al-jazeera | A billionaire real estate tycoon in the United States is rallying
support for a high-dollar media crusade to boost Israel’s image and
demonise the Hamas armed group amid global pro-Palestinian solidarity
protests.
The media campaign — called Facts for Peace — is seeking
million-dollar donations from dozens of the world’s biggest names in
media, finance and technology, according to an email seen by news
website Semafor.
More than 50 individuals are being courted, including former Google
CEO Eric Schmidt, Dell CEO Michael Dell and financier Michael Milken.
They have a combined net worth of around $500bn, Semafor said.
Some of the individuals, such as investor Bill Ackman, have publicly
threatened to blacklist pro-Palestine students who are critical of
Israel. On October 10, Ackman wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that he and
other business executives wanted Ivy League universities to disclose the
names of students who are part of organisations that signed open
letters criticising Israeli policies in Gaza.
US billionaire Barry Sternlicht, who started the project, said the
campaign would help Israel “get ahead of the narrative” as the world has
reacted to the intensive Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip.
“Public opinion will surely shift as scenes, real or fabricated by
Hamas, of civilian Palestinian suffering will surely erode [Israel’s]
current empathy in the world community”, Sternlicht wrote in an email
soliciting contributions from the wealthy figures shortly after Hamas’s
October 7 attacks on Israel, according to Semafor. “We must get ahead of
the narrative.”
Israel has carried out relentless air strikes on the besieged Gaza Strip since October 7, killing at least 11,078 Palestinian people, including 4,500 children, displacing 1.5 million people, and wrecking much of the territory’s infrastructure, Gaza officials say.
Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli territory on October 7 killed some 1,200 Israelis, according to Israeli officials.
Sternlicht’s media drive aims to brand Hamas as a “terrorist
organisation” that is “not just the enemy of Israel, but of the United
States”, he wrote. The goal is to draw $50m in private donations, paired
with a matching contribution from a Jewish charity. Hamas is already
designated as a “terrorist” organisation by the US and the European
Union for its armed resistance against Israeli occupation.
CTH | According to a recent media report, Senator Chuck Schumer led an AI
insight forum that included tech industry leaders: Google CEO Sundar
Pichai, Tesla, X and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, NVIDIA President Jensen
Huang, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, technologist and Google
alum Eric Schmidt, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya
Nadella.
Additionally, representatives from labor and civil rights advocacy
groups which included: AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, Leadership
Conference on Civil and Human Rights President and CEO Maya Wiley, and
AI accountability researcher Deb Raji. The group was joined by a list of
prominent AI executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO
Jensen Huang.
Notably absent from the Sept 13th forum was anyone with any
real-world experience that is not a beneficiary of government spending.
This is not accidental. Technocracy advances regardless of the citizen
impact. Technocrats advance their common interests, not the interests of
the ordinary citizen.
That meeting comes after DHS established independent guidelines we previously discussed {GO DEEP}.
DHS’ AI task force is coordinating with the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency on how the department can partner with critical infrastructure organizations
“on safeguarding their uses of AI and strengthening their cybersecurity
practices writ large to defend against evolving threats.”
Remember, in addition to these groups assembling, the Dept of Defense
(DoD) will now conduct online monitoring operations, using enhanced AI
to protect the U.S. internet from “disinformation” under the auspices of
national security. {link}
So, the question becomes, what was Chuck Schumer’s primary reference for this forum?
(FED NEWS)
[…] Schumer said that tackling issues around AI-generated content that
is fake or deceptive that can lead to widespread misinformation and
disinformation was the most time-sensitive problem to solve due to the
upcoming 2024 presidential election.
[…] The top Democrat in the Senate
said there was much discussion during the meeting about the creation of a
new AI agency and that there was also debate about how to use some of
the existing federal agencies to regulate AI.
South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds,
Schumer’s Republican counterpart in leading the bipartisan AI forums,
said: “We’ve got to have the ability to provide good information to
regulators. And it doesn’t mean that every single agency has to have all
of the top-end, high-quality of professionals but we need that group of
professionals who can be shared across the different agencies when it
comes to AI.”
Although there were no significant
voluntary commitments made during the first AI insight forum, tech
leaders who participated in the forum said there was much debate around
how open and transparent AI developers and those using AI in the federal
government will be required to be. (read more)
There
isn’t anything that is going to stop the rapid deployment of AI in the
tech space. However, for the interests of the larger American
population, the group unrepresented in the forum, is the use of AI to
identify, control, and impede information distribution that is against
the interests of the government and the public-private partnership the
technocrats are assembling.
The words “disinformation” and “deep fakes” are as disingenuous as
the term “Patriot Act.” The definitions of disinformation and deep
fakes are where the government regulations step in, using their portals
into Big Tech, to identify content on platforms that is deemed in
violation.
It doesn’t take a deep political thinker to predict that memes and
video segments against the interests of the state will be defined for
removal.
space | A newly unveiled company with some high-profile backers — including
filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page — is set to
announce plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for resources such as
precious metals and water.
Planetary Resources, Inc. intends
to sell these materials, generating a healthy profit for itself. But it
also aims to advance humanity's exploration and exploitation of space,
with resource extraction serving as an anchor industry that helps our
species spread throughout the solar system.
"If you look at space resources, the logical next step is to go to the near-Earth asteroids,"
Planetary Resources co-founder and co-chairman Eric Anderson told
SPACE.com. "They're just so valuable, and so easy to reach
energetically. Near-Earth asteroids really are the low-hanging fruit of the solar system."
Planetary Resources is officially unveiling its asteroid-mining plans at
1:30 p.m. EDT (1730 GMT) Tuesday (April 24) during a news conference at
Seattle's Museum of Flight.
