it different from Twitter, Facebook and the rest.

It's new, it's now, it's cool, learn how... everybody's on it, everybody's doing it. For some time now, we've been told you cannot build a business, find old friends or organize much of anything without the indispensable aid of corporate social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. But what if this is about as true as other stuff the supposedly wise and informed told us in recent years, like that real estate prices could be counted on to always go up?

Human societies are based on lots of horizontal communication. What if corporate social media is little more than a gigantic scam to extract revenue from the otherwise ordinary communication the internet permits between groups and individuals, between people and businesses, and among communities of interest. What if corporate social media ultimately aims not to open up but to throttle and restrict those conversations to make them artificially scarce and valuable commodities. What if corporate social media's business model is to thrive on content its proprietors don't create, and to place itself between that content and prospective audiences, even to substitute itself for the web sites, email lists and media offerings of content creators?

With a billion users, Facebook is far and away the largest player in the world of corporate social media, so all these criticisms apply to Facebook. But many also apply to Twitter, Pinterest and their little brothers as well.

Here are the top ten reasons why corporate social media is NOT your friend, and dark social media is.

1. Facebook currently limits the number of your “friends” who can see your posts to about 7 or 8%. What? You thought that “friends” list was yours? It's not. It's theirs. And think about it, if you had a thousand friends, and 25 of them, that's 2.5% posted 3 or 4 times a day, another 25 posted once a day, and a hundred posted once a week, that would be at least 150 daily posts for you to comb through, leaving little room for Facebook to insert ads and promoted content which customers have paid for into your news feed.
   
   
2. Facebook will let you talk to the other 92 or 93% of your friends, but you have to pay for that privilege. You buy an ad, or you “promote” the post by paying Facebook. Essentially Facebook is “broken on purpose” so it can extract payment from you to do what you imagined it would do anyway, keep you in touch with your friends. You can get around this to a very limited extent by “tagging” each post with the names of individuals, or joining dozens of Facebook groups and individually sharing posts in the groups. But this is a time consuming process which has to be repeated with each post. If Black Agenda Report, with only a dozen or so new articles each week, we'd be on Facebook three or four hours each publication day.
   
   
3. Facebook, along with Twitter and other corporate social media platforms provide you no way whatsoever to contact or individually identify your Facebook “friends” outside its own walled garden. Again, those lists of Twitter followers, and Facebook friends aren't really yours at all.
   
   
4. Facebook limits the “organic reach” of your business or nonprofit organization page to about 3% of those who say they “like” you. Presumably those people “liking” your page imagined this would keep them up to date with what you're doing. Not so. Neither Facebook nor Twitter provides you any way to identify those “likes”, and Facebook won't allow you even to send a message to them. Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose you've got a business or a worthy cause, and a list of thousands of customers, prospects, clients, or past and potential volunteers and like minded donors. If I offer to take care of deliveries to that list, but won't let you see their names, their email addresses, or how many and which of them I actually deliver to, would that be OK with you? No? Now please tell me again why corporate social media which pretty much does that is essential to building your business, your brand, your cause.
   
   
5. Facebook will gladly sell you advertising directed at the 97% of your “likes” who otherwise might never see your stuff. Actually, these people WILL see what you offer if they go out of their way to your Facebook page. But with the same amount of effort, they could have visited your web site independently of Facebook, couldn't they?
   
   
6. Third party vendors are eager to sell you all the “Facebook likes,” “Facebook friends” and Twitter “followers” you're willing to pay for. They might be located in Egypt, Sri Lanka or Croatia, and never interact with your product or page again, but you can count them as “likes.” Twitter and Facebook do not endorse these parasitic vendors, but the mythology around corporate social media being so important to your business or organizational “presence” on the web keeps them in business as well.
   
   
7. If someone hostile to your politics, your business or your person lodges a spurious complaint to Facebook, or Yahoo, Google or YouTube, say, that you're an anti-Semetic copyright-violating whistle blowing vegan child molester, what these providers generally do is simply cut your account off without notice. Their terms of service often relieve them of the bother of even sharing the exact nature of the complaint against you let alone investigating it, and explicitly state that “your” lists are really theirs. I know people who've lost thousands of business contacts and years of content in Yahoo and Google email accounts, lists and YouTube contents this way.
   
