Google Is Not What It Seemsby Julian Assange https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
by Julian Assange
Google
Chairman Eric Schmidt shares a joke with Hillary Clinton during a
special "fireside chat" with Google staff. The talk was held on 21 Jul 2014 at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California.
In this extract from his new book When Google Met Wikileaks,
WikiLeaks' publisher Julian Assange describes the special relationship
between Google, Hillary Clinton and the State Department -- and what
that means for the future of the internet. WikiLeaks readers can obtain a
20 percent discount on the cover price when ordering from the OR Books website by using the coupon code "WIKILEAKS".
* * *
E
ric
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,
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 US 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.1
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 US State
Department in 2010. He had been a fast-talking “Generation Y” ideas man
at State under two US 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
US policy circles and producing delightful rhetorical concoctions such
as “Public Diplomacy 2.0.”2
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.”3
Director
of Google Ideas, and "geopolitical visionary" Jared Cohen shares his
vision with US Army recruits in a lecture theatre at West Point Military
Academy on 26 Feb 2014 (Instagram by Eric Schmidt)
Later that year the 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 US foreign policy.5 Describing what they called “coalitions of the connected,”6 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].7
In the same piece they argued that “this
technology is overwhelmingly provided by the private sector.” Shortly
afterwards, Tunisia. then Egypt, and then the rest of the Middle East,
erupted in revolution. The echoes of these events on online social media
became a spectacle for Western internet users. The professional
commentariat, keen to rationalize uprisings against US-backed
dictatorships, branded them "Twitter revolutions." Suddenly everyone
wanted to be at the intersection point between US global power and
social media, and Schmidt and Cohen had already staked out the
territory. With the working title “The Empire of the Mind,” they began
expanding their article to book length, and sought audiences with the
big names of global tech and global power as part of their research.
They said they wanted to interview me. I agreed. A date was set for June.
Eric
Schmidt, Chairman of Google, at the "Pulse of Today's Global Economy"
panel talk at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting, 26 Sept. 2013 in New York. Eric Schmidt first attended the CGI annual meeting at its opening plenary in 2010. (Photo: Mark Lennihan)
By the time June came around
there was already a lot to talk about. That summer WikiLeaks was still
grinding through the release of US diplomatic cables, publishing
thousands of them every week. When, seven months earlier, we had first
started releasing the cables, Hillary Clinton had denounced the
publication as “an attack on the international community” that would
“tear at the fabric” of government.
It was into this ferment that Google projected
itself that June, touching down in a London airport and making the long
drive up into East Anglia to Norfolk and Beccles. Schmidt arrived first,
accompanied by his then partner, Lisa Shields. When he introduced her
as a vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations—a US
foreign-policy think tank with close ties to the State Department—I
thought little more of it. Shields herself was straight out of Camelot,
having been spotted by John Kennedy Jr.’s side back in the early 1990s.
They sat with me and we exchanged pleasantries. They said they had
forgotten their dictaphone, so we used mine. We made an agreement that I
would forward them the recording and in exchange they would forward me
the transcript, to be corrected for accuracy and clarity. We began.
Schmidt plunged in at the deep end, straightaway quizzing me on the
organizational and technological underpinnings of WikiLeaks.
Some time later Jared Cohen
arrived. With him was Scott Malcomson, introduced as the book’s editor.
Three months after the meeting Malcomson would enter the State
Department as the lead speechwriter and principal advisor to Susan Rice
(then US ambassador to the United Nations, now national security
advisor). He had previously served as a senior advisor at the United
Nations, and is a longtime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
At the time of writing, he is the director of communications at the
International Crisis Group.8
At this point, the delegation was one part Google, three parts
US foreign-policy establishment, but I was still none the wiser.
Handshakes out of the way, we got down to business.
Google's Chairman, Eric Schmidt, photographed in a New York elevator, carrying Henry Kissinger's new book, "World Order", 25 Sep 2014
Schmidt was a good foil. A
late-fiftysomething, squint-eyed behind owlish spectacles, managerially
dressed—Schmidt’s dour appearance concealed a machinelike analyticity.
His questions often skipped to the heart of the matter, betraying a
powerful nonverbal structural intelligence. It was the same intellect
that had abstracted software-engineering principles to scale Google into
a megacorp, ensuring that the corporate infrastructure always met the
rate of growth. This was a person who understood how to build and
maintain systems: systems of information and
systems of people. My world was new to him, but it was also a world of
unfolding human processes, scale, and information flows.
For a man of systematic
intelligence, Schmidt’s politics—such as I could hear from our
discussion—were surprisingly conventional, even banal. He grasped
structural relationships quickly, but struggled to verbalize many of
them, often shoehorning geopolitical subtleties into Silicon Valley
marketese or the ossified State Department microlanguage of his
companions.9
He was at his best when he was speaking (perhaps without realizing it)
as an engineer, breaking down complexities into their orthogonal
components.
I found Cohen a
good listener, but a less interesting thinker, possessed of that
relentless conviviality that routinely afflicts career generalists and
Rhodes scholars. As you would expect from his foreign-policy background,
Cohen had a knowledge of international flash points and conflicts and
moved rapidly between them, detailing different scenarios to test my
assertions. But it sometimes felt as if he was riffing on orthodoxies in
a way that was designed to impress his former colleagues in official
Washington. Malcomson, older, was more pensive, his input thoughtful and
generous. Shields was quiet for much of the conversation, taking notes,
humoring the bigger egos around the table while she got on with the
real work.
As the interviewee I was expected to do
most of the talking. I sought to guide them into my worldview. To their
credit, I consider the interview perhaps the best I have given. I was
out of my comfort zone and I liked it. We ate and then took a walk in
the grounds, all the while on the record. I asked Eric Schmidt to leak
US government information requests to WikiLeaks, and he refused,
suddenly nervous, citing the illegality of disclosing Patriot Act
requests. And then as the evening came on it was done and they were
gone, back to the unreal, remote halls of information empire, and I was
left to get back to my work. That was the end of it, or so I thought.
* * *
Two months later, WikiLeaks’ release of State
Department cables was coming to an abrupt end. For three-quarters of a
year we had painstakingly managed the publication, pulling in over a
hundred global media partners, distributing documents in their regions
of influence, and overseeing a worldwide, systematic publication and
redaction system, fighting for maximum impact for our sources.
