With a Little Help (13 page)

Greg felt very tired. "So now I'm feeling lucky I got out of the airport alive. I suppose I might have ended up in Gitmo if it had gone badly, huh?"

She was staring at him intently, her eyes flicking from side to side. He waited, but she didn't say anything.

"What?"

"What I'm about to tell you, you can't ever repeat it, OK?"

"Um, OK? You're not going to tell me you're a deep-cover Al-Quaeda suicide bomber?"

"Nothing so simple. Here's the thing: the 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 check the webcams for your face and gait. Read your mail. Log your searches."

"I thought you said the courts wouldn't let them --"

"The courts won't let them
indiscriminately
google you. But once you get into the system, it becomes a
selective
search. All legal. And once they start googling you, they
always
find something."

"You mean to say they've got a boiler-room of midwestern housewives reading the email of everyone who ever got a second look at the border? Sounds like the world's shittiest job."

"If only. No, this is all untouched by human hands. All your data is fed into a big hopper that checks for 'suspicious patterns' and gradually builds the case against you, using deviation from statistical norms to prove that you're guilty of
something
. It's just a variation of the way we spot search-spammers" -- the "optimizers" who tried to get their Viagra scams and Ponzi schemes to come to the top of the search results "-- but instead of lowering your search rank, we increase your probability of being sent to Syria. And of course, they google all of
us
, everyone who works on anything 'sensitive.'"

"Naturally," Greg said. He felt like he was going to throw up. He felt like never using a search engine again. "How the hell did this
happen
? It's such a
good
place. 'Don't be evil,' right?" That was the corporate motto, and for Greg, it had been a huge part of his reason for taking his fresh-minted computer science PhD from Stanford directly to Google.

Maya's laugh was bitter and cynical. "Don't be evil? Come on, Greg. Don't you remember what it was like when we started censoring the Chinese search results, and we all asked how that could be anything but evil? The company line was hilarious: 'We're not doing evil -- we're giving them 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
'. If we hadn't lost our don't-be-evil cherry by then, we surely did the day we took that one."

"Now what?" Greg pushed a dog away from him and Maya looked hurt.

"Now you're a person of interest, Greg. Googlestalked. Now, you live your life with someone watching over your shoulder, all the time. You know the mission statement, right? 'Organize all human knowledge.' That's
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 --"

"I'm scroogled."

"Totally."

"Thanks, Maya," he said. "Thanks anyway."

"Sit down," she said. The dog that had been bumping at his legs was at it again. Maya took both dogs down the hall to the bedroom and he heard her muffled argument with her girlfriend. She came back without the dogs.

"I can fix this," she said in a whisper so low it was practically a hiss. "I can googleclean you."

"But you're under constant scrutiny --"

"By DHS agents. Once they fired all non-native-born Americans from the DHS, it got a lot fatter and stupider. I can googleclean you, Greg."

"I don't want you to get into trouble."

She shook her head. "I'm already doomed. I built the googlecleaner. Every day since then has been borrowed time -- now it's just a matter of waiting for someone to point out my expertise and history to the DHS and, oh, I don't know. Whatever it is they do to people like me in the War on Abstract Nouns."

Greg remembered the questioning at the airport. The search. His shirt, the bootprint in the middle of it.

"Do it," he said.

#

The ads were weird. He hadn't really paid attention to them in years. The blocker got rid of most of them, but Google changed its code often enough that their little text ads showed up on a lot of his pages. They stayed subliminal mostly -- only clunkers like that Ann Coulter ringtone ad made it past his eyes into his brain.

Now the clunkers were everywhere: Intelligent Design Facts, Online Seminary Degree, Terror Free Tomorrow, Porn Blocker Software, Homosexuality and Satan. He clicked through a couple of these and found himself in some kind of alternate universe Internet, full of weird opinions about the evils of being gay, the certainty of the young Earth, the need for eternal national vigilance.

Then he started to notice something weird about the search results themselves. After unpacking his suitcase and opening his mail, he spent two weeks sitting at home on his ass, surfing. His pre-Mexico belly was reemerging, so he decided to do something about it. No burritos for lunch today -- he'd go to that holistic place Maya had told him about. Vegan low-fat cuisine couldn't possibly be as gross as it sounded.

"Did you mean 'Hungarian Restaurants'?"

He snorted. No, he'd meant "holistic restaurants," you dumbass search-engine. It nagged at him. He pulled up his search history and went back through the results, printing out the pages. Then he logged out of his Google account and went back through the same searches, comparing the results to the logged-in pages. The differences were striking. A search for "democratic primary" pointed to anti-Hillary rants on angry blogs when he was logged in, and to information on volunteering for the DNC when he was logged out. Searching for "abortion clinic" while logged out listed the nearest Planned Parenthood office; searching while logged in gave him information about Campaign Life, ProLife.com, and the ProLife alliance. Good thing he wasn't pregnant.