   
8. Facebook, Twitter and other corporate social media platforms don't just track your every move while you're on Twitter or Pinterest or Facebook. If you close the browser tab without logging off or purging cookies, they usually continue to record and transmit all your internet activity home for data miners to crunch. Such data, both raw and refined are major revenue sources.
   
   
9. While Facebook, Twitter and all the social media platforms rely on YOU and people like you for their compelling content, they deliberately aim to place themselves between you and your readers, customers, and clients, to substitute your Facebook presence for your own offerings elsewhere on the internet. Do you actually visit all the articles you pause over in your Twitter feed? Nobody else does either. We habitually comb through 140 character snippets and hundred word Facebook brain farts while seldom leaving the corporate social media plantation, and imagine we've actually visited those web sites, those sources. There are already folks whose ONLY daily internet experience is Facebook, and books like “The Shallows” explain how our internet reading makes us practically unable to read book length arguments, reluctant to follow any single line of inquiry for more than a minute or three.
   
   
10. Dark social media is “dark” because it's social media untraceable by Big Data and corporate marketers. It's direct email sent from your own lists and your own listserves. Dark social media was around before Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, and remains the proven way for individuals, causes and businesses to reach, retain and maintain contact with friends, customers, clients, and like minded souls. Using dark social media to expand the reach of your business or project, to engage audiences directly and without an intermediary is often a more fruitful way to spend scarce resources. Corporate media won't tell you this and neither will the “social media consultants,” sometimes because they don't believe fat meat is greasy, and other times because disinformed customers are more profitable.
    

Remember all those real estate professionals and “wealth building experts” who told us home values would never go down? Some of them actually believed it that swill. Some others knew better, but were watching their own bottom line, not those of their customers or the public. This is not so different.

Facebook does some really nice things, and many of us have and interacted (online at least) with a ton of interesting people. But it may be time for your business, your social movement or project or you as an individual to reconsider the effort and resources devoted to maintaining a presence on Facebook, Twitter and corporate social media platforms. If you've already got two or three thousand Facebook friends or tens of thousands of “likes” that aren't fakes a bit of continued effort on Facebook and Twitter is probably required.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, a state committee member of the Georgia Green Party and a partner in an internet technology firm. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via  emailed at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com.

 Reprinted with permission from Black Agenda Report.

Are Web Giants Finally Waking Up To Privacy? - Pt 2: Google Announces No More Ads and Gmail Account Scanning - But Only For Student Apps

Is Google spooked by Microsoft's ad campaign that spotlights "Google spying" on email accounts?

By Brandon Martin
It seems that Google is in full privacy-control mode as the company said Wednesday that it has permanently removed the ads from the Apps for Education suite. Also, it wouldn’t scan student’s Gmail accounts for advertising purposes. The company believes in enhancing the educational experience for Google Apps for Education.

For those who aren’t aware, Google Apps for Education is a free service used by over 30 million users from around the world, mostly students, teachers and administrators. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Drive are some of the apps currently offered under the service.

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Microsoft—Not Law Enforcement—Caught Looking At Emails of Hotmail User: Claims It Will Change Its Ways

Microsoft says it will not search a user's email or other Microsoft service "unless the circumstances would justify a court order, if one were available."

By Ian Paul
Outlook.com email should be private, Microsoft said in a recent blog post that then went on to explain why it violated that belief in privacy for at least one user.

Recently, a former Microsoft employee was arrested in Seattle, charged with theft of trade secrets. The ex-employee, Alex Kibkalo, is accused of leaking parts of Windows 8 to a French-language blogger.

The blogger in question, who remains unidentified, happened to use Hotmail—the investigation began in 2012 before Hotmail's Outlook.com transition—as his primary email account. So as part of its investigation, Microsoft peeked into the blogger's email account to read that person's correspondence with Kibkalo.

Say what?

Microsoft says it was justified in searching the blogger's email account, because it had probable cause to believe Kibkalo was funneling trade secrets to the blogger.The company also pointed out that even with its justification for searching the account, it would have been impossible to gain a court order.

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