But in an act of gross negligence the Guardian
newspaper—our former partner—had published the confidential decryption
password to all 251,000 cables in a chapter heading in its book, rushed
out hastily in February 2011.10
By mid-August we discovered that a former German employee—whom I had
suspended in 2010—was cultivating business relationships with a variety
of organizations and individuals by shopping around the location of the
encrypted file, paired with the password’s whereabouts in the book. At
the rate the information was spreading, we estimated that within two
weeks most intelligence agencies, contractors, and middlemen would have
all the cables, but the public would not.
I decided it was necessary to bring forward our publication
schedule by four months and contact the State Department to get it on
record that we had given them advance warning. The situation would then
be harder to spin into another legal or political assault. Unable to
raise Louis Susman, then US ambassador to the UK, we tried the front
door. WikiLeaks investigations editor Sarah Harrison called the State
Department front desk and informed the operator that “Julian Assange”
wanted to have a conversation with Hillary Clinton. Predictably, this
statement was initially greeted with bureaucratic disbelief. We soon
found ourselves in a reenactment of that scene in Dr. Strangelove,
where Peter Sellers cold-calls the White House to warn of an impending
nuclear war and is immediately put on hold. As in the film, we climbed
the hierarchy, speaking to incrementally more superior officials until
we reached Clinton’s senior legal advisor. He told us he would call us
back. We hung up, and waited.
Sarah Harrison and Julian Assange call the U.S. State Department in September 2011.
When the phone rang half an hour later, it
was not the State Department on the other end of the line. Instead, it
was Joseph Farrell, the WikiLeaks staffer who had set up the meeting
with Google. He had just received an email from Lisa Shields seeking to
confirm that it was indeed WikiLeaks calling the State Department.
It was at this point that I
realized Eric Schmidt might not have been an emissary of Google alone.
Whether officially or not, he had been keeping some company that placed
him very close to Washington, DC, including a well-documented
relationship with President Obama. Not only had Hillary Clinton’s people
known that Eric Schmidt’s partner had visited me, but they had also
elected to use her as a back channel. While WikiLeaks had been deeply
involved in publishing the inner archive of the US State Department, the
US State Department had, in effect, snuck into the WikiLeaks command center
and hit me up for a free lunch. Two years later, in the wake of his
early 2013 visits to China, North Korea, and Burma, it would come to be
appreciated that the chairman of Google might be conducting, in one way
or another, “back-channel diplomacy” for Washington. But at the time it
was a novel thought.11
Eric Schmidt's Instagram
of Hillary Clinton and David Rubinstein, taken at the Holbrooke Forum
Gala, 5 Dec 2013. Richard Holbrooke (who died in 2010) was a
high-profile US diplomat, managing director of Lehman brothers, a board
member of NED, CFR, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg steering
group and an advisor to Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. Schmidt donated
over $100k to the the Holbrooke Forum
Cohen’s directorate appeared to cross over from public
relations and “corporate responsibility” work into active corporate
intervention in foreign affairs at a level that is normally reserved for
states. Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google’s “director of regime
change.” According to the emails, he was trying to plant his
fingerprints on some of the major historical events in the contemporary
Middle East. He could be placed in Egypt during the revolution, meeting
with Wael Ghonim, the Google employee whose arrest and imprisonment
hours later would make him a PR-friendly symbol of the uprising in the
Western press. Meetings had been planned in Palestine and Turkey, both
of which—claimed Stratfor emails—were killed by the senior Google
leadership as too risky. Only a few months before he met with me, Cohen
was planning a trip to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan to “engage the
Iranian communities closer to the border,” as part of Google Ideas’
project on “repressive societies.” In internal emails Stratfor’s vice
president for intelligence, Fred Burton (himself a former State
Department security official), wrote,
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.14
In further internal communication, Burton said his sources on Cohen’s activities were Marty Lev—Google’s director of security and safety—and Eric Schmidt himself.15 Looking for something more concrete, I began to search in WikiLeaks’ archive for information on Cohen. State Department cables released as part of Cablegate reveal that Cohen had been in Afghanistan in 2009, trying to convince the four major Afghan mobile phone companies to move their antennas onto US military bases.16 In Lebanon he quietly worked to establish an intellectual and clerical rival to Hezbollah, the “Higher Shia League.”17 And in London he offered Bollywood movie executives funds to insert anti-extremist content into their films, and promised to connect them to related networks in Hollywood.18
Three days after he visited me at Ellingham Hall, Jared Cohen
flew to Ireland to direct the “Save Summit,” an event cosponsored by
Google Ideas and the Council on Foreign Relations. Gathering former
inner-city gang members, right-wing militants, violent
nationalists, and “religious extremists” from all over the world
together in one place, the event aimed to workshop technological
solutions to the problem of “violent extremism.”19 What could go wrong?
Cohen’s world seems to be one event like this after another:
endless soirees for the cross-fertilization of influence between elites
and their vassals, under the pious rubric of “civil society.” The
received wisdom in advanced capitalist societies is that there still
exists an organic “civil society sector” in which institutions form
autonomously and come together to manifest the interests and will of
citizens. The fable has it that the boundaries of this sector are
respected by actors from government and the “private sector,” leaving a
safe space for NGOs and nonprofits to advocate for things like human
rights, free speech, and accountable government.
This sounds like a great idea. But if it was
ever true, it has not been for decades. Since at least the 1970s,
authentic actors like unions and churches have folded under a sustained
assault by free-market statism, transforming “civil society” into a
buyer’s market for political factions and corporate interests looking to
exert influence at arm’s length. The last forty years has seen a huge
proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath
all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy.
It is not just obvious neocon front groups like Foreign Policy Initiative.20
It also includes fatuous Western NGOs like Freedom House, where naïve
but well-meaning career nonprofit workers are twisted in knots by
political funding streams, denouncing non-Western
human rights violations while keeping local abuses firmly in their
blind spots. The civil society conference circuit—which flies
developing-world activists across the globe hundreds of times a year to
bless the unholy union between “government and private stakeholders” at
geopoliticized events like the “Stockholm Internet Forum”—simply could
not exist if it were not blasted with millions of dollars in political
funding annually.
Scan the memberships of the biggest US think tanks and institutes and
the same names keep cropping up. Cohen’s Save Summit went on to seed
AVE, or AgainstViolentExtremism.org, a long-term project whose principal
backer besides Google Ideas is the Gen Next Foundation. This
foundation’s website says it is an “exclusive membership organization
and platform for successful individuals” that aims to bring about
“social change” driven by venture capital funding.21
Gen Next’s “private sector and non-profit foundation support avoids
some of the potential perceived conflicts of interest faced by
initiatives funded by governments.”22 Jared Cohen is an executive member.
