During the days of rampant anti-terrorism hard-ons (are those days even past? Maybe not…), the Department of Defense casually created something called the Information Awareness Office, whose main project was the ominously titled “Total Information Awareness” initiative. Conspiracy theorists the world over went nuts over their logo, which depicted an eye at the top of a pyramid (like on the dollar bill) firing some sort of scanning beams over a twirling globe. Over much public outcry, TIA was re-named to “Terrorist Information Awareness” and they re-did their website with new logos and language. Fortunately, you can still see the original versions at various locations on the web.

Funding for the newly re-defined TIA was eventually revoked by Congress (if I remember correctly), but work on such projects was surely not disbanded - just driven out of the public eye. Why? Because information equals money, that’s why. But preventing terrorism is to protect our freedoms, right? Not really. The reason you would want to prevent terrorist attacks is to minimize potential damage to property. Freedom is incidental.

The TIA was one of those octopus-style systems which was designed to reach into every facet of life and correlate information about everyone and everything into one central database. From that, the idea was to spot trends before it was too late. So what was so wrong about that? Spotting trends, saving property and lives - that all sounds semi-legit, even if they did have a creepy logo. What went wrong? Why did people flip out about TIA and pull the plug?

Simple: it was bad branding. The benefits to the consumer (the voting American public) were perceived as being far less than the total costs to the consumer (invasions of privacy, etc). Plus there’s this whole American fantasy about not letting the government have too much control over our lives. I say it’s a fantasy, of course, because it is. But people like to *feel* like it’s not. People like to feel like they’re Patriots in the original sense of the Boston Tea Party and all that shit.

Meanwhile, we don’t seem to have any mental blocks whatsoever as a culture about hanging over control of our lives to non-government groups. Case in point: Google. Their stated corporate mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” How do they do that? They build a big shiny pyramid with an eye on it which fires magical beams at the globe and collects data. Trillions and trillions of piece of data. And correlates them all together. So what the hell is the difference between what Google does and what the TIA project was all about?

Nothing! Nothing but better branding, that is. Compared to TIA, Google offered greater benefits to the consumer. They don’t just collect data to stop somebody from doing something; they collect data to enable people to do things. Just like their corporate mission says, they make it “universally accesible and useful.” And because they offer really damned useful benefits, we’re (myself included) more than happy to hand them over all our data. I mean really, imagine if a government agent came to your house demanding you give him access to all the files on your computer, let him read through all your email, saved all your online chats, looked through your search history, and all the websites you’ve ever looked at. More than likely, you would go ballistic - perhaps even literally so if you were a militia member (PS. how come nobody talks about them anymore?) And yet, Google does the same thing, they just do it unobtrusively, and they give something back - something that’s not so intangible and idealistic as fear… and anti-terrorism… something or other.

Oh, plus Google has that whole cute little motto, “Don’t be evil.” It’s brilliant. Imagine the US Government had that as a motto. We wouldn’t even need the Constitution or the Bill of Rights with all those annoying and hard to remember clauses and legal mumbo jumbo.

Anyway, looking at this as a matter of branding differences between two organizations interests me because it sheds new light on the legal wrangling that happened a couple of months ago where the Department of Justice kept demanding and Google kept refusing to hand over it’s search engine logs for a one week period. Again, the government went with the angle of trying to prevent something from happening, in this case they were trying to police porn (or. However, it looks like a compromise is about to be hammered out between the two parties. Interestingly, the judge involved in the case, James Ware, has cited what essentially amount to matters of branding in his protection of Google. Check this out from ZDNet:

Ware said he was reluctant to give the Justice Department everything it wanted because of the “perception by the public that this is subject to government scrutiny” when they type search terms into Google.

Note the use of the word “perception” here. He’s talking about branding. He’s working with an enormous company, and recognizing that they have a brand image to maintain - that of providing beneficial services at a minimal cost to the user. He is recognizing that he can’t upset that balance within the public imagination without endangering a company which likely generate huge tax revenues and is a useful ally for the government.

Also interesting is the alternative Judge Ware seems to be offering the Department of Justice - while simultaneously granting them access to a trimmed down portion of their original demands (which were probably over-inflated to begin with intentionally, knowing this would happen).

“They can go to Alexa,” Gidari said. “They have four billion URLs.”

Gidari said that Alexa Internet, which is owned by Amazon.com, is a site that offers Web analytics services that can produce similar information “without entangling us in litigation going forward”.

That point was raised repeatedly by Ware, who seemed concerned that if he granted the request, “a slew of trial attorneys and curious social scientists could follow suit.”

Alexa, in case you don’t know, is the search engine side of the Amazon behemoth. They run the ever-useful Internet Archive as well as collect a slew of analytic data about the web. Not coincidentally, they also just launched a service which opens up their vast resources to the consumer - well, the business consumer, that is.

[T]he Alexa platform offers up raw access to its entire index, and the tools will even let developers anywhere control how Alexa crawls the web. The fee schedule looks reasonable as well; you pay “consumption fees” for computer resources used by your applications, but no monthly or yearly subscriptions.

Again, they’re keeping their eye on the cost/benefit analysis ball and giving something back. And this judge meanwhile is doing a masterful juggling act between three different brands of organizations: the government, Google and Alexa. It’s an excellent strategy, but we’ve now lost sight of the rather esoteric point that we aren’t willing to give complete information access (Total Information Awareness) to one organizaion, but we are to several others. WTF? What’s the difference?

One force wants to restrict and track our activities while the more progressive business force realizes that enabling us to move forward allows them to make more money off us. Where are we left in this arrangement? We’re left making other companies scads of money that we don’t even notice because we’re so busy playing thankfully with the toys they give us (myself included, again). What I would be interested in seeing is some kind of coop ethic taking root in these domains. What if you had legal ownership over all the data about yourself? What if you owned the trends, patterns, predictions, estimates and everything else that was created from your actions? What if it were your intellectual property rights which had to be licensed out to companies, or which companies at least had to compensate you for somehow? How much do you think Google makes off of each one of us over our lifetime of using their email and their search and whatever else they come out with? We are their unpaid employees, when you get right down to it. They would have nothing to index and advertise on if it weren’t for us. I mean, after all, it’s our trillions of hours of content that is being harvested. If it’s not going to be private - which it clearly is not, at this point - let’s at least be allowed to sell it to the highest bidder, rather than being roped into somebody else’s business model.