WEBVTT 00:00:10.369 --> 00:00:17.429 Wheaton: Scroogled by Cory Doctorow. Originally published in Radar Magazine, September, 2007. 00:00:18.111 --> 00:00:19.372 Read by Will Wheaton. 00:00:21.423 --> 00:00:27.512 "Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him." 00:00:27.512 --> 00:00:29.365 Cardinal Richelieu 00:00:30.749 --> 00:00:36.799 Greg landed at SFO at 8PM, but by the time he made it to the front of the customs line it was after midnight. 00:00:36.814 --> 00:00:41.151 He had it good -- he'd been in first class, first off the plane, 00:00:41.151 --> 00:00:45.216 brown as a nut and loose-limbed after a month on the beach at Cabo, 00:00:45.216 --> 00:00:51.203 SCUBA diving three days a week, bumming around and flirting with French college girls the rest of the time. 00:00:51.941 --> 00:00:56.736 When he'd left San Francisco a month before, he'd been a stoop-shouldered, pot-bellied wreck -- 00:00:57.289 --> 00:01:03.067 now he was a bronze god, drawing appreciative looks from the stews at the front of the plane. 00:01:03.851 --> 00:01:08.179 In the four hours he spent in the customs line, he fell from god back to man. 00:01:08.179 --> 00:01:12.622 His warm buzz wore off, the sweat ran down the crack of his ass, 00:01:12.622 --> 00:01:17.668 and his shoulders and neck grew so tense that his upper back felt like a tennis racket. 00:01:17.668 --> 00:01:22.161 The batteries on his iPod died after the third hour, leaving him with nothing to do 00:01:22.161 --> 00:01:25.184 except eavesdrop on the middle-aged couple ahead of him. 00:01:25.184 --> 00:01:29.030 "They've starting googling us at the border," she said. "I told you they'd do it." 00:01:29.660 --> 00:01:31.956 "I thought that didn't start until next month?" 00:01:32.602 --> 00:01:37.865 The man had brought a huge sombrero on board, carefully stowing it in its own overhead locker, 00:01:37.865 --> 00:01:42.587 and now he was stuck alternately wearing it and holding it. 00:01:42.587 --> 00:01:49.480 Googling at the border. Christ. Greg vested out from Google six months before, cashing in his options 00:01:49.480 --> 00:01:53.500 and "taking some me time," which turned out to be harder than he expected. 00:01:53.500 --> 00:01:59.623 Five months later, what he'd mostly done is fix his friends' PCs and websites, and watch daytime TV, 00:01:59.623 --> 00:02:03.167 and gain ten pounds, which he blamed on being at home, 00:02:03.167 --> 00:02:07.010 instead of in the Googleplex, with its excellent 24-hour gym. 00:02:07.579 --> 00:02:09.525 The writing had been on the wall. 00:02:09.525 --> 00:02:13.300 Google had a whole pod of lawyers in charge of dealing with the world's governments, 00:02:13.300 --> 00:02:18.563 and scumbag lobbyists on the Hill to try to keep the law from turning them into the world's best snitch. 00:02:19.116 --> 00:02:21.016 It was a losing battle. 00:02:21.016 --> 00:02:26.927 The Government had spent $15 billion on a program to fingerprint and photograph visitors at the border, 00:02:26.927 --> 00:02:29.543 and hadn't caught a single terrorist. 00:02:30.312 --> 00:02:34.671 Clearly, the public sector was not equipped to Do Search Right. 00:02:34.671 --> 00:02:39.239 The DHS officers had bags under their eyes as they squinted at their screens, 00:02:39.239 --> 00:02:43.070 prodding mistrustfully at their keyboards with sausage fingers. 00:02:43.070 --> 00:02:46.635 No wonder it was taking four hours to get out of the goddamned airport. 00:02:47.465 --> 00:02:50.845 "Evening," he said, as he handed the man his sweaty passport. 00:02:50.845 --> 00:02:56.878 The man grunted and swiped it, then stared at his screen, clicking. A lot. 00:02:57.678 --> 00:03:00.652 He had a little bit of dried food in the corner of his mouth 00:03:00.652 --> 00:03:04.262 and his tongue crept out and licked at it as he concentrated. 00:03:04.262 --> 00:03:07.494 "Want to tell me about June, 1998?" 00:03:07.494 --> 00:03:12.587 Greg turned, rotated his head this way and that. "I'm sorry?" 00:03:12.587 --> 00:03:21.057 "You posted a message to alt.burningman on June 17, 1998 about your plan to attend Burning Man. 00:03:21.626 --> 00:03:27.111 You posted, 'Would taking shrooms be a really bad idea?'" 00:03:28.172 --> 00:03:31.906 It was 3AM before they let him out of the "secondary screening" room. 00:03:31.906 --> 00:03:36.766 The interrogator was an older man, so skinny he looked like he'd been carved out of wood 00:03:36.766 --> 00:03:40.582 His questions went a lot further than the Burning Man shrooms. 00:03:40.582 --> 00:03:43.241 They were just the start of Greg's problems. 00:03:44.056 --> 00:03:49.034 "I'd like to know more about your hobbies. Are you interested in model rocketry?" 00:03:50.003 --> 00:03:50.949 "What?" 00:03:50.949 --> 00:03:52.310 "Model rocketry." 00:03:53.110 --> 00:03:56.149 "No," Greg said. "No, I'm not." 00:03:56.149 --> 00:04:01.017 Thinking of all the explosives that model rocketry people surrounded themselves with. 00:04:01.786 --> 00:04:03.793 The man made a note, clicked some more. 00:04:04.208 --> 00:04:08.661 "You see, I ask because I see a heavy spike of ads for model rocketry supplies 00:04:08.661 --> 00:04:12.012 showing up alongside your search results and Google mail." 00:04:12.735 --> 00:04:17.145 Greg felt his guts spasm. "You're looking at my searches and email?" 00:04:17.744 --> 00:04:19.736 He hadn't touched a keyboard in a month, 00:04:19.736 --> 00:04:24.968 but he knew that what you put into the searchbar was more intimate than what you told your father-confessor. 00:04:24.968 --> 00:04:27.085 He'd seen enough queries to know that. 00:04:27.715 --> 00:04:31.888 "Calm down, please. No, I'm not looking at your searches." 00:04:32.595 --> 00:04:36.446 The man made a bitter lemon face and went on in a squeaky voice. 00:04:37.169 --> 00:04:41.454 "That would be unconstitutional. You weren't listening to me. 00:04:41.454 --> 00:04:46.555 We see the ads that show up when you read your mail and do your searching. 00:04:46.555 --> 00:04:50.564 I have a brochure explaining it, I'll give it to you when we're through here." 00:04:50.564 --> 00:04:56.142 "But the ads don't mean anything -- I get ads for Ann Coulter ringtones 00:04:56.142 --> 00:04:59.887 whenever I get email from my friend who lives in Coulter, Iowa!" 00:04:59.887 --> 00:05:07.829 The man nodded. "I understand, sir. And that's just why I'm here talking to you, instead of just looking at this screen. 00:05:07.829 --> 00:05:12.418 Why do you suppose model rocket ads show up so frequently for you?" 00:05:13.233 --> 00:05:14.938 He thought for a moment. 00:05:15.553 --> 00:05:21.381 "OK, just do this. Go to Google and search for 'coffee fanciers', all right?" 