Free Watchlist by Bryan Hurt Page B

you?”
    â€œNothing so simple. Here’s the deal: airport DHS scrutiny is a gating function. It lets the spooks narrow down their search criteria. Once you get pulled aside for secondary at the border, you become a ‘person of interest’ and they never, ever let up. They’ll scan webcams for your face and gait. Read your mail. Monitor your searches.”
    â€œI thought you said the courts wouldn’t let them . . .”
    â€œThe courts won’t let them indiscriminately Google you. But after you’re in the system, it becomes a selective search. All legal. And once they start Googling you, they always find something. All your data is fed into a big hopper that checks for ‘suspicious patterns,’ using deviation from statistical norms to nail you.”
    Greg felt like he was going to throw up. “How the hell did this happen? Google was a good place. ‘Don’t be evil,’ right?” That was the corporate motto, and for Greg, it had been a huge part of why he’d taken his computer science PhD from Stanford directly to Mountain View.
    Maya replied with a hard-edged laugh. “‘Don’t be evil’? Come on, Greg. Our lobbying group is that same bunch of crypto-fascists that tried to swift-boat Kerry. We popped our evil cherry a long time ago.”
    They were quiet for a minute.
    â€œIt started in China,” she went on, finally. “Once we moved our servers onto the mainland, they went under Chinese jurisdiction.”
    Greg sighed. He knew Google’s reach all too well: every time you visited a page with Google ads on it, or used Google Maps or Google mail, even if you sent mail to a Gmail account, the company diligently collected your info. Recently, the site’s search-optimization software had begun using the data to tailor Web searches to individual users. It proved to be a revolutionary tool for advertisers. An authoritarian government would have other purposes in mind.
    â€œThey were using us to build profiles of people,” she went on. “When they had someone they wanted to arrest, they’d come to us and find a reason to bust them. There’s hardly anything you can do on the Net that isn’t illegal in China.”
    Greg shook his head. “Why did they have to put the servers in China?”
    â€œThe government said they’d block us otherwise. And Yahoo was there.” They both made faces. Somewhere along the way, employees at Google had become obsessed with Yahoo, more concerned with what the competition was doing than how their own company was performing. “So we did it. But a lot of us didn’t like the idea.”
    Maya sipped her coffee and lowered her voice. One of her dogs sniffed insistently under Greg’s chair.
    â€œAlmost immediately, the Chinese asked us to start censoring search results,” Maya said. “Google agreed. The company line was hilarious: ‘We’re not doing evil, we’re giving consumers access to a better search tool! If we showed them search results they couldn’t get to, that would just frustrate them. It would be a bad user experience. ’”
    â€œNow what?” Greg pushed a dog away from him. Maya looked hurt.
    â€œNow you’re a person of interest, Greg. You’re Googlestalked. Now you live your life with someone constantly looking over your shoulder. You know the mission statement, right? ‘Organize the world’s information.’ Everything. Give it five years, we’ll know how many turds were in the bowl before you flushed. Combine that with automated suspicion of anyone who matches a statistical picture of a bad guy and you’re—”
    â€œScroogled.”
    â€œTotally.” She nodded.
    Maya took both labs down the hall to the bedroom. He heard a muffled argument with her girlfriend, and she came back alone.
    â€œI can fix this,” she said in an urgent whisper. “After the Chinese