Did Google breach and record 62 Million U.S. resident's email data?
Federal regulators and Justice Department officials have either ignored the incident or conducted cursory investigations that privacy advocates and members of Congress have openly complained about.
And some critics wonder if President Barack Obama’s personal ties to Eric Schmidt, who served as Google’s CEO until January, may have something to do with it.
Google representatives refused to discuss the Wi-spying incident with iWatch News despite repeated requests for comment or an interview.
The company has claimed in numerous blog posts that one of its engineers accidentally included a snippet of code in the Street View Cars, and that Google never had any intention of stealing private Internet data. “Quite simply, it was a mistake,” wrote Google Vice President Alan Eustace when the scandal first broke.
Activists with Consumer Watchdog, a Los Angeles-based consumer advocacy group, decided that Congress needed a lesson in just how serious this violation may have been. Security experts drove by the Washington homes of members of Congress whose homes appear on Google Street View, and used the same software employed by Google to check if the search engine could have stolen data from their Wi-Fi networks.
The watchdog group found open Wi-Fi networks near the homes of Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman, Edward Markey, John Dingell, and then-Rep. Rick Boucher. Two unsecured Wi-Fi networks clearly belonged to Democrat Jane Harman, who then chaired the Intelligence Subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee. Google could have secretly recorded sensitive emails about U.S. homeland security, the group said.
All five Democrats declined to comment for this story.
According to John Simpson , who investigates Google for Consumer Watchdog, such theatrics are critical. Unless the federal government holds the search giant accountable at times like this, he says, Google will keep trying to see what else it can learn about consumers. He sees it as part of the company’s DNA.
“I think they deliberately set out to gather the data,” Simpson says. “At least the people who created the project set out to gather the maximum amount of data. That stems from the engineering mindset, that you should always gather as much data as you can, because you never know what you can do with it.”
Nine months after Google first admitted to collecting this data, we still don’t have answers as to how this privacy breach was allowed to take place and how many Americans were affected, let alone a credible assurance that it will not happen again,” the congressmen wrote. “The lack of progress in this investigation is concerning.”
And on March 30, an exasperated Rep. Tom Graves, a Georgia Republican, grilled Genachowski on the status of the FCC’s probe during an appropriations subcommittee hearing. “There could be almost 62 million emails picked up, but you don’t know when you will be able to tell us about all this?” Graves asked, according to The Hill . “Would you consider this eavesdropping?”
Link:
http://www.iwatchnews.org/2011/07/05/5106/us-lawmakers-frustrated-lack-answers-about-google-street-view-wi-spying