DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [4]
This is where the very nature of the Web – in particular its interconnectedness – creates an enormous headache for the forces of law and order: nobody is ever 100 per cent certain whom they are communicating with on the Web. Are you dealing with a common-or-garden criminal hacker? Or are you dealing with somebody who has friends in higher places? Are you talking to a criminal? Or a spook? Or a military researcher assessing the value of criminal hacking techniques? Are you watching your interlocutor or is he watching you? Is he trying to make money for himself? Or for al-Qaeda?
‘This is like a game of seven-dimensional chess,’ the futurologist Bruno Guissani has remarked, ‘in which you are never certain of who your opponent is at any one time.’
Arriving at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, was not quite like clapping eyes on the Taj Mahal for the first time, but I nonetheless felt a spasm of awe as I parked on Charleston Avenue in front of the multicoloured sign proclaiming one of the wonders of the post-industrial world.
The speed with which Google has melted into our consciousness, with all the highs and lows associated with a controlled narcotic substance, has no precedent. Its only rivals are cousins in the family of digital behemoths, like Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. But not even these three are quite able to boast the success that Google can, in assisting, guiding and monitoring our lives as its cavernous servers spit out gazillions of bytes of requested information while slurping up and storing individual and collective data profiles of billions of humans. This data, of course, reveals much more about us than we know ourselves. One shudders to think what might happen if the information fell into the wrong hands. Maybe it already has …
The jolly pastel mix of primary and secondary colours, familiar from Google’s logo, is replicated throughout the ‘campus’. Often they use soft, rounded edges to define the large objects scattered around the place with precision higgledy-pigglediness. The sculptures are designed for sitting on, looking at or playing with, so that the entire complex resembles either a vast kindergarten or, depending on your anxiety and paranoia levels, the bizarre toytown village from the 1960s TV show The Prisoner, whither national-security risks were sent and whence there was no escape. Is it my imagination or does everyone I see on the campus, from cleaners to senior management, sport a trance-like smile? This both strengthens the paranoid interpretation of Google’s essence and gives the impression that they are all working a little too hard on not being evil. I cannot quite gauge whether this is a dream or a nightmare.
It is almost a relief when I meet Corey Louie, Google’s Trust and Safety Manager, because people involved in security have a no-nonsense air and a penchant for secrecy, regardless of who they are working for. His demeanour is a welcome contrast to Google’s vibe of Buddhist oneness. A smart Asian American in his thirties, with a brisk but warm manner, Louie cut his cyber teeth not among the lotus eaters in Silicon Valley, but in the much more abrasive and masculine world of the United States Secret Service. He had been recruited to Google two and a half years before my visit, in late 2006. And by the time he left law enforcement Corey Louie was in charge of the Secret Service’s E-Crimes Unit. There was little he did not know about attacks on networks (so-called intrusion or penetration), credit-card fraud, the pervasive Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attacks (capable of disabling websites and networks) and the malware that soon after the millennium began multiplying like rats in a sewer. And he knew a great deal about carding, the daily bread of cybercrime. This is the practice