Pokémon Go is more than a worldwide craze that inspired millions to hunt Zigzagoons through smartphone-enabled alternate reality. According to intelligence officials in several countries, it’s also an information security threat. Since the game’s release by game developer Niantic in 2016, people have pondered the potential uses of the data that’s collected by aspiring PokéMasters as they meander outside and scan virtual PokéStops.
Travis, Jake, Julian, and Liv dive into why a children’s game about collecting fighting pets has inspired such paranoia. Including how Niantic’s startup ancestor Keyhole, Inc. was saved from bankruptcy by the CIA, how Niantic’s former parent company Google committed one of the worst data privacy violations in history through the “Wi-Spy” scandal, and Niantic’s recent announcement that Pokemon Go data is being used to produce an artificial intelligence system they call a Large Geospatial Model (LGM).
Gotta Catch ‘Em All! And by “Em All” we mean “massive amounts of data from everyone’s smartphones for undisclosed purposes.”
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Editing by Julian Feeld. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
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REFERENCES
Consumer Watchdog. Lost In The Cloud: Google And the US Government
https://insidegoogle.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/GOOGGovfinal012411.pdf
Gawker. Pokemon Go Is A Government Surveillance Psyop Conspiracy
https://web.archive.org/web/20160712023458/http://blackbag.gawker.com/pokemon-go-is-a-government-surveillance-psyop-conspirac-1783461240
Pando. Oakland emails give another glimpse into the Google-Military-Surveillance Complex
https://web.archive.org/web/20150819032041/https://pando.com/2014/03/07/the-google-military-surveillance-complex/
Financial Times. Lunch with the FT: Pokémon Go creator John Hanke
https://www-ft-com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/content/596ec790-afe8-11e6-9c37-5787335499a0
Dalton, Craig M. "Sovereigns, spooks, and hackers: An early history of Google geo services and map mashups." Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 48.4 (2013): 261-274.
Kilday, Bill. Never lost again: The Google mapping revolution that sparked new industries and augmented our reality. Harper Business, 2018.
Wes’s Blog. My Personal Journey On Google Earth
https://westhierry.blogspot.com/2008/07/my-personal-journey-on-google-earth.html
Intercept. Privacy Scandal Haunts Pokemon Go CEO
https://theintercept.com/2016/08/09/privacy-scandal-haunts-pokemon-gos-ceo/
CJR. Poor coverage of Google’s Street View scandal settlement
https://www.cjr.org/the_audit/misleading_coverage_of_street.php
RFI. Pokemon Go to jail - Frenchman nabbed hunting Pokemon on Indonesian military base.
https://www.rfi.fr/en/asia-pacific/20160719-pokemon-go-jail-frenchman-nabbed-hunting-pokemon-indonesian-military-base
CIA Office of Security. Are you At An Agency Facility? Pokemon NO!
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/are%20you%20at%20an%20agency%20faci%5B15210727%5D.pdf
Foreign Policy. The Great Pokemon Go Spy Panic.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/11/29/pokemongo-cia-nsa-intelligence-spying/
Niantic Labs. Building a Large Geospatial Model to Achieve Spatial Intelligence
https://nianticlabs.com/news/largegeospatialmodel
Welcome to the QAA Podcast Premium Episode 269, Pokemon Go to Langley.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokotanski, Liv Agar, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Remember the summer of 2016. American gymnast Simone Biles made her Olympic debut in Rio de Janeiro, dazzling the world with her generational talent.
The Netflix series Stranger Things made captivating television by combining horror, mystery, conspiracy theories, and 80s nostalgia.
And the two major political parties hosted their national conventions, the Republican one showcasing a party bitterly divided over the nomination of Donald Trump, who was surely headed to a spectacular defeat in November.
And on top of all that, a new gaming craze swept the nation and the world.
Millions were engrossed with the innovative augmented reality game, Pokemon Go.
Rather than being a game that is played on a user's phone, it's a game played in the real world through the phone.
By using the smartphone's camera and GPS, users traveled through the physical world to track down and capture Pokemon.
Getting the Pokemon means pointing the phone's camera in physical space, seeing a digital Pokemon superimposed on the screen, and tapping it to throw a Pokeball.
Finding better Pokemon requires users to leave their house and explore landmarks and parks where they typically spawn.
Getting Pokeballs or potions means finding Pokestops at landmarks and public buildings.
It was a smash hit and possibly proof that our smartphone addiction could be perfectly compatible with going outside, getting exercise and socializing.
I did play some of that game at the beginning.
I was very fond of that.
That was the summer before I went to university.
I just went around Vancouver catching Pokemon.
It was great.
So you were like 12 as a precocious graduate?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I played it with my daughter, and I remember what I really liked about it is I drove down to Balboa Park in San Diego.
I don't know if you've ever driven an adolescent girl somewhere she wasn't really excited to go, but they kind of go mentally limp.
They're not really excited to go there.
But then you give them Pokemon Go, and they say, go find Pokemon.
