Its a Saturday and low on my priorities today is serious writing.  I need a quick tech fill however and hopped over to Digg where I came across a great story from a writer that works for Google debunking the myth that Google works for or in collaboration with the CIA.

Now the article doesn’t really debunk anything with proof, the debunkation buck stops short of the mark and sidetracks on a very funny dialogue between a Google Public Relations Person and a Google Founder.

From a personal perspective, I don’t care one way or the other.  Both groups will do what they have to do in order to get ahead.

Could Google have been cooperating with the US Government when they moved their Chinese user database out of China and out of the hands of the Chinese government and Red Army?

Sure such a move was good for corporate relations, but it would have been good for the US government too.

Of Course Google had previously agreed to censor searches in China.

So on an evil scale of 1 to 10

Google might see giving search records to the Chinese government as an 8, but censoring information from Chinese citizens is only evil at about a 5 or 6 and advertising for russian dating women at a 0.5 to a -2, but the Google culture might even see importing Russian brides as a public service for the brides and the nerds that bring them to the states so maybe its a -10 on the evil scale.   Either way they see it that helping the Chinese Government directly is more evil than withholding the raw information from their Chinese customers.  Its a corporate dilemma worthy of Solomon and worked out by mere mortal Googlions.

Playing into the hands and designs of the CIA and or some other group yet to be named by conspiracy theorists is off the scales (you be the judge of which direction it is going off the scales).  Then again is Google being devilishly smart, kind of like The Firm Character, Mitch (aka Google) has secreted away its database some where in a safe harbor where no government can touch it, not the Chinese and not the US.  Its good for the CIA the Chinese can’t touch it but may not be helping the US stay the course in the War on Terror.

But then again the NSA has been working on systems and codes for a lot longer than Google has been putting together algorithms.   Google may know how to get the right search result most of the time off the internet but I’ll bet you dollars to donuts the NSA knows how to get information out of a Google DB when they need it, safe harbor or not.

[insert maniacal laugh here]

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