Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447

by rcamera • 12 years ago

362 191 12 years ago

newsweek.com

state2• 12 years ago

I don't see the point. Just read the original text. https://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt.htm...

Fuzzwah• 12 years ago

Because the linked article includes a lot more than just the details of that meeting.

state2• 12 years ago

I'm not sure if they're details or opinions. I find the original meeting much more interesting. It's a legitmate exchange between two smart people.

yuhong2• 12 years ago

Personally, I do think asking Eric Schmidt to leak this kind of stuff was a horrible idea. But this reminds me of the anti poaching scandal:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7623873

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156005

lern_too_spel7• 12 years ago

The last section reads like the ravings of a conspiracy nut. From associating the DARPA grants that fund many university computer science projects with nefarious spy collaboration to repeating PRISM is the long-debunked full take program of Greenwald's fantasy, it's straight lunacy.

api3• 12 years ago

A lot of what's happened in the past ten years is straight out of the rantings of 1990s-era conspiracy nuts.

If anything, the 90s conspiracy wackos were too conservative. Nobody would have imagined that everyone would think it perfectly okay to carry a portable device that constantly reports their location to central servers 24/7, not to mention that it has a microphone that can be switched on by malware.

adventured• 12 years ago

The Patriot Act, indefinite detention, torture camps, the NDAA bill, NSA spying, the immense violations by the FBI and DEA when it comes to parallel construction and aggressive localized spying and tracking, StingRay, fake cell towers, local jurisdictions (eg Virginia) compiling phone records and tracking citizens, killing thousands of innocent people around the globe via drones, Guantanamo, arresting people under terrorism charges for joking on Facebook or online games, the TSA, Homeland Security...

And on and on

If you told someone in 1997 that that's how America would look today, they'd never believe it.

CyberDildonics• 12 years ago

Debunked?

runjake• 12 years ago

Could you address specifically which parts you are referring to? I speed-read through it and didn't notice anything that wasn't established fact, especially the DARPA bits.

api3• 12 years ago

We need an analogue of Godwin's law for the use of the phrase "conspiracy theory." It's a term used by naive establishmentarians to discredit any attempt to dig into the darker reaches of politics, even when the stuff being discussed is well documented and consistent with historical fact.

mkal_tsr3• 12 years ago

That's a lot of citations there, thanks for backing up your claims!

lern_too_spel7• 12 years ago

It's in TFA. What citations do you need?

dismal24• 12 years ago

Please let us know how it has been debunked.

lern_too_spel7• 12 years ago

The NY Times published a correct description of PRISM very shortly after Greenwald's published his insane misread. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-compani...

This description matches the declassified PRISM documents, the description in Snowden's leaked slides, US law, the miniscule price tag in Snowden's slides, and the description of a specific PRISM integration I heard from one of the implementers (possibly one interviewed in the nytimes story).

grecy• 12 years ago

reads like the ravings of a conspiracy nut.

As do all the articles about the information Snowden made available to us.

Imagine it's somewhere in 2005-2010 while reading... you would be nuts if you didn't think they were conspiracy nuts.

DanBC• 12 years ago

ECHELON was an open secret much earlier and the European Paiament had written reports on it in the 1990s.

People claiming it was conspiracy theory were fucking idiots given all the reputable evidence. The stuff about Boeing and McDonnal Douglas was late 1999 / early 2000.

mpyne6• 12 years ago

The only things that has been surprising about Snowden's revelations have been, in some cases, the scale (MUSCULAR comes to mind) and the audacity (Dual EC DRBG, which is technically "strong crypto", unless your opponent is NSA).

Warrant/NLS compliance (PRISM) was never a conspiracy theory, nor was foreign intelligence interception on domestic networks (regulated since 1978 by the FISA, with explicit increases in scope by PATRIOT ACT, and very public debates about "warrantless wiretaps" in the middle of the last decade).

Moreover what's notable about Snowden's leaks is how many conspiracy theories they didn't substantiate. No black helicopters are mentioned. Even the super-sekrit slides stamped TOP SECRET and EYES ONLY (which were never supposed to be seen by the sheeple) make reference to having to comply with First Amendment rights, civil liberties oversight, court orders, etc.

But people crow about conspiracy theories here because they honestly believe that showing specifics of programs and authorities that were widely known in general is proof of conspiracy.

dismal24• 12 years ago

Please read up on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore

It actually does what you claim was Greenwald's fantasy/lunacy

lern_too_spel7• 12 years ago

I know all about Xkeyscore: https://medium.com/state-of-play/getting-xkeyscore-right-f49...

It's a database that has nothing to do with a full-take of Google data with Google's cooperation as claimed by Greenwald and repeated by Assange to support his thesis. Greenwald's PRISM fantasy is just that.

jeangenie• 12 years ago

This comment reads like the ravings of a deluded government stooge.

chiaro4• 12 years ago

He writes well, and it's an interesting look at how intertwined the government has become (was it ever not?) enmeshed with corporate empires. Unfortunately in the wider population, Google's image is nigh unassailable. The average user wouldn't know about their being saddled with military contracts through their Boston Dynamics acquisition, for example. For this, and other reasons, 99 times out of 100, "free market" consumer action such as boycotts have negligible impact. That's alright though, when you can trust the state to properly monitor and regulate ethical conduct, though it doesn't look like we'll be quite so lucky here.

Regulatory capture is one of the biggest problems in the government today, but the solution isn't decreasing the power of the government over companies, it's decreasing the power of companies over the government.

api3• 12 years ago

"Regulatory capture is one of the biggest problems in the government today, but the solution isn't decreasing the power of the government over companies, it's decreasing the power of companies over the government."

It's both, really. Companies are incentivized to meddle with government because government meddles with them. The revolving door goes in both directions. It's the dark side of "public-private partnership."

BTW... I really wonder if it's possible to get as big as Google without kowtowing to the state. Are you allowed to get that big without being summoned to some... ahem... "interesting" meetings? Seems to me that no government would allow private power of that magnitude without ensuring that its leadership was somehow beholden to state interests or at least was "with the program."

smtddr3• 12 years ago

>Unfortunately in the wider population, Google's image is nigh unassailable.