00:05:21.381 --> 00:05:27.650 He'd been very active in the group, helping them build out the site for their coffee-of-the-month subscription service. 00:05:27.650 --> 00:05:32.414 The blend they were going to launch with was called "Jet Fuel." "Jet Fuel" and "Launch" 00:05:32.414 --> 00:05:35.769 -- that'd probably make Google barf up model rocket ads. 00:05:35.769 --> 00:05:39.434 Not that he would know -- he blocked all the ads in his browser. 00:05:40.341 --> 00:05:45.123 They were in the home stretch when the carved man found the Hallowe'en photos. 00:05:45.630 --> 00:05:51.217 They were buried three screens deep in the search results for "Greg Lupinski," and Greg hadn't noticed them. 00:05:52.124 --> 00:05:56.771 "It was a Gulf War themed party," he said. "In the Castro." 00:05:57.755 --> 00:05:59.361 "And you're dressed as --?" 00:06:00.899 --> 00:06:02.783 "A suicide bomber." 00:06:03.721 --> 00:06:06.637 Just saying the words in an airport made him nervous, 00:06:06.637 --> 00:06:10.019 as though uttering them would cause the handcuffs to come out. 00:06:11.188 --> 00:06:13.026 "Come with me, Mr Lupinski." 00:06:14.687 --> 00:06:20.251 The search lasted a long time. They swabbed him in places he didn't know he had. 00:06:20.251 --> 00:06:21.935 He asked about a lawyer. 00:06:21.935 --> 00:06:27.272 They told him that he could call all the lawyers he wanted once he was out of the Customs sterile area. 00:06:27.733 --> 00:06:29.448 "Good night, Mr Lupinski." 00:06:29.448 --> 00:06:32.436 This was a new interrogator, a man who'd wanted to know about 00:06:32.436 --> 00:06:39.038 the reason that he'd sought both night diving and deep diving specialist certification from the PADI instructor in Cabo. 00:06:39.038 --> 00:06:42.591 The guy impliedthat Greg had been training to be an al-Qaeda frogman, 00:06:42.591 --> 00:06:47.088 and didn't seem to believe that Greg had just wanted to do all the certifications he could, 00:06:47.088 --> 00:06:50.939 pursuing diving the way he pursued everything: thoroughly. 00:06:50.939 --> 00:06:57.340 But now the man with the frogman fantasy was bidding him a good night and releasing him from the secondary screening area. 00:06:57.340 --> 00:07:00.640 His suitcases stood alone by the baggage carousel. 00:07:00.640 --> 00:07:05.853 When he picked them up, he saw that they had been opened and then inexpertly closed. 00:07:05.853 --> 00:07:09.213 Some of his clothes stuck out from around the edges. 00:07:09.213 --> 00:07:13.634 At home, he saw that all the fake "pre-Colombian" statues had been broken, 00:07:13.634 --> 00:07:19.888 and that his white cotton Mexican shirt -- folded and fresh from his laundry-lady -- had a boot-print in the middle of it. 00:07:19.888 --> 00:07:25.622 His clothes no longer smelled of Mexico. Now they smelled of airports and machine oil. 00:07:26.389 --> 00:07:32.234 The mailman had dropped an entire milk-crate of mail off at his place that day, but he couldn't even begin to confront it. 00:07:32.234 --> 00:07:39.161 All he could think of, as the sun rose over the Mission, turning the Victorian houses they called "painted ladies" vivid colors, 00:07:39.161 --> 00:07:41.168 was what it meant to be googled. 00:07:41.183 --> 00:07:45.904 He wasn't going to sleep. No way. He needed to talk about this. 00:07:45.904 --> 00:07:51.849 And there was only one person who he could talk to, and luckily, she was usually awake around now. 00:07:52.849 --> 00:07:58.563 Maya had started at Google two years after him, but had gotten a much bigger grant of stock than he had. 00:07:58.563 --> 00:08:02.730 She knew exactly what she was going to do with it, too, once she vested: 00:08:03.091 --> 00:08:06.613 take her dogs and her girlfriend and head to Florence, for good. 00:08:06.613 --> 00:08:10.301 Learn Italian, take in the museums, sit in the cafes. 00:08:10.301 --> 00:08:17.430 It was she who'd convinced him to go to Mexico: anywhere, she said, anywhere that he could reboot his existence. 00:08:18.583 --> 00:08:24.569 Maya had two giant chocolate Labs and a very, very patient girlfriend who'd put up with anything 00:08:24.569 --> 00:08:30.653 except being dragged around Dolores Park at 6AM by 350 pounds of drooling brown canine 00:08:31.144 --> 00:08:36.235 She went for her Mace as he jogged towards her, then did a double-take and threw her arms open, 00:08:36.235 --> 00:08:40.407 dropping the leashes and stamping on them with one sneaker, a practiced gesture. 00:08:41.237 --> 00:08:44.288 "Where's the rest of you? Dude, you look hawt!" 00:08:44.288 --> 00:08:49.447 He took the hug, suddenly self-conscious of the way he smelled after a night of invasive googling. 00:08:49.447 --> 00:08:54.835 "Maya," he said. "Maya, what do you know about the DHS?" 00:08:55.804 --> 00:09:01.236 She stiffened and the dogs whined. She looked around, then nodded up at the tennis courts. 00:09:02.159 --> 00:09:07.242 "Top of the light standard there, don't look, there. That's one of our muni WiFi access points. 00:09:07.242 --> 00:09:11.290 Wide-angle webcam. Face away from it when you talk. Lip-readers." 00:09:12.290 --> 00:09:18.499 He parsed this out slowly. Google's free municipal WiFi program was a hit in every city where it played, 00:09:18.499 --> 00:09:25.283 and in the grand scheme of things, it hadn't cost much to put WiFi access points up on light standards and other power-ready poles around town. 00:09:25.283 --> 00:09:30.128 Especially not when measured against the ability to serve ads to people based on where they were sitting. 00:09:30.851 --> 00:09:34.964 He hadn't paid much attention when they'd made the webcams on all those access points public 00:09:34.964 --> 00:09:39.485 -- there'd been a day's worth of blogstorm while people looked out over their childhood streets 00:09:39.485 --> 00:09:44.180 or patrolled prostitution strolls, fingering johns, but it had blown over. 00:09:44.641 --> 00:09:47.452 Now he felt -- watched. 00:09:48.657 --> 00:09:52.484 Feeling silly, he kept his lips together and mumbled, "You're joking." 00:09:53.637 --> 00:09:56.966 "Come with me," she said, facing squarely away from the pole. 00:09:58.857 --> 00:10:01.467 The dogs weren't happy about having their walks cut short, 00:10:01.467 --> 00:10:07.275 and they let it be known in the kitchen as Maya fixed coffee for them -- barking, banging into the table and rocking it. 00:10:07.875 --> 00:10:13.711 Maya's girlfriend Laurie called out from the bedroom and Maya went back to talk to her, then emerged, looking flustered. 00:10:14.418 --> 00:10:16.533 "It started with China," she said. 00:10:17.040 --> 00:10:20.910 "Once we moved our servers onto the mainland, they went under Chinese jurisdiction. 