[Shadow_Group] Valerie Plame needs to know: Should Google index telephone numbers?

Tue Nov 2 20:52:55 PST 2004

Valerie Plame needs to know: Should Google index telephone numbers?

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"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism" - Thomas Jefferson

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be...
The People cannot be safe without information." -- Thomas Jefferson 

      "I think Google is the biggest privacy invader on the planet, no doubt about it."

                          -- Richard M. Smith, former officer, Privacy Foundation, as quoted by the Associated Press, 2004-03-21 

  Should Google index telephone numbers? 

  This isn't about spies, it's about the rest of us . . .

  by Daniel Brandt 
  October 8, 2003

  This page isn't about how naughty it is to expose spies. A spy is someone who deceives friends and enemies alike, and breaks the laws of other nations, in order to further the interests of those who are already too powerful. These powerful people are elitist politicians, and the corporations and financial interests behind them. U.S. spies have a sordid history of overthrowing governments, including democratic governments such as Greece in 1967 and Chile in 1973. Many of the non-democratic governments they've overthrown, or tried to overthrow, were doing a better job of providing for their people than the governments preferred by the CIA. Our media's spin machine -- itself guilty of too cozy a relationship with intelligence agencies -- would have us believe that spies put their lives in danger for the rest of us. That's not true. Being a U.S. spy is safer than working in a coal mine.* They need secrecy because this is how they avoid accountability. Speaking of feeling safe, everyone in the world would sleep easier at night if we dismantled the CIA entirely. 
  This page isn't about exposing spies. It's about Google's disrespect for privacy. It's about Google being the only search engine that does reverse lookups of telephone numbers listed in the white pages, and offers you two maps to locate the address. This number can also be used to latch onto other pages that would normally be difficult to find. 

  I use Valerie the Spy as an example, because I have no respect for her privacy. She doesn't represent me. Rather, she represents powerful interests in the government and corporate America that I find objectionable, and which in the past have worked against me. (I have documents from the CIA that prove they spied on me illegally in the late 1960s.) Secret agents of powerful interests have no right to privacy, but millions of ordinary citizens do. Using Valerie the Spy as an example is a good way to demonstrate what ordinary people should find objectionable about Google's indexing. 

  Ms. Wilson joined the CIA right out of college, which would have been around 1985. This was when William Casey was illegally consorting with death squads in Central America. Did she find this amusing or inspiring? This was at a time when there were widespread demonstrations against the CIA. I don't care if supermom, as the Washington Post brags, can handle two toddlers, a career, participate in church groups and community social activism, and sling an AK-47, all at the same time. She can probably bake big apple pies in the kitchen too, for all I care. This is the very same Post that has CIA connections everywhere you look<http://www.namebase.org/davis.html>, and you can bet that they have an agenda. 

  Her husband since 1998, Joseph C. Wilson IV, thinks of himself as a liberal, but his record is mixed. By the way, Mr. Wilson, why don't you go on TV and tell us who forged those documents you supposedly investigated? Doesn't that matter to you? Could it have been - gasp - the CIA ? 

        Washington is watching too much TV!

        "Mr. Wilson proudly showed off photographs of Ms. Plame, calling her a real-life Jennifer Garner, the actress who plays a spy on Alias on ABC-TV and whom the C.I.A. has enlisted as a spokeswoman to appeal to recruits." 
        -- New York Times, October 2, 2003, p. A23.

  You can look up Valerie Wilson (also known as Valerie Plame) at switchboard.com or any other white-pages web site. So far, no problem. But once you have a number, put it into Google and see what you get. Here is a screen shot taken on October 8: 

   Valerie the Spy could ask Google to delete her number so that the first line, with her address and those map links to her house, would not show up. Google will want her email address before they do this. But this doesn't solve the problem of those other links to her telephone number, which would still appear. 
  The point of all this is that millions of people, when they contemplate whether they should pay their telephone company for an unpublished listing, aren't even aware of what Google will do with their telephone number. Many aren't even aware of Google. They certainly aren't likely to opt out of Google's reverse lookup in the white pages. And even if they do, there's no telling where that number may end up on the web, to be discovered by Google's crawlers. 

  I believe that Google should not index telephone numbers at all. Their reverse lookup in the white pages should be discontinued, and their algorithms for indexing web pages should identify and discard anything that resembles a telephone number. You don't even have to be a spy to agree with me. 

  ____________ 

  * The CIA memorializes 71 who died in the line of duty since it was founded over 50 years ago. According to the Department of Labor, mine fatalities averaged 92 per year during the 1990s. Total miners number 557,000, and total full-time CIA run about 22,000, which when factored in, means miners are three times more likely to get killed on the job. Moreover, CIA employees can resign and find another job, but miners don't always have this option. The other thing that miners lack is a propaganda network of gullible journalists and script writers, who constantly depict CIA people as risking their lives to save the world.

<http://www.google-watch.org/> 
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