Platinum-group
metals — ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and platinum —
are found in low concentrations on Earth and can be tough to access,
which is why they're so expensive. In fact, Anderson said, they don't
occur naturally in Earth's crust, having been deposited on our planet
over the eons by asteroid impacts.
"We're
going to go to the source," Anderson said. "The platinum-group metals
are many orders of magnitude easier to access in the high-concentration
platinum asteroids than they are in the Earth's crust."
And there are a lot of precious metals up
there waiting to be mined. A single platinum-rich space rock 1,650 feet
(500 meters) wide contains the equivalent of all the platinum-group
metals ever mined throughout human history, company officials said.
"When
the availability of these metals increase[s], the cost will reduce on
everything including defibrillators, hand-held devices, TV and computer
monitors, catalysts," Planetary Resources co-founder and co-chairman
Peter Diamandis said in a statement. "And with the abundance of these
metals, we’ll be able to use them in mass production, like in automotive
fuel cells."
Asteroid water could help astronauts stay hydrated
and grow food, provide radiation shielding for spaceships and be broken
into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, the chief components of rocket
fuel, Anderson said.
Planetary Resources hopes its mining efforts lead to the establishment of in-space "gas stations" that could help many spacecraft refuel, from Earth-orbiting satellites to Mars-bound vessels.
"We're really talking about enabling the exploration of deep space," Anderson said. "That's what really gets me excited." [Future Visions of Human Spaceflight]
In
addition to Page, Planetary Resources counts among its investors Ross
Perot Jr., chairman of The Perot Group and son of the former
presidential candidate; Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google; K.
Ram Shriram, Google board of directors founding member; and Charles
Simonyi, chairman of Intentional Software Corp., who has taken two
tourist flights to the International Space Station.
Cameron serves the company as an adviser, as does former NASA space shuttle astronaut Tom Jones.
wired | “Let's imagine we’re going to build a better
war-fighting system,” Schmidt says, outlining what would amount to an
enormous overhaul of the most powerful military operation on earth. “We
would just create a tech company.” He goes on to sketch out a vision of
the internet of things
with a deadly twist. “It would build a large number of inexpensive
devices that were highly mobile, that were attritable, and those
devices—or drones—would have sensors or weapons, and they would be
networked together.”
The problem with today’s
Pentagon is hardly money, talent, or determination, in Schmidt’s
opinion. He describes the US military as “great human beings inside a
bad system”—one that evolved to serve a previous era dominated by large,
slow, expensive projects like aircraft carriers and a bureaucratic
system that prevents people from moving too quickly. Independentstudies
and congressional hearings have found that it can take years for the
DOD to select and buy software, which may be outdated by the time it is
installed. Schmidt says this is a huge problem for the US, because
computerization, software, and networking are poised to revolutionize
warfare.
Ukraine’s response to Russia’s invasion, Schmidt
believes, offers pointers for how the Pentagon might improve. The
Ukrainian military has managed to resist a much larger power in part by
moving quickly and adapting technology from the private sector—hacking
commercial drones into weapons, repurposing
defunct battlefield connectivity systems, 3D printing spare parts, and
developing useful new software for tasks like military payroll
management in months, not years.
Schmidt offers
another thought experiment to illustrate the bind he’s trying to get the
US military out of. “Imagine you and I decide to solve the Ukrainian
problem, and the DOD gives us $100 million, and we have a six-month
contest,” he says. “And after six months somebody actually comes up with
some new device or new tool or new method that lets the Ukrainians
win.” Problem solved? Not so fast. “Everything I just said is illegal,”
Schmidt says, because of procurement rules that forbid the Pentagon from
handing out money without going through careful but overly lengthy
review processes.
The
Pentagon’s tech problem is most pressing, Schmidt says, when it comes
to AI. “Every once in a while, a new weapon, a new technology comes
along that changes things,” he says. “Einstein wrote a letter to
Roosevelt in the 1930s saying that there is this new technology—nuclear
weapons—that could change war, which it clearly did. I would argue that
[AI-powered] autonomy and decentralized, distributed systems are that
powerful.”
With Schmidt’s help, a similar view has taken root
inside the DOD over the past decade, where leaders believe AI will
revolutionize military hardware, intelligence gathering, and backend
software. In the early 2010s the Pentagon began assessing technology
that could help it maintain an edge over an ascendant Chinese military.
The Defense Science Board, the agency’s top technical advisory body, concluded that AI-powered autonomy would shape the future of military competition and conflict.
“The
big challenge that the US military faces going forward is how to
rapidly adapt commercial technologies for military use faster than
competitors,” says Paul Scharre, a vice president at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank, and the author of Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,
a forthcoming book about AI and geopolitics. Scharre notes in his book
that the Pentagon’s share of global R&D spending has declined from
36 percent in 1960 to 4 percent today.
The
US DOD primarily works with the private sector through large defense
contractors specialized in building expensive hardware over years, not
nimble software development. Pentagon contracts with large tech
companies, including Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, have become more
common but have sometimes been controversial. Google’s work analyzing
drone footage using AI under an initiative called Project Maven caused staff to protest, and the company let the contract lapse. Google has since increased its defense work, under rules that place certain projects—such as weapons systems—off limits.
Scharre says it is valuable to have people like Schmidt, with serious private sector clout, looking to bridge the gap.
moderndiplomacy | The Ukrainian war started when the democratically elected
President of Ukraine (an infamously corrupt country), who was committed
to keeping his country internationally neutral (not allied with either
Russia or the United States), met privately with both the U.S. President
Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
in 2010, shortly after that Ukrainian President’s election earlier in
2010; and, on both occasions, he rejected their urgings for Ukraine to
become allied with the United States against his adjoining country
Russia. This was being urged upon him so that America could position its
nuclear missiles at the Russian border with Ukraine, less than a
five-minute striking-distance away from hitting the Kremlin in Moscow.