00:10:20.910 --> 00:10:23.747 They could google everyone going through our servers." 00:10:23.747 --> 00:10:25.385 Greg knew what that meant: 00:10:25.385 --> 00:10:33.376 if you visited a page with Google ads on it, if you used Google maps, if you used Google mail -- even if you sent mail to a gmail account -- 00:10:33.376 --> 00:10:36.019 Google was collecting your info, forever. 00:10:36.945 --> 00:10:40.753 "They were using us to build profiles of people. Not arresting them, you understand. 00:10:40.753 --> 00:10:46.041 But when they had someone they wanted to arrest, they'd come to us for a profile and find a reason to bust them. 00:10:46.041 --> 00:10:49.730 There's hardly anything you can do on the net that isn't illegal in China." 00:10:50.848 --> 00:10:54.560 Greg shook his head. "Why did they put the servers in China?" 00:10:55.383 --> 00:10:58.561 "The government said they'd block them if they didn't. And Yahoo was there." 00:10:59.155 --> 00:11:00.262 They both made a face. 00:11:00.270 --> 00:11:03.528 Somewhere along the way, Google had become obsessed with Yahoo, 00:11:03.528 --> 00:11:06.883 more worried about what the competition was doing than how they were performing. 00:11:07.488 --> 00:11:10.252 "So we did it. But a lot of us didn't like the idea." 00:11:11.126 --> 00:11:14.218 She sipped her coffee and lowered her voice. One of the dogs whined. 00:11:15.027 --> 00:11:16.873 "I made it my 20 percent project." 00:11:17.747 --> 00:11:21.098 Googlers were supposed to devote 20 percent of their time to blue-sky projects. 00:11:21.732 --> 00:11:24.460 "Me and my pod. We call it the googlecleaner. 00:11:24.953 --> 00:11:28.123 It goes deep into the database and statistically normalizes you. 00:11:28.611 --> 00:11:32.494 Your searches, your gmail histograms, your browsing patterns. All of it." 00:11:33.515 --> 00:11:34.607 "The search ads?" 00:11:35.125 --> 00:11:40.878 "Ah," she grimaced. "Yes, the DHS. So we brokered a compromise with the DHS. 00:11:40.878 --> 00:11:46.417 They'd stop asking to go fishing in our search records and we'd let them see what ads got displayed for you." 00:11:47.092 --> 00:11:52.272 Greg felt sick. "Why? Don't tell me Yahoo was doing it already --" 00:11:52.777 --> 00:12:01.286 "No, no. Well, yes. Sure. Yahoo was already doing it. But that wasn't it. You know, Republicans hate Google. 00:12:01.809 --> 00:12:04.175 We are overwhelmingly registered Democrat. 00:12:04.175 --> 00:12:07.448 So we're doing what we can to make peace with them before they clobber us. 00:12:08.276 --> 00:12:16.303 This isn't PII --" Personally Identifying Information, the toxic smog of the information age "-- it's just metadata. 00:12:16.329 --> 00:12:18.981 So it's only slightly evil." 00:12:19.719 --> 00:12:22.564 "If it's all so innocuous, why all this cloak-and-dagger stuff?" 00:12:23.419 --> 00:12:27.378 She sighed and hugged the dog that was butting her with his huge, anvil-shaped head. 00:12:28.131 --> 00:12:31.732 "The spooks are like pubic lice. They get everywhere. 00:12:31.732 --> 00:12:36.147 Once we let them in, everything suddenly got a lot more -- secret. 00:12:36.747 --> 00:12:39.651 Some of our meetings have to have spooks present, 00:12:40.465 --> 00:12:45.360 it's like being in some Soviet ministry, with a political officer always there, watching everything. 00:12:45.360 --> 00:12:51.762 And the security clearance. Now we're divided into these camps: the cleared and the suspect. 00:12:51.762 --> 00:12:56.035 We all know who isn't cleared, but no one knows why. 00:12:56.035 --> 00:13:02.209 I'm cleared. Lucky me -- being a homo no longer disqualifies you for access to seekrit crap 00:13:02.209 --> 00:13:06.822 No cleared person wants to even eat lunch with an un-clearable. 00:13:07.222 --> 00:13:13.696 Every now and again, one of your teammates will get pulled off your project 'for security reasons', whatever that means." 00:13:14.844 --> 00:13:20.550 Greg felt very tired. "So now I'm feeling lucky I got out of the airport alive. 00:13:20.550 --> 00:13:23.718 I suppose I might have ended up in Gitmo if it had gone badly, huh?" 00:13:24.655 --> 00:13:28.671 She was staring at him intently, her eyes flicking from side to side. 00:13:29.270 --> 00:13:31.500 He waited, but she didn't say anything. 00:13:32.389 --> 00:13:33.850 "What?" 00:13:34.727 --> 00:13:37.885 "What I'm about to tell you, you can't ever repeat it, OK?" 00:13:38.810 --> 00:13:44.290 "Um, OK? You're not going to tell me you're a deep-cover Al-Quaeda suicide bomber?" 00:13:44.853 --> 00:13:52.341 "Nothing so simple. Here's the thing: the airport DHS scrutiny is a gating function. 00:13:52.821 --> 00:13:55.971 It lets the spooks narrow down their search criteria. 00:13:56.526 --> 00:14:04.301 Once you get pulled aside for secondary at the border, you become a 'person of interest,' and they never, ever let up. 00:14:05.067 --> 00:14:08.941 They'll check the webcams for your face and gait. Read your mail. Log your searches." 00:14:09.525 --> 00:14:11.836 "I thought you said the courts wouldn't let them --" 00:14:12.262 --> 00:14:15.438 "The courts won't let them indiscriminately google you. 00:14:15.889 --> 00:14:20.356 But once you get into the system, it becomes a selective search. All legal. 00:14:20.356 --> 00:14:24.927 And once they start googling you, they always find something." 00:14:25.824 --> 00:14:32.199 "You mean to say they've got a boiler-room of midwestern housewives reading the email of everyone who ever got a second look at the border? 00:14:32.199 --> 00:14:34.383 That sounds like the world's shittiest job." 00:14:35.165 --> 00:14:40.490 "If only. No, this is all untouched by human hands. 00:14:40.490 --> 00:14:47.444 All your data is fed into a big hopper that checks for 'suspicious patterns' and gradually builds the case against you, 00:14:47.444 --> 00:14:51.783 using deviation from statistical norms to prove that you're guilty of something. 00:14:52.707 --> 00:14:55.428 It's just a variation of the way we spot search-spammers" 00:14:55.944 --> 00:15:01.450 -- the "optimizers" who tried to get their Viagra scams and Ponzi schemes to come to the top of the search results " 00:15:01.450 --> 00:15:07.835 -- but instead of lowering your search rank, we increase your probability of being sent to Syria. 00:15:07.835 --> 00:15:13.393 And of course, they google all of us, everyone who works on anything 'sensitive.'" 00:15:14.170 --> 00:15:20.281 "Naturally," Greg said. He felt like he was going to throw up. He felt like never using a search engine again. 00:15:21.005 --> 00:15:26.748 "How the hell did this happen? It's such a good place. 