Surveillance Valley: Why Google Is Eager to Align Itself With America’s Military Industrial Complex | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/surveillance-valley-why-google-eager-align-itself-americas-military-indust
Google isn’t a traditional Internet service company. It isn’t even an advertising company. Google is a whole new type of beast that runs on a totally new type of tech business model.
Google is a global for-profit surveillance corporation — a company that tries to funnel as much user activity in the real and online world through its services in order to track, analyze, and profile us: It tracks as much of our daily lives as possible: who we are, what we do, what we like, where we go, who we talk to, what we think about, what we’re interested in. All those things are seized, packaged, commodified, and sold on the market.
It’s an amazingly profitable activity that takes bits and pieces and the most intimate detritus of our private lives — something that never really had any commercial value and turns it into billions of pure profit. It’s like turning rocks and gravel into gold. And it nets Google nearly $20 billion in annual profits.
At this point, most of the business comes from matching the right ad to the right pair of eyeballs at jus the right time. But who knows how the massive database Google’s compiling on all of us will be used in the future?
In the past few years, Google has aggressively intensified its campaign to grab a bigger slice of the insanely lucrative military-intelligence contracting market.
It’s been targeting big and juicy federal agencies — the U.S. Naval Academy signed up for Google Apps, the U.S. Army tapped Google Apps for a pilot program involving 50,000 DoD personnel, Idaho’s nuclear labwent Google, the U.S. Department of the Interior switched to Gmail, and the U.S. Coast Guard Academy went with Google, too. Google even entered into a partnership with the NGA, a sister agency to NSA to launch its very own spy satellite called GeoEye-1 — a spy satellite that it would share with the U.S. military intelligence apparatus.