Well, for me I _still_[1] think of Google as the good guys because I place the blame for this mess squarely on USgov, which perhaps ultimately leads to the public's lack of empathy - but I see this as a chicken-and-egg problem. I don't know if USgov laws created a socioeconomic setup that made people too stressed about day-to-day life not care, or people not caring resulted in our current socioeconomic setup. That's the cycle I'd like to break; but blaming Google solves nothing. What are they suppose to do? Just straight up say "Screw you USgov, we're not obeying the law. Don't care about your gag-orders or your subpoenas. We're just going to flat out refuse. Do your worst, come at me bro." --- I would think even Google must crumble under the full force of USgov that would swiftly follow such an act of rebellion.

Afterall, Google cannot dodge, bob and weave like say... Snowden.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8443796

mindslight3• 12 years ago

What are they [Google] suppose to do?

Not have a business model predicated on datamining users' information, and build their systems in such a way that they are unable to collect troves of unnecessary information.

But the only way we'll ever see any change is through users/developers: Detach yourself from such businesses. Don't build your dream on top of their corrupted platform. And if you must use some of their services for pragmatic reasons, consider them hostile governmental entities and thoroughly understand what you are giving away to be stored indefinitely.

Even if we demolished the NSA and put the traitors' heads on pikes, it would only be a matter of time until insurance companies robustly created similar chilling effects: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7928484

nickff2• 12 years ago

"That's alright though, when you can trust the state to properly monitor and regulate ethical conduct, though it doesn't look like we'll be quite so lucky here."

Please provide an example of an industry whose regulator has performed this task well (or a list of regulators if you can find more than one), as I am not familiar with any in North America (my area of residence and familiarity).

"Regulatory capture is one of the biggest problems in the government today, but the solution isn't decreasing the power of the government over companies, it's decreasing the power of companies over the government."

Why is the former solution inferior to the latter? I believe that the first solution is the only solution because of problems such as the aformentioned regulatory capture, as well as public choice, and various resource allocation (market-related) reasons. Please explain why I am mistaken. If you would like clarification with respect to any of my reasoning, let me know, and I can show my work (but I don't want to bore you unnecessarily).

chiaro4• 12 years ago

That's kind of the catch, isn't it? All the government agencies that do their job with efficacy wouldn't be the ones you'd be made aware of. Only when something goes wrong do you become aware that your local water board performs useful work.

To the point though, regulation ensures our planes crash at a rate of less than one per 21,000 years of flight time. Food safety regulations have dropped e.coli poisoning by half in 15 years. I believe there's a state by state comparison on road deaths following seatbelt regulations, showing a clear causative effect.

Maybe we'd be a bit more aware of the fact that the government actually works pretty well most of the time if we sent our little prayers of gratitude to the Federal Aviation Administration on touch down instead.

Despite this, my larger point is that it works even better in most other Western countries. You can see this quite clearly in at least one case by comparing public expenditures on healthcare per person. Single payer health insurance is more effective per dollar, regardless of possible criticism on other grounds.

Largely, because the free market is a poor regulator, and the government does it pretty well most of the time. To break it down:

a) there are things we'd rather corporations didn't do, for the good of society as a whole - such as misleading consumers about ingredients, or hey, hiring local cartels to break down some unions in Columbia.

b) consumer action by itself is ineffective. Boycotts, in the vast majority of cases, are too transient to be effective. This is compounded by the sheer number of companies one must try to keep track of to be an ethical consumer, the cartel example above is Coca-Cola, for example. Furthermore, say a mining or oil company is doing massive ecological damage. It's just too difficult to be able to track the produce of that mine to any decisions you make personally to effect what minute sway that decision would have.

c) the solution is to codify our standards for this behavior by social agreement, and penalize corporations that are found wanting. This is a regulatory body that provides a net benefit to society.

I do agree that the government has protectionist and overreaching regulations in certain areas, but I believe it's remiss to label the entire government as such. "Big" and "small" government are rhetorical buzzwords that prevent people from evaluating regulations and regulatory bodies on the case by case basis they require.

lovemenot2• 12 years ago

He does indeed write well. This made me lol:

> 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.

AshleysBrain• 12 years ago

In all of Chrome, Firefox and IE, after a few moments the page background turns black, and then it's unreadable (black text on black background). Is this happening to anyone else? Is there a readable link? :P

grandalf• 12 years ago

Happening to me. Unreadable.

redthrowaway• 12 years ago

Try:

    jQuery('#cboxOverlay').remove();
    jQuery('#colorbox').remove();

There's a modal that pops up with a black overlay. Opacity is 0 for me, but that might not be registering for whatever reason for you.

incision2• 12 years ago

That was interesting.

I've always been a bit curious about Schmidt and what sort of measure someone who is neither in awe nor seeking to impress might make of him.

I think the whole piece is probably best summed up with this line towards then end.

"What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first."

That certainly makes sense.

GeneralMayhem• 12 years ago

Only sort of. "Technology" (by which I assume you mean the sort of things produced by Google - namely, software services) and cyber-security are different from Lockheed's products in one extremely important way: anyone has the capacity and reason to use them. Only the government and a handful of large entities (airlines, maybe a few research labs) have any need for the things made by Lockheed and Boeing. But almost every single American uses a Google service, and certainly the entire population of the Internet can use cyber-security solutions.

They're similar in the sense that the government might spend incomprehensible sums of money on them, but that's where it ends, and in that sense airplanes are the same as potatoes. The potential issues with something like Google are very, very different from the steel-and-gears military industrial complex (which is also still going strong), where the companies and government seem to exist solely to justify each other's existence.

serf8• 12 years ago

Only sort of. "Technology" (by which I assume you mean the sort of things produced by Google - namely, software services) and cyber-security are different from Lockheed's products in one extremely important way: anyone has the capacity and reason to use them.

No. Lockheed and Boeing are defense companies. They sell safety to citizenry in the form of defense through government as a proxy. Anyone enjoying the safety of well maintained national borders employing equipment by either of those groups are 'using' their 'product'.

They (as defense contractors, and not private plane builders) are dependent on capitalization funding -- provided by the people through a vote for elected officials -- who will have the chance to provide a positive or negative pressure on the party in question with regards to allotted subsidies and funding towards that effort.

One way that both groups (both Google and the defense contractors) are much alike is that there is no way that they could have naturally grown to such proportions without anti-trust/monopoly/power-grab laws kicking in. Their (the companies) size is the largest indicator, to me personally, that they are playing ball with the world's governments.