'Don't be evil,' right?" 00:15:27.529 --> 00:15:31.792 That was the corporate motto, and for Greg, it had been a huge part of his reason 00:15:31.792 --> 00:15:36.024 for taking his fresh-minted computer science PhD from Stanford directly to Google. 00:15:36.709 --> 00:15:44.434 Maya's laugh was bitter and cynical. "Don't be evil? Come on, Greg. 00:15:45.081 --> 00:15:48.586 Don't you remember what it was like when we started censoring the Chinese search results, 00:15:48.586 --> 00:15:51.829 and we all asked how that could be anything but evil? 00:15:51.829 --> 00:15:57.578 The company line was hilarious: 'We're not doing evil -- we're giving them access to a better search tool! 00:15:57.578 --> 00:16:02.132 If we showed them search results they couldn't get to, that would just frustrate them. 00:16:02.132 --> 00:16:04.300 It would be a bad user experience. 00:16:05.147 --> 00:16:10.884 If we hadn't lost our don't-be-evil cherry by then, we surely did the day we took that one." 00:16:11.631 --> 00:16:15.443 "Now what?" Greg pushed a dog away from him and Maya looked hurt. 00:16:16.321 --> 00:16:19.828 "Now you're a person of interest, Greg. Googlestalked. 00:16:20.557 --> 00:16:24.735 Now, you live your life with someone watching over your shoulder, all the time. 00:16:25.402 --> 00:16:30.529 You know the mission statement, right? 'Organize all human knowledge.' That's everything. 00:16:31.176 --> 00:16:35.171 Give it five years, we'll know how many turds were in the bowl before you flushed. 00:16:35.171 --> 00:16:41.395 Combine that with automated suspicion of anyone who matches a statistical picture of a bad guy and you're --" 00:16:42.271 --> 00:16:43.471 "I'm scroogled." 00:16:44.031 --> 00:16:45.123 "Totally." 00:16:46.460 --> 00:16:50.164 "Thanks, Maya," he said. "Thanks anyway." 00:16:51.491 --> 00:16:56.275 "Sit down," she said. The dog that had been bumping at his legs was at it again. 00:16:56.956 --> 00:17:02.239 Maya took both dogs down the hall to the bedroom and he heard her muffled argument with her girlfriend. 00:17:02.933 --> 00:17:04.717 She came back without the dogs. 00:17:05.483 --> 00:17:09.690 "I can fix this," she said in a whisper so low it was practically a hiss. 00:17:10.348 --> 00:17:11.686 "I can googleclean you." 00:17:12.553 --> 00:17:14.460 "But you're under constant scrutiny --" 00:17:14.460 --> 00:17:15.914 "By DHS agents. 00:17:16.621 --> 00:17:21.708 Once they fired all non-native-born Americans from the DHS, it got a lot fatter and stupider. 00:17:22.520 --> 00:17:24.012 I can googleclean you, Greg." 00:17:24.804 --> 00:17:26.157 "I don't want you to get into trouble." 00:17:26.714 --> 00:17:30.866 She shook her head. "I'm already doomed. I built the googlecleaner. 00:17:30.866 --> 00:17:33.211 Every day since then has been borrowed time 00:17:33.792 --> 00:17:38.139 -- now it's just a matter of waiting for someone to point out my expertise and history to the DHS 00:17:38.139 --> 00:17:39.739 and, oh, I don't know. 00:17:39.747 --> 00:17:43.572 Whatever it is they do to people like me in the War on Abstract Nouns." 00:17:44.379 --> 00:17:51.428 Greg remembered the questioning at the airport. The search. His shirt, the bootprint in the middle of it. 00:17:52.228 --> 00:17:53.966 "Do it," he said. 00:17:55.235 --> 00:17:58.986 The ads were weird. He hadn't really paid attention to them in years. 00:17:59.007 --> 00:18:06.420 The blocker got rid of most of them, but Google changed its code often enough that their little text ads showed up on a lot of his pages. 00:18:06.424 --> 00:18:12.967 They stayed subliminal mostly -- only clunkers like that Ann Coulter ringtone ad made it past his eyes into his brain. 00:18:13.629 --> 00:18:20.285 Now the clunkers were everywhere: Intelligent Design Facts, Online Seminary Degree, 00:18:20.285 --> 00:18:26.754 Terror Free Tomorrow, Porn Blocker Software, Homosexuality and Satan. 00:18:26.754 --> 00:18:31.342 He clicked through a couple of these and found himself in some kind of alternate universe Internet, 00:18:31.342 --> 00:18:36.934 full of weird opinions about the evils of being gay, the certainty of the young Earth, 00:18:36.934 --> 00:18:39.980 the need for eternal national vigilance. 00:18:40.847 --> 00:18:44.528 Then he started to notice something weird about the search results themselves. 00:18:44.528 --> 00:18:50.222 After unpacking his suitcase and opening his mail, he spent two weeks sitting at home on his ass, surfing, 00:18:50.222 --> 00:18:54.424 His pre-Mexico belly was reemerging, so he decided to do something about it. 00:18:54.424 --> 00:18:59.482 No burritos for lunch today -- he'd go to that holistic place Maya had told him about. 00:18:59.482 --> 00:19:03.855 Vegan low-fat cuisine couldn't possibly be as gross as it sounded. 00:19:04.593 --> 00:19:06.523 "Did you mean 'Hungarian Restaurants'?" 00:19:07.292 --> 00:19:14.563 He snorted. No, he'd meant "holistic restaurants," you dumbass search-engine. It nagged at him. 00:19:14.563 --> 00:19:18.716 He pulled up his search history and went back through the results, printing out the pages. 00:19:18.747 --> 00:19:22.293 Then he logged out of his Google account and went back through the same searches, 00:19:22.293 --> 00:19:26.212 comparing the results to the logged-in pages. The differences were striking. 00:19:26.212 --> 00:19:32.242 A search for "democratic primary" pointed to anti-Hillary rants on angry blogs when he was logged in, 00:19:32.242 --> 00:19:36.324 and to information on volunteering for the DNC when he was logged out. 00:19:36.324 --> 00:19:41.177 Searching for "abortion clinic" while logged out listed the nearest Planned Parenthood office; 00:19:41.177 --> 00:19:47.890 searching while logged in gave him information about Campaign Life, ProLife.com, and the ProLife alliance. 00:19:47.890 --> 00:19:50.498 This was Maya's googlecleaner at work. 00:19:50.498 --> 00:19:54.662 It was like the stories of people who asked their TiVos to record an episode of "Queer Eye" 00:19:54.662 --> 00:19:58.160 and then got inundated with suggestions for other "gay shows" 00:19:58.160 --> 00:20:02.266 -- "My TiVo thinks I'm gay,"was the title of one article he remembered. 00:20:02.266 --> 00:20:06.899 Google had been experimenting with "personalized" search results before he left the country 00:20:06.899 --> 00:20:09.655 -- here it was, in all its glory. 00:20:09.655 --> 00:20:12.582 Google thought he was a conservative Christian Republican 00:20:12.582 --> 00:20:16.425 who supported the War on Terror and many other abstract nouns. 00:20:16.425 --> 00:20:21.107 He logged out of Google -- that was simple. Five minutes later, he logged in again. 