The Silicon Jungle

by Shumeet Baluja

  “Life and circumstances will be different if we can ever see each other again. As much as I want to, I can’t change that,” he wrote. The letter ended simply. There was so much more he would like to say, but for now, perhaps it was better left unsaid. No amount of her own brilliance, homework, or research could help her now. He was already resigned to something she was not prepared to endure.

  She could not know it then, but with the appropriate amount of introspection she would eventually be able to pinpoint this moment as the one in which an important transition occurred. Life from then on would have little resemblance to her life just seconds before. She had started as an isolated researcher, studying the politics and science of message boards, and had become a devout participant in the lives she encountered there. She needed the support of people who still cared about the anger she was feeling and who shared in her venom—first toward the men who took Stephen, and then to all those unseen people who, through their silence, refused to do anything about it. She needed to be a part of the people who believed she should not sit idly by and wait for something to happen. She needed to act.

  To her readers, she never revealed her real name or the extent of her rage, though the words she would go on to write were clear and unmistakable in their intent. Her endless flow of intensity needed a channel and her readers obliged by providing a clear one. The impassioned support, responses, and unwavering encouragement bestowed upon her from her ardent followers would give her the resolve needed to continue on her newfound path. In less time than she and Stephen had together, she would come to reinvent herself into someone primed to let her still fresh, still stinging, resentment overtake all else: Sahim.

  -EPILOGUE: BEGINNINGS-

  December 25, 2009.

  “That’s a pretty mean look you’re giving the coffee machine,” she said.

  A small yelp escaped Stephen as he whirled around to find Aarti smiling at him. He figured the office was completely empty today. “What are you doing here?”

  “Same as you, I imagine—might as well come into work. Not much else to do. My travel schedule seems to have been taken care of for me.”

  “Yeah, I know. Coffee’s terrible here,” Stephen replied, waiting for the antiquated vending machine to dispense its $0.75 of acrid sludge. He slammed the vending machine, hoping to convince it to at least hurry.

  “Why don’t you just write Molly again, Stephen? They didn’t find out the last time. You haven’t written her in months.”

  His gaze didn’t waver from the vending machine, so she continued. “Stephen, you’ve been absolutely miserable. For her sake, and yours, write her again.”

  He looked up at her, as if to start the same conversation they’d had dozens of times before. But not again. Not today. He reached through the stream of coffee dispensing into his cup, and let the liquid scald his hand. With his cup half empty, he turned his back to her and started walking away.

  “Hey. Wait. I have something for you,” she opened her backpack and held out a small package neatly wrapped in red and green paper with a shiny gold ribbon. “Thought it might cheer you up.”

  He looked at her, then the package, then back at her. He took it from her hands slowly. “Thanks.” He visibly relaxed his shoulders and stammered some apology for his behavior.

  An awkward moment passed. Only when she looked like she might walk away did he speak again. “Do you have a second? I have something for you, too. It’s in my office.”

  They turned to walk together through the empty building. “So why are you here today?” he asked again as they entered the musty concrete stairwell.

  “What else was I supposed to do? No contact with family, no contact with friends, remember? Those are the terms for you and I,” she smiled. Then, in her languid British accent, she added, “Screw Alan.”

  “Screw Alan, indeed,” Stephen replied. “Prison would have been better for us. Cush life, white-collar criminal, playing golf all day, or whatever it is they do . . .”

  “I’m not sure it would have been quite that good—not if Alan had his way. He’d have pushed the terrorist threat, made up some intent on our part, found the nearest firing squad, or just pulled the trigger himself if he had the chance. Not that Ubatoo would have minded. They would have had a field day with you and me. It would have been ugly. How Rajive managed this deal, I have no idea. Still, though, screw Rajive,” she concluded.

  “Yep, now we’re just Rajive’s play things. Screw Rajive,” he agreed with a nod.

  “By the way, I know it’s Christmas, but since we’re here, just curious. I don’t suppose you’ve gotten anywhere tracking down the whereabouts of Rajive’s newest top-priority urgent global menace have you?” The sarcasm in her voice was good to hear. She usually kept it in check during normal office hours.