TheMagicHorsey2• 12 years ago

I did not realize what a nut Assange has become. The more there is the danger that he might be forgotten, the more ridiculous his theories of the world.

However, you have to think about his target audience. The audience doesn't consist of people who are familiar with things like DARPA grants, and think tanks. For people in the know, this writing will read like lunacy, because they will understand that Assange sees demons behind every innocuous shadow. Some random college kid from middle America, on the other hand, won't know that his writing is lunacy.

For example, think about his casual implication that DARPA funding of Page and Brin's Stanford research might be a signal of their nefarious links to some cabal of elites in the defense industry. Anyone who has worked in a top-ten engineering program knows that nothing could be further from the truth. Those grants go out, in a bureaucratic fashion, to tons of people, without any such elites getting involved at all. In fact the worst thing you can say about those DARPA grants is that they are haphazardly doled out for some real stupid projects.

But think about how that accusation looks to some kid. It seems like there is this grand conspiracy because Larry Page and Sergey Brin took DARPA money ... of course they must be deep cover CIA implants right?

Its complete stupidity from start to finish, but its the type of stupidity that can only be debunked by actually being there and seeing that Assange speaks nonsense. This guy is an entertainer and self-promoter of extraordinary cunning. Think of the audacity it takes to write this gibberish with such confidence.

yid• 12 years ago

DARPA grants is that they are haphazardly doled out for some real stupid projects.

I think this is what a lot of people outside academia don't realize. DARPA brings up connotations of inventing Arpanet, but the reality (like VC investing) is that a lot of silly research is funded by DARPA grants.

incision2• 12 years ago

The piece is 5800+ words, exactly one of which is DARPA.

It's entirely possible that Assange is a nut, but nothing he says presents quite as nutty as extrapolating that single mention into a tale of innocent students being seeded with delusions of CIA double agents and elite shadow cabals by a scheming madman.

TheMagicHorsey2• 12 years ago

The DARPA point wasn't the only point of insanity. I just don't have the patience to sit and list out why his other points are equally silly for anyone versed in the space. The DARPA point was the easiest to explain and the most accessible for the Hacker News audience.

programmarchy• 12 years ago

Calling someone a conspiracy "nut" is not an argument, and doesn't add anything to the conversation besides an ad hominem fallacy.

I do agree with your one point that DARPA funding is given out in a seemingly haphazard manner. However, giving companies money is an effective way of exerting influence over them in the future.

alexqgb3• 12 years ago

Simply calling somebody a nut instead of pointing out the flaws in their argument is a proper example of the ad hominem fallacy. However, taking aim at the argument itself, successfully demonstrating its nuttiness, and concluding that one would have to be a nut to try making such a case is not a failure of reason. Quite the opposite.

After all, the ad hominem rule is not some generalized prohibition against personal attacks. It is merely a prohibition against baseless or irrelevant personal attacks – especially when used to deflect a justified charge, skirt a legitimate issue, or evade a properly vexing question.

This is a very important limit, and one that serves a valuable social function. Specifically, it's what allows us to derive positive utility from clear and direct condemnation of dubious personal characteristics in cases where those traits are producing or defending overt violations of reasonable and openly defensible social norms – like not gleefully spreading baseless FUD, for whatever reason.

I'll be the first to agree that killing messengers is bad policy. That said, I'm also a big fan of marginalizing unreliable narrators. In that regard, knocking Assange down a few pegs seems like a major boon to the mass surveillance conversation, which could really benefit from cooler, clearer heads prevailing.

skyjacker• 12 years ago

Perhaps in 5-10 years, people are going to look back at your comment and think you are the nut.

I'm confident Assage knows what he's talking about more than you do.

Mandatum2• 12 years ago

Hence why I think Snowden is somewhat stand-offish around him. Assange seeks acceptance and validation in a lot of the duo-presentations I've seen (especially in the Mega sponsored New Zealand one, where Snowden outright disagreed with him on a few points), but Snowden knows that he appears as a crackpot. A crackpot with SOME good ideals and points, but are ultimately poisoned by his high-level of lunacy appearance.

EDIT: It seems some people don't agree with me.

EDIT2: And the responder below has also been downvoted. Not liking this attitude, if you disagree with something it doesn't mean you should downvote. :\

contingencies4• 12 years ago

I have seen some very shallow attempts to paint this as truth on Youtube. Not sure who the sponsoring organization was for that one, but you can probably safely assume it's an western-based acronym. Anyway, if you watch the full event it's clear that the entire thing was out of context. The fact is, both characters were somewhat standoffish around Mr. Dotcom and with good reason. I am not sure how, when discussing such important matters as the political direction society is taking with regards to its economic, technological development and the preservation of fundamental human rights within that context, how anyone's appearance is remotely relevant.

dalke8• 12 years ago

In fact the worst thing you can say about those DARPA grants is that they are haphazardly doled out for some real stupid projects.

There have been protests and boycotts against DARPA funding even back when it was ARPA. See http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~kuipers/opinions/no-military-fund... . This was especially an issue because "[t]he Mansfield Amendment of 1973 expressly limited appropriations for defense research through ARPA, which is largely independent of the Military Services, to projects with direct military application." You can see some of the effects at http://books.google.com/books?id=nUJdAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT264&lpg=P... , where project had to have a military justification.

Perhaps you can tell me this - why is there so much funding through DARPA and not NSF, NIH, and other non-military sources? Steve Blank's "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" discusses some of the long ties between Silicon Valley and the military. Do you call that a 'grand conspiracy'? Whatever it is, Assange's statement seem to be in line with at least part of DARPA documented history.

sitkack• 12 years ago

I am bummed that the "silly research" is gone. Whether intended or not, it pushed for more military research, which when not weighed against a maturation of the human race puts us in a more precarious technological imbalance.

rayiner2• 12 years ago

The Naval Surface Warfare Lab funded my high school robotics team trip to Seattle. I must be really evil.

serf8• 12 years ago

you may not be evil, but it would be logical to think that your ambitions coincided with a few of the ambitions/priorities of the Naval Surface Warfare Lab.

If a consensus was reached by the public that NSWL does 'evil' things, it'd make logical sense to further investigate the possibility that you do evil things.

