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It has been revealed today, thanks to Edward Snowden, that Google and other US tech companies received millions of dollars from the NSA for their compliance with the PRISM mass surveillance system.
So just how close is Google to the US securitocracy? Back in 2011 I had a meeting with Eric Schmidt, the then Chairman of Google, who came out to see me with three other people while I was under house arrest. You might suppose that coming to see me was gesture that he and the other big boys at Google were secretly on our side: that they support what we at WikiLeaks are struggling for: justice, government transparency, and privacy for individuals. But that would be a false supposition. Their agenda was much more complex, and as we found out, was inextricable from that of the US State Department. The full transcript of our meeting is available online through the WikiLeaks website.
The pretext for their visit was that Schmidt was then researching a new book, a banal tome which has since come out as The New Digital Age. My less than enthusiastic review of this book was published in the New York Times in late May of this year. On the back of that book are a series of pre-publication endorsements: Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Michael Hayden (former head of the CIA and NSA) and Tony Blair. Inside the book Henry Kissinger appears once again, this time given pride of place in the acknowledgements.
Schmidt’s book is not about communicating with the public. He is worth $6.1 billion and does not need to sell books. Rather, this book is a mechanism by which Google seeks to project itself into Washington. It shows Washington that Google can be its partner, its geopolitical visionary, who will help Washington see further about America’s interests. And by tying itself to the US state, Google thereby cements its own security, at the expense of all competitors.
Two months after my meeting with Eric Schmidt, WikiLeaks had a legal reason to call Hilary Clinton and to document that we were calling her. It’s interesting that if you call the front desk of the State Department and ask for Hillary Clinton, you can actually get pretty close, and we’ve become quite good at this. Anyone who has seen Doctor Strangelove may remember the fantastic scene when Peter Sellers calls the White House from a payphone on the army base and is put on hold as his call gradually moves through the levels. Well WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison, pretending to be my PA, put through our call to the State Department, and like Peter Sellers we started moving through the levels, and eventually we got up to Hillary Clinton’s senior legal advisor, who said that we would be called back.
Shortly afterwards another one of our people, WikiLeaks’ ambassador Joseph Farrell, received a call back, not from the State Department, but from Lisa Shields, the then girlfriend of Eric Schmidt, who does not formally work for the US State Department. So let’s reprise this situation: The Chairman of Google’s girlfriend was being used as a back channel for Hillary Clinton. This is illustrative. It shows that at this level of US society, as in other corporate states, it is all musical chairs.
That visit from Google while I was under house arrest was, as it turns out, an unofficial visit from the State Department. Just consider the people who accompanied Schmidt on that visit: his girlfriend Lisa Shields, Vice President for Communications at the CFR; Scott Malcolmson, former senior State Department advisor; and Jared Cohen, advisor to both Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, a kind of Generation Y Kissinger figure — a noisy Quiet American as the author Graham Greene might have put it.
Google started out as part of Californian graduate student culture around San Francisco’s Bay Area. But as Google grew it encountered the big bad world. It encountered barriers to its expansion in the form of complex political networks and foreign regulations. So it started doing what big bad American companies do, from Coca Cola to Northrop Grumman. It started leaning heavily on the State Department for support, and by doing so it entered into the Washington DC system. A recently released statistic shows that Google now spends even more money than Lockheed Martin on paid lobbyists in Washington.
Jared Cohen was the co-writer of Eric Schmidt’s book, and his role as the bridge between Google and the State Department speaks volumes about how the US securitocracy works. Cohen used to work directly for the State Department and was a close advisor to both Condolezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. But since 2010 he has been Director of Google Ideas, its in-house ‘think/do’ tank.
Documents published last year by WikiLeaks obtained from the US intelligence contractor Stratfor, show that in 2011 Jared Cohen, then (as he is now) Director of Google Ideas, was off running secret missions to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan. In these internal emails, Fred Burton, Stratfor’s Vice President for Intelligence and a former senior State Department official, describes Google as follows:
“Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do…[Cohen] is going to get himself kidnapped or killed. Might be the best thing to happen to expose Google’s covert role in foaming up-risings, to be blunt. The US Gov’t can then disavow knowledge and Google is left holding the shit-bag”
In further internal communication, Burton subsequently clarifies his sources on Cohen’s activities as Marty Lev, Google’s director of security and safety and.. Eric Schmidt.