  “Dorothy, we’re not in Ubatoo anymore. No, it’s going to take some time. Hopefully, I’ll be able to work my way through all the telephone transcripts by next week. Did you have any luck on your end?”

  “Not yet. Still waiting to free up some computer resources so I can start analyzing their credit card transactions, too,” she replied as she sat down in Stephen’s windowless closet of an office.

  “I don’t think we’d be able to get the same resources even if we were still at Ubatoo. With all of the announced employee—especially intern—monitoring and the dozens of oversight committees they’ve promised to look into people’s privacy, sounds like things are going to be a mess there, at least internally, for a long time.”

  “You think so? Even for Atiq’s group? That would pretty much kill or cripple everything our . . . I mean his . . . group did.”

  Stephen tried to imagine life in Atiq’s group with committees questioning all the experiments he ran that summer for the countless advertisers, for Jaan, for ACCL, for Sebastin. “I bet the rules apply to his group. After all, his group was the reason they were created. But I’d also be willing to bet you that Jaan either doesn’t know about the rules and committees or, if he does, he never pays any attention to them. It’s probably too mundane for him to think about, and—”

  “—and Atiq will never even notice,” she said, jumping to his conclusion for him.

  “Until one of them winds up in here, with us,” Stephen added with a smile.

  He sat a moment sipping his coffee, letting the air of business adequately dissipate. It only took a few seconds, given neither wanted to be at work.

  Stephen reached into his desk and pulled out her Christmas present carefully. “I don’t know if you’ll like it. It’s an 1894 edition of Pride and Prejudice. It’s not in the best condition, but I thought . . . anyway, I hope you like it. I know I should have wrapped—”

  “I can’t believe it! I’ve always wanted this—ever since I first read it. Thank you. Thank you so much,” she leaned close and gave him a kiss on his cheek. “It’s perfect. It really is.”

  Stephen reached across his desk and picked up his gift that he had set down when he walked in. He tore away the holiday wrapping paper—the complete Freddie Krueger’s Nightmare on Elm Street series. “I love horror movies,” he exclaimed. “How did you know I liked . . .”

  The fluorescent lights did nothing to diminish the shimmer in her eyes and her happy joyful smile—a smile that had been missing for months. She held up her book and beamed. “The same way you knew exactly what I wanted, I suspect.”

  The End

  Acknowledgments

  Writing is often regarded as a lonely pursuit. True as that is, publishing one’s writing requires interacting with many people. I am greatly indebted to the Princeton University Press, in particular to Vickie Kearn and her excellent team, for guiding me through this process. My appreciation for her constant encouragement and kind words cannot be overstated.

  At Google, my managers and wonderful colleagues have all been supportive of my writing pursuits. Life would have been difficult, and certainly far less interesting, had it been any other way.

  I have sou
ght the critique and selfishly requested the time of many family members and friends throughout this process. For all those who read early drafts and provided such thoughtful feedback, I would like to express how indebted I am to you for your help. Let me assure you again that any mean glances, muttering, and rolling eyes that might have initially been construed as my being defensive, were just my own unique ways of saying thank you.

  I would like to give special thanks to Todd Wiggins. He had the misfortune of being the first “outsider” to read my first (of many) “final versions.” Todd, I officially apologize for putting you through that. Although, beware, if you let me, I would do it again—your insightful critique helped reshape the book from the first page to the last.

  To the person to whom I should say the most, my wife, Kaari, I’m at the greatest loss for words. In a year in which our lives were turned upside down, she made the time to read countless drafts, provide unfathomable amounts of reassurance, and give endless encouragement at all hours of the day and especially the night. She did this all while having to endure the great variety of moods and insecurities inherent in an “aspiring writer.” I don’t know how she did it. I am, truly, in awe. Thank you.

  Finally, a note to my two children, Ashwin and Emma. My daughter is at the age where books are more tasty than interesting. She seemed to enjoy the drafts. My son declared this to be the “best book ever,” long before it was finished. Someday, when you’re old enough to read it, I hope you still like it. This book is for you two.