DARPA creates lots of things, but one of those things they focus on is weapon advancement and defense. They have a lot of creation under their belt (the internet, various medical advancements, surgical and prosthetic equipment and techniques, etc etc), but their public military image and priority on defense is such that the public has come to the consensus that DARPA is a spooky, evil, lab -- regardless of the good that they've done.

If the public consensus is that a group that Google deals with 'is evil', it'd make logical sense for there to be more pressure on both parties (Google and the involved party) to be as transparent with the public as possible to negate the brooding bad PR -- otherwise that 'bad' image may rub off and affect both parties.

That is, unless, the benefits of the partnership are greater than the disadvantages created by the negative PR generated by the partnership itself.. and I am personally of the opinion that that's the state Google is in now.

dalke8• 12 years ago

From an old Onion article at http://www.theonion.com/articles/death-star-to-open-day-care... :

After months of speculation, it was confirmed yesterday that the Death Star, the Empire’s vaunted, planet-destroying space station, has added a new, state-of-the-art day care center to its already vast array of capabilities. The massive four-room day care center, which, according to Grand Moff Tarkin, will “provide a safe and fun learning environment for tots between the ages of one and four,” has already begun spring enrollment and is expected to be fully operational by June 1.
... Last Friday, in the middle of a coloring activity, the planet Alderan was blown up, delighting 23 of the 24 children who witnessed the devastating power of the battle station.
... “As a stormtrooper and father of three, I’m very excited about the new day care center,” Death Star citizen Ralph Sedgwick said. “It’s a safe, nurturing environment, one in which my child will learn.”

I'm not at all saying that NSWL is evil. Only that, realistically, even the most quintessential of evil empires must surely not have been evil in every single aspect. A large organization can't work that way.

xnull2guest6• 12 years ago

I am his target audience and I know plenty about DARPA grants and think tanks. Assange has read massive amounts of leaked diplomatic cables (remember he ranks among names like Manning and Snowden for leaking documents), and as far as I can tell is very well politically aware and spoken.

No, don't look at the (one) mention of DARPA funding. Go look at the content of the diplomatic cable quotes, the fact that Schmidt visited him with US Government Officials to espouse US foreign policy objectives. Look at the sum of his argument including all of his evidence. And remember that this is just an extract from a book he wrote about it.

Partnerships with US Corporations has always played a role in US Foreign Policy. Right now the military is talking about replacing large parts of its active forces with private companies. For information systems and telecommunication, launching rockets, building planes, creating munitions, researching weapons, it is the same.

Eisenhower gave his famous speech in 1961 on the forming Military-Industrial Complex. Military-Industrial because it partners the Military and Industry. (He warns America that if it goes unchecked, it could have dire consequences. I'm not saying it's gone unchecked - that's a different discussion.)

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html

I go to my earlier point, the partnerships are not limited to munitions. Using Google to spy on foreign countries already shows that they have an intimate relationship. The question is whether Google is involved in Foreign Policy in other ways.

From GCHQ to NSA: "Let's be blunt - the Western World (especially the US) gained influence due to drafting earlier standards:

* The US was a major player in shaping today's internet. This resulted in pervasive exportation of America's culture as well as technology. It also resulted in a lot of money being made by US entities."

http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPl... (96)

The US would have a lot to gain if they could use Google to 'prioritize and export US culture'. Google's CEO sounds an awful lot like he's saying that.

From the intro text:

"They outlined radically opposing perspectives: for Assange, the liberating power of the Internet is based on its freedom and statelessness. For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with U.S. foreign policy objectives and is driven by connecting non-Western countries to Western companies and markets."

The US keeps an eye out on US Companies, too. Seems like an easy trade for me if I were a CEO. It will also help you expand your international base. Win-win.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/05/us-governments...

gasull• 12 years ago

I am his target audience too and agree with the view that Google is playing a role in the US Foreign Policy. But I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. It all depends on what you're promoting and that Movements.org non-profit the article/book talks about is a pro human rights organization.

So what is Google promoting in its role in the US Foreign Policy? Is Google promoting anything like torture or drone executions? As far as I can tell, no. They are lobbying for things like net neutrality.

I agree with Assange that Movements.org it has "blind spots", but do those blind spots make Google involvement a bad thing? Isn't Google just picking its battles?

All what the article proves is that Google has an agenda. WikiLeaks has an agenda too. I like both agendas and I think they overlap.

7952• 12 years ago

It is ironic but the DoD is increasingly more progressive than the actual elected government. They fund open ended science and research. They invest in renewable energy projects and have a serious attitude towards climate change. They can have a suprisingly beneficial for the environment of sites they own.

HonorSworn• 12 years ago

It is not that I believe that Google and Eric Schmidt along with the government are part of some kind of conspiracy. And I do acknowledge that someone like Assange probably is much more paranoid than he should be.

It is simply that we should not voluntarily give so much power to a single company.

BigChiefSmokem• 12 years ago

It's stupid that you are being down-voted but I agree profusely.

Google might stand for a better way of doing things (from what we had before) but at the end of the day it is a global and impersonal corporation with thousands of employees.

What our governments must due is keep a close eye on them. What we must do is compete with them and do everything in our power to beat them to market or circumvent their walled garden. If they go down in the process then too bad, we will take all their engineers - the real value of Google.

I would expect any startup and government to approach a huge conglomerate like Google, Apple, or Microsoft without fear and with much integrity.

lotsofmangos• 12 years ago

Is interesting to read other people's suppositions on this stuff. In a similar vein, I tend to think of Facebook as being just another government agency, but Google has always been much more curious. Google seems to have ambition beyond getting close to power, Google has since the very earliest days seemed that it is interested in being a power in and of itself. The International Olympic Committee has this unusual designation of being a non-geographical state-like entity. I suspect Google would also like that designation.

pedalpete6• 12 years ago

Sadly, I found the following pieces gave Assange so little credibility that if he had just written about the last 3rd of the article, it would seem more credible to me.

If a suspended employee was shopping around "the location of the encrypted file, paired with the password’s whereabouts" and in "two weeks most intelligence agencies, contractors and middlemen would have all the cables", wouldn't you just move the files and change the password?

He then goes on to say "Not only had Hillary Clinton’s people known that Eric Schmidt’s partner had visited me, but they had also elected to use her [Lisa Sheilds] as a back channel." However, he never mentions who Lisa Sheilds is, just that was Schmidts 'partner'.

