Twilight of Soft Power

PRC Moves to Hard Power in South China Sea

It is difficult to be blithe about the dispatch of China’s HYSY981 drilling rig into disputed waters off the Vietnamese coast.

It actually would have been less of a provocation if the PRC had sent the aircraft carrier Liaoning down there instead.

One of the interesting by-products of the US “freedom of navigation” campaign in the South China Sea was the U.S. staking out a position that military operations by foreign vessels inside an Exclusive Economic Zone or EEZ were not the kind of economic intrusion that UNCLOS intended to preclude.

In fact, after the harassment of the USNS Impeccable, a US Navy survey vessel that cruises through China’s EEZ towing various gadgets, the US went out of its way to assert that the ship was not doing anything that could be construed as economic or even dual use, such as mapping the ocean floor, and insisted the ship was there to track PLAN submarine movements.

By that logic, the Liaoning chugging through any waters in the South China Sea, in EEZs disputed or not, is something that nobody can complain about.  And indeed, that’s what the Liaoning did, on its shakedown cruise in the South China Sea at the end of 2013.

Sending the HYSY981, China’s billion dollar deep water drilling rig--with its Vaderesque Death Star mission to intimidate China’s hydrocarbon adversaries by demonstrating the PRC’s capabilities in unilateral development of contested oil fields--is exactly the kind of destabilizing EEZ gambit that raises tensions and invites a response.  

The PRC has left itself some wiggle room by sending the rig to a location close to the Paracel Islands—held by China and deserving some as yet undetermined EEZ of its own—so that the waters are contested rather than unambiguously Vietnamese, but the nature of the incursion implies that the PRC was not expecting Vietnam to suck it up and ignore the PRC challenge.

The HYSY981 is reportedly escorted by a flotilla of dozens of vessels, including the PRC’s ubiquitous maritime patrol vessels and, I would assume, the various support vessels needed to go about its drilling business.  I also came across a report, well, actually a statement by an overwrought PRC nationalist blogger, that the rig is also escorted by anti-missile destroyers, which would be a major crossing of the line in bringing overtly military elements into the PRC’s economic contention with its maritime neighbors.

Even if the destroyers aren't on the scene, the PRC is committed to dishing it out.  

Vietnam released a video of PRC maritime patrols vessel ramming Vietnamese coast guard cutters trying to approach the rig, a sign that the PRC has no qualms about playing the pugnacious/threatening/aggressive regional power for a world audience.

The big question is Why?

Why, after Vietnam has been reasonably cooperative in its dealings with the PRC, most conspicuously by declining to openly support the Philippines’ arbitration case against the nine-dash-line, is the PRC picking on it in such an ostentatiously crude and overbearing fashion?

On the most immediate level, I think it’s because the PRC wants the practice—practice in engaging in relatively large, cumbersome naval operations in a genuinely hostile environment, but one in which the embarrassment of a catastrophic military encounter is pretty low.  Engaging in a major provocation inside Vietnam’s declared EEZ and getting the chance to bully Vietnam, with its underpowered marine forces and lack of a formal defense alliance with a capable regional (Japanese) or world (US) power, fills the bill.

One of the biggest challenges to the PRC’s military capability and credibility is that it hasn’t fought a hot war with anybody in the last 35 years.  With a provocation against Vietnam, the military system gets a nice little exercise.

Bearing in mind a comment I read that “the same capital ships that escorted the Liaoning are with the HYSY981", it doesn’t take too much imagination to imagine the Liaoning plunked down inside the same kind of security cordon that now contains the rig.

On the intermediate level, I see the Vietnam gambit as preparation for a confrontation with the country that the PRC really wants to humiliate: the Philippines.

The Philippines is a much riskier nut, since it has 1) a military alliance with the United States and 2) a foreign policy team that has put most of its eggs in the brinksmanship basket, refusing to engage bilaterally with the PRC, relying/hoping that the US will deter PRC aggression and, if some kind of conflict breaks out, intervene in an effective way on the Philippines behalf.

The Philippines apparently sees it the same way, if yesterday’s seizure of a Chinese fishing boat is indeed designed to demonstrate its resolve to succor Vietnam by presenting the PRC with the unwelcome prospect of getting embroiled in two maritime disputes—with the prospect of US involvement—at once.

I don’t think the PRC will take that particular bait today.  But I would not be surprised to see the HYSY981 show up in the “West Philippine Sea” in the near future.