All of a sudden, they're in charge.
I'm following her, figuring out where she wants to go.
And they're a lot more engaged in the environment.
And yeah, it was a lot of fun.
Happy memories, which have been tainted by the strangeness around the game.
I actually never played Pokemon Go.
It's weird.
Whoa, that is kind of weird.
I just think video games belong in the video game world, not in my real world.
The part that Jake didn't like was he had to leave his house.
Well, I just didn't like it.
I don't like digital characters superimposed over photorealistic real video capture.
I don't know.
It's just not my thing.
Two worlds that shouldn't fly.
They should be separate.
What Jake is not telling you is that he captured a lot of low-level Pokemon directly in front of his toilet.
And then he was done.
Now, for a children's game about collecting fighting monsters, Pokemon Go sure has inspired a lot of paranoia over the past eight years.
Privacy advocates express concern because playing the game requires allowing the developer to have extensive access to your mobile phone, including the camera, storage, GPS, Bluetooth, contacts, and pretty much everything else.
What's more, governments around the world became concerned that the game is a front for a massive crowdsourced intelligence gathering system.
And just last month, the company that develops Pokemon Go, Niantic, announced that they have in fact used location-based player data to build an artificial intelligence geospatial model.
This is another huge W for China.
LAUGHTER They were like, nah.
Nope.
This is illegal.
Now, the whole thing opens up questions about how much privacy we have to give up just to play a game on our phones, what our data is being used for, and the relationship between the tech industry and the security state.
So today we're going to explore those questions and hopefully arrive at just the right amount of paranoia.
Not too crazy, not too naive, just right.
The sweet spot.
It's not like it's going to change anything I do about the world.
It's just to not be owned, you know?
Yeah, well, you know, here's the thing.
I think that being owned stings less when you know it's going to happen beforehand.
Okay, I'm going to tell, you know, these massive corporations everything about my life, but I know it's happening, so...
I got you, really.
It sounds like Travis was given a crash course on perception management by his handler.
He's like, let me tell you how paranoid you should be.
So yeah, I did some research into how Pokemon came to be and the concerns surrounding it.
And probably the most interesting thing I sort of put together is that Pokemon Go only exists because of 9-11.
So it's a long chain of events.
But yeah, they're there.
I'll get to that.
What?
Yeah.
Now, the short version of the story of Pokemon Go is that back in 2001, entrepreneur John Hanke founded a company called Keyhole, which made interactive earth visualization software.
It struggled for years before it was saved from bankruptcy by its use in television news reports.
This gave it enough buzz to earn an investment from In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit venture capital firm owned by the CIA.
and once the company was back on its feet it was acquired by Google so So, and then John Hankey developed Google products like Google Maps, and then within Google, he founded the company Niantic, which went on to eventually create Pokemon Go.
Now, you know, it sounds a little strange and spooky that the CIA's sort of like venture capital firm would be interested in this early company, but I should point out that this is not unusual, that there's some sort of relationship between defense and intel and tech companies.
So, Google's relationship to defense and intel goes back to its very conception.
The search technology that would eventually be used by Google was developed in the 90s by founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page when they were PhD computer science students at Stanford.
So, this research was partially funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. I don't like any of this.
I don't like DARPA and funding and companies non-profit owned by the CIA. It just feels a little dark.
This is such a conspiracy W. This feels like a post you would find on r slash conspiracy in 2017. Do you know Niantic was bought by the CIA? And it's like, okay, dude, sure.
And just remember, these are the ones we are finding out about.
Yeah, yeah.
This research for the technology that made Google, yeah, was funded by DARPA. This is the branch of the Pentagon, develops new technology.
And I do want to point out, like, the DARPA involvement was never hidden.
In fact, in the foundational 1998 paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, that was titled, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.
And in that paper, they tipped their hat in the acknowledgement section, which says this.
Funding for this cooperative agreement is also provided by DARPA and NASA. So, yeah.
Does this soothe you, Travis?
Does this soothe you?
Oh, they're not hiding it!
Oh, that's good.
Hey, there's a visible part of an iceberg.
I bet there's nothing underneath.
Google, like many large tech companies, is also a government contractor.
The relationship between Google and the NSA goes back to at least August of 2003, when the company entered into a $2.07 million contract with the agency.
According to documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act by the nonprofit organization Consumer Watchdog, the NSA paid Google for a search application capable of searching 15 million documents in four languages.
John Hanke, founder of Niantic, actually had some experience working for the government in his youth.
After graduating as an arts and science major from the University of Texas at Austin in 1989, he took a job in the U.S. Foreign Service in Washington, D.C. and then in the U.S. Embassy in Myanmar.
Now, as far as I can tell, he's never really detailed the work that he did.
In an interview with Wired, he said that it was, quote, just foreign affairs stuff.
And in an interview with the Financial Times, he said, quote, I was third secretary and doing a bit of everything as one does.
A bit of everything.
Yes, one does.
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