I had to research it, but apparently she works for the "Council on Foreign Relations" http://www.cfr.org/staff/b5862 They do a horrible job explaining what they do. But I find it odd that Assange would have left out this details. Sheilds is a conduit to Clinton as well as Schmidts partner. This is an important detail.

"While WikiLeaks had been deeply involved in publishing the inner archive of the U.S. State Department, the U.S. State Department had, in effect, snuck into the WikiLeaks command center and hit me up for a free lunch." Assange blames Google, but he was naive enough to take a meeting, not knowing who the people setting up or attending were? I find this doubtful.

"The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy." Which direction is this statement going? The state is influencing the political agenda's of corporations? or vice versa. Was it any other way, and is this a problem as Assange seems to assume it is?

Google and the Council on Foreign Affairs put together a conference to 'workshop technological solutions to the problem of “violent extremism.”' This sounds like a good thing to me, but Assange condescendingly and rhetorically asks "What could go wrong?", ok, I'll bite. What went wrong? Unfortunately, he never answers.

"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: U.S. officials, telecom magnates, security consultants, finance capitalists and foreign-policy tech vultures... " Invite-only ? Really? Is this surprising for such a gathering? If so, what are the activists doing with the foreign-policy tech vultures? Who's calling them vultures?

"I began to think of Schmidt as a brilliant but politically hapless Californian tech billionaire who had been exploited by ... U.S. foreign-policy types". He again here is assuming that Schmidts agenda and that of US Foreign Policy are not aligned.

If this article didn't have Julian Assange posted all over it, I almost think it would be more credible. What I've never understood about those who praise Assange (not WikiLeaks as an idea, but the way Assange runs it) is that he's as bad as many of the actions of people reported in the leaks. He has his own political agenda, and is given a huge volume of classified information by a third party, and he then decides what of these classified information gets published and what doesn't. What makes him the deciding factor in all of this? If you think you're doing good publishing information that others think is classified, than publish the information. Don't pick through it, see what you think will make headlines or embarrass people you don't like, and publish only that which you feel is fit to press.

mpyne6• 12 years ago

"The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy."

This one is especially ironic, given that WikiLeaks has been reduced by now to a proxy political action arm for the Kremlin. The world is still waiting for the WikiLeaks "secrets on Moscow" that Assange threatened to release in 2010.

RT at least got smart and finally stopped "The Julian Assange show" (http://rt.com/tags/the-julian-assange-show/) so that the connection isn't quite so obvious, but it is there, even today.

Zigurd• 12 years ago

"WikiLeaks has been reduced by now to a proxy political action arm for the Kremlin"

Seriously?

lawnchair_larry• 12 years ago

And people call Assange the conspiracy theorist...

I guess that's why you made a good soldier.

kps• 12 years ago

As someone who was once naïve, Assange's writing echos the folks hawking copies of Socialist Worker on the street corner. A wikileaks sounds like a good idea, but this WikiLeaks is a tool to attack the less-bad and protect the more-bad.

dalke8• 12 years ago

wouldn't you just move the files and change the password?

Quoting from http://unspecified.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/wikileaks-passwo... - "speculation says that since it was on the WikiLeaks server temporarily, and WikiLeaks was aggressively mirroring their site to avoid being taken down, it was copied within the few hours that it was available online, and spread from there." Quoting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cables... - "This included WikiLeaks volunteers placing an encrypted file containing all WikiLeaks data online as "insurance" in July 2010, in case something happened to the organization." In either case, the encrypted file could not be moved from everyone's computers.

Several people knew the password. One was a journalist. The journalist published the password.

He has his own political agenda, and is given a huge volume of classified information by a third party, and he then decides what of these classified information gets published and what doesn't. What makes him the deciding factor in all of this? If you think you're doing good publishing information that others think is classified, than publish the information. Don't pick through it, see what you think will make headlines or embarrass people you don't like, and publish only that which you feel is fit to press.

Don't we all have our own political agendas? Assange is at least somewhat direct about expressing them.

But ... have you not read any of the history of Wikileaks? Assange invited the US to "privately nominate any specific instances (record numbers or names) where it considers the publication of information would put individual persons at significant risk of harm that has not already been addressed" and "reached an agreement with media partners in Europe and the United States to publish the rest of the cables in redacted form, removing the names of sources and others in vulnerable positions." (Quotes from that Wikipedia leak.)

Your proposal might kill people.

Slow leaks also keep the pressure up. If your agenda, for example, is to point out the contradictions in the government's statements and actions, then a partial release may elicit an official response, then a later release of more information can be used to show that that response was a lie, or to highlight how certain words were carefully chosen based on differences between an internal meaning of certain words and the general public meaning of those same words.

pedalpete6• 12 years ago

I wasn't proposing that the leaks be published without names being redacted, so with your comment regarding having names and such redacted to protect people.

I'm not sure I agree regarding slow leaks to keep pressure up. If that was the purpose, do you think that has been effective?

I don't think we all have 'political agendas', I would hope that most of us have humanitarian agendas which manifest themselves through political influence. There are definitely those with political agendas, but I don't think it's the majority.

Ironchefpython• 12 years ago

wouldn't you just move the files and change the password?

The encrypted files were distributed via bittorrent, with the password given to trusted individuals. This was done as a "dead-man's switch"; insurance against "prior restraint" (which can cover anything from incarceration to termination, depending on your level of paranoia).

See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/01/cablegate_leak_row/

The problem is this:

    Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

    -- Benjamin Franklin

Once the password started being shared to people without professional security training and the temperament to keep secrets, it was only a matter of time before it all came out. Regardless if you agree with wikileak's political and social philosophies, and even if you feel they provided much-needed sunlight/disinfectant, as an organization they acted like a bunch of preteens running a club out of a treehouse.

tomgg• 12 years ago

An excerpt from the excerpt:

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 U.S. foreign-policy think tank with close ties to the State Department—I thought little more of it

The effort you spent writing all those words should perhaps have been better spent objectively reading and understanding the piece.

pandatigox• 12 years ago

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

I remember reading Daniel Domscheit-Berg's (or was known as Daniel Schmidt, I think) book "Inside WikiLeaks", which talked about Assange's increasing paranoia.

I'm sad to read that the former German employee was once someone very important to Wikileak's early days and, if you read the book, someone who was very close to the man himself.