On the higher, long-game level, I believe the PRC leadership has decided that the United States can no longer bring anything positive to the table for the PRC as it has completely and symbolically committed to the Asia pivot and its narrative of PRC containment with President Obama’s trip to Asia.

I think it would have been prudent for President Obama to have hedged America’s bets by dropping in on Beijing, but he didn’t, sending Michelle Obama instead.  Die is cast, in other words.

The PRC response, I believe, is not to confront the United States; it is to marginalize it, by driving the Asian security narrative into regions that deeply concern its neighbors but only tangentially engage the United States.

In recent weeks, I would contend that the PRC has reversed the wedge against the US-Japan alliance. 

Instead of trying to wedge the United States away from Japan and toward some kind of accommodation with PRC interests, the PRC is trying to wedge Japan away from the United States by goading/enticing Japan into an independent role that marginalizes the United States.

So we saw the PRC wait for President Obama to leave Asia, then resume its provocations in the Senkakus, while exchanging peaceable mid-level envoys with Japan…

…and ostentatiously beating up on Vietnam, which Japan has been courting as a member of Prime Minister Abe’s anti-PRC economic and security alliance.

The motive, I would guess, is to compel Japan to abandon its formal lockstep identification with the US pivot leadership in Asia (which, I would posit, Japan has honored in the breach already with its independent-minded footsie with Vietnam, Philippines, & North Korea) and emerge with its own initiative to provide Vietnam with some kind of diplomatic, economic, or military support—or else reveal the hollowness of the assurances it is offering to South East Asian countries to entice them into the Japanese camp.

Once Japan is “off the rez” so to speak, it will be forced to engage in a meaningful way, either through confrontation or negotiation, with the PRC in order to advance its Asia strategy…and the United States will see its clout diminished and have to deal with the PRC as well to get back into the game.

Given the PRC’s traditional focus on avoiding confrontation while it muscles up militarily and diplomatically, this kind of provocation and open escalation would seem to be counter-intuitive.

But I think the PRC has decided that, with the US public commitment to the pivot and encouragement to Japan to implement collective self defense, the US “honest broker” ship has sailed, the real US security role in Asia is backstopping its pivot allies, and the pivot battleline has to be challenged before it became too entrenched.

And it’s doing that by demonstrating, in relatively crude terms, that the deterrent strategy that underpins the pivot will not, well, deter the PRC and the PRC will bear—and extract—the economic costs of defying the will and preferences of the US and its Asian allies (and, in the case of Vietnam, its unlucky Asian associates).

As to why the PRC should decide to excite universal fear and loathing at this particular junction, one could spin it positively by saying that it is simply accelerating the birth of a new Asian order with a new balance of powers and the US stripped of its dominating role.

The negative interpretation is probably more persuasive.  The PRC sees a hard and ugly decade ahead, with anti-PRC administrations in power in many of the Asian capitals, keystoned by a Hillary Clinton presidency.  Best to lance the pivot boil early, before the pivot military bulk-up has completed , and while the relatively conciliatory President Obama is in power and distracted by the idea that he doesn’t want to pile a confrontation with China on top of his current problems with Russia.

The PRC’s decade of soft power is, prematurely, over, thanks to the success of the pivot in blunting the PRC’s drive to dominate the region by virtue of its economic, demographic, and implied military clout.  Its relations with its maritime neighbors will, I expect, be increasingly driven by hard power.

I think the PRC has decided to hunker down, and absorb the diplomatic, economic, and social costs of heightened fear and anger, and gamble that it can outmaneuver and outlast the hostility of the pivot nations.

It’s an ugly and dangerous gamble, especially since the first, second, and third instinct of everyone involved on the anti-PRC side will be to escalate in order to create a greater feeling of security and also bolster the deterrent narrative that the military capabilities of the US and its pivot partners is what is keeping Asia safe.

Dangerous days, indeed.

I originally addressed these themes a couple weeks ago in a piece I’m excerpting below.  So far the model is holding up.  If trends continue, we're in one of those "hate to be right" scenarios.

From April 23, 2014:

In bad news for the United States and the pivot, it looks like the PRC has decided to call [the pivot] bluff.

When Secretary of Defense Hagel visited the PRC, his counterpart, Chang Wanquan, stated:

"The China-U.S. relationship is neither comparable to U.S.-Russia ties in the Cold War, nor a relationship between container and contained. China's development can't be contained by anyone."