On 1 March 2013 inside
America’s Embassy to Ukraine in Kiev, a series of “Tech Camps” started
to be held, in order to train those Ukrainian nazis for their leadership
of Ukraine’s ‘anti-corruption’ organizing. Simultaneously, under Polish
Government authorization, the CIA was training in Poland the military
Right Sector leaders how to lead the coming U.S. coup in neighboring
Ukraine. As the independent Polish investigative journalist Marek
Miszczuk headlined for the Polish magazine NIE (“meaning “NO”) (the original article being in Polish): “Maidan secret state secret: Polish training camp for Ukrainians”. The article was published 14 April 2014. Excerpts:
An informant who introduced himself as Wowa called the “NIE”
editorial office with the information that the Maidan rebels in Wrocław
are neo-fascists … [with] tattooed swastikas, swords, eagles and crosses
with unambiguous meaning. … Wowa pleadingly announced that photos of
members of the Right Sector must not appear in the press. … 86 fighters
from the then prepared Euromaidan flew over the Vistula River in
September 2013 at the invitation of the Polish Ministry of Foreign
Affairs. The pretext was to start cooperation between the Warsaw
University of Technology and the National University of Technology in
Kiev. But they were in Poland to receive special training to overthrow
Ukraine’s government. … Day 3 and 4 – theoretical classes: crowd
management, target selection, tactics and leadership. Day 5 – training
in behavior in stressful situations. Day 6 – free without leaving the
center. Day 7 – pre-medical help. Day 8 – protection against irritating
gases. Day 9 – building barricades. And so on and on for almost 25 days.
The program includes … classes at the shooting range (including three
times with sniper rifles!), tactical and practical training in the
assault on buildings. …
Excited by the importance of the information that was presented to me, I started to verify it.
The Office of the Press Spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs refused to answer the questions about the student exchange
without giving any reason. It did not want to disclose whether it had
actually invited dozens of neo-fascists to Poland to teach them how to
overthrow the legal Ukrainian authorities. …
Let us summarize: in September 2013, according to the information
presented to me, several dozen Ukrainian students of the Polytechnic
University will come to Poland, at the invitation of the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs. In fact, they are members of the Right Sector, an
extreme right-wing and nationalist Ukrainian group led by Dmytro Jarosz –
he declined to comment on his visit to Legionowo.
Poland’s ‘fact-checking’ organization is (appropriately) titled demagog dot org (Demagog Association), and it is funded by the Stefan Batory Foundation. Demagog’s article about that NIE
news-report rated it “NIEWERYFIKOWALNE” or “ NOT VERIFIABLE”. The sole
reason given was: “The Ministry [of Foreign Affairs] strongly opposes
such news, emphasizing that the weekly (magazine) has violated not only
the principles of good taste, but also raison d’etat (reasons of
state).” No facts that were alleged in Miszczuk’s article were even
mentioned, much less disproven. How can his article be “unverifiable” if
the evidence that it refers to isn’t so much as even being checked?
scheerpost | Since 2016, a number of other measures have been taken to bring
social media under the wing of the national security state. This was
foreseen by Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who wrote in
2013, “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology
and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.” Since then,
Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM have become integral parts of the
state apparatus, signing multibillion-dollar
contracts with the CIA and other organizations to provide them with
intelligence, logistics and computing services. Schmidt himself was
chairman of both the National Security Commission on Artificial
Intelligence and the Defense Innovation Advisory Board, bodies created
to help Silicon Valley assist the U.S. military with cyberweapons,
further blurring the lines between big tech and big government.
Google’s current Global Head of Developer Product Policy, Ben Renda,
has an even closer relationship with the national security state. From
being a strategic planner and information management officer for NATO,
he then moved to Google in 2008. In 2013, he began working for U.S.
Cybercommand and in 2015 for the Defense Innovation Unit (both divisions
of the Department of Defense). At the same time, he became a YouTube
executive, rising to the rank of Director of Operations.
Other platforms have similar relationships with Washington. In 2018,
Facebook announced that it had entered a partnership with The Atlantic
Council whereby the latter would help curate the news feeds of billions
of users worldwide, deciding what was credible, trustworthy information,
and what was fake news. As noted previously, The Atlantic Council is
NATO’s brain-trust and is directly funded by the military alliance. Last
year, Facebook also hired Atlantic
Council senior fellow and former NATO spokesperson Ben Nimmo as its
head of intelligence, thereby giving an enormous amount of control over
its empire to current and former national security state officials.
The Atlantic Council has also worked its way into Reddit’s management. Jessica Ashooh went straight
from being Deputy Director of Middle East Strategy at The Atlantic
Council to Director of Policy at the popular news aggregation service – a
surprising career move that drew few remarks at the time.
Also eliciting little comment was the unmasking of
a senior Twitter executive as an active-duty officer in the British
Army’s notorious 77th Brigade – a unit dedicated to online warfare and
psychological operations. Twitter has since partnered with
the U.S. government and weapons manufacturer-sponsored think tank ASPI
to help police its platform. On ASPI’s orders, the social media platform
has purged hundreds of thousands of accounts based out of China, Russia, and other countries that draw Washington’s ire.
Last year, Twitter also announced that
it had deleted hundreds of user accounts for “undermining faith in the
NATO alliance and its stability” – a statement that drew widespread
incredulity from those not closely following the company’s progression
from one that championed open discussion to one closely controlled by
the government.
The First Casualty
Those in the halls of power well understand how important a weapon
big-tech is in a global information war. This can be seen in a letter published
last Monday written by a host of national security state officials,
including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former
CIA directors Michael Morell and Leon Panetta, and former director of
the NSA Admiral Michael Rogers.