I'm suddenly more worried about Julian Assange and his paranoid/conspiracy theory view of the world

plaguuuuuu• 12 years ago

Paranoia is one thing. But I don't think it's paranoid to state that conspiracies exist. 5 years ago, people were called crazy for suggesting that the NSA were eavesdropping on the entire internet.

This particular article outlines the well-known links between NGOs and the US administration, and the probable ulterior motives underlying NGOs' stated objectives (i.e. 'human rights' etc). I don't think this is a paranoid theory.

cromwellian8• 12 years ago

A lot of innuendo and guilt by association, political conspiracy ala Kevin Bacon. I suppose isolation tends to produce conspiracy theories. I'll get down voted for this of course.

When Assange is raising concerns about a potential Google monopoly over the whole of the internet, he is of course, raising a legitimate concern. But the attempts by Assange, and people like Yasha Levine, to tie Google into the military industrial complex are weak sauce. The point about DARPA funding is particularly bullshit. Is any student who ever worked using research funds or equipment from DARPA at a university, and later goes on to found another company, beholden to the agenda of that organization? I worked on projects in college where I scarcely knew where the funds were coming from or who I should be paying my allegiance to.

contingencies4• 12 years ago

the attempts by Assange, and people like Yasha Levine, to tie Google into the military industrial complex are weak sauce

The historical, current and future involvement of senior Google executives in US foreign policy, their self-description and in some cases their personal identification as middle-east focused was, I felt, well illustrated in the article. The DARPA point is tangential.

pedalpete6• 12 years ago

Though the article was focused on middle-east related activities, would your argument change if the article mentioned an equal number of South American or Asia focused conferences/think tanks, etc. etc.

It's interesting that we keep saying US foreign policy, but I wonder if it truly is US only, or if Google's connections in other countries have similar connections and activities? If they do, does that change how we feel about these?

Raphael• 12 years ago

It's not mentioned in the article, but Google acquired Boston Dynamics, a military contractor.

cromwellian8• 12 years ago

And? Do you think Google is going to build robot weapons for the defense department? Or, do you think this was an IP and talent Acquihire?

That's what I mean by guilt-by-association. Elon Musk tried to buy Russian ICBMs, was he trying to build intercontinental ballistic missiles for nuking, or was he trying to get to Mars?

pkrs• 12 years ago

A lot of what he writes has nothing to do with the facts but rather adds to the general "evil theme".

Somehow he was able to paint having "analyticity" as a bad thing: "Schmidt’s dour appearance concealed a machinelike analyticity".

And acquisitions are conveniently renamed into takeovers: "In 2004, after taking over Keyhole"

And then this. I don't even:

"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 U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

dalke8• 12 years ago

Those interested in geopolitics have their own cultural references. The last is a reference to Thomas Friedman's "A Manifesto for the Fast World" (NYT, 1999). The more complete context is:

It's true that no two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war since they each got their McDonald's. (I call this the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention.) But globalization does not end geopolitics -- the enduring quest for power, the fear of neighbors, the tug of history. What globalization does is simply put a different frame around geopolitics, a frame that raises the costs of war but cannot eliminate it.
That is why sustainable globalization still requires a stable, geopolitical power structure, which simply cannot be maintained without the active involvement of the United States. All the technologies that Silicon Valley is designing to carry digital voices, videos and data around the world, all the trade and financial integration it is promoting through its innovations and all the wealth this is generating, are happening in a world stabilized by a benign superpower, with its capital in Washington, D.C.
The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist -- McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. ''Good ideas and technologies need a strong power that promotes those ideas by example and protects those ideas by winning on the battlefield,'' says the foreign policy historian Robert Kagan. ''If a lesser power were promoting our ideas and technologies, they would not have the global currency that they have. And when a strong power, the Soviet Union, promoted its bad ideas, they had a lot of currency for more than half a century.''

See http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/28/magazine/a-manifesto-for-t... for the McDonald's/McDonnell Douglas quote, but I started the context from the end of the previous page to show why McDonald's was relevant in the first place.

The 'Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention' is from Friedman's 1999 book "The Lexus and the Olive Tree". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Olive_Tree' .

dragonwriter3• 12 years ago

The Golden Arches Theory (even before it was disproven by the Russia-Georgia war of 2008) -- and similar theories like the "democracies don't fight wars against each other" theory -- have always been silly things that take rely on people not understanding math. You've got a feature that (at the time the theory is articulated) is historically fairly recent and that, when you take the number of pairs of countries that have been in wars that have occurred in any given time frame and the total number of pairs of country that have existed in the same time frame, and the total number of pairs of country that share the feature in question, where the expected value of number of wars between countries sharing the trait that is supposed to protect against war would be closer to zero than one if wars were randomly distributed and the feature had no effect, and then the theory uses the (utterly unsurprising) fact that the actual number of wars between countries sharing the trait is zero as the whole basis for an argument that sharing the trait prevents war.

ebgfkjnbe• 12 years ago

I suggest that people reading these comments look through the posting histories of the people bashing Assange and make a judgement about whether or not they're real people.

You be the judge.

pedalpete6• 12 years ago

We're all real people, you're the one who created a throwaway account to question other peoples motives.

modifier2• 12 years ago

To any "outsider" unfamiliar with Hacker News, it's heavily populated with Google employees, contractors, and developers that build on to Google products and services.

Keep that in mind when you read the comments here.

krapp3• 12 years ago

It is unfortunate that so much effort in this thread is being put into suggesting that anyone who disagrees with Assange must be a tool of the government or Google. We must not allow ourselves to fall prey to the military intelligence complex and actually think critically.

But I suppose when you agree with the premise then it's not actually propaganda...

modifier2• 12 years ago

An ad hominem attack voted up to the top is one giveaway that the rebuttals are emotional, rather than counter-arguments supported by facts.

chaz• 12 years ago

It's also heavily populated with people who work at or with Google's competitors, of which there are many more. Bias and differing opinions are everywhere.

serf8• 12 years ago

it's also heavily populated with government contractors and our friends at various alphabet groups, and Google employees, and Google competitors and people that don't care either way.

hardwaresofton4• 12 years ago

Despite all the people that think he sounds like a lunatic, is any of what he is saying a lie? Lots of people who sound like lunatics but aren't telling lies are worth listening to, I think.