00:20:21.107 --> 00:20:25.628 His entire address book was in there. He logged out again. Logged back in. 00:20:25.628 --> 00:20:29.270 His calendar -- when was his parents' anniversary again? 00:20:29.823 --> 00:20:32.010 Logged out. Logged back in. 00:20:32.010 --> 00:20:34.758 Needed his bookmarked locations in Maps. Logged out. 00:20:35.358 --> 00:20:38.919 He stopped trying. Google was where his friendships lived 00:20:38.919 --> 00:20:43.406 -- all those people he stayed connected to on Orkut. It was where his relationships lived: 00:20:43.406 --> 00:20:47.112 all that archived email, all those addresses in his address-book. 00:20:47.112 --> 00:20:49.690 It was his family photos, his bookmarks. 00:20:49.690 --> 00:20:55.368 Hell, his search history -- his real search history -- was like an outboard brain, 00:20:55.368 --> 00:20:59.026 remembering which parts of the unplumbable Internet he cared about, 00:20:59.026 --> 00:21:02.946 so that he didn't have to remember it the hard way, with the meat in his skull. 00:21:02.946 --> 00:21:08.801 Google had a copy of him -- all the parts of him that navigated the world and the people in it. 00:21:08.801 --> 00:21:13.956 Google owned that copy, and without it, he couldn't be himself anymore. 00:21:13.956 --> 00:21:16.251 He'd just have to stay logged in. 00:21:16.251 --> 00:21:20.736 Greg mashed the keys on the laptop next to his bed, bringing the screen to life. 00:21:20.736 --> 00:21:27.652 He squinted at the toolbar clock: 4:13AM! Christ, who was pounding on his door at this hour? 00:21:27.652 --> 00:21:32.021 He shouted "Coming!" in a muzzy voice and pulled on a robe and slippers. 00:21:32.021 --> 00:21:35.876 He shuffled down the hallway, turning on lights as he went, squinting. 00:21:35.876 --> 00:21:40.671 At the door, he squinted through the peephole, peering at -- Maya. 00:21:41.224 --> 00:21:45.086 He undid the chains and the deadbolt and yanked the door open and Maya rushed in past him, 00:21:45.086 --> 00:21:50.252 followed by the dogs, followed by her girlfriend, Laurie, whom he'd last seen at a Christmas party at Google, 00:21:50.252 --> 00:21:53.212 in a fabulous cocktail dress and an elaborate up-do. 00:21:53.212 --> 00:21:57.136 Now she was wearing a freebie Google Summer of Code sweatshirt, jeans, 00:21:57.136 --> 00:22:01.532 and a frown that started between her eyebrows and intensified all the way down her face. 00:22:01.532 --> 00:22:05.259 Maya was sheened with sweat, her hair sticking to her forehead. 00:22:05.259 --> 00:22:08.068 She scrubbed at her eyes, which were red and lined. 00:22:08.699 --> 00:22:11.060 "Pack a bag," she said, in a hoarse croak. 00:22:11.060 --> 00:22:11.914 "What?" 00:22:12.421 --> 00:22:14.783 "Whatever you can't live without. A couple changes of clothes. 00:22:14.783 --> 00:22:18.932 Anything you're sentimental about -- shoebox of pictures, your grandfather's razor, whatever. 00:22:18.932 --> 00:22:22.127 But keep it small, something you can carry. We're traveling light." 00:22:22.680 --> 00:22:23.934 "Maya, what are you --" 00:22:23.934 --> 00:22:29.364 She took him by the shoulders. "Do. It," she said. "Don't ask questions right now. There's no time." 00:22:29.887 --> 00:22:31.125 "Where do you want to --" 00:22:31.125 --> 00:22:34.087 "Mexico, probably. Don't know yet. Pack, dammit." 00:22:34.087 --> 00:22:37.647 She pushed past him into his bedroom and started yanking open drawers. 00:22:38.339 --> 00:22:42.512 "Maya," he said, sharply, "I'm not going anywhere until you tell me what's going on." 00:22:43.281 --> 00:22:45.669 She glared at him and pushed her hair away from her face. 00:22:45.669 --> 00:22:49.702 "The googlecleaner lives. I shut it down, walked away from it, after I did you. 00:22:49.702 --> 00:22:51.571 It was too dangerous to use anymore. 00:22:51.571 --> 00:22:55.333 But I still get buginizer notifications when new bugs get filed against it, 00:22:55.333 --> 00:22:57.484 I'm still in B as the project's owner. 00:22:57.484 --> 00:23:00.547 Someone filed eight bugs against it this week. 00:23:00.547 --> 00:23:05.704 Someone's used it six times to smear six very specific accounts." 00:23:06.427 --> 00:23:07.480 "Who's using it?" 00:23:07.480 --> 00:23:11.254 "Well, I'll give you a hint. Let me tell you who's been cleaned this week --" 00:23:11.254 --> 00:23:17.191 She listed six candidates, four Republican and two Democrat, who were all in the running for the primaries. 00:23:17.760 --> 00:23:20.412 "Googlers are blackwashing political candidates?" 00:23:21.012 --> 00:23:26.260 "Not Googlers. This is all coming from offsite. The IP block is registered in DC. 00:23:26.260 --> 00:23:31.020 And the IPs are all also used by Gmail users. And those Gmail users --" 00:23:31.020 --> 00:23:33.089 "You spied on gmail accounts?" 00:23:33.089 --> 00:23:34.819 "I'm leaving in two minutes, with or without you. 00:23:34.819 --> 00:23:37.318 You can interrupt me to ask me questions, or you can listen." 00:23:37.779 --> 00:23:39.032 She gave him another look. 00:23:39.032 --> 00:23:43.914 Laurie stood in the door of the bedroom, holding the dogs by the collars and looking down at the floor. 00:23:44.590 --> 00:23:47.991 "Good. OK. Yes. I did spy on their email. Of course I did. 00:23:47.991 --> 00:23:51.701 Everyone does it, now and again, and for a lot worse reasons that this. 00:23:52.362 --> 00:23:56.911 "It's our lobbying firm. The ones who invented the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Remember them? 00:23:56.911 --> 00:24:02.253 It was a stink when we hired them, but Google couldn't afford to be 'that company full of registered Democrats' forever. 00:24:02.253 --> 00:24:05.980 We needed friends in Congress. These guys could do it for us." 00:24:05.980 --> 00:24:08.564 "But they're ruining politicians' careers!" 00:24:08.564 --> 00:24:11.641 "Yeah. They certainly are. And who benefits when they do that?" 00:24:11.641 --> 00:24:15.041 Laurie spoke, at last. "Other politicians." 00:24:15.041 --> 00:24:18.536 He felt his pulse beating in his temples. "We should tell someone." 00:24:19.151 --> 00:24:23.044 "Yeah," Maya said. "How? They know everything about us. 00:24:23.044 --> 00:24:27.653 They can see every search. Every email. Every time we've been caught on the webcams. 00:24:27.653 --> 00:24:31.482 Who is in our social network -- you know that if you've got more than fifteen Orkut buddies, 00:24:31.482 --> 00:24:36.789 it's statistically certain that you're no more than three steps to someone who's contributed money to a 'terrorist' cause? 00:24:37.589 --> 00:24:40.977 Remember the airport? Imagine a lot more of that." 00:24:41.684 --> 00:24:47.711 "Maya," he said, carefully. "I think you're over-reacting. You don't need to go to Mexico. 