Google's team-up with spy agency dangerous
Internet search firm Google's deal that invites the US National
Security Agency (NSA) to help with its inquiry into cyberattacks may
pose serious threats to other countries' national and commercial
security and is worrisome to world netizens.
Google, founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, has become the
largest world Internet search engine. It runs more than 1 million
servers in data centers around the world, and processes more than 1
billion search requests and 20 petabytes of user-generated data every
day.
If we compare Google to a globalized information processing machine,
then its collaboration with the NSA would allow its products to flow in
vast volume to the spy agency and greatly boost the agency's information
collection capabilities.
Hiroyuki Miyawaki, senior consultant at the Japan Research Institute,
told Xinhua that intelligence agencies' independent information
collecting capacity is usually limited, but joining hands with Google
would significantly improve its capacity. That would be manifested not
only in the wide range of information but also in the usage of Google's
history information, which is counted in large quantities.
In comments on the deal, French magazine L'Expansion said many people
have doubts about this kind of collaboration. American magazine Wired
wrote a headline like this: 'Don't Be Evil' Meet 'Spy on Everyone': How
the NSA Deal Could Kill Google.
"Don't be evil" is Google's unofficial slogan coined by the company's
engineer Paul Buchheit.
World experts were also worried about the deal between Google and the
NSA. A researcher at the Institute of Scientific and Technical
Information of China told Xinhua that if Google, which holds a sea of
information, and the NSA, which is strong in intelligence analysis, work
together fully, other countries will face severe potential threats.
In addition, Google remembers not only its users' registration
information but also their search and browsing records. That is to say,
intelligence agencies such as the NSA can easily get to know who is
interested in what if they attain the relevant information and find out
the IP address of the user.
During the Cold War, the NSA worked with companies like Western Union
to intercept and read millions of telegrams. During the war on terror
years, the NSA teamed up with the telecommunications companies to
eavesdrop on customers' phone calls and Internet traffic right from the
telcos' switching stations.
Michel Riguidel, head of the Department of Computer Science and
Networks at Telecom Paris Tech in Paris, said that European companies
like Airbus and Total could become targets of the Google-NSA
collaboration because collaborations between intelligence agencies and
information technology companies in the past mainly focused on
commercial or national domestic security areas.
Riguidel suggested that Europe work out corresponding policies for
the information industry to break up the monopoly dominated by Google
and other US Internet search technologies corporations. Xinhua
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