Together, they warn that regulating or breaking up the big-tech
monopolies would “inadvertently hamper the ability of U.S. technology
platforms to … push back on the Kremlin.” “The United States will need
to rely on the power of its technology sector to ensure” that “the
narrative of events” globally is shaped by the U.S. and “not by foreign
adversaries,” they explain, concluding that Google, Facebook, Twitter
are “increasingly integral to U.S. diplomatic and national security
efforts.”
Commenting on the letter, journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote:
[B]y maintaining all power in the
hands of the small coterie of tech monopolies which control the internet
and which have long proven their loyalty to the U.S. security state,
the ability of the U.S. national security state to maintain a closed
propaganda system around questions of war and militarism is guaranteed.”
The U.S. has frequently leaned on social media in order to control
the message and promote regime change in target countries. Just days
before the Nicaraguan presidential election in November, Facebook deleted the
accounts of hundreds of the country’s top news outlets, journalists and
activists, all of whom supported the left-wing Sandinista government.
When those figures poured onto Twitter to protest the ban, recording
videos of themselves and proving that they were not bots or
“inauthentic” accounts, as Facebook Intelligence Chief Nimmo had
claimed, their Twitter accounts were systematically banned as well, in
what observers coined as a “double-tap strike.”
Meanwhile, in 2009, Twitter acquiesced to
a U.S. request to delay scheduled maintenance of its app (which would
have required taking it offline) because pro-U.S. activists in Iran were
using the platform to foment anti-government demonstrations.
More than 10 years later, Facebook announced that it would be
deleting all praise of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani from its many
platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp. Soleimani – the most popular political
figure in Iran – had recently been assassinated in a U.S. drone strike.
The event sparked uproar and massive protests across the region. Yet
because the Trump administration had declared Soleimani and his military
group to be terrorists, Facebook explained,
“We operate under U.S. sanctions laws, including those related to the
U.S. government’s designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps
and its leadership.” This meant that Iranians could not share a majority
viewpoint inside their own country – even in their own language –
because of a decision made in Washington by a hostile government.
jacobin | Unlike Steve Jobs, who embraced the counterculture and sought to
infuse the tech industry with some of its values, Thiel has long been
hostile to the Left and all its cultural offshoots. Like Noyce before
him, he believes that the Left’s influence slows technological progress
and sets humanity back.
Thiel has been described as a libertarian because he funded
initiatives like the Seasteading Institute for a time and has advocated
for deregulation and slashing government spending on welfare and social
programs. But he doesn’t just want a smaller state. He wants a
particular kind of state, one reminiscent of the early days of Silicon
Valley, when the tech industry and pro-capitalist governments
collaborated to exercise global hegemony.
Chafkin writes that, especially after 9/11, Thiel was “no longer much
of a libertarian, if he’d ever been one in the first place.” He’d
originally positioned PayPal as an anti-establishment innovation that
would give everyone their own Swiss bank account and “unilaterally strip
governments of the power to control their own money supplies.” But he
later complied with financial regulations and worked with the FBI to
find money launderers — the same people whom he had described as
personal Swiss bank account–holders. He benefited handsomely from the
collaboration.
As he became a more prominent right-wing political figure by backing
Trump, appearing at the 2019 National Conservatism conference, and
funding so-called right-wing populist
candidates like Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance, his companies also became
more closely entwined with the US government. Thiel had invested in
SpaceX and cofounded Palantir, two companies that rely heavily on
lucrative public contracts, and even went so far as to sue the US
government to gain access to them. Palantir, in particular, is a
data-mining company that works with both major corporations and the US
military and intelligence community.
In 2019, Thiel took to the pages of the New York Times to argue for tech companies to work more closely with the US military.
He criticized decades of US policy toward China and called out Google
for opening an AI lab in China as it canceled an AI contract with the
Pentagon — effectively accusing it of helping the enemy. In seeking to
stoke a Cold War nationalism centered around opposition to China,
Chafkin explains, Thiel wants “to bring the military-industrial complex
back to Silicon Valley, with his own companies at its very center.”
And he’s not the only tech executive who feels this way — just the
first to come out and say it, paving the way for the others. In February
2020 Eric Schmidt, whom Thiel once called “Google’s minister of
propaganda,” wrote his own Times
op-ed calling for the United States to take China’s technological
threat more seriously. “For the American model to win,” he wrote, “the
American government must lead.” A few months later, Zuckerberg positioned Facebook in opposition to China
in front of US lawmakers, while other companies, including Amazon and
Microsoft, have continued to fight for major contracts with the US
military.
Regardless of whether they identify as liberal or conservative, the
tech industry’s leaders are embracing the military-industrial complex.
Thiel is not an outlier; he’s just a few paces ahead.
privacytogo | In 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt created Google Ideas. In typical Silicon Valley newspeak, Ideas was marketed as a “think/do tank to research issues at the intersection of technology and geopolitics.“
Astute readers know this “think/do” formula well – entities like the
Council on Foreign Relations or World Economic Forum draft policy papers
(think) and three-letter agencies carry them out (do).
And again, in typical Silicon Valley fashion, Google wanted to
streamline this process – bring everything in-house and remake the world
in their own image.
To head up Google Ideas, Schmidt tapped a man named Jared Cohen.
He couldn’t have selected a better goon for the job – as a
card-carrying member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Rhodes
Scholar, Cohen is a textbook Globalist spook. The State Department
doubtlessly approved of his sordid credentials, as both Condoleeza Rice
and Hillary Clinton enrolled Cohen to knock over foreign governments
they disapproved of.
More recently, the role of Google Ideas in the attempted overthrow of Assad in Syria went public thanks to the oft-cited Hillary Clinton email leaks.
