The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [93]
For example, when an unusually high number of Internet users in Mexico began Googling terms like “flu” and “cold” in mid-April 2009, it signaled the outbreak of swine flu. In fact, Google Flu Trends, a dedicated Google service built especially for the purpose of tracking how often people search for flu-related items, identified the spike on April 20, before the swine flu became a cause célèbre with many in the media. And even though several scientific studies by health researchers found that Google’s data is not always as accurate as other ways of tracking the spread of influenza, even they acknowledged how cheap and quick Google’s system is. Besides, in fields that are not as data-intensive as disease control, Google does a much better job than the alternatives—if those exist at all.
Search engines have inadvertently become extremely powerful players in the business of gathering intelligence and predicting the future. The temptation—which Google executives, to their credit, have resisted so far—is to monetize the vast quantity of this trends-related information beyond just ad sales.
Technically, Google does know how often Russian Internet users search for the words “bribes,” “opposition,” and “corruption”; it even knows how such queries are distributed geographically and what else such potential troublemakers are searching for. It does not take a Nostradamus to interpret a sudden spike of Internet searches for words like “cars,” “import,” “protests,” and “Vladivostok” as a sign of growing social tensions over increases in car tariffs brewing in Vladivostok, Russia’s major outpost in the Far East.
This is the kind of data that Russian secret services would literally kill for. Such knowledge may, of course, make authoritarianism more responsive and inject at least a modicum of democracy into the process. But it’s also possible that governments would use this knowledge to crack down on dissenters in a more effective and timely manner.
Internet search engines offer an excellent way to harness the curiosity of the crowds to inform the authorities of impending threats. Monitoring an Internet search could produce even more valuable intelligence than monitoring Internet speech, because speech is usually directed at somebody and is full of innuendo, while an Internet search is a simple and neutral conversation between the user and the search engine.
The intelligence value of search engines is not lost on the Internet gurus consulting authoritarian governments. In March 2010, speaking about the Kremlin’s ambitions to establish its own search engine, Igor Ashmanov, one of the pioneers of the Russian Internet and someone who had consulted for the Kremlin about their national search plan in the past, was direct: “Whoever dominates the search market in the country knows what people are searching for; they know the stream of search queries. This is completely unique information, which one can’t get anywhere else.” If one assumes that authoritarian governments usually fall by surprise—if they are not surprised, they are probably committing suicide (e.g., the case of the Soviet Union)—then we also have to assume that, given how much data on the Internet can be harvested, analyzed, and investigated, surprises may become rarer.
But even if the governments’ attempts to control—directly or indirectly—the world of Internet search would not bring immediate results, the Internet could boost their intelligence-gathering apparatus in other ways. The advent of social media has made most Internet users increasingly comfortable with the idea of sharing their thoughts and deeds with the world at large. It may not seem obvious, but trolling through all those blog posts, Twitter updates, photos, and videos posted to Facebook and YouTube could yield quite a lot of useful information for intelligence services—and not just about individual habits, as in the Belarusian KGB case, but also about broad social trends and the public mood as a whole. Analyzing social networks could offer even better insights than monitoring online searches, as