Google’s secret NSA alliance: The terrifying deals between Silicon Valley and the security state
In mid-December 2009, engineers at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, began to suspect that hackers in China had obtained access to private Gmail accounts, including those used by Chinese human rights activists opposed to the government in Beijing.
Like a lot of large, well-known Internet companies, Google and its users were frequently targeted by cyber spies and criminals. But when the engineers looked more closely, they discovered that this was no ordinary hacking campaign.
In what Google would later describe as “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China,” the thieves were able to get access to the password system that allowed Google’s users to sign in to many Google applications at once. This was some of the company’s most important intellectual property, considered among the “crown jewels” of its source code by its engineers. Google wanted concrete evidence of the break-in that it could share with U.S. law enforcement and intelligence authorities. So they traced the intrusion back to what they believed was its source — a server in Taiwan where data was sent after it was siphoned off Google’s systems, and that was presumably under the control of hackers in mainland China.
“Google broke in to the server,” says a former senior intelligence official who’s familiar with the company’s response. The decision wasn’t without legal risk, according to the official. Was this a case of hacking back? Just as there’s no law against a homeowner following a robber back to where he lives, Google didn’t violate any laws by tracing the source of the intrusion into its systems. It’s still unclear how the company’s investigators gained access to the server, but once inside, if they had removed or deleted data, that would cross a legal line. But Google didn’t destroy what it found. In fact, the company did something unexpected and unprecedented — it shared the information.
Google uncovered evidence of one of the most extensive and far-reaching campaigns of cyber espionage in U.S. history. Evidence suggested that Chinese hackers had penetrated the systems of nearly three dozen other companies, including technology mainstays such as Symantec, Yahoo, and Adobe, the defense contractor Northrop Grumman, and the equipment maker Juniper Networks. The breadth of the campaign made it hard to discern a single motive. Was this industrial espionage? Spying on human rights activists? Was China trying to gain espionage footholds in key sectors of the U.S. economy or, worse, implant malware in equipment used to regulate critical infrastructure?
http://www.salon.com/2014/11/16/googles_secret_nsa_alliance_the_terrifying_deals_between_silicon_valley_and_the_security_state/
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I'm grateful to Shane Harris for finally delivering what I've futilely been asking Snow-Wald to produce for the past year and a half, which is documented proof of complicity by the telecoms and Silicon Valley...For those keeping score, this is the THIRD major domino I've been eventually vindicated on after being pilloried on DU for months...
From day one, Greenwald, Snowden, the EFF and ACLU have made it a point to portray Silicon Valley as powerless victims in the NSA scandal, and I'd said at the time it was bullshit since Google wants to hoover up the same mass data as the NSA (albeit for different reasons), so isn't it logical that they would work together for a mutual goal?
But to the contrary, not only have Greenwald and his legion of cronies and useful idiots had this info about corporate involvement at their disposal and chose *NOT* to report it, they have actively re-directed the conversation every time it was going in that direction...My big question (for those DUers who haven't put me on ignore yet) is: Why would they do that? Once I find the answer to this, I'll have the answer to everything...
= new reply since forum marked as read
