/pol/ - Politically Incorrect

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.

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. Looking for something more concrete, I began to search in WikiLeaks’ archive for information on Cohen. State Department cables released as part of Cabletavistock 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. In Lebanon he quietly worked to establish an intellectual and clerical rival to Hezbollah, the “Higher Shia League.” 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.

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.” 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. 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.

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. Advancing Human Rights aims to right Human Rights Watch’s wrong by focusing exclusively on “dictatorships.” 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.” He then joined the Advancing Human Rights board, which also includes Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in occupied Afghanistan. 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.

Google Ideas is bigger, but it follows the same game plan. Glance down the speaker lists of its annual invite-only get-togethers, such as “Crisis in a Connected World” in October 2013. Social network theorists and activists give the event a veneer of authenticity, but in truth it boasts a toxic piñata of attendees: US officials, telecom magnates, security consultants, finance capitalists, and foreign-policy tech vultures like Alec Ross (Cohen’s twin at the State Department). At the hard core are the arms contractors and career military: active US Cyber Command chieftains, and even the admiral responsible for all US military operations in Latin America from 2006 to 2009. Tying up the package are Jared Cohen and the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt.

>Now here’s a little background on Schmidt.

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. 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.

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 tavistocks Foundation. Secondary funders include Google, USAID, and Radio Free Asia.

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, Coltavistock-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.

>>10377827

The chief executive of the foundation, appointed in 2013, is Jared Cohen’s former boss at the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton law and international relations wonk with an eye for revolving doors. She is everywhere at the time of writing, issuing calls for Obama to respond to the Ukraine crisis not only by deploying covert US forces into the country but also by dropping bombs on Syria—on the basis that this will send a message to Russia and China.41 Along with Schmidt, she is a 2013 attendee of the Bilderberg conference and sits on the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.

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. 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. 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.

Even when Google airs its corporate ambivalence publicly, it does little to dislodge these items of faith. 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. 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.

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). 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. These were the days of the “Total Information Awareness” program. 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.” 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”—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.

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. In 2010, NGA awarded Google a $27 million contract for “geospatial visualization services.”

Around the same time, Google was becoming involved in a program known as the “Enduring Security Framework” (ESF), which entailed the sharing of information between Silicon Valley tech companies and Pentagon-affiliated agencies “at network speed.” 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. 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.”

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

POL NEEDS TO DE-GOOGLE ITSELF

ASK BIG JIM TO REMOVE YOUTUBE EMBEDDING

BO SHOULD DISABLE EMBEDS UNTIL JIM HAS DONE SO

CLEAN UP HOME FIRST ANONSS

from Gamertavistock https://archive.is/oxh4K and trimmed a bit

Ross Frenett managed the Against Violent Extremism (AVE) network which was initiated by Google Ideas and managed by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ross-frenett-b93a4022 https://archive.is/TpDns

The ISD and European Commission run the FREE Initiative which defines "anti-multicultural nationalists" (that is, normal people) as "far-right" extremists http://thefreeinitiative.com/the-problem/ https://archive.is/9Xoc4 http://thefreeinitiative.com/about/ https://archive.is/SqZxV

ISD's Twitter https://archive.is/sV8Wc header image shows UNHCR head Zeid Ra'ad al Hussein, New York mayor Bill de Blasio, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and ISD's Sasha Havlicek. These people have influence.

>The hackathon, called No2H8, was organized by a company called Affinis Labs, which specializes in throwing events to brainstorm solutions to major challenges.

http://www.devicedaily.com/pin/more-startups-are-emerging-to-take-on-internet-trolls/ https://archive.is/HfPCp

Affinis Labs members include Quintan Wiktorowicz, Shahed Amanullah, and Wajahat Ali. https://www.facebook.com/affinislabs https://archive.is/Ib2CX

Quintan Wiktorowicz is the author of Global Jihad: Understanding September 11, Senior Director for Global Engagement at the The White House, National Security Council https://www.linkedin.com/in/quintanwiktorowicz https://archive.is/UA4ah

Quintan Wiktorowicz invited a known Hamas front to speak to British Muslim teenagers. https://counterjihadreport.com/2013/05/28/quintan-wiktorowicz-architect-of-us-counter-extremism-strategy/ https://archive.is/qHZzk

Under the co-opted direction of National Security Council official, Quintan Wiktorowicz, key Cabinet Departments, including Defense, Homeland Security, Justice and State are purging their curriculum materials of any references about Islam that their Muslim Brotherhood advisors find objectionable. https://counterjihadreport.com/2012/06/05/jihads-willing-executioners/ https://archive.is/mf7AU

Google Ideas is now known as Jigsaw and is partnered with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Jigsaw organized a team to "fight online abuse": https://twitter.com/JigsawTeam/status/646783722570682369 https://archive.is/JndJs

* Holly Jacobs, Cyber Civil Rights Initiative

* Rose Eveleth, the person responsible for getting Tim Hunt fired in the "Shirttavistock" incident

* "Feminista Jones"

* Randi Harper, professional online abuser

* Anita Sarkeesian, con artist

* Zoe Quinn, professional online abuser

* Jamia Wilson of Women, Action, and Media (WAM)

About Jigsaw director Jared Cohen:

On 11 February, Burton wrote to the secure email list that Cohen was still planning to head to Gaza. He added, "The dude is a loose can[n]on. GOOGLE is trying to stop his entry into Gaza now because the dude is like scorched earth. It's unclear to GOOGLE if he's driving without a license, but GOOGLE believes he's on a specific mission of "regime change" on the part of leftist fools inside the WH who are using him for their agendas.