Why scrap all that hard work when you can just rebrand and shift your regime change operations to domestic targets?
The four subheaders on Jigsaw’s homepage, Disinformation, Censorship, Toxicity, and Violent Extremism demonstrate this tactic at work.
There is no greater source of media disinformation than MSM and the information served up by Google search engines.
Big Tech are at the forefront of destroying free speech through heavy-handed censorship, Google among them.
Psychological manipulation tactics used by the social justice crowd doubtlessly instill toxicity in those subjected to them.
And
Google’s well-documented history of participating in bloody regime
change as described in this article are textbook cases of violent extremism.
Yet Jigsaw markets itself as combating these societal ails.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, just as Google’s
former company tag-line of “Don’t Be Evil” was a similar reversal of
reality.
And yes, regime change aficionado Jared Cohen is still the CEO of Google Jigsaw. In fact, Jigsaw, LLC was overtly brought back in-house as of October 2020.
mintpressnews | Reddit is one of the world’s most influential news and social media platforms. The website attracted
over 1.2 billion visits in April 2021 alone, making it the United
States’ eighth most visited site, ahead of other leviathans like
Twitter, Instagram and eBay. Now majority-owned by a much larger
corporate publishing empire, Reddit is also far ahead of more
established news sites, garnering three times the numbers of Fox News and five times those of The New York Times.
That is why it was so surprising that so little was made of the
company’s decision to appoint foreign policy hawk Jessica Ashooh to the
position of Director of Policy in 2017, at which time it was also the
eight most visited site in the U.S. Ashooh, who had been a Middle East
foreign policy wonk at NATO’s think tank the Atlantic Council, was
appointed at around the same time that the Senate Select Intelligence
Committee was demanding
more control over the popular website, on the grounds that it was being
used to spread disinformation. In her role as Director of Policy, she
oversees all government relations and public policy for the company, in
addition to managing content, product and advertising. Yet a Google
search for “Jessica Ashooh Reddit” filtered between late 2016 and early
2017 (after she was appointed) elicits zero relevant results, meaning not one media outlet even mentioned the questionable appointment.
This is all the more hair-raising, given her resume as a high state
official — all of which raises serious questions about the extent of
collaboration between Silicon Valley and the national security state.
The Atlantic Council is the de-facto brains of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and takes funding
from the military alliance, as well as from the U.S. government, the
U.S. military, Middle Eastern dictatorships, other Western governments,
big tech companies, and weapons manufacturers. Its board of directors
has been and continues to be a who’s who of high U.S. statespeople like
Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, as well as senior
military commanders such as retired generals Wesley Clark, David
Petraeus, H.R. McMaster, James “Mad Dog” Mattis, the late Lt. Gen. Brent
Scowcroft, and Admiral James Stavridis. At least seven former CIA
directors are also on the board. As such, the council chooses to
represent both political wings of the national security state.
Between 2015 and 2017, Ashooh was Deputy Director of the Atlantic
Council’s Middle East Strategy Task Force, working directly with and
under Madeline Albright and Stephen Hadley. This is particularly
noteworthy, given both these individuals’ roles in the region. As Bill
Clinton’s secretary of state, Albright oversaw the Iraq sanctions and
the Oil for Food Program, denounced as “genocide” by the successive United Nations diplomats charged with carrying them out. In an infamous interview with 60 Minutes, Albright casually brushed off a question about her role in the killing of half a million children, stating
“the price is worth it.” Meanwhile, Hadley was deputy or senior
national security advisor to the government of George W. Bush throughout
the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, surely the greatest crimes against
humanity thus far in the 21st century.
charleshughsmith |The first question identifies the structural weak points in the system. These weak points could
have any number of sources: they could be perverse incentives embedded in the system, elites
caught up in their own enrichment, or even a willful blindness to the nature of the crisis
threatening the system.
Here's an example in the U.S. system: corporations reap $2.4 trillion in profits annually, roughly
15% of the nation's entire output. Politicians need millions of dollars in campaign contributions
to win elections. Those seeking political influence have not just billions but tens of billions.
Those needing to distribute political favors will do so for mere millions.
"I'd say that contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe,
ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States.
And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business,
have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects
the preferences of those groups -- of economic elites and of organized interests."
This asymmetry
cannot be overcome. Indeed, the past 40 years have witnessed an increasing concentration of
wealth and power in corporations and their lobbyists and a decline of political influence of
the masses to near-zero. Every reform has failed to slow this momentum, which is constructed
of incentives to maximize profits, gain political favors and win elections.
In a similar fashion, the Imperial Presidency has gained power at the expense of Congress for
decades--a reality that scholars bemoan but the reforms allowed by the system are unable to stop.
So we have endless wars of choice without a declaration of war by Congress, one of the core powers
of the elected body.
An analogy to these systemic weak points is the synergies of an organism's essential
organs: if any one organ fails, the organism dies even though the other organs are working
just fine. In other words, any system is only as robust as its weakest essential
component/process.
Whatever problems the system is incapable of resolving have the potential to bring down the system
once they interact synergistically.
The second question identifies how many groups have been suppressed, silenced or ignored by
those at the top of the heap. If these groups have an essential role in the system as producers,
consumers and taxpayers, their demand to have a say in decisions that directly affect them is natural.
Another group with understandable frustrations at being left out of the decision-making are those
in the educated upper classes whose expectations of roles in the top tier were encouraged by their
families, society and training. When these expectations are not met because there are no longer
enough slots in the top tier for the rapidly proliferating upper classes, the group left out in
the cold has the time, education and motivation to demand a voice.
In other words, those denied access to resources, capital and agency who felt entitled to this
access will not be as easily silenced as those who accept their low status and restricted access
to resources, capital and agency as "the natural order of things."