WikiLeaks cables also reveal that previously Cohen, when working for the State Department, was in Afghanistan trying to convince the four major Afghan mobile phone companies to move their antennas onto US military bases. In Lebanon he covertly worked to establish, on behalf of the State Department, an anti-Hezbollah Shia think tank. And in London? He was offering Bollywood film executives funds to insert anti-extremist content into Bollywood films and promising to connect them to related networks in Hollywood. That is the Director of Google Ideas. Cohen is effectively Google’s director of regime change. He is the State Department channeling Silicon Valley.
That Google was taking NSA money in exchange for handing over people’s data comes as no surprise. When Google encountered the big bad world, Google itself got big and bad.
abstractions be damned — this is a dictatorship of finance capital
Looks like China was right to kick them out. I wonder if other countries will now do the same?
Now Google, Microsoft and Apple have their offices in China. The incentives are low labor rates, cheap import duties, good security, good power system…
The state and big business in bed together. That’s the definition of Fascism. The USA is a fascist state. Read some history to find out what happens next.
I thank Julian Assange for his present exposé.
Google has long been closely enmeshed with the US intelligence agencies. Dr. Rick Steinheiser in the Office of Research and Development at the CIA and Matt Cutts of the NSA, to name a few, are employed by Google in high-level positions. Google Earth and Google Maps software came from Keyhole, Inc., which was funded by the CIA via In-Q-Tel. As well, Google has been helping the Chinese government in censoring the internet in that country.
Government, whatever its de jure status, strongly tends toward oligarchy. The bigger the government the stronger this tendency will be, since then the stakes of exercising a disproportionate influence over government policy is raised–as big government has the ability to, e.g., make or break business fortunes via its policies and how it chooses to enforce them. That is true every bit as much for formal democracies. Consequently, under government, the strong inclination is a winnowing effect whereby those who rise to the top of the private sector and the government sector are those who are willing to “play along to get along”, i.e., amenable to supporting the furtherance of the political establishment’s power.
Such applies to media outlets and universities, as well; which, when combined with the government’s own schooling and propaganda, inculcates the largest part of individuals’ Weltanschauung from cradle to grave: the contents of that worldview being rather thoroughgoing, if muddleheaded and hodgepodge, forms of etatism, accompanying a high degree of political naïveté which such a position implies. Hence, the very intellectual tools which are prerequisite for sustaining an effective defense of liberty are absent most people.
So also due to that effect of winnowing, there tends to be a confluence of ideology at the top level, for accruement of power becomes its own purpose as the government moves toward its logical conclusion: the total state, and all the horrors that come with it. Distinctions such as Democrat and Republican, “liberal” and conservative, etc., are useful for providing hoi polloi with innocuous distractions, but they mean little at the top echelon.
Since all governments (including totalitarian dictatorships) ultimately can only exist due to the “consent” of its subjects (at least “consent” in the sense of resignation), it’s understandable why the oligarchic nature of government would not be widely publicized by the political establishment within a formal democracy.
The process of tendency toward oligarchy I’ve outlined above is intrinsic to government due to the inherent perverse incentive structures which obtain under government (i.e., the internal logic of the system). Ultimately it doesn’t matter how pure and good the intentions are of the people who set up the government, nor what type of government is nominally instituted: so long as the defining feature of government exists–that of a regional monopoly on ultimate control over the law–then this process cannot be avoided, since the inherent incentives of the system are such as to reward actors who bring about such outcomes (being that one who is able to inordinately influence the policies of a government can use that influence for his personal benefit and that of his friends, whereas liberty for society is a general benefit which accrues to no one in particular). All the good intentions in the world are no match against perverse incentives.
