After several instances of groveling appeasement of the Chinese authorities that seem to have done it no good whatsoever in the longer-term, "do no evil" empire Google is now chumming up with the US National Security Agency (NSA), ostensibly in an effort to protect itself from...? Yup, you've guessed it - irony upon irony - Chinese cyber-attacks! Martyn Warwick reports.
Apparently the small print of the co-operation agreement is still being finalised but Google seems to have persuaded the NSA to help analyse aspects of the full-on December 2009 attack on its servers and network that, the company says, originated in China. The alleged object of the collaboration is to minimise the effects of any future attack.
An anonymous source quoted in the US media says the alliance will permit the two organisations to share "critical information without violating Google's policies or laws that protect the privacy of American citizen's online communications."
An emollient sentiment, but like the man said back in 1651, "fine words butter no parsnips". That's as true now as it was in the time of Oliver Cromwell; words are cheap and the NSA, the largest intelligence agency in the US, has a reputation for being a law unto itself and all too often riding roughshod over privacy laws and civil rights, most blatantly and recently during the period of younger Bush's warrantless wiretapping programme and the clandestine eavesdropping on and recording of the conversations and email communications of private US citizens.
The NSA has also co-operated on security matters with several other private US commercial organisations in the past, including AT&T and Microsoft, and will no doubt be delighted to continue to expand such involvement. Indeed, it's probably hit the mother lode with Google.
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