Soghoian notes that Google likely receives thousands of subpoenas and warrants every year from law enforcement and government agencies demanding information (AOL gets approximately 1,000 requests a month related to civil and criminal cases), and it has hired former DOJ officials and U.S. intelligence officers as corporate legal compliance officers handling the traffic. "The government gets somebody on the other end of the line who's from the intelligence or law enforcement community," says Soghoian, "who knows how they work, and maybe is sympathetic to their cause. Google doesn't put former ACLU lawyers in charge of its compliance team." According to Google's Chen, such numbers are not publicly available. "Obviously, we follow the law like any other company," she says. "When we receive a subpoena or court order, we check to see if it meets both the letter and the spirit of the law before complying. And if it doesn't, we can object or ask that the request is narrowed." She points out that, in 2006, Google went to court to fight a Department of Justice subpoena for millions of search queries on the grounds that it invaded user privacy. The judge ruled in Google's favor.

Soghoian, however, suggests a perverse incentive for cooperation: by law, Google and the telecoms must be compensated for their time and effort. Thus, the feeding of information to spooks and cops can become a profitable enterprise.

Google also works with some of the top players in the surveillance industry, notably Lockheed Martin and SRA International. SRA is listed as a Google "enterprise partner" — more than a hundred such partners are listed on the Google website. Both companies, Lockheed and SRA, have engineered and sold data-mining software to the intelligence agencies. SRA's NetOwl program, for example, has been described by a blogger at Pennsylvania State University, who watched the application in action at a corporate recruiter forum, as "searching all kinds of documents using Google for a certain person." In response to our inquiries for further information on these programs and how they might have been developed in cooperation with Google, a Lockheed Martin spokesperson told us, "The work we do with Google is exclusively related to their Google Earth system." SRA International's vice president for public affairs, Sheila Blackwell, states, "We don't discuss the specifics of our intelligence clients' business."

Former CIA officer Robert Steele says that the CIA's Office of Research and Development had, at one point, provided funding for Google. According to its literature, ORD has a charter to push beyond the state of the art, developing and applying technologies and equipment more advanced than anything commercially available, including communications, sensors, semi-conductors, high-speed computing, artificial intelligence, image recognition and database management. Steele says that Google's liaison at the ORD is Dr. Rick Steinheiser, a counterterrorism data-mining expert and a long-time CIA analyst. (No CIA response about Steinheiser's work was forthcoming.)

Then, there are the intelligence officials allegedly working at Google's Mountain View headquarters. When tech guru Stephen Arnold first revealed this information in the 2006 OSS conference. Anthony Kimery, a veteran intelligence reporter at Homeland Security Today, followed up with a report alleging a "secret relationship" between Google and U.S. intelligence. Google was "cooperat[ing] with U.S. intelligence agencies to provide national and homeland security-related user information from its vast databases," with the intelligence agencies "working to 'leverage Google's [user] data monitoring' capability as part of an effort to glean from this data information of ‘national security intelligence interest' in the war on terror." In other words, Google's databases — or, some targeted portion — may have been dumped straight into the maw of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Like the giants of the surveillance-industrial complex, Google has backed its federal sales force in Reston, Virginia, with a D.C. lobbying operation — spending $2.9 million on lobbying in 2009 — to make sure that privacy is not a priority in the Obama administration. It also works with several industry-supported interest groups: the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Technology Policy Institute, and the Progress & Freedom Foundation, whose mission statement espouses "an appreciation for the positive impacts of technology with a classically conservative view of the proper role of government... Those opportunities can only be realized if governments resist the temptation to regulate, tax and control." All these groups are funded by Google, along with a who's-who of communications behemoths. Their mission: subvert any congressional legislation extending Fourth Amendment-style prohibitions to the data-mining private sector. Their argument, per the Technology Policy Institute: "More privacy ... would mean less information, less valuable advertising, and thus fewer resources available for producing new low-priced services" — in other words, privacy is a threat to the economy.

Google has also managed to install favorites in the White House. Andrew McLaughlin, formerly chief of Google's Global Public Policy and Government Affairs division while also serving as assistant treasurer for Google's NetPAC lobby, has been appointed as Obama's deputy chief technology officer for Internet policy, despite protests from privacy advocates. Vivek Kundra, now posted as the Obama administration's chief information officer at the Office of Management and Budget, formerly served as the chief technology officer for the city of Washington, D.C., where he ditched the use of Microsoft programs for municipal operations in favor of Google products. Concerns were heightened last spring by an administration initiative, proposed in Senate Bill 773, to grant the executive branch authority to disconnect and assume some measure of control over private networks in a declared "cybersecurity emergency." That could be a quarantine operation to isolate and defeat a viral attack. It could also be an excuse for censorship of certain sites — or, for the cybersecurity agencies to data-mine where they have been hitherto forbidden. Google could be declared "critical infrastructure" in such an emergency, and its management temporarily assumed by federally certified "cybersecurity professionals," as defined in S.773. It's not wholly unfeasible that Google's massive and much coveted behavioral profiles could then be fed into the NSA's computers. And even without S.773, a long accumulation of executive orders over three decades has likely laid the groundwork for executive authority to take over critical communications networks in a "national emergency."

But long before such an emergency comes to pass, if ever, the government and the regiments of data-mining companies it contracts with are seeing eye to eye. The commercial surveillance complex and the security surveillance complex have many common interests and methods: the ad gurus' neuromarketing research complemented by the intel agencies' longstanding research into mind control, from the CIA's MK-ULTRA to the NSA's current "cognitive neuroscience research"; the profiling of political behavior for campaign advertising complemented by the DHS's elastic definitions of dissidents and "potential terrorists."

Google is now anonymizing IP addresses from search logs after nine months, down from its previous eighteen-month retention policy. Company spokesperson Chen states, "We're committed to using data both to improve our services and our security measures for our users and to protect their privacy, and we remain convinced that our current logs retention policy represents a responsible balance." This is in contrast to Microsoft, which after six months throws out the search query data altogether. "Remember that totally anonymized search queries can be linked together to build an identity," says Bankston. "Why does Google need to store our data perpetually? They're very vague about it."

Indeed, Google could, without violating the law, reveal a lot more about how it cooperates with the intelligence agencies — how many requests for information it receives, from what government entities, how many it complies with. "They could talk about all this, but they don't," says Bankston. "Google may not care a lot about your privacy, but they care a whole helluva lot about your perception of your privacy. To remind people of the risk of government access to your data is anathema."

Research support for this article was provided by The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.