Nyquist Capital

Robert X. Cringely examines the scale of wiretapping in WWII and the story of IXC, an early twentieth century international carrier HQ’ed in New York:

Intercepting communications for purposes of maintaining national security is nothing new. From before Pearl Harbor through 1945, EVERY trans-Atlantic phone call, cable and indeed letter was intercepted in Bermuda by the Coordinator of Information (COI) in the White House and later by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Sir William Stephenson revealed this in his autobiography, A Man Called Intrepid. They literally tapped the undersea cables and shipped all post to Europe through Bermuda, where every single call was monitored, every cable printed out, and every letter opened. FDR and Churchill needed intelligence and they took the steps they needed to get it.

Wow. I guess you would want that operation based in Memphis today. Even more from Cringeley, which reminds me of the recent request of porn search data from Google.

One fun fact from that monitoring: The CEO of International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT) reportedly spoke with Adolf Hitler on the phone from New York City every week of the war. According to the book The Sovereign State of ITT, the call was placed from New York to South America, and then used a cable from South America to Berlin. Key companies that maintained the German telephone network were ITT subsidiaries at that time, and communications were obviously of strategic importance for Germany; thus Hitler needed to speak with the CEO every week. ITT never stopped running the German phones during the war and were evidently allowed to continue doing so to gather just this sort of intelligence…

Think of the strategic advantages the US has as the defacto leader in internet architecture. It is in our best interest to continue to allow traffic to physically transit our infrastructure and services such as Google, Yahoo, etc. Why? Not only can the above companies see the data and make better business decisions, but the US Government can access that data for national security reasons.

Running a blog (and seeing solid traffic increases - thank you readers!) over the last few months has been an eye opening experience. I too have obtained (small so far) strategic advantages I never anticipated by mining the statistical data of this site (sample screenshot below).

When someone searches on “Microsoft IPTV Xbox 360” this post comes up ranked 7th. When that someone clicks on that post and comes to this site - Google is kind enough to inform me what search terms brought the user here. My site then does a reverse lookup on that user’s IP address and resolves it, often right down to a company name. The stats part of running this site (I use Mint, the best $30 I ever spent) is far more interesting and informative than I ever imagined. I’ve seen the following:

• Cisco employees Googling “Ciena 4200 Pricing” (Nyquist is on top of second page currently)
• Transwitch’s Law Firm looking at this post (after many TXCC employees already did)
• Scientific Atlanta storming the post on Microsoft IPTV and the Xbox 360 with 15 unique SFA users in a 30 minute span of time. Are they worried about something?
• Other than searches on FiOS, FTTH, and Passave, “XM Subscribers” or “Sirius Subscribers” is my biggest draw. And I don’t consider myself greatly informed about satellite radio, other than a post I wrote here. Seems like these stocks simply draw too much attention.
• Teknovus (Passave Competitor) Googling “Passave Lawsuit” before I had even heard of the lawsuit, or mainstream media reporting it. I didn’t think anything about it at the time…. next time I will.

People refer to this as metadata, information about information. I am beginning to realize that it is extremely valuable, both from a national security perspective as well as a financial and business perspective. It is just begging to be mined. It may be as valuable, if not more valuable, than the current Google revenue model. That is, of course, assuming people continue to allow themselves to be spied upon.

People pay Google today in order to have their ads placed along side search keywords. How long will it be until people pay Google to see who is searching for what. Imagine the value to business intelligence - how much would Ciena have paid two years ago to see who was searching for “Ciena 4200 pricing” while bidding for the BT 21cn contract.

Corporate America, you have no idea what sort of information sieve your employees have left open.

Take this one step forward by doing cookie and history mining of browsers (which I do not currently do) and you could see who is searching for what and where they have been and when they did it. The why can be extrapolated, with all of the risks (wrongful raids of mosques, speculative short-term investments) involved in such a process.

I’m thinking of a weekly “Best of Search” column to illustrate what nuggets I can mine out. Feedback welcome.

Consider this fair warning. I’m watching you. I didn’t think I would be when I stated this blog. And you should be thankful that I’m honest enough to tell you - most others won’t.