Type Think tank Founders Eric Schmidt | Founded 2010 | |
 | ||
Formerly called Google Ideas (2010–2015) Headquarters New York City, United States Key people Jared Cohen (President) | ||
Jigsaw, formerly Google Ideas, is a technology incubator created by Google, and now operated as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Based in New York City, Jigsaw is dedicated to understanding global challenges and applying technological solutions, from countering extremism, online censorship and cyber-attacks, to protecting access to information. Jared Cohen, formerly with the Policy Planning Committee at the US State Department, is the founder and president of Jigsaw, and was formerly founder and director of Google Ideas.
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Google Ideas
In 2010, Eric Schmidt approached Jared Cohen to lead Google Ideas, as a "think/do tank" to research issues at the intersection of technology and geopolitics, and has worked on projects intended to protect activists and independent media from cyber-attacks. Google Ideas also set a moon-shot goal of ending censorship within a decade.
Under the leadership of Jared Cohen, Ideas brought together a team of Google engineers, research scientists, product managers, and policy experts to address these issues. The team also hosted a number of conferences, the most recent of which was the Conflict in a Connected World Roundtable Series, in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations’ Center of Preventative Action. It has come under scrutiny for its links with the US State Department and its "regime change" activities.
Jigsaw
In February 2016, Eric Schmidt announced in a Medium post the expansion of Google Ideas to a technology incubator named Jigsaw. According to Schmidt, the new name "reflects our belief that collaborative problem-solving yields the best solutions" and the team's mission "is to use technology to tackle the toughest geopolitical challenges, from countering violent extremism to thwarting online censorship to mitigating the threats associated with digital attacks." Jigsaw will also leverage more of Alphabet's engineering talent and resources to build more sophisticated products.
Project Shield
Project Shield is a free anti-distributed denial-of-service (anti-DDoS) service that is offered by Jigsaw to websites that have "media, elections, and human rights related content." The main goal of the project is to serve "small, under-resourced news sites that are vulnerable to the web’s growing epidemic of DDoS attacks", according to team lead George Conard. It is similar to services offered by companies like Cloudflare. Google initially announced Project Shield at their Ideas Conference on October 21, 2013. The service was initially only offered to trusted testers, but on February 25, 2016, Google opened up the service to any qualifying website. The service works by having the website use Google's IP's, and traffic is routed through a Google-owned reverse proxy that identifies and filters malicious traffic.
Project Shield provides news, human rights, and election monitoring sites with protection from DDoS cyber-attacks by a system of caching (storing the data from the protected website to reduce load on the site). It also filters traffic to thwart DDoS attacks. Project Shield is built on Google Cloud Platform. It is provided free of charge to the qualifying websites of independent journalists, human rights, and elections monitoring websites to protect them regardless of their location and Project Shield as of 2016 October has users in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa.
Project Shield notably rescued Brian Krebs's security blog from an unprecedented DDoS attack that knocked the website entirely offline.
uProxy
uProxy is an extension for Chrome and Firefox web browsers which allows users to access the Internet via a web proxy. The extension works by enabling a user to share their Internet connection with someone else. The extension is intended to allow users, often in repressive societies, to get more secure access to the Internet without being monitored. Jigsaw provided funding for the development which was carried out by the University of Washington and Brave New Software — the same organization behind the anti-censorship tool Lantern. It has been used in over one hundred countries and is free/libre software under Apache license 2.0.
Conversation AI
Conversation AI is software developed by Jigsaw that is "designed to use machine learning to automatically spot the language of abuse and harassment." According to a Wired profile, "Feed a string of text into its Wikipedia harassment-detection engine and it can, with what Google describes as more than 92 percent certainty and a 10 percent false-positive rate, come up with a judgment that matches a human test panel as to whether that line represents an attack." Jigsaw has partnered with The New York Times and Wikipedia—both of which will be the first platforms to employ the harassment detector on discussion pages and comment threads—to secure millions of comments that have helped train the machine learning software.
Redirect Method
The Redirect Method is an open source methodology developed by Jigsaw that leverages Google's AdWords platform and YouTube to target potential ISIS recruits and dissuade them from joining the group. Redirect, which was based off interviews with ISIS defectors and jailed recruits, "places advertising alongside results for any keywords and phrases that Jigsaw has determined people attracted to ISIS commonly search for. Those ads link to Arabic- and English-language YouTube channels that pull together preexisting videos Jigsaw believes can effectively undo ISIS’s brainwashing—clips like testimonials from former extremists, imams denouncing ISIS’s corruption of Islam, and surreptitiously filmed clips inside the group’s dysfunctional caliphate in Northern Syria and Iraq."
Jigsaw claims that during a pilot project conducted in early 2016, its advertising was three to four times more effective than a normal campaign, and "those who clicked spent more than twice as long viewing the most effective playlists than the best estimates of how long people view YouTube as a whole." Jigsaw published the detailed steps for the methodology under a creative commons license on a Github repository.
Other projects
Other Jigsaw projects include Password Alert, Unfiltered.news, Digital Attack Map, and Montage (graduated to Storyful). Password Alert protects against phishing attacks; according to Wired, "the company developed it for Syrian activists targeted by government-friendly hackers, but when it proved effective, it was rolled out to all of Google’s users." Unfiltered.news "uses Google News data to show users what topics are being under-reported or are popular in regions around the world," and the Digital Attack Map displays the top digital attacks in the world in real time. Montage is a program that "lets war correspondents and nonprofits crowdsource the analysis of YouTube videos to track conflicts and gather evidence of human rights violations." Additionally, in May 2016, Jigsaw announced it had partnered with Vice News on a five-part documentary series called Blackout to examine free expression around the world.