All the groups that are denied a voice and access to resources, capital and agency are in effect
a sealed pressure cooker atop a flame. The pressure builds and builds without any apparent consequence
until it explodes.
The more that power is concentrated in the hands of the few, the greater the desperation of the
groups who are locked out of power. As their desperation rises, some of these groups are willing
to go to whatever lengths are necessary to effect change.
The process of explosive demands for change erupting is difficult to manage once released.
The system's essential subsystems may be destabilized--the equivalent of organ failure--and
once destabilized, it's often no longer possible to restore the previous stability.
In this environment, the common good falls by the wayside and the system collapses.
Politico | Embattled New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, continuing an April tour of the
state with another press-free press conference in Buffalo, got a vote
of confidence Friday from one of the biggest names in tech: Former
Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Cuomo, who faces an impeachment inquiry and multiple investigations
into allegations of misconduct, has been parading around the state in
the days since he cut a deal with lawmakers on a state budget.
As the governor signed one of the budget bills Friday, Schmidt joined
Cuomo to help tout an effort to expand broadband access — and give the
Democrat a public boost of confidence.
“Governor, your leadership in general over this pandemic has been extraordinary,” Schmidt said.
As with other events in recent weeks, Cuomo was flanked by supporters who praised his handling of the Covid-19 crisis.
“I trust Gov. Cuomo’s leadership,” Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said.
“I’ve worked with him long enough to know that he truly cares about our
great city … Thank you for your vision and your bold leadership toward
building back a better and stronger New York."
Key context: The purpose of Friday’s event was to sign the
Education, Labor and Family Assistance portion of the budget, which
Cuomo was due to act on by Monday.
Another closed press event: Cuomo stopped letting reporters attend these events in December, citing concern about the spread of Covid-19.
The Buffalo event was his fourth one this week. One closed press
event held at an apple orchard on Tuesday was outside. On Wednesday, his
schedule said the media was prohibited from an event at Belmont Park
“due to COVID restrictions” — a few hours later, the governor announced
that it is now safe for more than 20,000 spectators to attend races
there.
theintercept |For a few fleeting moments during New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s
daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday, the somber grimace that has
filled our screens for weeks was briefly replaced by something
resembling a smile.
“We are ready, we’re all-in,” the governor gushed.
“We are New Yorkers, so we’re aggressive about it, we’re ambitious
about it. … We realize that change is not only imminent, but it can
actually be a friend if done the right way.”
The inspiration for these uncharacteristically good vibes was a video
visit from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who joined the governor’s
briefing to announce that he will be heading up a blue-ribbon commission
to reimagine New York state’s post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on
permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life.
“The first priorities of what we’re trying to do,” Schmidt said, “are
focused on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband. … We need to
look for solutions that can be presented now, and accelerated, and use
technology to make things better.” Lest there be any doubt that the
former Google chair’s goals were purely benevolent, his video background
featured a framed pair of golden angel wings.
Just one day earlier, Cuomo had announced
a similar partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to
develop “a smarter education system.” Calling Gates a “visionary,” Cuomo
said the pandemic has created “a moment in history when we can actually
incorporate and advance [Gates’s] ideas … all these buildings, all
these physical classrooms — why with all the technology you have?” he
asked, apparently rhetorically.
It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent
Pandemic Shock Doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the “Screen New
Deal.” Far more high-tech than anything we have seen during previous
disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies
still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a
painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a
permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.
newsweek |In this extract from When Google Met WikiLeaks Assange describes his encounter with Schmidt and how he came to conclude that it was far from an innocent exchange of views.
Eric Schmidt is an influential figure, even among the parade of
powerful characters with whom I have had to cross paths since I founded
WikiLeaks. In mid-May 2011 I was under house arrest in rural Norfolk,
England, about three hours' drive northeast of London. The crackdown
against our work was in full swing and every wasted moment seemed like
an eternity. It was hard to get my attention.
But when my
colleague Joseph Farrell told me the executive chairman of Google wanted
to make an appointment with me, I was listening.
In some ways the higher echelons of Google seemed more distant and
obscure to me than the halls of Washington. We had been locking horns
with senior U.S. officials for years by that point. The mystique had
worn off. But the power centers growing up in Silicon Valley were still
opaque and I was suddenly conscious of an opportunity to understand and
influence what was becoming the most influential company on earth.
Schmidt had taken over as CEO of Google in 2001 and built it into an
empire.
I was intrigued that the mountain would come to Muhammad. But it was
not until well after Schmidt and his companions had been and gone that I
came to understand who had really visited me.
The stated reason
for the visit was a book. Schmidt was penning a treatise with Jared
Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, an outfit that describes itself as
Google's in-house "think/do tank."
I knew little else about Cohen
at the time. In fact, Cohen had moved to Google from the U.S. State
Department in 2010. He had been a fast-talking "Generation Y" ideas man
at State under two U.S. administrations, a courtier from the world of
policy think tanks and institutes, poached in his early twenties.
He
became a senior advisor for Secretaries of State Rice and Clinton. At
State, on the Policy Planning Staff, Cohen was soon christened "Condi's
party-starter," channeling buzzwords from Silicon Valley into U.S.
policy circles and producing delightful rhetorical concoctions such as
"Public Diplomacy 2.0." On his Council on Foreign Relations adjunct staff page he listed his expertise as "terrorism; radicalization; impact of connection technologies on 21st century statecraft; Iran."
It
was Cohen who, while he was still at the Department of State, was said
to have emailed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to delay scheduled maintenance
in order to assist the aborted 2009 uprising in Iran. His documented
love affair with Google began the same year when he befriended Eric
Schmidt as they together surveyed the post-occupation wreckage of
Baghdad. Just months later, Schmidt re-created Cohen's natural habitat
within Google itself by engineering a "think/do tank" based in New York
and appointing Cohen as its head. Google Ideas was born.