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1snh6n2 https://archive.is/3HH7p

Key members of the The Institute for Strategic Dialogue: : https://archive.is/JjHYJ

* Sasha Havlicek - CEO, claims to be "founding Chief Executive Officer".

* Farah Pandith - head of strategy

* Zahed Amanullah - Head of Counter Narratives

* Curtis Hougland - Head of Technology and Marketing. "Curtis leads ISD’s efforts to counter violent extremism online."

Almost everyone else looks like a noob fresh out of college.

Harvard’s Berkman Center to launch global research and action network focused on youth-oriented hate speech online April 16, 2014 https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/95705 https://archive.is/wuFU3

To form the thematic network, the Berkman Center - with participation from Harvard's Institute of Politics Spring 2014 Resident Fellows Class - will work with partners such as former Special Representative to Muslim Communities at the U.S. Department of State and current IOP Fellow Farah Pandith, former Commissioner of the Boston Police Department and current IOP Fellow Ed Davis, tech entrepreneur Shahed Amanullah, the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), and other Viral Peace collaborators, among others.

Farah Pandith is US Special Representative for Muslim Outreach. Pandith was listed among the participants of the March 2006 conference Muslim Communities Participating in Society: A Belgian-U.S. Dialogue in which American members of the Muslim Brotherhood met with members of the Federation of European Muslim Youth Organizations, a known financier of Taibah International. Taibah's Bosnia branch is a designated terrorist organization.

https://web.archive.org/web/20061231001122/http://www.usip.org/muslimworld/projects/muslim_youth/brussels_report.html https://archive.is/htXjC

http://www.globalmbwatch.com/2009/06/25/breaking-news-new-us-special-representative-announced-for-muslim-outreach/ https://archive.is/QNXTz

http://old.post-gazette.com/pg/05363/629642.stm https://archive.is/68QF0

Something that GG missed. The Kashmiri American Council of Ghulam Nabi Fai issued a congratulatory press release when Farah Pandith was appointed. The archive hides the text but you can see it in the source code. https://archive.is/CpnLK

Ghulam Nabi Fai turned out to be an ISI operative. https://pjmedia.com/blog/the-biggest-d-c-spy-scandal-you-havent-heard-about-part-two/?singlepage=true

Deep State is real, pervasive, and everywhere.

Snowden? Deep State.

Steve Bannon? Deep State.

Your mama's cunt-gina? SUPER FUCKING DEEP STATE CAVERN

>>10377942

>pol

gtfo

Yes

brump

>>10378238

>>10377942

hes right, embeds have a stealth refer hidden in the image fetch, can break that link. even with prefetch off and element blocked

lycos

alta vista

web crawler

then suddenly seemingly out of nowhere comes (((Jewgle)))

do no evil != doing good

they've always omitted certain IPs from their crawlers searches

they've always omitted some data their crawlers find from their search database

(((they))) are getting more blatant at the revisionism

so what's new?

There's a thread about this over on >>>/tech/774544

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e

https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

did whole sections of this thread get nuked?

Off topic but is it true that (((Zuckerberg))) is going to run for president in 2020?

>>10381249

Hotbot and Dogpile were my go-tos

>>10377999

Like a good neighbor deep state is there.

I first used Google inside a large multinational in 2001 and it seemed like alien technology, so no real surprise here.

>>10381353

Google, FB, MS… all building AIs.

>>10381458

No, Trudeau will defect and run.

Look up how Google as well as facebook aided HRC in the US elections. There's no question they are an arm of the "deep state".

Let's not forget the time when Google's Street View trucks spied on everyone's Wi-Fi.

>Mapping isn't the same as collecting data, which Google said happened by accident. In any case, the company claimed, all that was being inadvertently collected were disconnected and unusable snippets from unsecured (i.e. unencrypted) home Wi-Fi networks.

>Actually that wasn't true, according to a report by the FCC. It was neither a mistake nor the action of some undisciplined engineer working on his or her own. A new, uncensored version of a report on the matter is now available, and reading it – which you can do here – will make you mad.

>It turns out that an engineer on the project who intentionally wrote code to glean the personal data, told two other engineers what he was doing, and gave the entire Street View team a document that detailed his work on Street View, including the logging of payload data – all the data that your network broadcasts – including things like the full text of emails. When the FCC investitavistockd, he refused to cooperate and hid behind his Fifth Amendment rights to not incriminate himself.

https://archive.is/cqAoR

Cuckerberg thinks he can win an election using the data hes gained from his network what does that tell you

>>10381458

I've seen it rumored, but idk whether they're just testing the waters so to speak or if they're trying to ride the "wave of populism", but I think that there's a bit of memetic ammo out there that would take him down a few notches and I can't imagine older people taking him seriously, but if they're all dead from crazy shit then who knows?

>>10383034

then he will win, unless.. someone with more autism fucks him up

true

>>10383034

Can you really imagine him debating Trump (or anyone before getting that far)? It would be a massacre