00:24:47.711 --> 00:24:51.306 You can just quit. We can do a startup together or something. 00:24:51.306 --> 00:24:56.016 Or you can move to the country and raise dogs. Whatever. This is crazy --" 00:24:56.769 --> 00:25:00.800 "They came to see me today," she said. "At work. Two of the political officers 00:25:00.800 --> 00:25:06.055 -- the minders who monitor our sensitive projects. And they asked me a lot of very heavy questions." 00:25:06.055 --> 00:25:07.539 "About the googlecleaner?" 00:25:07.539 --> 00:25:12.023 "About my friends and family. About my search history. About my political beliefs." 00:25:12.639 --> 00:25:13.631 "Jesus." 00:25:13.631 --> 00:25:17.529 "They were sending me a message. They were letting me know that they were onto me. 00:25:17.529 --> 00:25:22.130 They're watching every click and every search. It's time to go -- time to get out of range." 00:25:22.791 --> 00:25:24.984 "There's a Google office in Mexico, you know." 00:25:24.984 --> 00:25:27.391 "Are you coming, Greg? We're going now." 00:25:28.590 --> 00:25:30.855 "Laurie, what do you think of this?" 00:25:31.717 --> 00:25:37.683 Laurie thumped the dogs between the shoulders. "Maya showed me what Google knows about me. 00:25:37.683 --> 00:25:44.432 It's like there's a little me in there, a copy of me. Like I'm pinned down under a jar with a ball of ether. 00:25:44.939 --> 00:25:50.163 My parents left East Germany in '65 -- they used to tell me about the Stasi. 00:25:50.163 --> 00:25:54.061 They'd put everything about you in your file -- even unpatriotic jokes. 00:25:54.707 --> 00:26:01.383 Lately I've been feeling...watched. All the time. Like I can't live without leaving a trail. 00:26:01.383 --> 00:26:05.156 Like I'm throwing off a smog of data and it can't be gotten rid of." 00:26:06.017 --> 00:26:08.840 "We're going now, Greg. Now. Are you coming?" 00:26:09.640 --> 00:26:13.818 Greg looked at the dogs. "I've got some pesos left over," he said. 00:26:13.818 --> 00:26:16.425 "You take them. Be careful, OK?" 00:26:17.271 --> 00:26:19.386 She looked like she was going to slug him. 00:26:19.386 --> 00:26:25.272 Then she softened and gave him a ferocious hug. "Be careful yourself," she whispered in his ear. 00:26:27.086 --> 00:26:31.695 They came for him a week later. At home, in the middle of the night, just as he'd imagined it. 00:26:31.695 --> 00:26:35.232 Their knock was nothing like Maya's tentative, nervous thump. 00:26:35.232 --> 00:26:39.905 They went bang-bang-bang, confident, knowing that they had every right to be there 00:26:39.905 --> 00:26:42.165 and not caring who else came after them. 00:26:43.041 --> 00:26:46.089 Two men. One stayed by the door and didn't say anything. 00:26:46.089 --> 00:26:52.267 The other was a smiler, short and rumpled, in a sports coat with a small stain on one lapel 00:26:52.267 --> 00:26:54.406 and an American flag on the other. 00:26:54.406 --> 00:26:57.835 "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act," he said, by way of introduction. 00:26:57.835 --> 00:27:02.951 "'Exceeding authorized access, and by means of such conduct having obtained information. 00:27:02.951 --> 00:27:07.297 Ten years for a first offense, ever since the PATRIOT Act extended it. 00:27:07.297 --> 00:27:12.479 I have it on the best of authority that what you and your friend did to your Google records qualifies. 00:27:13.294 --> 00:27:19.361 And oh, what will come out in the trial. All the stuff you whitewashed out of your profile." 00:27:20.076 --> 00:27:22.633 Greg had been playing this scene out in his head for a week. 00:27:22.633 --> 00:27:25.950 He'd had all kinds of brave things to say, planned out in advance. 00:27:25.950 --> 00:27:28.628 He'd even written some down, to see how they looked. 00:27:28.628 --> 00:27:32.076 It had given him something to do while the knots in his stomach tightened, 00:27:32.076 --> 00:27:33.760 while he waited to hear from Maya. 00:27:34.990 --> 00:27:39.716 "I'd like to call a lawyer," is all he managed. It came out in a whisper. 00:27:39.716 --> 00:27:43.265 "You can do that," the man said. "But hear me out first." 00:27:44.126 --> 00:27:47.920 Greg found his voice. "I'd like to see your badge." 00:27:48.642 --> 00:27:58.342 The man's basset-hound face lit up as he hissed a laugh. "Oh, Greg, buddy. I'm not a cop. I work for --" 00:27:58.342 --> 00:28:03.482 He named the DC firm in Google's employ. The inventors of swiftboating. 00:28:03.974 --> 00:28:06.767 "You're a Googler. You're part of the family. 00:28:06.767 --> 00:28:12.386 We wouldn't send the police after you without talking with you first. There's an offer I'd like to make." 00:28:13.278 --> 00:28:14.531 Greg made coffee. 00:28:14.531 --> 00:28:19.314 It gave him something to do with his hands while he tried to find that bravery he'd been honing all week. 00:28:19.314 --> 00:28:23.671 "I'll go to the press," he said. "I've written this all up. I'll go straight to them." 00:28:24.501 --> 00:28:26.659 The guy nodded as if thinking it over. 00:28:26.659 --> 00:28:31.992 "Well, sure. You could walk into the Chronicle's office in the morning and spill everything you need. 00:28:31.992 --> 00:28:35.661 They'd try to find a confirming source. They won't find it. 00:28:36.353 --> 00:28:39.155 Maybe you'll try to show them what your profile looks like today? 00:28:39.155 --> 00:28:44.194 Well, tell you what, it looks just like it looked the day you landed at SFO. 00:28:44.917 --> 00:28:50.733 Greg, buddy, why don't you hear me out before you start trying to figure out how to fight me? 00:28:51.409 --> 00:28:57.056 I'm in the win-win business. I'm in the business of figuring out how to get all parties what they need. 00:28:57.702 --> 00:29:03.395 I'm very good at it. You don't even want to know what I'm billing Google for this little tete-a-tete. 00:29:03.395 --> 00:29:07.343 By the way, those are excellent beans, but you want to give them a little rinse first, 00:29:07.343 --> 00:29:12.269 takes some of the bitterness out and brings up the oils. Here, pass me a colander?" 00:29:13.038 --> 00:29:17.846 Greg watched in numb bemusement as the man took off his jacket and hung it over a kitchen chair, 00:29:17.846 --> 00:29:22.648 then undid his cuffs and rolled them up, slipping a cheap digital watch into his pocket. 00:29:22.648 --> 00:29:28.210 Then he poured the beans back out of the grinder and into Greg's colander and did things at the sink. 00:29:28.979 --> 00:29:35.204 He was a little pudgy, and very pale. He needed a haircut -- he had unruly curls at his neck. 00:29:35.204 --> 00:29:37.165 It made Greg relax, somehow. 