Suppose, for a minute, that you’re Joe Garcia, the deputy agent in charge of the San Diego office of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. You’ve just got word that your Border Tunnel Task Force has found a drug smuggling tunnel that’s clearly coming from Mexico.

What you know about the tunnel: Somebody spent close to $1 million to build it -– tunnels usually turn up after neighbors have alerted police to truck traffic at unusual hours — signs that bales of marijuana are being loaded onto trucks and moved out of warehouses on the U.S. end. You know that it’s the work of a drug cartel –- these d...

In the Hyve: Server racks bound for Facebook's data centers (Photo: Synnex)

If you drive down highway 880 from Oakland, California, take an exit about 30 miles south, and snake past a long line of car dealerships, you’ll find an ordinary office building that belongs to a company you’ve never heard of. And if you’re allowed to walk inside — past the receptionist and the cubicles, through another door, around the security guard, and into the warehouse — you’ll find some technicians assembling and testing server hardware for some of the biggest names on the internet.

This includes Facebook and...