Jared Cohen on stage with the delegates at the New York City inaugural summit for the Alliance of Youth Movements, in 2008
You are the vanguard of a rising generation of citizen activists. . . . And that makes you the kind of leaders we need.27
Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton addressing the delegates to the 2009 Alliance
of Youth Movements Annual Summit in Mexico City, on 16 Oct 2009, via videolink.
In 2011, the Alliance of Youth
Movements rebranded as “Movements.org.” In 2012 Movements.org became a
division of “Advancing Human Rights,” a new NGO set up by Robert
L. Bernstein after he resigned from Human Rights Watch (which he had
originally founded) because he felt it should not cover Israeli and US
human rights abuses.28 Advancing Human Rights aims to right Human Rights Watch’s wrong by focusing exclusively on “dictatorships.”29
Cohen stated that the merger of his Movements.org outfit with Advancing
Human Rights was “irresistible,” pointing to the latter’s “phenomenal
network of cyberactivists in the Middle East and North Africa.”30
He then joined the Advancing Human Rights board, which also includes
Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in occupied
Afghanistan.31
In its present guise, Movements.org continues to receive funding from
Gen Next, as well as from Google, MSNBC, and PR giant Edelman, which
represents General Electric, Boeing, and Shell, among others.32
I began to think of Schmidt as a brilliant but politically
hapless Californian tech billionaire who had been exploited by the very
US foreign-policy types he had collected to act as translators between
himself and official Washington—a West Coast–East Coast illustration of
the principal-agent dilemma.35
I was wrong.
* * *
Eric Schmidt was born in Washington, DC, where his father
had worked as a professor and economist for the Nixon Treasury. He
attended high school in Arlington, Virginia, before graduating with a
degree in engineering from Princeton. In 1979 Schmidt headed out West to
Berkeley, where he received his PhD before joining Stanford/Berkley
spin-off Sun Microsystems in 1983. By the time he left Sun, sixteen
years later, he had become part of its executive leadership.
Sun had significant contracts
with the US government, but it was not until he was in Utah as CEO of
Novell that records show Schmidt strategically engaging Washington’s
overt political class. Federal campaign finance records show that on
January 6, 1999, Schmidt donated two lots of $1,000 to the Republican
senator for Utah, Orrin Hatch. On the same day Schmidt’s wife, Wendy, is
also listed giving two lots of $1,000 to Senator Hatch. By the start of
2001 over a dozen other politicians and PACs, including Al Gore, George
W. Bush, Dianne Feinstein, and Hillary Clinton, were on the Schmidts’
payroll, in one case for $100,000.36
By 2013, Eric Schmidt—who had become publicly over-associated with the
Obama White House—was more politic. Eight Republicans and eight
Democrats were directly funded, as were two PACs. That April, $32,300
went to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. A month later the
same amount, $32,300, headed off to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign
Committee. Why Schmidt was donating exactly the same amount of money to
both parties is a $64,600 question.37
It was also in 1999 that Schmidt joined the board of a Washington,
DC–based group: the New America Foundation, a merger of well-connected
centrist forces (in DC terms). The foundation and its 100 staff serves
as an influence mill, using its network of approved national security,
foreign policy, and technology pundits to place hundreds of articles and
op-eds per year. By 2008 Schmidt had become chairman of its board of
directors. As of 2013 the New America Foundation’s principal funders
(each contributing over $1 million) are listed
as Eric and Wendy Schmidt, the US State Department, and the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation. Secondary funders include Google, USAID, and
Radio Free Asia.38
Schmidt’s involvement in the New America Foundation places him
firmly in the Washington establishment nexus. The foundation’s other
board members, seven of whom also list themselves as members of the
Council on Foreign Relations, include Francis Fukuyama, one of the
intellectual fathers of the neoconservative movement; Rita Hauser, who
served on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under both Bush
and Obama; Jonathan Soros, the son of George Soros; Walter Russell Mead,
a US security strategist and editor of the American Interest; Helene
Gayle, who sits on the boards of Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive, the
Rockefeller Foundation, the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy
Unit, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, the White House Fellows program, and Bono’s ONE
Campaign; and Daniel Yergin, oil geostrategist, former chair of the US
Department of Energy’s Task Force on Strategic Energy Research, and
author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power.39
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt introduces
Hillary Clinton as the keynote speaker at the 16 May 2014 conference
"Big Ideas for a New America" for the New America Foundation, of which
Schmidt is the Chair of the Board and the largest funder.
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.
Around the same time, Google was becoming involved in a program known as the “Enduring Security Framework”58
(ESF), which entailed the sharing of information between Silicon Valley
tech companies and Pentagon-affiliated agencies “at network speed.”59
Emails obtained in 2014 under Freedom of Information requests show
Schmidt and his fellow Googler Sergey Brin corresponding on first-name
terms with NSA chief General Keith Alexander about ESF.60
Reportage on the emails focused on the familiarity in the
correspondence: “General Keith . . . so great to see you . . . !”
Schmidt wrote. But most reports overlooked a crucial detail. “Your
insights as a key member of the Defense Industrial Base,” Alexander
wrote to Brin, “are valuable to ensure ESF’s efforts have measurable
impact.”
The
Department of Homeland Security defines the Defense Industrial Base as
“the worldwide industrial complex that enables research and development,
as well as design, production, delivery, and maintenance of military
weapons systems, subsystems, and components or parts, to meet U.S. military requirements [emphasis added].”61
The Defense Industrial Base provides “products and services
that are essential to mobilize, deploy, and sustain military
operations.” Does it include regular commercial services purchased by
the US military? No. The definition specifically excludes the purchase
of regular commercial services. Whatever makes
Google a “key member of the Defense Industrial Base,” it is not
recruitment campaigns pushed out through Google AdWords or soldiers
checking their Gmail.
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt's Instagram video
from 2 May 2014, showing an experimental US military troop support
drone, the LS3, or "Cujo", designed by Boston Dynamics, newly acquired
by Google
In 2012,
Google arrived on the list of top-spending Washington, DC, lobbyists—a
list typically stalked exclusively by the US Chamber of Commerce,
military contractors, and the petrocarbon leviathans.62
Google entered the rankings above military aerospace giant Lockheed
Martin, with a total of $18.2 million spent in 2012 to Lockheed’s $15.3
million. Boeing, the military contractor that absorbed McDonnell Douglas
in 1997, also came below Google, at $15.6 million spent, as did
Northrop Grumman at $17.5 million.