This statement is not just bravado and bullshit, in my opinion.  It reflects the PRC’s considered response to the threat of the pivot.

Specifically, the PRC is stating that the containment model doesn’t apply because the PRC is deeply integrated into the global economy and, indeed, into the economies of its putative adversaries.  The PRC does not recapitulate the containment of the USSR envisioned by George Kennan; for Kennan, the USSR had intentionally isolated itself and sought to prop up its rule by invocation of the Western threat, so economic isolation automatically underpinned the military element of containment.

Also, I think the PRC position is based upon the perception that there are no existential issues involved in the PRC’s conflicts with its neighbors.  Nobody wants to upset the global economic applecart by starting World War III over TWINWTDF [The Worthless Islands Nobody Wants to Die For].

So the PRC is signaling it does not fear the pivot.  Or, more accurately, the pivot has produced genuine disadvantages and costs to the PRC, but it has decided it is in its interests to push back, strategically and systematically, instead of trying to modify its behavior to suit the US and its pivoteers.  That’s why the PRC excluded Japan from the naval fleet review planned at Qingdao and, when the US pulled out to demonstrate its support for its pivot partner, cancelled the whole exercise instead of pursuing some face-saving compromise.

…

Given the unfavorable west Pacific environment, sitting idly by, or trying to ingratiate itself with the Asian democracies and the United States through soft power gambits do not appear to be high on the PRC's list of options.

With its overtly confrontational moves in Qingdao and Shanghai, it appears the PRC is signaling it is prepared to abandon "soft power", give up on the promise of US forbearance, and manage its business in an increasingly hostile regional environment.

And it doesn't seem likely that the PRC is blustering in order to obtain some face-saving concessions or lip service from the US. It is targeting Japan instead of dealing with the US, and challenging the United States to do something effective in support of its ally.

The PRC has always been alert to the need or opportunity to challenge the credibility of the US deterrent and, with the heightened anxiety fostered by Russia's annexation of Crimea, that day has arrived perhaps sooner than anybody wished.

If the PRC intentionally fomented the Ayungin Shoal resupply crisis with the resolve to let the US-PRC relation go south if needed rather than passively let the pivot dynamic play out to its disadvantage, we are definitely in for some tense and unpleasant times - and the costs of maintaining the credibility of the US deterrent might be considerably higher than we prefer.

The PRC appears to be signaling its determination to hunker down and weather the geopolitical storm - which might include a sooner-rather-than-later Taiwan crisis and the need to blame a handy US scapegoat - for years if need be, and pursue the struggle in domestic venues where it holds an advantage.

Google Knew! And We Knew! For Over Four Years!

What China, India, and Obama Tell Us About Google

It’s now cool to dump on Google.

At Al Jazeera, Jason Leopold obtained copies of e-mail exchanges between the NSA’s Keith Alexander & Google executives.

The meetings addressed an apparently benign episode of behind-the-scenes jiggery pokery, in this case discussions concerning NSA-industry cooperation on various cybervulnerabilities.

But, since it’s Google, there’s also room for darker interpretations:

Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying.

Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the agency’s vast capability for spying on Americans’ electronic communications prompted a number of tech executives whose firms cooperated with the government to insist they had done so only when compelled by a court of law.

But Al Jazeera has obtained two sets of email communications dating from a year before Snowden became a household name that suggest not all cooperation was under pressure.

Well, I dumped on Google before it was cool, when the Google slogan “Don’t Be Evil” sent a thrill up techies’ legs instead of a derisive smile to their lips. 

It was clear long before Snowden that Google was in bed with the US government.

In fact, it was revealed in the ruckus surrounding first big China cyber-scandal—the hacks of Chinese activists’ Gmail accounts and the Aurora exploit—back in December 2009-January 2010.

It’s interesting to go back and look at what was ignored and what was hyped in those innocent pre-Snowden days.

Fortunately, I wrote about the whole affair in January 2010 at Asia Times Online:

Google isn't doing well in China, and President Barack Obama isn't doing well in the United States. These twin realities have helped trigger a high-profile confrontation with China.

On January 12, Google responded to a sophisticated hack of its Google.cn servers, apparently emanating from within China, with the threat that it would stop filtering its Google.cn search results in compliance with the demands of the Chinese government, even if that meant Google would have to close its China operations.

…

Google's high-profile demolition of its relationship with China may not simply be a matter of outrage at the hacking of pro-democracy e-mails.

