Google engineer behind Street View data breach identified

On Monday, even as we reported about the recently concluded FCC investigation, there was a fair amount of ambiguity over the identity of the engineer himself. He, however, was being increasingly referred to as Engineer Doe, while being written about. Now, the true identity of Engineer Doe has been revealed. Reports coming in reveal that the Google engineer (Engineer Doe) behind the Street View data breach has been identified as Marius Milner - a programmer, who is quite popular in the field of Wi-Fi networking - a technology that is essential to the project. Milner comes from a telecommunications background, and according to a Sydney Morning Herald report, Milner’s LinkedIn page, lists his occupation as “hacker”. Further, the report adds that “under the category called “Specialties,” his entry reads, “I know more than I want to about Wi-Fi.”

Identified…

According to this report, Google had refused to identify the engineer, and so did the FCC, who in their report stated that Google had only created roadblocks in their investigation, but had not broken any laws. In one of our previous reports, covering the data breach, it had been revealed that the FCC imposed a fine of $25,000 on Google for having delayed the investigation. The true identity of Engineer Doe, therefore came out only when a former investigator - a part of a second inquiry into the data breach decided to look into things. According to the report, the former state investigator spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak on the matter. However, the report adds, “Although the FCC declined to identify the engineer, a footnote in the full text of its report said Google told the agency the identity of Engineer Doe “only because it had disclosed his name to state investigators on December 17, 2010.””

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Google Street View, as it has been established is one of Google’s most popular and controversial services, which allows users to bring various global locations to the comfort of a user’s PC. The report adds that the Google engineer, who was working in the project also included “code to collect unencrypted data sent from homes by computers — emails and internet searches — as specially equipped cars drove by. That data collection occurred from 2007 to 2010.”