For those who would like a deeper examination into this most pressing of issue which I touch upon above, see Sec. 8.2.1 of my following article; pp. 63-65 of said section give a methodological analysis of government, with pp. 65-86 giving historical background on some of the more unseemly acts by states, and finally pp. 87-98 of that section giving a history on our present globalist plutocracy: James Redford, “The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything”, Social Science Research Network, Sept. 10, 2012 (orig. pub. Dec. 19, 2011), doi:10.2139/ssrn.1974708. This article concerns physicist and mathematician Prof. Frank J. Tipler’s Omega Point cosmology and the Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything; however, it also analyzes the societal implications of said, particularly the implications of the exponential advancement of technology and hence also the coming radical life-extension technologies (i.e., transhumanism) in light of a world dominated by a callous oligarchy.
Excellent. The truth is coming out bit by bit. Soon they will have no lie left to hide behind.
Outstanding letter, thanks. It will give the boys and girls down in the fusion centers some things to ponder.
Wonderful.. soon everyone will know every detail of the treason being perpetrated against then and the future generations to come. Too bad it wont matter a bit because the sheeple populating this country have already been programmed into a stste of mind that believes its right and ok.
Refugees from Natural Selection at every turn.
Yank lll
YankIII rightly points out that the Sheeple have been programmed to believe everything that Leviathan and its minions in the Lamestream Media are promulgating at any given time. Is it any coincidence that the precipitous descent of the “educational” system occurred when FEDGOV started paying for it and dictating the curriculum? People who have no historical context from which to judge the veracity of the agitprop that bombards us incessantly will never find the Truth unless they actively seek it from other sources, and thus will believe whatever they hear repeatedly without dissenting views ever coming to their attention.
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” _Thomas Jefferson
Those who would usurp our freedom require an ignorant populace, which explains the sorry state of public education and its results.
At this point all we can do is collect names and remember them. Someday this may have value seeing as how they are doing the same thing to us.
Light Pole Meet Rope
When the economic collapse comes, all these cockroaches will be seeking refuge in the underground cities with the government elite. All the money and power will be meaningless. Safe they will be, so long as they stay there.
My wife says to pour cement on the doors to the underground elites’ hideaways…
Everyone laughed and called Ismail Ahmadi, Iran’s then police chief, crazy, delusional, and paranoid when he called Google “a spying tool” for the US government in 2012. Now, only after numerous reports have surfaced of NSA-Google collusion to spy on the whole world are people beginning to see the truth. It’s time to wake up people. Don’t fall for lies disseminated by mainstream media. We have no freedom. We have no privacy. Let’s face it.
Jeez, I am always horrified by how tight these cirles of influence are. Google CEO–>Girlfriend–>NSA and Hillary Clinton
So what is the chance that all my interesting Google search info is being fed directly to the NSA? I bet it is for sure whether through a regular secret court order or just through back channels
This is grave news indeed, I wouldn’t have thought such tight connections possible, but now that seems as plain naivety.
The power that concentrates in the different subsidiaries and projects of Google is immense, and we must not forget about all the side-projects the company is running. It is one thing that they have profiles of nearly anyone using the internet. It is a completely other thing that they are one of the leading innovators for space flight and robotics. You can guess what might come of that…
The key to stopping bad behavior of a government that fails to adhere to the limitations and restraints of the Constitution is to cut off its funding by exercising said document’s provisions for control of the disposition of an individual’s wealth. Since 2003, hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Americans have upheld the rule of law, cut off the fed’s funding, and successfully secured the return of their wealth by (1) learning how the Constitution provides for the control of one’s wealth, (2) learning how the federal government has deceived them into bearing false testimony against themselves, and (3) exercising their right to tell the truth in a legally meaningful manner. It all starts with reading a $25 book (some PDFs floating around are free) available at LostHorizons.com. The book, website, and author have survived 15 years of failed injunction attempts and character assassination, because the book and website have exposed and laid bare a $2 trillion per year fraud, billions of which have been secured by the informed folks who have learned and then upheld the law. If you care about liberty, you MUST at least read the website for free, view the evidence, and attend one of the author’s free public seminars.
so in essence, Assange is saying that google is PATTY HURST
The state and big business in bed together. That’s the definition of Fascism. The USA is a fascist state. Read some history to find out what happens next.