In Autumn 2013 the Obama administration was
trying to drum up support for US airstrikes against Syria. Despite
setbacks, the administration continued to press for military action well
into September with speeches and public announcements by both President
Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry.63
On September 10, Google lent its front page—the most popular on the
internet—to the war effort, inserting a line below the search box
reading “Live! Secretary Kerry answers questions on Syria. Today via
Hangout at 2pm ET.”64
As the self-described “radical centrist”65 New York Times
columnist Tom Friedman wrote in 1999, sometimes it is not enough to
leave the global dominance of American tech corporations to something as
mercurial as “the free market”:
The hidden hand of the market will
never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without
McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that
keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is
called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.66
If anything has changed since those words were written, it is that Silicon Valley has grown restless with that passive role, aspiring instead to adorn the "hidden fist" like a velvet glove. Writing in 2013, Schmidt and Cohen stated,
What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.67
This was one of many bold assertions made by Schmidt and Cohen in their book, which was eventually published in April 2013. Gone was the working title, “The Empire of the Mind”, replaced with "The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business". By the time it came out, I had formally sought and received political asylum from the government of Ecuador, and taken refuge in its embassy in London. At that point I had already spent nearly a year in the embassy under police surveillance, blocked from safe passage out of the UK. Online I noticed the press hum excitedly about Schmidt and Cohen’s book, giddily ignoring the explicit digital imperialism of the title and the conspicuous string of pre-publication endorsements from famous warmongers like Tony Blair, Henry Kissinger, Bill Hayden and Madeleine Albright on the back.
Google's
Chairman Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State and
National Security Council head under President Richard Nixon, during a
"fireside chat" with Google staff at the company's headquarters in
Mountain View, California, on 30 Sep 2013. In the talk, Kissinger says National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden is "despicible".
Billed as a visionary forecast of global
technological change, the book failed to deliver—failed even to imagine a
future, good or bad, substantially different to the present. The book
was a simplistic fusion of Fukuyama “end of history” ideology—out of
vogue since the 1990s—and faster mobile phones. It was padded out with
DC shibboleths, State Department orthodoxies, and fawning grabs from
Henry Kissinger. The scholarship was poor—even degenerate. It did not
seem to fit the profile of Schmidt, that sharp, quiet man in my living
room. But reading on I began to see
that the book was not a serious attempt at future history. It was a
love song from Google to official Washington. Google, a burgeoning
digital superstate, was offering to be Washington’s geopolitical
visionary.
One way of looking at it is that it’s just
business. For an American internet services monopoly to ensure global
market dominance it cannot simply keep doing what it is doing, and let
politics take care of itself. American strategic and economic hegemony
becomes a vital pillar of its market dominance. What’s a megacorp to do?
If it wants to straddle the world, it must become part of the original
“don’t be evil” empire.
But part of the resilient image
of Google as “more than just a company” comes from the perception that
it does not act like a big, bad corporation. Its penchant for luring
people into its services trap with gigabytes of “free storage” produces
the perception that Google is giving it away for free, acting directly
contrary to the corporate profit motive. Google is perceived as an
essentially philanthropic enterprise—a magical engine presided over by
otherworldly visionaries—for creating a utopian future.68 The company has at times
appeared anxious to cultivate this image, pouring funding into
“corporate responsibility” initiatives to produce “social
change”—exemplified by Google Ideas. But as Google Ideas shows, the
company’s “philanthropic” efforts, too, bring it uncomfortably close to
the imperial side of US influence. If Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi was
running a program like Google Ideas, it would draw intense critical
scrutiny.69 But somehow Google gets a free pass.
Whether it is being just a
company or “more than just a company,” Google’s geopolitical aspirations
are firmly enmeshed within the foreign-policy agenda of the world’s
largest superpower. As Google’s search and internet service monopoly
grows, and as it enlarges its industrial surveillance cone to cover the
majority of the world’s population, rapidly dominating the mobile phone
market and racing to extend internet access in the global south, Google
is steadily becoming the internet for many people.70 Its influence
on the choices and behavior of the totality of individual human beings
translates to real power to influence the course of history.
If the future of the internet is to be Google, that should be of
serious concern to people all over the world—in Latin America, East and
Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, sub-Saharan
Africa, the former Soviet Union, and even in Europe—for whom the
internet embodies the promise of an alternative to US cultural,
economic, and strategic hegemony.71
A “don’t be evil” empire is still an empire.
This has been an extract from Julian Assange's new book When Google Met Wikileaks, available from OR Books. WikiLeaks readers can obtain a 20 percent discount on the cover price when ordering from the OR Books website by using the coupon code "WIKILEAKS". For reprint rights inquiries, contact rights [at] orbooks.com
Notes
1 The
company is now valued at $400 billion and employs 49,829 people. The
valuation at the end of 2011 was $200 billion with 33,077 employees. See
“Investor Relations: 2012 Financial Tables,” Google, archive.today/Iux4M. For the first quarter of 2014, see “Investor Relations: 2014 Financial Tables,” Google, archive.today/35IeZ.
2 For
a strong essay on Schmidt and Cohen’s book that discusses similar
themes, and that provoked some of the research for this book, see Joseph
L Flatley, “Being cynical: Julian Assange, Eric Schmidt, and the year’s
weirdest book,” Verge, 7 June 2013, archive.today/gfLEr.
3 Jared Cohen’s profile on the Council on Foreign Relations website, archive.today/pkgQN.
4 Shawn Donnan, “Think again,” Financial Times, 8 July 2011, archive.today/ndbmj. See also Rick Schmitt, “Diplomacy 2.0,” Stanford Alumni, May/June 2011, archive.today/Kidpc.
5 Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, “The Digital Disruption: Connectivity and the Diffusion of Power,” Foreign Affairs, November /December 2010, archive.today/R13l2.
6 “Coalitions
of the connected” is a phrase apparently designed to resonate with the
“coalition of the willing,” which was used to designate the 2003 US-led
alliance of states preparing to invade Iraq without UN Security Council
approval.
7 The
phrase “duty to protect” is redolent of “responsibility to protect,”
or, in its abbreviated form, “R2P.” R2P is a highly controversial
“emerging norm” in international law. R2P leverages human rights
discourse to mandate “humanitarian intervention” by “the international
community” in countries where the civilian population is deemed to be at
risk. For US liberals who eschew the naked imperialism of Paul
Wolfowitz (on which see Patrick E. Tyler, “U.S. strategy plan calls for
insuring no rivals develop,” New York Times, 8 March 1992, archive.today/Rin1g),
R2P is the justification of choice for Western military action in the
Middle East and elsewhere, as evidenced by its ubiquity in the push to
invade Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2013. Jared Cohen's former superior at
the US State Department, Anne-Marie Slaughter, has called it “the most
important shift in our conception of sovereignty since the Treaty of
Westphalia in 1648.” See her praise for the book Responsibility to Protect: The Global Moral Compact for the 21st Century, edited by Richard H. Cooper and Juliette Voïnov Kohler, on the website of the publisher Palgrave Macmillan, archive.today/0dmMq.