00:29:37.902 --> 00:29:43.290 This guy had the social gracelessness of a nerd, felt like a real Googler, obsessed with the minutiae. 00:29:43.290 --> 00:29:45.542 He knew his way around a coffee-grinder, too. 00:29:46.049 --> 00:29:48.923 "We're drafting a team for Building 49 --" 00:29:48.923 --> 00:29:52.128 "There is no building 49," Greg said, automatically. 00:29:52.128 --> 00:29:57.971 "Yeah," the guy said, with a private little smile. "There's no Building 49. 00:29:58.617 --> 00:30:02.975 And we're putting together a team, with its own buginizer, to own googlecleaner. 00:30:02.975 --> 00:30:08.383 Maya's code wasn't very efficient. Every time someone runs it, it clobbers the whole farm. 00:30:08.383 --> 00:30:12.532 And it's got plenty of bugs. We've asked around and there's consensus on this. 00:30:12.532 --> 00:30:17.056 You'd be the right guy, and it wouldn't matter what you knew if you were back inside --" 00:30:17.732 --> 00:30:20.160 "No, I wouldn't," Greg said. "You're on crack." 00:30:20.160 --> 00:30:26.855 "Hear me out. There's money involved. Good work, too. Smart colleagues. A direction for your life. 00:30:26.855 --> 00:30:29.637 A chance to participate in the political life of your country --" 00:30:29.637 --> 00:30:34.575 Greg gave a bitter laugh. "Unbelievable," he said. 00:30:34.575 --> 00:30:41.038 "If you think I'm going to help you smear political candidates in exchange for favors, you're even crazier than I thought." 00:30:42.053 --> 00:30:49.785 "Greg," he said, "Greg, you're right. That was dumb. No one is going to do that anymore. 00:30:50.431 --> 00:30:58.017 We're just going to -- clean things up a little. For some select people. You know what I mean, right? 00:30:58.017 --> 00:31:02.216 Every Google profile is a little scary under close inspection. 00:31:02.908 --> 00:31:05.585 Close inspection is the order of the day in politics. 00:31:06.139 --> 00:31:10.283 You stand for office and they'll look at your kids, your brothers, your ex-girlfriends. 00:31:10.283 --> 00:31:15.864 Now that your search history is available to so many people, it won't be that hard to look into that too. 00:31:16.494 --> 00:31:20.643 Your Orkut network, your old Usenet messages, your searches, all of it." 00:31:21.105 --> 00:31:26.570 He loaded the cafetiere and depressed the plunger, his face screwed up in solemn concentration. 00:31:27.139 --> 00:31:33.710 He held out his hand and Greg got down two coffee mugs -- Google mugs, of course -- and passed them to him. 00:31:34.648 --> 00:31:40.263 "We're going to do for our friends just what Maya did for you. Just give them a little cleanup. 00:31:40.263 --> 00:31:44.976 Preserve their privacy. That's all -- I promise you, that's all." 00:31:45.683 --> 00:31:48.266 Greg sipped the coffee, but didn't taste it. 00:31:48.835 --> 00:31:50.904 "And whichever candidates you don't clean --" 00:31:51.488 --> 00:31:55.711 "Yeah," the guy said. "Yeah, you're right. It'll be tough for them." 00:31:56.572 --> 00:31:58.241 "You can go now," Greg said. 00:31:59.056 --> 00:32:04.831 "Oh, Greg," the guy said. He plucked his jacket off his chair-back and shrugged it on, 00:32:04.831 --> 00:32:09.612 felt in the inside pocket and produced a small stack of paper, folded into quarters. 00:32:09.612 --> 00:32:12.093 He smoothed it out and put it on the table. 00:32:12.816 --> 00:32:16.775 Greg looked quickly and saw the rows of results he'd seen on the DHS man's screen, 00:32:16.775 --> 00:32:18.828 back at the airport, when this all started. 00:32:19.551 --> 00:32:22.969 "I don't care," he said. "Tell the world about my search history. Go ahead. 00:32:22.969 --> 00:32:26.936 In five years, everyone will have had their search history ruptured. We'll all be guilty." 00:32:27.705 --> 00:32:32.122 "It's not your history," the man said. He divided the stack into two piles, 00:32:32.122 --> 00:32:34.870 and pointed to names on the top sheet of each. 00:32:34.870 --> 00:32:36.584 One was Maya's. 00:32:36.584 --> 00:32:41.381 The other was a candidate whose campaign Greg had contributed to for the last three elections. 00:32:41.381 --> 00:32:45.233 "You get five weeks' vacation a year. You can go to Cabo for the SCUBA. 00:32:45.233 --> 00:32:48.019 The options package is very generous, too." 00:32:48.742 --> 00:32:54.114 The man sat down and drank some coffee. Greg tried some more of his own. It didn't taste so bad. 00:32:54.821 --> 00:32:59.192 It was, in fact, more delicious than anything that had ever come out of his kitchen. 00:32:59.192 --> 00:33:01.076 The man knew what he was doing. 00:33:01.660 --> 00:33:04.158 The best years of Greg's life had been spent at Google. 00:33:04.158 --> 00:33:10.784 Smart people. Amazing work environment. Wonderful technology. Nothing in the world like it. 00:33:11.537 --> 00:33:15.203 When you worked at G, you had the best model train set in the universe to play with. 00:33:15.203 --> 00:33:17.195 Organizing all of human knowledge. 00:33:18.363 --> 00:33:21.464 "You can pick your team, of course," the man said. 00:33:21.464 --> 00:33:24.619 Greg poured himself another cup of delicious coffee. 00:33:25.203 --> 00:33:26.996 The new Congress took eleven working days 00:33:26.996 --> 00:33:31.374 to pass the Securing and Enumerating America's Communications and Hypertext Act, 00:33:31.374 --> 00:33:38.719 which authorized the DHS and the NSA to outsource up to 80 percent of its intelligence and analysis work to private contractors. 00:33:39.288 --> 00:33:44.196 Theoretically, the contracts were open to a competitive bidding process, but within the secure group at Google, 00:33:44.196 --> 00:33:47.987 in building 49, there was no question of who would win those contracts. 00:33:47.987 --> 00:33:52.639 If Google had spent $15 billion on a program to catch bad guys at the border, 00:33:52.639 --> 00:33:57.237 you can bet that they would have caught them -- governments just aren't equipped to Do Search Right. 00:33:57.898 --> 00:34:00.549 Greg looked himself in the eye that morning as he shaved 00:34:00.549 --> 00:34:04.926 -- the security minders didn't like hacker-stubble, and they weren't shy about telling you so -- 00:34:04.926 --> 00:34:10.514 and realized that today was his first day as a de facto intelligence agent in the US government. 00:34:11.175 --> 00:34:16.304 How bad would it be? Wasn't it better to have Google doing this stuff than some ham-fisted spook? 00:34:17.073 --> 00:34:22.511 He had himself convinced by the time he parked at the Googleplex, among the hybrid cars and bulging bike-racks. 00:34:22.511 --> 00:34:27.488 He stopped for an organic smoothie on the way to his desk, then sat down and sipped. 