Later that year two co-wrote a policy piece
for the Council on Foreign Relations' journal Foreign Affairs, praising
the reformative potential of Silicon Valley technologies as an
instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Describing what they called
"coalitions of the connected," Schmidt and Cohen claimed that:
Democratic states that have built
coalitions of their militaries have the capacity to do the same with
their connection technologies.…
They offer a new way to exercise the duty to protect citizens around the world [emphasis added].
theintercept |For a few fleeting moments during New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s
daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday, the somber grimace that has
filled our screens for weeks was briefly replaced by something
resembling a smile.
“We are ready, we’re all-in,” the governor gushed.
“We are New Yorkers, so we’re aggressive about it, we’re ambitious
about it. … We realize that change is not only imminent, but it can
actually be a friend if done the right way.”
The inspiration for these uncharacteristically good vibes was a video
visit from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who joined the governor’s
briefing to announce that he will be heading up a blue-ribbon commission
to reimagine New York state’s post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on
permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life.
“The first priorities of what we’re trying to do,” Schmidt said, “are
focused on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband. … We need to
look for solutions that can be presented now, and accelerated, and use
technology to make things better.” Lest there be any doubt that the
former Google chair’s goals were purely benevolent, his video background
featured a framed pair of golden angel wings.
Just one day earlier, Cuomo had announced
a similar partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to
develop “a smarter education system.” Calling Gates a “visionary,” Cuomo
said the pandemic has created “a moment in history when we can actually
incorporate and advance [Gates’s] ideas … all these buildings, all
these physical classrooms — why with all the technology you have?” he
asked, apparently rhetorically.
It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent
Pandemic Shock Doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the “Screen New
Deal.” Far more high-tech than anything we have seen during previous
disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies
still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a
painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a
permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.
injusticewatch | The request by a Kansas prosecutor to create a unit that would review
cases involving evidence of wrongful convictions has exposed a schism
among law enforcement officials who contend that the business of
reviewing wrongful convictions should not be left to the local
prosecutor.
The dispute was touched off after Wyandotte County
District Attorney Mark Dupree asked the County Board in July for
$300,000 to create the new conviction integrity unit. The Kansas City,
Kansas police chief, sheriff and two Fraternal Order of Police union
presidents then sent a July 30 letter
to Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt questioning the proposal, and
asking Schmidt’s office to oversee any decisions by the local prosecutor
to reopen past cases.
On Wednesday, Cook County State’s Attorney
Kim Foxx, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and Eric
Gonzalez, the Brooklyn, New York prosecutor, were among 54 current and
former law enforcement officials who signed a letter
supporting the creation of the unit within Dupree’s office. Pursuing
justice is not “at odds with community safety or victim support,” their
letter states. “In fact, victims are safer – and we prevent further
victimization – when communities trust that their law enforcement
officials seek the truth rather than ‘win.’”
The issue has erupted
months after Dupree cut short a hearing into Lamonte McIntyre’s claim
that he had been wrongly convicted and spent 23 years in prison for a
1994 double murder, saying he was acting to correct a “manifest
injustice.”
Questions of McIntyre’s conviction involved allegations
of a corrupt police detective, a corrupt state prosecutor, misconduct
by the trial judge and ineffective representation by his court appointed
attorney. The July 30 letter by law enforcement officials challenging
Dupree stated the prosecutor had “failed to fulfill its role as an
advocate for the homicide victims(s) and the State” in that case.
antimedia | With all the attention paid to Facebook in recent weeks over ‘data
breaches’ and privacy violations (even though what happened with
Cambridge Analytica is part of their standard business model), it’s easy
to forget that there are four other Big Tech corporations collecting
just as much — if not more — of our personal info. Google, Amazon,
Apple, and Microsoft are all central players in
“surveillance capitalism” and prey on our data. New reports suggest
that Google may actually harvest ten times as much as Facebook.
Curious about just how much of his data Google had, web developer Dylan Curran says
he downloaded his Google data file, which is offered by the company in a
hub called “My Account.” This hub was created in 2015, along with a
tool called “My Activity.” The report issued is similar to the one Facebook delivers to
its users upon request. Whether or not these reports are comprehensive
is still up in the air, but Curran says his was 5.5 GB, which is almost
ten times larger than the one Facebook offered him. The amount and type
of data in his file, Mr. Curran says, suggests Google is not only
constantly tracking our online movements but may also be monitoring our
physical locations.
Curran’s Google report contained an incredible amount documentation
on his web activity, going back over a decade. But perhaps more
importantly, Google had also been tracking his real-life movements via
his smartphone device or tablet. This included fairly random places he’d
frequented, many of the foreign countries and cities he visited, the
bars and restaurants he went to while in these countries, the amount of
time he spent there, and even the path he took to get there and back.
This, of course, is not new. It has been well-known for some time that Google silently tracks you
everywhere you go and creates a map of your physical movements through
its Location History feature. You can deactivate it by going to your timeline and adjusting the preferences.
Another Google user downloaded
his file and discovered the company had been archiving his data even
when he browsed in Incognito mode, a setting that advertises itself as
one that does not save browsing history.
Like Facebook, Google gathers your info for
sale to 3rd-party advertisers, including your name, email address,
telephone number, credit card, specific ways you use Google’s services,
your mode of interaction with any website that uses Google technology
(such as AdWords), your device, and your search queries. And if you
don’t enter your account and make adjustments, pretty much anything you
do online while deploying a Google tool is tracked. Google’s policy states:
“If other users already have your email, or other information that
identifies you, we may show them your publicly visible Google Profile
information, such as your name and photo.”
