Google and Spin 2

Two years ago, Prince Charles was subject to some unlikely allegations of sexual misconduct. Instead of turning a blind eye, he issued strenuous denials to all news media. At the time, some people thought this unwise - it merely drew attention to the allegations.

But the effect of the denials was to swamp the Internet. It became almost impossible to find the original allegations, because a Google search merely came up with hundreds and hundreds of denials, repeated by every news channel in the world. Even if you eventually reached the allegations, you would almost certainly have seen (and been conditioned by) repeated denials, together with many statements undermining the credibility of those making the allegations. In my post Google and Spin (Nov 2003), I suggested that this was in fact a clever bit of news management by the Prince's staff.

I also noted that Google search wasn't always even-handed, but could be strongly biased towards those advocating a particular technology with a marketing budget to support their efforts, making it hard to find sites that were sceptical or critical. The example I cited then was biometrics. Laurie Sullivan of TechWeb News suggests that a similar thing is now happening with RFID. RFID Firm Turns To Google For Pro-RFID Campaign (November 1st, 2005)

It seems that the pro-RFID campaign has a large budget explicitly for information warfare, with Google as the battlefield, and is prepared to spend heavily on sponsored links, which presumably bias the search rankings in its favour. The pro-RFID campaign has made no secret of its hostility towards an anti-RFID book called SpyChips, and would doubtless be happy if this book received very poor search rankings. Nobody has suggested that Google would ever take money for suppressing an inconvenient website; the search algorithms are not disclosed, so we must trust that Google would never abuse their position of power. But the effect can probably be achieved anyway without any moral hazard for Google - simply as an emergent effect of positive sponsorship and marketing spend.

Surveillance of trust

originally posted by John

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CCTV surveillance is entirely a trust issue. In fact it is an absence of trust issue.

Despite being publicness made manifest, it is presented to us as being of unarguable benefit. The message is that it is something with which we not only have a citizen’s duty to cooperate, but with which we should cooperate willingly and submissively, even enthusiastically if we have any sense at all of where our own best interests lie. Non-cooperation carries sanctions. In other words, surveillance constrains choice, it minimizes options and it imposes a frightening need for security. In which respect it closely resembles a religion or current US foreign policy.

Inauthentic, imposing high commodity trust, high network trust and high power trust, surveillance leaves us in a bleak corner of the trust space in which similar absurdities begin to look reasonable. It’s a dystopian place, where ASBOs live, where borders must be closed and communities gated against outsiders, a place where dog eats dog, a place of curfews and vigilante patrols. It’s a Final Solution place where undesirables must wear their IBM number tattoos. Where everyone must be made to carry a lifeful of show-on-demand biometrics wherever they go. And be barred from wearing hoods. Sadder yet, it’s a place where solutions mostly don’t work. In which respect too it closely resembles a religion or current US foreign policy.

Saddest of all, it seems to me, the ethos of surveillance is driving us back to the dark ages. Back to when a superstitious fear of an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful deity was the preferred method of social control. Quite comforting it could be too for the line-toeing bourgeoisie. And surveillance promises that it could be that again. And, as with Rupert Brooke’s Fish, ‘dateless and deathless, blind and still, the intricate impulse works its will’ so with us and back we go.

Nowadays we generally don’t have to worry about an all-seeing almighty watching our every move. Reality TV lets us know how it must have been though.

Berufsverbot

Adam Shostack rails against the Kafka-esque implementation of "watch lists" in the United States and cites the sad case of Juan Carlos Merida, who is apparently barred from his job because his name appears on a watch list. Note: this can happen as an accidental result of innocent association with not-so-innocent people, or as a result of identity theft (including biometric impersonation).

(With a combination of identity theft, false accusation and other tricks, it may be possible to get anyone blacklisted. Ruin their career for a few years, while they get investigated to death. If you cover your tracks properly, it can never be traced back to you. I understand this happened a lot in the United States during the McCarthy years.)

Michael Froomkin points out an interesting twist to the Juan Carlos Merida case. As part of his campaign to restore his good name, Merida was persuaded to provide confidential information on fellow students. (In a police state, this process is known as denunciation.) From one perspective, Merida's willingness to do this demonstrates that he is trustworthy; from another perspective it demonstrates the exact opposite. (Veiled Chameleon makes this comment on Michael's blog.) Meanwhile, Merida's good name remains unrestored.

The only way for the people to fight against a police state is by collective action. If everyone is on the watch list, then it ceases to be of any significance. But to deliberately get yourself onto the blacklist? Foolhardy unless everyone else does the same thing. Complex trust issues here.

More on no-fly lists.
More on identity theft and biometric impersonation/repudiation.

Google and Spin

News management and opinion management requires careful google-spinning

originally posted November 13th, 2003

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The marketing value of search engines has been obvious to many for ages. If you are selling spangled wangles, you want your website spangleplanet.com to appear near the top of any google search. Webmasters are constantly looking for new ways to trick google into giving them a higher ranking than they deserve.

As people (including journalists) rely increasingly on googling to find out what is going on, then news management and opinion management also depend on google spinning. There is often a systematic bias in the material that is presented to the googler. This bias may be contrived, or it may be an inevitable consequence of the economics of truth.

Here are some examples from my own googling over the past few days.

The British home secretary recently made an announcement about biometrics. When I searched for biometrics on Google, I found hundreds of pro-biometric websites, from vendors, industry consortia and government bodies. There are undoubtedly also websites that present a more critical stance on biometrics, but these don't rank highly on Google, and I didn't have the patience to page down and find them. (As it happens, I had other ways of reaching the material I wanted.)

A member of the British Royal family recently denied some allegations that had been circulating on the Internet. If you search for this story now, you are presented with a lot of news items reporting the denial and discrediting the source - before you get to the allegation itself. This creates a different context for the allegation, and many people will read the allegation differently as a result.

A few days later, the British minister for children unwisely and perhaps inadvertently attempted a similar tactic, when she described one of her critics as "extremely disturbed". Many years previously he had been a victim of child abuse when living in a children's home for which she had had overall responsibility.