For a critical essay on R2P see Noam Chomsky's statement
on the doctrine to the UN General Assembly. Noam Chomsky, “Statement by
Professor Noam Chomsky to the United Nations General Assembly Thematic
Dialogue on Responsibility to Protect,” United Nations, New York, 23
July 2009, is.gd/bLx3uU.
See also “Responsibility to protect: An idea whose time has come—and gone?” Economist, 23 July 2009, archive.today/K2WZJ.
8 The
International Crisis Group bills itself as an “independent, non-profit,
non-governmental organization” that works “through field-based analysis
and high-level advocacy to prevent and resolve deadly conflict.” It has
also been described as a “high-level think tank . . . [devised]
primarily to provide policy guidance to governments involved in the
NATO-led reshaping of the Balkans.” See Michael Barker, “Imperial
Crusaders For Global Governance,” Swans Commentary, 20 April 2009, archive.today/b8G3o.
Malcomson’s International Crisis Group staff profile is available from www.crisisgroup.org, archive.today/ETYXp.
9 One might argue that this is living proof of the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. See “Linguistic Relativity,” Wikipedia, archive.today/QXJPx.
10 Glenn Greenwald, “Fact and myths in the WikiLeaks/Guardian saga,” Salon, 2 September 2011, archive.today/5KLJH.
See also Matt Giuca, “WikiLeaks password leak FAQ,” Unspecified Behaviour, 3 September 2011, archive.today/ylPUp.
See also “WikiLeaks: Why the Guardian is wrong and shouldn’t have published the password,” Matt’s Tumblr, 1 September 2011, archive.today/aWjj4.
11 Andrew Jacobs, “Visit by Google Chairman May Benefit North Korea,” New York Times, 10 January 2013, archive.today/bXrQ2.
12 Jeremy
Hammond, a brave and principled young digital revolutionary, was later
accused by the US government of ferreting these documents out and giving
them to WikiLeaks. He is now a political prisoner in the US, sentenced
to ten years after speaking to an FBI informer.
13 Yazan al-Saadi, “StratforLeaks: Google Ideas Director Involved in ‘Regime Change,’” Al Akhbar, 14 March 2012, archive.today/gHMzq.
“Re: GOOGLE & Iran ** internal use only—pls do not forward **,” email ID 1121800 (27 February 2011), Global Intelligence Files, WikiLeaks, 14 March 2012, archive.today/sjxuG.
For more internal Stratfor discussions about Jared Cohen and Google, see:
“Egypt - Google ** Suggest you read,” email ID 1122191 (9 February 2011), Global Intelligence Files, WikiLeaks, 14 March 2012, archive.today/DCzlA.
“Re: More on Cohen,” email ID 1629270 (9 February 2011), Global Intelligence Files, WikiLeaks, 14 March 2012, archive.today/opQ3a.
“Re: Google Shitstorm Moving to Gaza (internal use only),” email ID 1111729 (10 February 2011), Global Intelligence Files, WikiLeaks, 14 March 2012, archive.today/vpK3F.
“Re: Google’s Cohen Activist Role,” email ID 1123044 (10 February 2011), Global Intelligence Files, WikiLeaks, 11 March 2013, archive.today/nvFP6.
“Re: movements.org founder Cohen,” email ID 1113596 (11 February 2011), Global Intelligence Files, WikiLeaks, 6 March 2012, archive.today/ToYjC.
“Re: discussion: who is next?,” email ID 1113965 (11 February 2011), Global Intelligence Files, WikiLeaks, 14 March 2012, archive.today/ofBMr.
“GOOGLE Loose Canon Bound for Turkey & UAE (SENSITIVE - DO NOT FORWARD),” email ID 1164190 (10 March 2011), Global Intelligence Files, WikiLeaks, 14 March 2012, archive.today/Jpy4F.
“Re: [alpha] GOOGLE - Cohen & Hosting of Terrorists,” email ID 1133861 (22 March 2011), Global Intelligence Files, WikiLeaks, 14 March 2012, archive.today/OCR78.
“[alpha] Jared Cohen (GOOGLE),” email ID 1160182 (30 March 2011), Global Intelligence Files, WikiLeaks, 14 March 2012, archive.today/FYQYe.
15 “Re: GOOGLE’s Jared Cohen update,” email ID 398679 (14 February 2011), Global Intelligence Files, WikiLeaks, 14 March 2012, archive.today/IoFw4.
This email is included in the collection of sources at when.google.met.wikileaks.org.
16 “Using
connection technologies to promote US strategic interests in
Afghanistan: mobile banking, telecommunications insurance, and
co-location of cell phone towers,” canonical ID: 09KABUL2020_a, Public Library of US Diplomacy, WikiLeaks, archive.today/loAlC.
This cable is included in the collection of sources at when.google.met.wikileaks.org.
In May 2014, WikiLeaks revealed that the NSA had gained
access to all Afghan mobile phone calls and was recording all of them
for later retrieval. See “WikiLeaks statement on the mass recording of
Afghan telephone calls by the NSA,” WikiLeaks, 23 May 2014, archive.today/lp6Pl.
17 From the Public Library of US Diplomacy, WikiLeaks, see cables with canonical IDs: 07BEIRUT1944_a, 08BEIRUT910_a, 08BEIRUT912_a, 08BEIRUT918_a, 08BEIRUT919_a, 08BEIRUT1389_a, and 09BEIRUT234_a. Collection available at: archive.today/34MyI.
See also the collection of sources at when.google.met.wikileaks.org.
18 “EUR senior advisor Pandith and s/p advisor Cohen’s visit to the UK, October 9-14, 2007,” canonical ID: 07LONDON4045_a, Public Library of US Diplomacy, WikiLeaks, archive.today/mxXGQ.
See also the collection of sources at when.google.met.wikileaks.org.
19 See “Summit Against Violent Extremism (SAVE)” on the Council on Foreign Relations website, archive.today/rA1tA.
20 For
an insight into Foreign Policy Initiative, see Max Blumenthal, Rania
Khalek, “How Cold War–Hungry Neocons Stage Managed RT Anchor Liz Wahl’s
Resignation,” Truthdig, 19 March 2014, archive.today/JSUHq.
21 “About GNF,” Gen Next Foundation website, archive.today/p91bd.
22 “AgainstViolentExtremism.org,” Gen Next Foundation website, archive.today/Rhdtf.
