All Hail Google!

Folks,

I think Google is doing well and doing good, by not cooperatng with the US
Government, and
cooperating with the Chinese government. Leave it to a Russian kid to get it
right in USA.

Here is the problem: the justice department wants a private company (Google) to
turn over
trade secrets and client information so the justice department can go on a
fishing expedition
for criminals. UnAmerican!

China is making a mistake by limiting access to the internet for its citizens.
We are in
competition with China, so we ought to be happy to let them make mistakes.
Calls for
Google to somehow cause China to do what is right are misplaced, beside the fact
that China
is China's business, not ours.

This reminds me of the do-gooders who want to pass a law everytime big biz
exploits
consumers. Recall the demand to get banks to stop gouging ATM users. Why
should govt
stop bad bank behaviour? If it is bad, it leaves an opening for someone to
come in and do
good. Washington Mutual capitalized on the fee bandits by makng WAMU ATM's
fee-free and
thereby stealing customers and punishing the fee bandit banks. Go USA!

A more intriguing reason why China wants to limit access to google has to do
with...well...
you read... this is rather over my head...


China, Google, and press spin

7 September 2002
China's recent blocking of Google and AltaVista has us asking whether they
might be doing it
for reasons that have not been mentioned in the press.

Our proxy has not been blocked. We wonder who will block us first -- China or
Google, Inc.?
The former because we're a back door to Google's index, or the latter because
our interface is
ad-free and unauthorized by Google?

U.S. intelligence agencies have recently shown a great deal of interest in
Internet surveillance.
One thrust of this is determining geolocation from IP number. Currently this is
about 80
percent effective in fixing the IP number to a major city, and over 90 percent
in fixing it to a
country.

Another important aspect is the search terms used to query search engines. These
terms are
absolute pearls; they are a succinct window into the Internet user's interests
and state of
mind at a particular point in time. Cluster analysis that uses geolocation along
with search
terms would provide an insight into a society and its subcultures.

Chinese officials may be worried that Google logs all search terms together
with the IP
number, a time stamp, a unique cookie ID, and browser information. If this
information is
available to the National Security Agency from Google -- and current U.S. laws
almost require
Google to provide this information to the feds, especially when the Internet
user is a non-U.S.
citizen in a country that's of national security interest to the U.S. -- then
China may be well-
advised to block the use of U.S. engines to protect their own national security.

The NSA, if it gets this information straight from Google, is operating at a
level of efficiency
much greater than Chinese officials themselves, who must intercept and collate
such
information by monitoring the packet stream. This puts the NSA at a tremendous
advantage
in determining where pro-U.S. sentiment may exist in China.

The privacy policies of search engines generally do not cover items such as IP
number
storage, and storage of search terms. In the case of portals that use Google
results, it is
important to know whether the portal forwards the IP number to Google along with
the
search terms. We've asked this question of several portals, and received a reply
only from
Netscape, which said that they do not forward the IP number to Google.

Journalists interested in privacy can provide a service by asking search engines
and portals
about the user data they collect. When engines fail to reveal this, then they
should at least
allow proxies and meta-engines to access their index as a matter of policy and
convenience
to Internet users around the world. We hope our proxy can continue to operate,
both in China
and in the U.S.


Geolocation links:

Washington Post article on geolocation from IP number
Digital Envoy
GeoIP by MaxMind
Google searches are geolocated on the fly (Wired, May, 2003)


News item: "The winner of the 2002 Google programming contest and the $10,000
prize was
Daniel Egnor. Egnor's winning project allows users to search web pages based on
locale.
Egnor took street addresses, converted them to latitude and longitude
coordinates, and then
created a location index. The result was a system that allows users to focus
keyword searches
to an area of a specific location."

Bottom line: Geolocation is neither fad nor fantasy. It's something that must be
considered
when evaluating the behavior of major Web players.

Update, March 2003: We still don't know the story behind China's blocking and
unblocking of
Google. It may be that Google's acute interest in geolocation by IP number is
designed
primarily to sell more ads in more markets. In an article by Josh McHugh
("Google vs. Evil,"
Wired Magazine, January 2003), several paragraphs imply that Google worked out
some sort
of secret deal with Chinese authorities:
Brin was no expert on international diplomacy. So he ordered a half-dozen books
about
Chinese history, business, and politics on Amazon.com and splurged on overnight
shipping.
He consulted with Schmidt, Page, and David Drummond, Google's general counsel
and head
of business development, then put in a call to tech industry doyenne Esther
Dyson for advice
and contacts. Google has no offices in China, so Brin enlisted go-betweens to
get the
message to Chinese authorities that Google would be very interested in working
out a
compromise to restore access. "We didn't want to do anything rash," Brin says.
"The situation
over there is more complex than I had imagined."

Four days later, Chinese authorities restored access to the site. How did that
happen? For
starters, the Chinese government was deluged with outcries from the nation's 46
million
Internet users when access to Google was cut off. "Internet users in China are
an apolitical
crowd," says Xiao Qiang, executive director of New York-based Human Rights In
China. "They
tend to be people who are doing well, and they don't usually voice strong views.
But this
stepped into their digital freedom."

The quick workaround: Chinese authorities tweaked the national firewall, making
the new
Google China different from the site that was turned off. Today, Chinese who use
Google to
search on terms like "falun gong" or "human rights in china" receive a
standard-looking
results page. But when they click on any of the results, either their browsers
are redirected to
a blank or government-approved page, or their computers are blocked from
accessing
Google for an hour or two. "They have a new mechanism that can block the results
of certain
searches," Brin says. Did Google help China find or obtain the filtering
technology? "We didn't
make changes to our servers" is all he'll say.

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