  —Shumeet Baluja

  Know More

  The Silicon Jungle is a work of fiction. The companies, people, numbers, and anything else that can be misconstrued as fact, are fictional. Really.

  The research for this book was often exciting, sometimes scary, and always thought provoking. For those who want to read more, I’ve provided a few places to start your search. Note, all the links and references below are provided for information and sometimes amusement. The thoughts expressed on them are their own—not mine. Their perspectives are yours to consider or ignore. All of them provide ample fodder for the imagination—whether you’re a mathematician, a conspiracy theorist, or both.

  All the best in your pursuits.

  First and foremost, documents addressing

  data mining and civil liberties:

  Executive Committee on SIGINT—KDD (2003), “Data Mining” Is NOT Against Civil Liberties, by the Executive Committee on ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. See SIGKDD.org: http://www.sigkdd.org/civil-liberties.pdf.

  Thuraisingham, B. (2002) “Data Mining, National Security, Privacy and Civil Liberties.” SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter 4, 2 (Dec. 2002), 1–5.

  Carafano, J. (2007) “Promoting Security and Civil Liberties: The Role of Data Mining in Combating Terrorism,” The Heritage Foundation (Jan. 10, 2007). http://www.heritage.org/Research/Homeland Security/tst010907a.cfm

  The Privacy Policy of a few

  organizations, in their own words

  (as found in April, 2009):

  Microsoft:

  http://privacy.microsoft.com/

  Google:

  http://www.google.com/privacy.html

  Yahoo:

  http://privacy.yahoo.com

  Facebook:

  http://www.facebook.com/policy.php

  MySpace:

  http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.privacy

  YouTube:

  http://www.youtube.com/t/privacy

  Amazon:

  http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=468496

  TRUSTe:

  http://www.truste.org/

  References

  Chapter: Touchpoints

  Chapter: An Understatement

  Assael, H. (2005) “A Demographic and Psychographic Profile of Heavy Internet Users and Users by Type of Internet Usage,” Journal of Advertising Research, 45:1: 93–123.

  Ayers, I. (2007) Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart, Bantam.

  Bilchev, G. and Marston, D. (2003) “Personalised Advertising—Exploiting the Distributed User Profile,” BT Technology Journal 21, 1 (Jan. 2003), 84–90.

  Claypool, M., Le, P., Wased, M., and Brown, D. (2001) “Implicit Interest Indicators.” In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States, January 14–17, 2001). IUI ’01. ACM, New York, NY, 33–40.

  ClickZ (1999) “Engage Launches Profile Based Web-Wide Ad Network,” ClickZ (Oct. 13, 1999), http://www.clickz.com/216871.

  Fink, J. and Kobsa, A. (2000) “A Review and Analysis of Commercial User Modeling Servers for Personalization on the World Wide Web,” User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 10, 2–3 (Feb. 2000), 209–49.

  Fox, S., Karnawat, K., Mydland, M., Dumais, S., and White, T. (2005) “Evaluating Implicit Measures to Improve Web Search,” ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 23, 2 (Apr. 2005), 147–68.

  Germanakos P., Tsianos N., Lekkas Z., Mourlas C., and Samaras G. (2008) “Realizing Comprehensive User Profile as the Core Element of Adaptive and Personalized Communication Environments and Systems,” The Computer Journal Advance Access published online on April 4, 2008.

  Guo, F., Liu, C., Kannan, A., Minka, T., Taylor, M., Wang, Y., and Faloutsos, C. (2009) “Click Chain Model in Web Search,” Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW-2009, 11–20.

  Hassan, A., Jones, R., and Klinkner, K. L. (2010) “Beyond DCG: User Behavior as a Predictor of a Successful Search,” Proceedings of the Third ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (New York: February 4–6, 2010). WSDM ’10. ACM, New York: 221–30.

  Jansen, B. (2007) “Preserving the Collective Expressions of the Human Consciousness,” Query Log Analysis: Social and Technological Challenges: A Workshop at the 16th International World Wide Web Conference.