Bruce Schneier, a well-known US cyber security expert, made waves in the IT community with an op-ed on CNN on January 23 [3] asserting that the e-mail hacker had obtained the e-mail information by accessing Google's own internal intercept system - a program designed to enable Google to collect user information in response to US government demands.

If this is the case, the e-mail hack is more of an embarrassment for Google than anything else: an indication that Google had not only created the application to enable governments to spy on e-mail accounts, it had done such a poor job of protecting it that it could be hijacked by malicious parties.

The actual significance of the e-mail hack is open to question.

Only a handful of accounts were accessed, and apparently yielded no more information than the kind that the US government is supposed to get in response to a subpoena: account information and subject line. No message text was compromised, according to Google.

In a January 21 conference call with financial analysts, Google executive Eric Schmidt stated that Google wasn't even sure that the e-mail intrusion was related to the larger hack, now known as the Aurora exploit.

Aurora was a sophisticated, simultaneous industry-wide penetration of sensitive computers at Google, Adobe and perhaps more than two dozen other Silicon Valley companies, possibly a "zero day" attack intended to exploit an intrinsic weakness in Internet Explorer (IE) for maximum effect before the attack itself compelled Microsoft to issue a patch to plug the leak.

The target of this multi-front blitzkrieg was apparently a quest for IT's crown jewels - source code.

This cyber-sparring between Western high-tech companies and Chinese hackers is a historical albeit worrisome feature of the complicated relationship between US IT companies and the large Chinese market they hope to serve.

The large scale and synchronized timing of the assault has caused the target companies to point the finger, albeit gingerly and with caveats, directly at the Chinese government.

It is an open question whether the scale of the attack reflects Chinese government involvement, or an awareness of the transient nature of IE vulnerability and the resultant desire of networked private or semi-private Chinese hackers to exploit the flaw massively before it could be discovered and repaired.

Another anxious aspect was added to the case as rumors spread that Google suspected that a Chinese employee of its organization inside China may have facilitated Aurora's intrusion onto a computer with administrative privileges, thereby opening significant domains of the Google realm to inspection and downloading by the hackers.

However, Google took an important and inflammatory step of escalating its conflict with China by using the e-mail hack against democracy advocates to wrap itself in a human-rights flag. As a result, its threat to stop censoring its Google.cn search engine in retaliation for the hacks has become a cause celebre for free speech and Internet-rights activists.

This cause has been taken up by the US government.

The Obama administration is smarting from its devastating political defeat in the Massachusetts senate election, a defeat that has removed the Democrat Party's supermajority and put it on track for possible electoral catastrophe at November's mid-term congressional elections - unless it can rally its disaffected base of liberal and progressive voters. Thus, Obama's government is set to embark on a populist anti-banking campaign inside the US and a crowd-pleasing anti-China campaign internationally.

Google's emergence as a champion of Internet openness is, in a certain sense, rather ironic. Its data-collection capabilities extend from cookies to click-logging, which involves the recording of a user's search terms for two years and has aroused the concern of the European Union, the US government and privacy advocates. The tools are likely the envy of China's busy public and Internet security monitors.

Google is no stranger to cooperation with security services in the United States as well as abroad.

Google has an intimate relationship with the US intelligence community. It acquired one of its signature services - Google Earth - from the Central Intelligence Agency's acknowledged not-for-profit venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. As part of a one-hand-washes-the-other synergism between the private and public sector, In-Q-Tel's director of technology assessment, Rob Painter, moved to Google in 2005 to become chief technologist for federal business. His main job: selling Google Earth imagery back to the government.

The company itself is secretive not only about the precious algorithm that drives its world-beating search engine, but about everything else. Despite enjoying the benefits of being a publicly-traded company, its ownership is structured to enable close control by its founding members. It accumulates gigantic amounts of data concerning its users - including information from the over 75 billion Google searches, 10 billion Youtube views and hundreds of millions of Doubleclick ad page views per month they undertake - so it can target them with advertising tailored to their needs and weaknesses.

In an unintentionally ironic twist, Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt turned the company's ballyhooed motto - Don't Be Evil - into a warning to Google's users in an interview with CNBC in December 2009. [4]

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," Schmidt said. "If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."

Google is committed to an open Internet because this provides the maximum leverage for its competitive advantage as the pre-eminent search engine. Google also relies on the open Internet to allow it to collect the full spectrum of data that allows it to characterize and exploit the monetary potential of its users.

The one area in which Google cannot tolerate openness is in the one area the hackers targeted: the secrets of its search engine.

