I have read "When Google Met WikiLeaks" wrote by Julian Assange thinking, that I will not learn something new. I mean, we are already past times when people were shocked about PRISM when media was widely covering this. Everyone heard about PRISM - it's wall water over the dam, they have been spying on us, privacy is in the disappearance, let's live on... right? I am also a little skeptical when it comes to books and articles that claim that big companies are bad, "just because they are big". And I was wrong and it's still worth to read this book from 2014, after five years. First, I was anticipating some kind of grumbling and complaints about Google, the bad Google who is collecting information about us and using it to sell ads (yawn, we all know this already). What I got instead? Information about an active collaboration between Google and the government of the United States. Information suggesting that Google is helping the government with its military activities and other interesting information. Things that I did not know earlier, even that I knew one or two cents about Google sins, as almost everyone nowadays who is at least partly interested in technology. Second, the whole thing is wrapped into a nice story about the personal meeting of Assange and highly places people from Google, meeting that was supposedly friendly, but as Assange learned later and as we will learn while reading the book - it was not friendly. You can read it almost like some kind of novel about betrayal.
One of the more interesting things in this book were materials stating that Google cooperated (and probably is still cooperating) with the government of USA, and what is more important, that this cooperation is (was?) quite friendly. Google was not opposing cooperation with NSA. The e-mails sent between Google Chairman of the Board and general Keith Alexander looked like this: "General Keith so great to see you!"^. As we can see in the papers published in Al-Jazeera in 2014, Google along with other big companies was taking part in secret Enduring Security Framework program, which assumed an exchange of information between technology companies and government of USA, to fight with cyber threats. But some scratches appear on that image. Why? One thing that this program supposedly achieved was stopping a plot to use exploits in BIOS by China. The plot that was targeted at destroying the economy of the United States. We can not be sure this plot really taken place, some cybersecurity experts challenge its authenticity. But two weeks later German newspaper "Der Spiegel" published documents delivered by Snowden, showing that government of the USA itself was implementing backdoors in BIOS system. Backdoors that allowed them to access computers. So they did something similar that they claim China was doing.
Google also took part in project Defense Industrial Base, that Homeland Security describes as^:
the worldwide industrial complex that enables research and development, as well as design, production, delivery, and maintenance of military weapons systems, subsystems, and components or parts, to meet U.S. military requirements
Maybe Google involvement in Defense Industrial Base is about offering commercial services of Google for the army? So soldiers abroad could talk via Google Talk with their wives, receive e-mails via GMail? No, the documents are clear that it is not about "regular commercial Google services".^ It's about a different kind of cooperation. Also, the documents say that Google is a "key member". So... Google is wearing a camo behind the curtains. There is a cherry on top of this - according to Assange, management of companies such as Stratfor are afraid of competition from Google. What is Stratfor? They are a private intelligence agency, often called "The Shadow CIA". They get orders from the government of the USA among the others and usually, it was the CIA that was considered their competition. In the future, the competition will come from Google and similar tech companies.
I mentioned betrayal while starting this post. It was about the meeting of highly placed officials from Google with Assange. They assured him that they shared his ideas and the meeting was a friendly one. They wanted to meet him to prepare information for their book. The whole thing was recorded with a dictaphone, a voice recorder, so it could be later processed into text and analyzed. But Google officials while visiting Julian in his home arrest... forget to take their own voice recorder. So Assange told them that they can use his, and he will send them over the recording. Thanks to this we are able to look at the transcription of conversations that were conducted during that meeting, questions that were asked by Google officials, about technical aspects of how WikiLeaks works, we can see that they showed interest and support for the idea that Assange fought for. But then Assange shows us how all this contrasts with what was published in the book that these officials were preparing. In the book, he and his ideas were presented as dangerous ones. Betrayal.
Assange sensed that something is not right already at the end of the talks. He suggested to the officials from Google that they could reveal for the WikiLeaks some information about requests for data from government, what government was trying to gain from Google, requests for data. In the response, he heard only excuses. Because as we learn later, a partnership of Google and government of USA was (still is?) quite pleasant, friendly and nice, it was not the case that Google receiving some kind of official letter with a request to reveal some data. They did it willingly and freely.
I love how Assange takes care of the quality of journalism, and he mentions this at the end of the book. Journalism that should be based on sources, footnotes, especially right now when "fake news" is getting more and more popular. Thanks to this kind of attitude we can see how talk between him and Google officials looked like and what was published later, what was distorted.
This is not some kind of long article that would pretend to be the abstract of the book, summary. It is just a small review of this book or something like that. I am just encouraging you to read it yourself - it is worth reading. Even if before reading you are confident, just as I was, that you will not learn anything new, because it is from 5 years ago and you already read about PRISM and you know that, "yeah, Google is bad yawn". Read anyway. Google is not bad because it collects data and sends it to advertisers, it might have worse sins. Google should be treated just as politicians or a government - we should look at its hands. Since it is cooperating with the government of the United States, it would be a mistake to treat it as a regular private company. Just as it would be a mistake to treat Huawei as a regular private company that is not influenced by China government. Maybe it sounds obvious, but this book might give you a new insight into lies that are being seld to us by both big companies and single people. I recommend this book to everyone.