  Joachims, T. and Radlinski, F. (2007) “Search Engines that Learn from Implicit Feedback,” Computer 40, 8 (Aug. 2007), 34–40.

  Karagiannis, T. and Vojnovic, M. (2009) “Behavioral Profiles for Advanced Email Features,” Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW-2009, 711–20.

  Katz, R. (2009) “Tech Titans Building Boom,” IEEE-Spectrum Online, http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb09/7327.

  Kelly, D. and Teevan, J. (2003) Implicit Feedback for Inferring User Preference: A Bibliography. SIGIR Forum 37, 2 (Sep. 2003), 18–28.

  Markoff, J. (2008) “You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What about Privacy?” The New York Times (Nov. 29, 2008), http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/30privacy.html.

  McDonald, J. (2008) “China Reports It’s Tied U.S. for Most Internet Users,” USA Today.com, 4/24/2008, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2008-04-24-3250683510_x.htm.

  Narayanan, A. and Shmatikov, V. (2009) “De-anonymizing Social Networks,” IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2009.

  Pasca, M., Lin, D., Bigham J., Lifchits, A., and Jain, A. (2006) “Names and Similarities on the Web: Fact Extraction in the Fast Lane,” Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (COLING-ACL-06), 809–16.

  Shankland, S. (2009) “Google Uncloaks Once-Secret Server,” CNET News (Apr. 1, 2009), http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html.

  Smith, G., and Ashman, H. (2009) “Evaluating Implicit Judgments from Image Search Interactions,” Proceedings of the WebSci ’09: Society On-Line, 18–20.

  Song, Y., and Leung, T. (2006) “Context-aided Human Recognition—Clustering,” Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Computer Vision, 382–95.

  Stamou, S. and Efthimiadis, E. N. (2010) “Interpreting User Inactivity on Search Results,” Advances in Information Retrieval: Proceedings of the 32nd European Conference on IR Research (ECIR).

  Story, L. (2008) “To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You,” The New York Times, March 10, 2008, http://www.nyti
mes.com/2008/03/10/technology/10privacy.html.

  Thomas G., Method and Apparatus for Determining Behavioral Profile of a Computer User. Patent #5848396.

  Vishwanath, K., Greenberg, A., and Reed, D. (2009) “Modular Data Centers: How to Design Them?” High-Performance Distributed Computing, Proceedings of the 1st ACM Workshop on Large-Scale System and Application Performance, 3–10.

  Yan J., Liu N., Wang G., Zhang W., Jiang Y., and Chen Z. (2009) “How Much Can Behavioral Targeting Help Online Advertising?” Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW-2009, 261–70.

  Youn, S., Lee, M., and Doyle, K. (2003) “Lifestyles of Online Gamers: A Psychographic Approach,” Journal of Interactive Advertising, 3:2.

  Zetter, K. (2009) “Yahoo, Verizon: Our Spy Capabilities Would ‘Shock,’ ‘Confuse’ Consumers,” www.wired.com (Dec. 1, 2009), http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/wiretap-prices

  Zheng, Y. T., Zhao, M., Song, Y., Adam, H., Buddemeir, U., Bissaco, A., Brucher, F., Chua, T. S., and Neven, H. (2009) “Tour the World: Building a Web-Scale Landmark Recognition Engine,” Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference, 2009.

  A recent job posting for Yahoo.com: http://www.job.com/my.job/sup/appTo=32758541/p=1/jsOn=1.

  Chapter: Mollycoddle

  Eliot, T. S. (1917) “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Prufrock and Other Observations.

  Chapter: Anthropologists in the Midst

  Chapter: Subjects

  Chapter: Control

  Abbasi, A. (2007), “Affect Intensity Analysis of Dark Web Forums,” Intelligence and Security Informatics, 2007 IEEE, May 23–24, 2007, 282–88.

  ANI. (2008) “Extremist Groups Using Facebook, MySpace, YouTube to Recruit Members,” ANI November 20th, 2008, http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/india-news/extremist-groups-using-facebook-myspace-youtube-to-recruit-members_100121244.html.