23 “Movements.org,” Gen Next Foundation website, archive.today/oVlqH.
Note this extract from a confidential report of a March
2011 meeting between Stratfor and the “main organizer” of Movements.org:
“How Movements.org got started: [This part is not for publication] in
2008 it became apparent to the USG that they needed to do public
diplomacy over the internet. So Jared Cohen was at DoS then and played a
major role in starting the organization. The main goal was just
spreading the good word about the US.” “[alpha] INSIGHT- US/MENA-
Movements.org,” email ID 1356429 (29 March 2011), Global Intelligence
Files, WikiLeaks, 4 March 2013, archive.today/PgQji.
See also the collection of sources at when.google.met.wikileaks.org.
24 For more on this event see Joseph L Flatley, “Being cynical: Julian Assange, Eric Schmidt, and the year’s weirdest book,” Verge, 7 June 2013, archive.today/gfLEr.
See also “The Summit: New York City, The 2008 Inaugural Alliance of Youth Movements Summit,” Movements.org website, archive.today/H2Ox1#2008.
See the logos of the corporate sponsors at “About movements.org,” Movements.org website, archive.today/DQo19.
25 “Attendee Biographies, 3-5 December 2008, New York City,” Alliance of Youth Movements, is.gd/bLOVxT.
See also “09 Summit, Attendee Biographies, 14-16 October 2009, Mexico City,” Alliance of Youth Movements, is.gd/MddXp7.
26 “The Summit: London, The 2010 Alliance For Youth Movements Summit,” Movements.org website, archive.today/H2Ox1#2010.
And “The Summit: Mexico City, The 2009 Alliance of Youth Movements Summit,” Movements.org website, archive.today/H2Ox1#2009.
27 Hillary
Rodham Clinton, “Secretary Clinton’s Video Message for Alliance of
Youth Movements Summit,” US Department of State, 16 October 2009, archive.today/I2x6U.
See also Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Remarks At TecMilenio University,” US Department of State, 26 March 2009, archive.today/49ACj.
28 Scott Shane, “Groups to Help Online Activists in Authoritarian Countries,” New York Times, 11 June 2012, archive.today/jqq9U.
29 “Mission Statement,” Advancing Human Rights website, archive.today/kBzYe.
Scott Shane, “Groups to Help Online Activists in Authoritarian Countries,” New York Times, 11 June 2012, archive.today/jqq9U.
30 Ibid.
31 “People,” Advancing Human Rights website, archive.today/pXmPk.
32 Edelman
is famous for a series of astroturfing campaigns for Big Tobacco and
Walmart. The Sourcewatch.org page on Edelman, which is worth reading in
full, has a section on Edelman’s strategy toward co-opting the
nongovernmental sector: “Edelman PR tells clients that activists are
winning because ‘they play offense all the time; they take their message
to the consumer; they are ingenious at building coalitions; they always
have a clear agenda; they move at Internet speed; they speak in the
media’s tone.’ The solution, it argues, are partnerships between NGOs
and business. ‘Our experience to date is positive,’ they say, citing
examples such as ‘Chiquita-Rainforest Alliance’ and ‘Home Depot-Forest
Stewardship Council.’” See “Daniel J. Edelman, Inc.,” SourceWatch
website, archive.today/APbOf.
For the sponsors of Movements.org, see “About movements.org,” Movements.org website, archive.today/NMkOy.
33 For an example of Alec Ross’s writing, see Alec Ross, Ben Scott, “Social media: power to the people?” NATO Review, 2011, archive.today/L6sb3.
34 “Speakers,” Conflict in a Connected World website, archive.today/Ed8rA.
35 The
“principal-agent problem” or “agency dilemma” is where the initiating
party, the principal, tasks an accepting party, the agent, to act on his
or her behalf, but where the interests of the two parties are not
sufficiently aligned and the agent uses his or her position to exploit
the principal. A lawyer who makes decisions that are in the lawyer’s,
but not the client’s, interests is a classic example.
36 “PAC”
stands for “Political Action Committee,” a campaign-funding pool often
used to obscure support for particular politicians, to sidestep
campaign-finance regulations, or to campaign on a particular issue.
37 All political donation figures sourced from OpenSecrets.org (opensecrets.org/indivs) and the US Federal Election Commission (fec.gov/finance/disclosure/norindsea.shtml). See the results listed for Eric Schmidt on the Federal Election Commission website, archive.today/yjXoi.
See also a screenshot of the results listed for Eric and Wendy Schmidt on the Open Secrets website, archive.today/o6hiB.
38 “Our Funding,” New America Foundation website, archive.today/3FnFm.
39 Francis Fukuyama profile on the New America Foundation website: archive.today/6ZKk5.
40 Anne-Marie Slaughter profile on the New America Foundation website: archive.today/yIoLP.
41 “The
solution to the crisis in Ukraine lies in part in Syria. It is time for
US President Barack Obama to demonstrate that he can order the
offensive use of force in circumstances other than secret drone attacks
or covert operations. The result will change the strategic calculus not
only in Damascus, but also in Moscow, not to mention Beijing and Tokyo.”
Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Stopping Russia Starts in Syria,” Project Syndicate, 23 April 2014, archive.today/GiLng.
Jared Cohen has retweeted approval for Slaughter on the
issue. For example, he shared a supportive tweet on 26 April 2014 that
claimed that the argument in the article quoted above was “spot on.” archive.today/qLyxo.
42 On the Bilderberg conference see Matthew Holehouse, “Bilderberg Group 2013: guest list and agenda,” Telegraph, 6 June 2013, archive.today/PeJGc.
On the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board,
see the list of current board members on the US Department of State
website: archive.today/Why8v.
43 Attendee
lists for Bilderberg conferences since 2010 are available from the
Bilderberg website: www.bilderbergmeetings.org. Eric Schmidt was
photographed at Bilderberg 2014 in Copenhagen, meeting with Viviane
Reding, the EU Commissioner for Justice, and Alex Karp, the CEO of
Palantir Technologies, an intelligence data-mining company which sells
search and data integration services to clients in the US law
enforcement and intelligence community, and which was launched with
funding from the CIA's venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel. See Charlie
Skelton, “Bilderberg conference 2014: eating our politicians for
breakfast,” Guardian, 30 May 2014, archive.today/pUY5b.
In 2011, Palantir was involved in the HBGary scandal,
having been exposed as part of a group of contractors proposing to take
down WikiLeaks. For more on this, see “Background on US v. WikiLeaks” in
When Google Met WikiLeaks. See also Andy Greenberg, Ryan Mac, “How A ‘Deviant’ Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut,” Forbes, 2 September 2013, archive.today/ozAZ8.