This was Maya's googlecleaner at work. It was like the stories of people who asked their TiVos to record an episode of "Queer Eye" and then got inundated with suggestions for other "gay shows" -- "My TiVo thinks I'm gay," was the title of one article he remembered. Google had been experimenting with "personalized" search results before he left the country -- here it was, in all its glory.

Google thought he was a conservative Christian Republican who supported the War on Terror and many other abstract nouns.

He logged out of Google -- that was simple. Five minutes later, he logged in again. His entire address book was in there. He logged out again. Logged back in. His calendar -- when was his parents' anniversary again? Logged out. Logged back in. Needed his bookmarked locations in Maps. Logged out.

He stopped trying. Google was where his friendships lived -- all those people he stayed connected to on Orkut. It was where his relationships lived: all that archived email, all those addresses in his address-book. It was his family photos, his bookmarks. Hell, his search history -- his real search history -- was like an outboard brain, remembering which parts of the unplumbable Internet he cared about, so that he didn't have to remember it the hard way, with the meat in his skull.

Google had a copy of him -- all the parts of him that navigated the world and the people in it. Google owned that copy, and without it, he couldn't be himself anymore. He'd just have to stay logged in.

#

Greg mashed the keys on the laptop next to his bed, bringing the screen to life. He squinted at the toolbar clock: 4:13AM! Christ, who was pounding on his door at this hour?

He shouted "Coming!" in a muzzy voice and pulled on a robe and slippers. He shuffled down the hallway, turning on lights as he went, squinting. At the door, he squinted through the peephole, peering at -- Maya.

He undid the chains and the deadbolt and yanked the door open and Maya rushed in past him, followed by the dogs, followed by her girlfriend, Laurie, whom he'd last seen at a Christmas party at Google, in a fabulous cocktail dress and an elaborate up-do. Now she was wearing a freebie Google Summer of Code sweatshirt, jeans, and a frown that started between her eyebrows and intensified all the way down her face.

Maya was sheened with sweat, her hair sticking to her forehead. She scrubbed at her eyes, which were red and lined.

"Pack a bag," she said, in a hoarse croak.

"What?"

"Whatever you can't live without. A couple changes of clothes. Anything you're sentimental about -- shoebox of pictures, your grandfather's razor, whatever. But keep it small, something you can carry. We're traveling light."

"Maya, what are you --"

She took him by the shoulders. "Do. It," she said. "Don't ask questions right now. There's no time."

"Where do you want to --"

"Mexico, probably. Don't know yet.
Pack
, dammit." She pushed past him into his bedroom and started yanking open drawers.

"Maya," he said, sharply, "I'm not going anywhere until you tell me what's going on."

She glared at him and pushed her hair away from her face. "The googlecleaner lives. I shut it down, walked away from it, after I did you. It was too dangerous to use anymore. But I still get buginizer notifications when new bugs get filed against it, I'm still in B as the project's owner. Someone filed eight bugs against it this week. Someone's used it six times to smear six very specific accounts."

"Who's using it?"

"Well, I'll give you a hint. Let me tell you who's been cleaned this week --" She listed six candidates, four Republican and two Democrat, who were all in the running for the primaries.

"Googlers are blackwashing political candidates?"

"Not Googlers. This is all coming from offsite. The IP block is registered in DC. And the IPs are all also used by Gmail users. And those Gmail users --"

"You spied on gmail accounts?"

"I'm leaving in two minutes, with or without you. You can interrupt me to ask me questions, or you can listen." She gave him another look. Laurie stood in the door of the bedroom, holding the dogs by the collars and looking down at the floor.

"Good. OK. Yes. I did spy on their email. Of course I did. Everyone does it, now and again, and for a lot worse reasons than this.

"It's our lobbying firm. The ones who invented the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Remember them? It was a stink when we hired them, but Google couldn't afford to be 'that company full of registered Democrats' forever. We needed friends in Congress. These guys could do it for us."

"But they're ruining politicians' careers!"

"Yeah. They certainly are. And who benefits when they do that?"

Laurie spoke, at last. "Other politicians."

He felt his pulse beating in his temples. "We should tell someone."

"Yeah," Maya said. "How? They know everything about us. They can see every search. Every email. Every time we've been caught on the webcams. Who is in our social network -- you know that if you've got more than fifteen Orkut buddies, it's statistically certain that you're no more than three steps to someone who's contributed money to a 'terrorist' cause? Remember the airport? Imagine a lot more of that."

"Maya," he said, carefully. "I think you're over-reacting. You don't need to go to Mexico. You can just quit. We can do a startup together or something. Or you can move to the country and raise dogs. Whatever. This is crazy --"

"They came to see me today," she said. "At work. Two of the political officers -- the minders who monitor our sensitive projects. And they asked me a lot of very heavy questions."

"About the googlecleaner?"

"About my friends and family. About my search history. About my political beliefs."

"Jesus."

"They were sending me a message. They were letting me know that they were onto me. They're watching every click and every search. It's time to go -- time to get out of range."