So, he's putting a lot of "these guys are all evil" spin on it, but then again, all the connections he is making seem to be true. Whether it means Google is in bed with the US government or not is up to the reader (with nudging from him, of course), but I don't anyone confronted with this many factual connections between a CEO of a mega corporation and government actors could simply write this off as "lunacy".

I think most people in the tech industry (and sadly not many people outside it) have already realized the Google is very very big-brothery.

mkal_tsr3• 12 years ago

What I've always found interesting in the nebulus of Assange/Google/NSA/etc. is 90%+ of the time, people only focus on this as it if is only as US-gov issue. As if Russia, India, China and others haven't developed similar systems of surveillance. It's not to say that any system is wrong or right (whole different debate for another time) ... but it just astounds me that people look at what was leaked/released/unclassified and say, "well, look at all the threats to the US, look at what we need to protect. it's for our safety" completely ignoring that other governments and organizations are also developing similar systems. In my mind, it should just be treated as a baseline of possibility/capability.

_nedR• 12 years ago

Everybody and their grandmothers know that Russia, India, China are using everything within their means to spy on the world, and their citizens. Its the US hypocrisy of whining about this, while doing as much and more is what gets people.

hardwaresofton4• 12 years ago

But a lot of those other countries are fundamentally different (or at least they are on paper... specifically old constitution paper) than the US.

When the US does it, it's hypocrisy (because of written law, and what we supposedly stand for), when the other countries do it it's not questioned because their citizens don't have the same protection by a long shot.

So while contradictory, I think (partially) that it IS a US-gov issue -- other countries it's a non-starter because they don't have the same rights (or claim the same things).

chj• 12 years ago

I think most people in the tech industry (and sadly not many people outside it) have already realized the Google is very very big-brothery.

.. and is politically oriented. For example, the China government hacking incident was blown way out of proportion, greatly damaging the company's business in there. The consequence is still hurting them that Google services are now almost inaccessible in China.

xnull2guest6• 12 years ago

"The company, which in 2010 blamed China for an attack on its computer networks, said it recently discovered the Gmail campaign, which "appears to originate from Jinan, China," and targeted specific individuals." - http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/china-hacks-go...

"Chinese hackers who breached Google’s servers several years ago gained access to a sensitive database with years’ worth of information about U.S. surveillance targets, according to current and former government officials." - http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/chines...

There's a reason PRISM and others go through the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Courts.

China hacked the interface US intelligence agencies were used to request Chinese surveillance targets and information. This is why they've lost business in China.

michaelochurch• 12 years ago

Some of it's clearly true, even if it's the more prosaic part of it.

The Google founders clearly have links to some evil people. If you attend the neo-Nazi rally[0] in Davos or the Bilderberg Group, you're meeting up with some rotten human beings who have both the power and the desire to do the world harm.

[0] Godwin does not apply because they actually are white supremacists.

I wouldn't accept the whole story uncritically. The thing about conspiracies and "conspiracy theories" is that lower-case-c conspiracies happen all the time. There isn't one Conspiracy to rule them all (that's an adolescent fantasy; if it did exist, you could slaughter them all in the room where they meet, and save the world) and the Bilderberg group doesn't have as much power or importance as is ascribed to it, and just as the various crime families don't identify with any single animal called "the Mafia", there isn't a cohesive "Power Elite" or "Illuminati". Google isn't at the center of The Conspiracy because it doesn't exist. However, people (and especially the sorts of people who tend to acquire power in large organizations) are naturally conspiratorial. When it suits their self-interest, people conspire. Given the company that is now available for the Google founders to keep, and the published fact that, to some extent, they do so, it's obvious based on these links, with the Google founders attending Murdoch's private parties. that Google is going to be involved in some dirty shit. Should it surprise anyone? The Valley is filthy. That's only news to the clueless.

This is, as Assange admits, largely speculation when it comes to motives. However, I think there's more truth in what he's putting forward than 99% of people in tech will want to admit.

jamesaguilar• 12 years ago

Godwin does not apply because [the Bilderberg Group] actually are white supremacists.

Basis for this accusation? Can't find anything about it except for from Stormfront and Alex Jones, neither of which count as basis for anything. It is Godwin if you accuse people of being Nazis without evidence, FYI.

valas2• 12 years ago

How do you define a "lie"?

It is full of misinformation and omission of fact which then creates a false narrative. There are a few options then:

a) Assange is omitting important facts intentionally (which I don't think is the case). In this case you can call this misinformation a "lie".

b) Assange truly believes in the narrative and honestly thinks the important facts are not that important. In this case, well, he is a bit of a lunatic...

Some examples of omission/misinformation:

1. DARPA funding. He omitted that perhaps 30-50% of all PhD students in one or another way get DARPA funding.

2. "$2M contract with NSA in 2003". He omitted that Google was selling it's "Search Appliance" left and right in 2003 and NSA was just a small fish.

3. "Caught redhanded with handing petabytes of data... via PRISM". He forgot to mention that Google was bound by law to comply with NSL and warrants and was one of the first ones among all the companies to push for more transparency.

4. "Google Maps are shopped to Pentagon". He forgot to mention that Google sells access to maps to everyone and Pentagon is just a small fish.

5. When talking about lobbying, he stops explaining why Google lobbies. It doesn't lobby for more contracts, like Lockheed, it lobbies for less regulation in search ;-)

I could go on.

Overall, I would say, the Lockheed-Google analogy is deeply flawed. Just follow the money. Google does not care for government contracts - virtually all of it's revenue is from ads. The key asset for Google is user trust, which as you can see, is very hard to retain. If user trust is lost, Google is toast. Why would it then have any incentive to bed with the government?

Disclosure: I work for Google. I sit next to security folks (not physical security, mind you). Everyone I know here is super super pissed about Keyscore, wiretaps, NSL, etc.

xnull2guest6• 12 years ago

Replying only to your comment about sitting next to security professionals. I am a security professional at another large company. I and my team mates are also all pissed about XKeyScore etc. But it doesn't bubble up all the way through upper management. Because at some point there's section 215 of the Patriot Act, NSLs, and CALEA.

It's the compliance and legal folk who implement key and data escrow. The security folks are mostly not working to defend against nation states - although they will partner with other companies in the field and with the government to share intelligence about ongoing campaigns and fingerprints.