00:34:28.611 --> 00:34:31.726 The rumpled man hadn't been to the G since Greg went back to work, 00:34:31.726 --> 00:34:35.043 but it often felt like his influence was all around them in building 49. 00:34:35.043 --> 00:34:37.179 He wasn't any less rumpled today 00:34:37.179 --> 00:34:43.680 -- he could have been wrapped in saran-wrap on the day he brought Greg back to work and refrigerated for all that he hadn't changed a hair. 00:34:43.680 --> 00:34:46.958 "Hi, Greg," he said, sliding into the chair next to his. 00:34:46.958 --> 00:34:49.872 His podmates stood up in unison and left the room. 00:34:49.872 --> 00:34:56.811 "Just tell me what it is," Greg said. "Just spit it out. You want me to pwn NORAD and start World War III, right?" 00:34:57.348 --> 00:35:02.399 "Nothing so obvious," the man said, patting his shoulder. "Just a little search-job." 00:35:03.229 --> 00:35:04.336 "Yeah?" 00:35:04.337 --> 00:35:08.948 "There's a person we want to find. A person who's left the country, apparently headed for Mexico. 00:35:08.948 --> 00:35:12.585 She knows certain things that are, as of today, classified. 00:35:12.585 --> 00:35:15.058 She needs to be briefed on her new responsibilities." 00:35:15.058 --> 00:35:19.806 Greg stood up. "I'm not going to find Maya for you." He pulled on his jacket. 00:35:19.806 --> 00:35:23.715 "There are plenty of people here who will. It's up to you, though. 00:35:23.715 --> 00:35:28.947 You can work here with her, being productive, or you can find out just how rotten life can get 00:35:28.947 --> 00:35:32.163 -- while she works here, being productive with your co-workers." 00:35:33.793 --> 00:35:36.510 Greg stared at him, his hands balled into fists. 00:35:37.448 --> 00:35:42.140 "Come on," the rumpled man said. "Greg, we both know how this goes. 00:35:42.140 --> 00:35:48.456 When you said yes to me in your kitchen, you lost the option of saying no. It's not so bad, is it? 00:35:48.456 --> 00:35:52.590 Who would you rather have doing the nation's intelligence: you and your pals here in the Valley, 00:35:52.590 --> 00:35:55.689 or a bunch of straight-edge code-grinders in Virginia?" 00:35:55.689 --> 00:35:58.104 Greg turned on his heel and left. 00:35:58.472 --> 00:36:04.220 He made it all the way to the parking lot before he stopped and kicked a wall so hard he felt something give way in his foot. 00:36:04.958 --> 00:36:09.959 Then he limped back to his desk, hung his jacket on his chair, and logged back in. 00:36:10.974 --> 00:36:14.607 It was a week later when his key-card failed to open the door to Building 49. 00:36:14.607 --> 00:36:20.416 The idiot red LED shone at him every time he swiped it. He swiped it and swiped it. 00:36:20.416 --> 00:36:24.684 Any other building and there'd be someone to tailgate on, people trickling in and out all day. 00:36:24.684 --> 00:36:29.189 But the Googlers in 49 only emerged for meals, and sometimes not even that. 00:36:29.189 --> 00:36:33.051 Swipe, swipe, swipe. 00:36:33.051 --> 00:36:35.710 "Greg, can I see you, please?" 00:36:36.479 --> 00:36:38.733 The rumpled man hadn't shaved in a couple of days. 00:36:38.733 --> 00:36:43.234 He put an arm around Greg's shoulders and Greg smelled his citrusy aftershave. 00:36:43.987 --> 00:36:48.246 It was the same cologne that his divemaster in Baja had worn when they went out to the bars in the evening. 00:36:48.246 --> 00:36:52.902 Greg couldn't remember his name. Juan-Carlos? Juan-Luis? 00:36:53.825 --> 00:36:57.713 The man's arm around his shoulders was firm, steering him away from the door, 00:36:57.713 --> 00:37:01.153 out onto the immaculate lawn, past the kitchen's herb garden. 00:37:01.922 --> 00:37:04.323 "We're giving you a couple of days off," he said. 00:37:05.077 --> 00:37:08.533 Greg felt a cold premonition that sank all the way to his balls. 00:37:08.533 --> 00:37:12.447 "Why?" Had he done something wrong? Was he going to jail? 00:37:13.247 --> 00:37:18.214 "It's Maya." The man turned him around, met his eyes with his bottomless basset-hound gaze. 00:37:18.214 --> 00:37:24.959 "It's Maya. Killed herself. In Guatemala. I'm sorry, Greg." 00:37:26.834 --> 00:37:33.051 Greg seemed to hurtle away from himself, to a place miles above, a Google Earth view of the Googleplex, 00:37:33.051 --> 00:37:39.096 looking down on himself and the rumpled man as a pair of dots, two pixels, tiny and insignificant. 00:37:39.112 --> 00:37:43.972 He willed himself to tear at his hair, to drop to his knees and weep. 00:37:43.972 --> 00:37:49.294 From a long way away, he heard himself say, "I don't need any time off. I'm OK." 00:37:49.770 --> 00:37:52.971 From a long way away, he heard the rumpled man insist. 00:37:52.971 --> 00:37:55.367 But one-pixel Greg wouldn't be turned aside. 00:37:55.367 --> 00:38:03.576 The argument persisted for a long time, and then the two pixels moved into Building 49 and the door swung shut behind them. 00:38:15.499 --> 00:38:21.363 Doctorow: This one came as a commission from Radar magazine -- now defunct, a casualty of the 2008 crash, 00:38:21.363 --> 00:38:26.160 but in 2007, it was the most widely circulated "lifestyle" magazine in the US. 00:38:26.160 --> 00:38:30.769 They asked me to write about "the day Google became evil." 00:38:30.769 --> 00:38:34.926 I didn't want to cheap out and just write about the company selling out to some evil millionaire. 00:38:34.926 --> 00:38:39.382 If Google ever turned evil, it would be because a) evil had a compelling business-model 00:38:39.382 --> 00:38:42.924 and b) evil lay at the end of a compelling technical challenge. 00:38:42.924 --> 00:38:48.229 I spent a lot of time talking off-the-record to Googlers, who are, to a one, the nicest people I know 00:38:48.229 --> 00:38:52.982 (OK, one exception springs to mind, but let's not air our dirty laundry in public, right?). 00:38:52.982 --> 00:38:58.203 I also had an incredibly productive conversation with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Kevin Bankston, 00:38:58.203 --> 00:39:00.664 a profound and sharp-witted privacy lawyer. 00:39:00.664 --> 00:39:05.656 I wanted to capture a company that was full of good people who do bad. There are lots of these. 00:39:05.656 --> 00:39:11.248 For example, all the Microsoft employees I know are fantastic and smart and caring and principled. 00:39:11.248 --> 00:39:15.149 But ethically and technically, most of what comes out of Redmond is a train-wreck. 00:39:15.149 --> 00:39:19.178 It's anti-synergy: a firm that is far less than the sum of its parts. 00:39:19.178 --> 00:39:21.682 I could easily see Google turning into that. 00:39:21.682 --> 00:39:26.081 I wish I understood how groups of good people trying to do good can do bad.