For coverage of Schmidt at the World Economic Forum see
Emily Young, “Davos 2014: Google’s Schmidt warning on jobs,” BBC, 23
January 2014, archive.today/jGl7B.
See also Larry Elliott, “Davos debates income inequality but still invites tax avoiders,” Guardian, 19 January 2014, archive.today/IR767.
44 Adrianne Jeffries, “Google’s Eric Schmidt: ‘let us celebrate capitalism,’” Verge, 7 March 2014, archive.today/gZepE.
45 For
an example of Google’s corporate ambivalence on the issue of privacy
see Richard Esguerra, “Google CEO Eric Schmidt Dismisses the Importance
of Privacy,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, 10 December 2009, archive.today/rwyQ7.
46 Figures
correct as of 2013. See “Google Annual Search Statistics,” Statistic
Brain (Statistic Brain Research Institute), 1 January 2014, archive.today/W7DgX.
47 There
is an uncomfortable willingness among privacy campaigners to
discriminate against mass surveillance conducted by the state to the
exclusion of similar surveillance conducted for profit by large
corporations. Partially, this is a vestigial ethic from the Californian
libertarian origins of online pro-privacy campaigning. Partially, it is a
symptom of the superior public relations enjoyed by Silicon Valley
technology corporations, and the fact that those corporations also
provide the bulk of private funding for the flagship digital privacy
advocacy groups, leading to a conflict of interest.
At the individual level, many of even the most committed
privacy campaigners have an unacknowledged addiction to easy-to-use,
privacy-destroying amenities like Gmail, Facebook and Apple products. As
a result, privacy campaigners frequently overlook corporate
surveillance abuses. When they do address the abuses of companies like
Google, campaigners tend to appeal to the logic of the market, urging
companies to make small concessions to user privacy in order to repair
their approval ratings. There is the false assumption that market forces
ensure that Silicon Valley is a natural government antagonist, and that
it wants to be on the public's side—that profit-driven multinational
corporations partake more of the spirit of democracy than government
agencies.
Many privacy advocates justify a predominant focus on
abuses by the state on the basis that the state enjoys a monopoly on
coercive force. For example, Edward Snowden was reported to have said
that tech companies do not “put warheads on foreheads.” See Barton
Gellman, “Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his
mission’s accomplished,” Washington Post, 23 December 2013, archive.today/d6P8q.
This view downplays the fact that powerful corporations
are part of the nexus of power around the state, and that they enjoy the
ability to deploy its coercive power, just as the state often exerts
its influence through the agency of powerful corporations. The movement
to abolish privacy is twin-horned. Privacy advocates who focus
exclusively on one of those horns will find themselves gored on the
other.
48 See section 7, Acknowledgments, in The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,
Sergey Brin, Lawrence Page (Computer Science Department, Stanford
University, 1998): “The research described here was conducted as part of
the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project, supported by the
National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement IRI-9411306.
Funding for this cooperative agreement is also provided by DARPA and
NASA, and by Interval Research, and the industrial partners of the
Stanford Digital Libraries Project,” archive.today/tb5VL.
49 Michael
Hayden is now with the Chertoff Group, a consultancy firm which
describes itself as a “premier security and risk management advisory
firm.” It was founded and is chaired by Michael Chertoff, who was the
former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under President
George W. Bush. See Marcus Baram, “Fear Pays: Chertoff, Ex-Security
Officials Slammed For Cashing In On Government Experience,” Huffington Post, 23 November 2010, updated 25 May 2011, archive.today/iaM1b.
50 “Total
Information Awareness” was a radical post-9/11 US intelligence program
under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to surveil and
gather detailed information about individuals in order to anticipate
their behavior. The program was officially discontinued in 2003 after
public outcry, but its legacy can arguably be seen in recent disclosures
on bulk spying by the National Security Agency. See Shane Harris,
“Giving In to the Surveillance State,” New York Times, 22 August 2012, archive.today/v4zNm.
51 “The Munk Debate on State Surveillance: Edward Snowden Video” (video), Munk Debates, archive.today/zOj0t.
See also Jane Mayer, “The Secret Sharer: Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?” New Yorker, 23 May 2011, archive.today/pXoy9.
52 “Company overview,” Google company website, archive.today/JavDC.
53 Lost in the Cloud: Google and the US Government (report), Consumer Watchdog’s Inside Google, January 2011, bit.ly/1qNoHQ9.
See also Verne Kopytoff, “Google has lots to do with intelligence,” San Francisco Chronicle, 30 March 2008, archive.today/VNEJi.
See also Yasha Levine, “Oakland emails give another glimpse into the Google-Military-Surveillance Complex,” Pando Daily, 7 March 2014, archive.today/W35WU.
See also Yasha Levine, “Emails showing Google’s closeness with the NSA Director really aren’t that surprising,” Pando Daily, 13 May 2014, archive.today/GRT18.
Yasha Levine has written a number of investigative
articles on Google’s ties to the military and intelligence industry,
which can be browsed at: pando.com/author/ylevine.
54 Yasha Levine, “Oakland emails give another glimpse into the Google-Military-Surveillance Complex,” Pando Daily, 7 March 2014, archive.today/W35WU.
For more on Google’s ties to the CIA, see Noah Shachtman, “Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring,” Wired, 28 July 2010, archive.today/e0LNL.
55 Yasha Levine, “Oakland emails give another glimpse into the Google-Military-Surveillance Complex,” Pando Daily, 7 March 2014, archive.today/W35WU.
56 Ibid.
57 Ellen Nakashima, “Google to enlist NSA to help it ward off cyberattacks,” Washington Post, 4 February 2010, archive.today/hVTVl.
58 The
official name for US military occupation of Afghanistan is similar:
“Operation Enduring Freedom.” See “Infinite Justice, out—Enduring
Freedom, in,” BBC, 25 September 2001, archive.today/f0fp7.
59 Jason Leopold, “Exclusive: emails reveal close Google relationship with NSA,” Al Jazeera America, 6 May 2014, archive.today/V0fdG
60 Ibid.
61 “Defense Industrial Base Sector,” on the US Homeland Security website: archive.today/Y7Z23.
62 See “Top Spenders” under “Influence and Lobbying” on the OpenSecrets.org website: archive.today/xQyui.
See also Tom Hamburger, “Google, once disdainful of lobbying, now a master of Washington influence,” Washington Post, 13 April 2014, archive.today/oil7k.