It would not be surprising if Google decided to make a public issue of the December 2009 intrusions in order to get the Chinese government to crack down on hackers within its borders, be they public or private actors.

…

Simply walking back the tense situation and negotiating some kind of symbolic, face-saving compromise on filtering of search-engine results may also be out of reach, thanks to the rapid escalation of political rhetoric by the Obama administration.

In a speech in Washington on January 21, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton planted the US government flag as champion of the "right to connect" to an open Internet. Echoing the phrase of British statesman Winston Churchill that announced the beginning of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West, she talked of an "information curtain" (rather than an iron curtain) descending across the world at the behest of totalitarian regimes.

Clearly, the lengthy speech was prepared long in advance to burnish America's information age luster. Equally clear was the fact that one paragraph was inserted about the Google case at the last minute.

Clinton issued a call that the Chinese government investigate the Google case "transparently", implying in effect that China had a responsibility to mollify foreign stakeholders based on Google's so far undocumented public assertions:

And we look to the Chinese authorities to conduct a thorough review of the cyber intrusions that led Google to make its announcement. And we also look for that investigation and its results to be transparent.

Open-society advocates lauded the tough American approach, even as IT professionals pointed out the awkward fact that the US itself embargoes Internet software - including Google's Chrome browser - to deny the benefits of Internet openness to users within Syria, Sudan and other countries.

The Chinese government - which has labored mightily to create an international regime in which China is an acknowledged superpower and not the target of condescending and embarrassing demands for transparency - responded with predictable heat.

China's Ministry of Foreign Relations denounced Clinton's call, stating, "We urge the US to respect facts and stop attacking China under the excuse of the so-called freedom of Internet."

China's Global Times accused the United States of "information imperialism".

According to an Associated Press report [7], the US government seems willing to up the ante:

Washington, meanwhile, carried its message on Internet freedom directly to Chinese bloggers. The US Embassy in Beijing and consulates in Shanghai and Guangzhou hosted Internet-streamed discussions with members of the blogging community on Friday afternoon - the latest example of Washington's outreach to Chinese bloggers as a way of spreading its message.

The bloggers met with US diplomats from the political, economic and public affairs sections, who held discussions and answered questions about Clinton's speech. The meetings were similar to a session organized during Obama's visit to China in November.

It would appear that nothing good for US-China relations will come of this. Perhaps the United States doesn't care too much.

In a widely-linked comment entitled "The Google news : China enters its Bush-Cheney era" [8], the Atlantic Monthly's James Fallows saw the Google case as a regrettable hardening of Chinese attitudes towards the US just as America was entering the halcyon period of the Obama administration.

It is more likely that the Obama administration, with the world financial system stabilized and Chinese goodwill a less vital commodity than before, and its own political fortunes in jeopardy, has found it politically expedient and feasible to harden towards China.

It subsequently came out that the Aurora hack--a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer--had been discovered and reported to Microsoft a year before by an Israeli security firm, but MS had not gotten around to writing a patch for it.  Nowadays, of course, we can wonder if the NSA also knew about it, did nothing about it, or, worst case did something about it: i.e. told Microsoft to keep the vulnerability under its hat while the NSA used Aurora itself to rummage through the innards of various target computer systems.

The exploit itself was relatively unsophisticated and remarkable only for the fact that it had been simultaneously unleashed against over two dozen companies, presumably to try and get something in a hurry before the vulnerability got fixed.  When Symantec analyzed Aurora, it observed there was nothing special about the hack, only about the mainstream media furor surrounding it.

I am of the opinion that the United States government had decided to put Chinese hacking on the menu of US grievances, Google was ready to cooperate, and a generic hacking episode was seized upon in order to start selling the pre-prepared product.

By the way, blowing up Google's position in the China market was apparently a brainwave of Sergey Brin, executed over the objections of Eric Schmidt.  

In my original piece for Asia Times Online, I speculated that Brin could afford to be blase about the mainland China market because the PRC had banned key Google services like Youtube, Baidu was eating Google's search-engine lunch, and Google's alternate future was the currently low-spending but big, democratic, Anglophone, pro-US, Indian market.  

Indeed, Google responded to its setbacks in China with a huge push into India, making India--where only 12% of the population is currently on-line-- its most important market bet after the United States.  In India Google's search engine share is over 97%, attracting envy, fear, and concern of everybody, including its customers, as a lengthy and revealing article in Forbes India reported:

Thus, partners and customers warily treat it as both a threat and an opportunity. A friend and a sort-of enemy—a ‘frenemy’.

