Al-Jazeera America published emails on Tuesday between former National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin. From these emails, it can be inferred that Google and the NSA have a close relationship — the heads of both organizations even met face-to-face prior to the leaking of NSA revelations by Edward Snowden.
“When we reach this point in our projects we schedule a classified briefing for the CEO’s of key companies to provide them a brief on the specific threats we believe can be mitigated and to seek their commitment for their organization to move ahead,” Alexander wrote in a June 2012 email to Schmidt. “Google’s participation in refinement, engineering and deployment of the solutions will be essential.”
Schmidt passed on his regret for not being able to attend by responding, “Would love to see you another time. Thank you !”
While this does not contradict statements by Google that the only information the company only shared information with the government as mandated by law, it does muddy Google’s story. Considering that Google previously sold equipment to the NSA to protect the agency’s secret signals-intelligence group, it bought Keyhole — which formed the backbone of Google Earth and was initially funded by the CIA — and participated in investment of Recorded Future, a relationship search engine, with the intelligence group, Google’s hands may not be as clean as the company suggests.
Questions of Google’s relationship with the CIA have filled the pages of conspiracy and anti-government websites for years. However, recently, Google’s unusually close business ties to the government have raised the specter of suspicion both at home and abroad.
Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin urged his fellow Russians to avoid using Google. Calling the Internet a “CIA project,” the Russian leader — who is currently at odds with the United States over sanctions imposed due to Russian activities in Ukraine, including the seizing of Crimea and inciting calls for independence in pro-Russia Eastern Ukraine — argued that the Mountain View, Calif.-based company’s web traffic “goes through servers that are in the States” and that “everything is monitored there.” This call came as Russia’s primary search engine, Yandex, saw a fall in shares as Putin expressed his concern about the company’s overseas investors.
“We must fight determinedly for our own interests. This process is happening. And we will support it from the government side, of course” he said.
Putin is seeking greater control of the Internet. As the opposition is banned from nationally-controlled television, they have been able to promote and organize online. In April, the Russian parliament passed a law requiring social media websites to keep their servers in Russian territory, with user data required to be saved for six months. The parliament also passed a law allowing the Russian government to block blacklisted sites without a court order.
While Putin’s motivations to remove foreign control over the Internet in Russia are clearly personal, he may have a legitimate point of concern with Google.
“We work really hard to protect our users from cyber attacks and we talk to outside experts, including occasionally in the US government, to ensure we stay ahead of the game,” a Google spokesperson told The Huffington Post in response to the emails.