63 Sy
Hersh has written two articles about the Obama administration's
ill-fated case for “intervention” in Syria. See Seymour M. Hersh, “Whose
Sarin?” London Review of Books, 19 December 2013, archive.today/THPGh.
See also Seymour M. Hersh, “The Red Line and the Rat Line,” London Review of Books, 17 April 2014, archive.today/qp5jB.
64 An archive snapshot of the page can be found at archive.today/Q6uq8.
Google explicitly prides itself on keeping its front page free of all
interference. Its purity and sacredness are incorporated into Google's
corporate manifesto: “Our homepage interface is clear and simple, and
pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to
anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it offers
relevant content and is not distracting.” See “Ten things we know to be
true,” Google company website, archive.today/s7v9B.
On the rare occasions Google adds a single line to the
search page to plug its own projects, like the Chrome browser, that
choice itself becomes news. See Cade Metz, “Google smears Chrome on
'sacred' home page,” Register, 9 September 2008, archive.today/kfneV.
See also Hayley Tsukayama, “Google advertises Nexus 7 on home page,” Washington Post, 28 August 2012, archive.today/QYfBV.
65 Thomas
Friedman has published several columns extolling the virtues of his
“radical centrism,” such as “Make Way for the Radical Center,” New York Times, 23 July 2011, archive.today/IZzhb.
66 Thomas Friedman, “A Manifesto for the Fast World,” New York Times, 28 March 1999, archive.today/aQHvy.
67 Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age, British paperback edition (John Murray, 2013), p. 98.
Google is committing to this ambition. Since the
beginning of 2013, Google has bought nine experimental robotics and
artificial intelligence companies and put them to work towards an
undeclared goal under Andy Rubin, the former-head of Google's Android
division. See John Markoff, “Google Puts Money on Robots, Using the Man
Behind Android,” New York Times, 4 December 2013, archive.today/Izr7B.
See also Adam Clark Estes, “Meet Google’s Robot Army. It’s Growing,” Gizmodo, 27 January 2014, archive.today/mN2GF.
Two of Google's acquisitions are leading competitors in
the DARPA Robotics Challenge, a competition held by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, with lavish Pentagon funding support for
competitors. Schaft Inc, a Japanese company, is tipped to triumph at the
DARPA competition with its entry—a bipedal, human-like robot that can
climb stairs, open doors, traverse rubble, and is impervious to
radiation. The other company, Boston Dynamics, specializes in producing
running, walking, and crawling military robots for the Department of
Defense. The most well known of Boston Dynamics' robots is “BigDog”—a
horse-sized troop support carrier, which must be seen (on YouTube: is.gd/xOYFdY) to be believed. See Breezy Smoak, “Google’s Schaft robot wins DARPA rescue challenge,” Electronic Products, 23 December 2013, archive.today/M7L6a.
See also John Markoff, “Google Adds to Its Menagerie of Robots,” New York Times, 14 December 2013, archive.today/cqBX4.
Google's real power as a drone company is its unrivalled
collection of navigational data. This includes all the information
associated with Google Maps and the locations of around a billion
people. Once gathered, it should not be assumed that this data will
always be used for benign purposes. The mapping data gathered by the
Google Street View project, which sent cars rolling down streets all
over the world, may one day be instrumental for navigating military or
police robots down those same streets.
68 A
utopianism occasionally bordering on megalomania. Google CEO Larry
Page, for example, has publicly conjured the image of Jurassic Park-like
Google microstates where Google is exempt from national laws and can
pursue progress unimpeded. “The laws . . . can’t be right if it’s 50
years old; that’s before the internet. . . . Maybe we could set apart a
piece of the world. . . . An environment where people can try new
things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where
we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society—what’s
the effect on people?—without having to deploy it to the whole world.”
See Sean Gallagher, “Larry Page wants you to stop worrying and let him
fix the world,” Ars Technica, 20 May 2013, archive.today/kHYcB.
69 The
notorious mercenary security company Blackwater, best known for killing
Iraqi civilians, was renamed Xe Services in 2009 and then Academi in
2011. See Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, (Nation Books, 2007).
70 Historically
Google’s success was built on the commercial surveillance of civilians
through “services”: web search, email, social networking, et cetera. But
Google’s development in recent years has seen it expand its
surveillance enterprise by controlling mobile phones and tablets. The
success of Google’s mobile operating system, Android, launched in 2008,
has given Google an 80 percent share of the smartphone market. Google
claims that over a billion Android devices have registered themselves,
at a rate now of more than a million new devices a day. See “Q1 2014
Smartphone OS Results: Android Dominates High Growth Developing
Markets,” ABIresearch, 6 May 2014, archive.today/cTeRY.
See also “Android, the world’s most popular mobile platform,” on the Android Developers website: archive.today/5y8oe.
Through Android, Google controls devices people carry on
their daily routine and use to connect to the internet. Each device
feeds back usage statistics, location, and other data to Google. This
gives the company unprecedented power to surveil and influence the
activities of its user base, both over the network and as they go about
their lives. Other Google projects such as “Project Glass” and “Project
Tango” aim to build on Android’s ubiquity, extending Google’s
surveillance capabilities farther into the space around their users. See
Jay Yarow, “This Chart Shows Google’s Incredible Domination Of The
World’s Computing Platforms,” Business Insider, 28 March 2014, archive.today/BTDJJ.
See also Yasha Levine, “Surveillance Valley has put a billion bugs in a billion pockets,” Pando Daily, 7 February 2014, archive.today/TA7sq.
See also Jacob Kastrenakes, “Google announces Project Tango, a smartphone that can map the world around it,” Verge, 20 February 2014, archive.today/XLLvc.
See also Edward Champion, “Thirty-Five Arguments Against Google Glass,” Reluctant Habits, 14 March 2013, archive.today/UUJ4n.
Google is also aiming to become an internet access
provider. Google’s “Project Loon” aims to provide internet access to
populations in the global south using wireless access points mounted on
fleets of high-altitude balloons and aerial drones, having acquired the
drone companies Titan Aerospace and Makani Power. Facebook, which bid
against Google for Titan Aerospace, has similar aspirations, having
acquired the UK-based aerial drone company Ascenta. See Adi Robertson,
“Google X ‘moonshots lab’ buys flying wind turbine company Makani
Power,” Verge, 22 May 2013, archive.today/gsnio.
See also Sean Hollister, “Google nabs drone company Facebook allegedly wanted to buy,” Verge, 14 April 2014, archive.today/hc0kr.
71 For an example of European concern, see Mathias Döpfner, “Why we fear Google,” Frankfurter Allgemeine, 17 April 2014, archive.today/LTL6l.
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