[Mb-civic] I'm Feeling . . . Surveilled - Eugene Robinson - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

I'm Feeling . . . Surveilled

By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, January 24, 2006; A17

It's so easy, so seductive, such a reliable source of instant 
gratification. Just put your cursor inside that familiar unadorned 
rectangle, type a name or a few artfully considered words, click the 
search button -- I never click on "I'm Feeling Lucky" because luck has 
nothing to do with it; this is all about having mad skills, about Google 
mastery -- and within mere fractions of a second you can luxuriate in 
the illusion of perfect omniscience.

We Google because we think we must, but sometimes we Google simply 
because we can. When we're feeling especially cocky or especially 
insecure, we Google ourselves. When I do that, I get links to columns 
I've written, along with links to screeds that others have written about 
those columns. But I also get links to material about the pro football 
player who shares my name, and who once had the misfortune of being 
arrested for soliciting a prostitute, actually an undercover cop, the 
night before he was to play in the Super Bowl.

As if that weren't enough, now there's another intruder -- another 
writer, of all things, who has my name and is also African American. He 
seems to have worked mainly in magazines, not newspapers, and one link 
speaks of his "love of crime and mayhem" (only on the printed page, I 
presume) and his "belief in the transformative power of violence." Both 
these guys are younger than I am, and since I was here first, they 
really should be required to use a middle initial or something.

But I digress.

The point was omniscience, or apparent omniscience. All you need is a 
computer and an Internet connection. Google then uses its tens of 
thousands of servers to let you believe you know all there is to know 
about everything and everybody. In truth, of course, what you get from a 
Google search is an overload of information and pseudo-information. If 
you come across two versions of a fact -- the birth date of an aging 
world leader, say -- you can go with the one that gets the most hits, 
but you do so at your own peril. The mob can be dead wrong.

But if Google's search results aren't truly omniscient, it turns out 
that the company itself is potentially so. Google has the ability to 
track an individual's searches -- to record where your mind wanders when 
the boss isn't looking, what political commentators you read, what 
you're thinking about buying and what price you're willing to pay, even 
what kinds of fantasies you entertain late at night.

Google is able to know too much, and I guess it's no surprise that the 
Bush administration wants in on the action. The Justice Department's 
demand to see an entire week's worth of Google searches looks to me like 
an attempt by the administration to get its foot in the door, and if I'm 
right, it's even more of an Orwellian threat than the National Security 
Agency's snooping on phone calls and e-mails. The NSA snooping is 
illegal and unforgivable, to be sure, but the spooks want access to 
communications, and when we communicate with another human being we 
always censor ourselves to some degree. When we ask a question of 
Google, it's akin to being in the privacy of the confessional. We lay 
ourselves bare.

Google is right to resist the Justice Department's overreaching 
subpoena. Cyber-privacy is going to be one of the great issues of the 
coming years, as servers fill up with more and more of our most intimate 
dreams, ambitions, beliefs and fears. It's much easier to store 
information in cyberspace than to erase it -- it's hard even to find all 
the actual machines on which a certain computer file resides. Computers 
do our remembering for us these days, and government can't be given a 
license to browse at will.

Keeping government at bay will be an ongoing process, because in the 
Information Age both technology and hegemony are short-lived. Dell 
clawed its way to becoming the dominant manufacturer of computers, but 
then hardware became almost a commodity and prices began to plummet. 
Microsoft has maintained its near-monopoly in operating system software, 
but Bill Gates is frantically trying to adapt before Google moves that 
whole business to the Web.

Someday, I imagine, you'll probably be able to type (or maybe just think 
) the name of a person, and a life-size hologram of the subject will 
instantly appear in your living room. In which case, I hope Gene 
Robinson the beefy football player and Gene Robinson the violence-loving 
writer know how to take a joke.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/23/AR2006012301254.html?nav=hcmodule
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