No Google = Threat to National Security?

While attempting to write my thesis proposal tonight, I got distracted by a very disturbing article. The article was in the Washington Post today and titled "Seeking Iran Intelligence, U.S. Tries Google." It begins:

When the State Department recently asked the CIA for names of Iranians who could be sanctioned for their involvement in a clandestine nuclear weapons program, the agency refused, citing a large workload and a desire to protect its sources and tradecraft.

Frustrated, the State Department assigned a junior Foreign Service officer to find the names another way -- by using Google. Those with the most hits under search terms such as "Iran and nuclear," three officials said, became targets for international rebuke Friday when a sanctions resolution circulated at the United Nations.

This article begs the question: How much does our national security apparatus rely on Google? Personally, at my government client site, we depend on the use of search engines, such as Google, to conduct open source research all the time. When I worked at USAID in the Office of Iraq Reconstruction, we did not turn to the Department of Defense or State Department for statistics on reconstruction costs, the Iraq population, or foreign development projects--we turned to Google. With our information sharing mechanisms within the government in such disarray, I wonder whether it would be a bigger national security risk if one of the U.S. classified computer networks went down or Google? This might seem like a ridiculous claim but it would not surprise me to find that Google would cause a greater risk. I am not going to go into the tiresome debate about how miserably the U.S. Government adopts new technology but it does bring up an interesting issue about whether the government has a responsibility to help protect private information technology, such as Google.

Much government focus is on protecting national security systems but when does a non-classified and open system become such a powerful aggregator that it itself becomes a national security system?