Of the nearly two dozen people Forbes India spoke to for this story, none were comfortable saying anything even remotely critical of their frenemy, Google, on record. Many refused to be quoted at all. Reason: When the bulk of online sales depends on one company, you can’t afford to antagonise it.

Readers reflecting on the close political ties between Google and the Obama administration will find this passage concerning Google's political activities in India revealing:

In December 2011 things appeared pretty bleak for Google after the union telecom and IT minister, Kapil Sibal, berated it (along with peers Facebook and Yahoo!) for not “pre-screening” user content for defamatory comments before it was uploaded.

Having been ejected from China for its failure to kowtow to the government, Google was, of course, extremely wary of losing its next biggest market the same way. So it pulled out the stops on a high voltage charm offensive.

Google has used its popularity with consumers as a carrot, offering key influencers a digital pulpit few others can match—the Google Hangout, a multi-party video-conferencing service that can also be broadcast.

Though Hangouts can be set up free of cost by any Google user, the service offered to ministers and politicians was supported directly by Google, with weeks of preparation beforehand.

The first person Google chose to do a Hangout with in August 2012 was Gujarat chief minister and BJP leader Narendra Modi. Drawing in tens of thousands of online viewers, the session was a resounding success. That made the job of convincing Congress politicians much easier, leading to Hangout sessions this year featuring union ministers Shashi Tharoor, CP Joshi, P Chidambaram and Milind Deora.

“It was the platform determining the speaker, and not the other way round,” says a senior industry watcher on the condition of anonymity.

Modi, of course, will become India's next prime minister if his BJP party performs up to expectations in the current Indian parliamentary elections.

Over four years ago the institutional relationships between Google and the US government (and the presence of surveillance backdoors in Google services) and the political and personal synergies between Google execs and the Obama administration became apparent, and a thing for people to get worked up about.

As to where this all leads, post-Snowden, I rubbed it in in a post from late 2013 titled Google Knew!

I recently wrote a post on the (to me) unconvincing hero-splaining of the privacy commitments espoused by Google, Yahoo! Et al. in the wake of revelations of “MUSCULAR” NSA intrusions into their data backbones:

Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the [notorious smiley face] drawing [showing the NSA’s penetration of the Google data backbone]. “I hope you publish this,” one of them said. 

Publish what?  Evidence that Google's security is cracked?  Or document Google's hyperbolic anger at NSA transgressions to reassure Google Cloud customers?

If you’re searching for privacy heroes, I think you’d better scratch Google off your list.  Per Gellman:

Last month, long before The Post approached Google to discuss the penetration of its cloud, vice president for security engineering Eric Grosse announced that the company is racing to encrypt the links between its data centers. “It’s an arms race,” he said then. “We see these government agencies as among the most skilled players in this game.”

Google knew, kids.  Get used to it.

Then the Guardian reported:

Yahoo, Microsoft and Google deny they co-operate voluntarily with the intelligence agencies, and say they hand over data only after being forced to do so when served with warrants. The NSA told the Guardian that the companies' co-operation was "legally compelled".

But this week the Washington Post reported that the NSA and its UK equivalent GCHQ has been secretly intercepting the main communication links carrying Google and Yahoo users' data around the world, and could collect information "at will" from among hundreds of millions of user accounts.

The NSA's ability to collect vast quantities of data from the fibre-optic cables relies on relationships with the companies, the document published on Friday shows.

The presentation, titled "Corporate Partner Access" was prepared by the agency's Special Source Operations division, which is responsible for running those programs. 

In an opening section that deals primarily with the telecom companies, the SSO baldly sets out its mission: "Leverage unique key corporate partnerships to gain access to high-capacity international fiber-optic cables, switches and/or routes throughout the world."

This piece hasn't received a lot of play.  Wonder why.  On the other hand, the Guardian treats us to a column from its digital beat guy, Dann Gillmour, with the title slug:

Google, Yahoo et al have the power (and money) to fight back against the NSA

The tech billionaires should create the anti-surveillance, pro-security equivalent of the National Rifle Association.

In my humble opinion, asking Google, Yahoo! et al. to lobby on behalf of Internet privacy is like expecting the gun manufacturers who provide a lot of the NRA’s juice to endorse gun control.

Google Knew!  Maybe the new corporate slogan should be...Google Knows!