But much of the location data stems from the use of Google apps like
Maps or Now, which broadcast your location. If you want to stop this
information from being shared, you have to go into your account settings
and make adjustments.
The ostensible purpose of this data-sharing is to fine-tune your user
experience, but who is benefitting more is arguable. The same year it
released its new activity hub, Google also unveiled a new program that shares your email with high-value advertisers. Called Customer Match, this system streamlines consumer info so that an advertiser’s “brand is right there, with the right message, at the moment your customer is most receptive.”
Google’s policy also lists the three major categories of data collection: Things you do; Things you create; and Things that make you “you.”
pagesix | A source familiar with the purchase said: “While everyone in New York
wants a doorman, Eric specifically said he didn’t want one. He doesn’t
want anyone to see him and his guests coming in and out. He insisted on
his own elevator.”
Schmidt has also spent millions getting the 6,250-square-foot duplex —
which has four bedrooms and a large entertainment area with a wet bar
opening onto a 3,300-square-foot terrace — soundproofed, claiming he
“doesn’t sleep well,” but also affording him complete privacy.
Other sources say that earlier this summer, the tech mogul was
embarking on a tour of the French Riviera and asked his aides to find
alluring female companions to “decorate his yacht.”
Schmidt, who’s worth $8.2 billion, bought the 195-foot Oasis for
about $72.3 million in 2009. The source said, “He had one of his aides
approach beautiful and intelligent women that Schmidt never met before,
saying, ‘Eric would like to invite you to his yacht,’ which was cruising
around the Riviera.”
He was spotted in St. Tropez earlier this month, and later sailed to
the Cap d’Antibes, and we’re told that some of the women approached by
his aides had agreed to join Schmidt onboard.
Wendy Schmidt, who lives in Nantucket, said in an interview last year
that they started living separate lives because she felt like “a piece
of luggage” following him around the world.
wikileaks | There was nothing politically hapless about Eric
Schmidt. I had been too eager to see a politically unambitious Silicon
Valley engineer, a relic of the good old days of computer science
graduate culture on the West Coast. But that is not the sort of person
who attends the Bilderberg conference four years running, who pays
regular visits to the White House, or who delivers “fireside chats” at
the World Economic Forum in Davos.43
Schmidt’s emergence as Google’s “foreign minister”—making pomp and
ceremony state visits across geopolitical fault lines—had not come out
of nowhere; it had been presaged by years of assimilation within US
establishment networks of reputation and influence.
On a personal level, Schmidt and Cohen are
perfectly likable people. But Google's chairman is a classic “head of
industry” player, with all of the ideological baggage that comes with
that role.44
Schmidt fits exactly where he is: the point where the centrist,
liberal, and imperialist tendencies meet in American political life. By
all appearances, Google's bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing
power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they see this
mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the
better judgment of the “benevolent superpower.” They will tell you that
open-mindedness is a virtue, but all perspectives that challenge the
exceptionalist drive at the heart of American foreign policy will remain
invisible to them. This is the impenetrable banality of “don’t be
evil.” They believe that they are doing good. And that is a problem.
Google is "different". Google is "visionary". Google is
"the future". Google is "more than just a company". Google "gives back
to the community". Google is "a force for good".
Even when Google airs its corporate ambivalence publicly, it does little to dislodge these items of faith.45 The company’s reputation is seemingly unassailable. Google’s colorful,
playful logo is imprinted on human retinas just under six billion times
each day, 2.1 trillion times a year—an opportunity for respondent
conditioning enjoyed by no other company in history.46
Caught red-handed last year making petabytes of personal data available
to the US intelligence community through the PRISM program, Google
nevertheless continues to coast on the goodwill generated by its “don’t
be evil” doublespeak. A few symbolic open letters
to the White House later and it seems all is forgiven. Even
anti-surveillance campaigners cannot help themselves, at once condemning
government spying but trying to alter Google’s invasive surveillance
practices using appeasement strategies.47
Nobody wants to acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad.
But it has. Schmidt’s tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the
shadiest of US power structures as it expanded
into a geographically invasive megacorporation. But Google has always
been comfortable with this proximity. Long before company founders Larry
Page and Sergey Brin hired Schmidt in 2001, their initial research upon
which Google was based had been partly funded by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA).48
And even as Schmidt’s Google developed an image as the overly friendly
giant of global tech, it was building a close relationship with the
intelligence community.
In 2003 the US National Security Agency (NSA) had already started
systematically violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA) under its director General Michael Hayden.49 These were the days of the “Total Information Awareness” program.50
Before PRISM was ever dreamed of, under orders from the Bush White
House the NSA was already aiming to “collect it all, sniff it all, know
it all, process it all, exploit it all.”51
During the same period, Google—whose publicly declared corporate
mission is to collect and “organize the world’s information and make it
universally accessible and useful”52—was
accepting NSA money to the tune of $2 million to provide the agency
with search tools for its rapidly accreting hoard of stolen knowledge.53
In 2004, after taking over Keyhole, a mapping tech startup
cofunded by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the
CIA, Google developed the technology into Google Maps, an enterprise
version of which it has since shopped to the Pentagon and associated
federal and state agencies on multimillion-dollar contracts.54
In 2008, Google helped launch an NGA spy satellite, the GeoEye-1, into
space. Google shares the photographs from the satellite with the US
military and intelligence communities.55 In 2010, NGA awarded Google a $27 million contract for “geospatial visualization services.”56
In 2010, after the Chinese government was accused of hacking
Google, the company entered into a “formal information-sharing”
relationship with the NSA, which was said to allow NSA analysts to
“evaluate vulnerabilities” in Google’s hardware and software.57 Although the exact contours of the deal have never been disclosed, the NSA brought in other government agencies to help, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
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