Argorak4• 12 years ago

Omissions are not lies. Yes, it's true that a lot of PhD-Students get DARPA funding, but that doesn't make the fact less true that Google also gets this.

All you are presenting is different interpretations of facts and weighting them differently - which is completely okay and a politics standard.

I disagree with you on one thing: if the main asset of google is trust, how come it aggressively lobbies against german consumer rights and makes themselves a hated target in that country? Doesn't quite fit...

I don't believe that Assange is necessarily _dishonest_. I have different interpretations to a lot of his things, but I am convinced that they are his actual opinions.

chippy2• 12 years ago

Do you have folks in your company with the red ID badges? I think that they are the security vetted employees. These people are working on projects that you, your boss and their bosses do not and cannot know anything about. Are they super pissed also? Are you allowed to ask them?

hardwaresofton4• 12 years ago

A little late, but there is no way to submit every piece of available (or even easily-researchable) information in one article. So I think every article would be guilty of lying were that the case.

Also, the facts that you listed are not the facts that really sell his story. It's the connections, not the business Google was doing. Google's a company, I am at peace with the fact that they're selling their products to the highest bidder (the government has a big wallet, filled with money we give it). It's the connections with schmidt, and the other high-ranking Google employees and various parts of gov't.

Also, remember, the only company that seemed to really fight surveillance (I might be getting this wrong, I only really read pretty standard news sources) was Yahoo.

I don't know why everyone is focusing on the DARPA funding... I don't really like it, and I'm worried about the priorities of the research, but that's not so relevant to google.

Natsu• 12 years ago

The biggest problem for me is that it simply doesn't matter if I trust today's Google 100%. The fact is that it's a company and eventually the leaders will die, leave or retire.

Even if I claim that Google [today] is 100% pure, honest and ethical, that trust isn't transferable to Google [tomorrow] that will have all of its resources and all of its databanks to mine someday.

And that's a problem. Rationally we shouldn't let them occupy too high a pedestal or trust them too far, or we run the risk of regretting it later, when it's too late.

wutbrodo3• 12 years ago

I think this is an important point that a lot of people miss. An entity having too much power is a concern separate from what you think they'll do with that power: there are always situations where your current understanding of their "morality" will no longer be valid (i.e. coercion by gov'ts as with the NSA, change in leadership as in your example).

People seem to have an intuitive sense of this but don't have the brains to comprehend it so they land up on "Google has the potential to be evil so therefore they're evil now".

dwd• 12 years ago

Any time you read an article by Assange you have to read it in context and using his meaning for some key concepts:

Some further reading: http://estaticos.elmundo.es/documentos/2010/12/01/conspiraci...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/urizenus-sklar/understanding-c...

bane2• 12 years ago

So Google does business with the U.S. government? No duh. It's not exactly a state secret, it's not like Google doesn't post job openings at the Washington D.C. and Reston, VA locations for people who want to sell and support the government.

Here's the contract awards

http://www.usaspending.gov/search?form_fields=%7B%22search_t...

https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?indexName=awardfull&...

Of course they want to sell to the government. The government has money.

colordrops3• 12 years ago

The claim is not only that Google does business with the government, but that they also help push the US Government's agenda. Did you read the article?

bane2• 12 years ago

Of course, that's how government acquisitions work. Do you think the government purchases things that don't help its agenda?

You can add up the dollar figures in the contracts yourself and guess if that's worth the CEO of Google adopting an unduly favorable tone about the government in order to continue to receive more contracts.

I know if I had a big enough customer for one of my products I'd probably talk nice about them also.

serf8• 12 years ago

Of course they want to sell to the government. The government has money.

sell what exactly? Eric Schmidt as Ambassador for the US? That's what the article claims they are attempting to 'sell'.

oskarth• 12 years ago

I noticed something curious in the comment section:

DARPA is mentioned exactly once in this article and then mostly as a tangential point. Despite this, it's mentioned several times in multiple critical top-level comments here in the comment section.

lern_too_spel7• 12 years ago

Perhaps because that is the one thing that anybody with even the slightest academic computer science background in the US will immediately recognize as utter nonsense.

There are many other ridiculous associations in Assange's essay, some of which have been pointed out by others in the thread, but that one jumps out of the page, grabs you by the ears, and screams crazy.

glitchdout• 12 years ago

This is straight out of NSA's manual to manipulate online discourse. You can read more about it here:

* Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media [1]

* How Covert Agents Infiltrate The Internet To Manipulate, Deceive, And Destroy Reputations [2]

Poul-Henning Kamp, in a hypothetical talk about his work at the NSA, talks about just this. [3] Here's a quote:

The idea is to steer discussions in these forums to or from particular topics (...) and disrupt consensus building against our purposes

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope...

[2] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...

[3] http://youtu.be/fwcl17Q0bpk?t=14m36s

anonbanker2• 12 years ago

It wasn't until this article that I realized that Eric Schmidt of Google was the same Eric Schmidt of Sun Microsystems that famously said "you have zero privacy anyway. get over it".

Why am I supporting Google?

jlukanta• 12 years ago

It was actually Scott McNealy who said that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_McNealy

anonbanker2• 12 years ago

I stand corrected. thank you.

xnull2guest6• 12 years ago

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html

From GCHQ to NSA: "Let's be blunt - the Western World (especially the US) gained influence due to drafting earlier standards:

http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPl... (96)

The US would have a lot to gain if they could use Google to 'prioritize and export US culture'. Google's CEO sounds an awful lot like he's saying that.

From the intro text:

The US keeps an eye out on US Companies, too. Seems like an easy trade for me if I were a CEO. It will also help you expand your international base. Win-win.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/05/us-governments...

auggierose• 12 years ago

Here you might have the real explanation for why Eric Schmidt stepped down.

harry8• 12 years ago

Not a single occurrence in the 154 previous comments of the words rape or rapist. I remember when that number would be 30 or higher. I guess it's not so believable anymore?

edit: voted down to zero but with no responders. :-)

/me waves to the NSA propagandists & apologists among us. I remember when many of us would have labeled that a whacky conspiracy theory, not so very long ago. Now we have the evidence that we were wrong we should remind each other of it whenever these stories come up.

mikebay• 12 years ago

I really dont like google or they "dont be evil" lies. I believe they are the one of the most dangerous organization.. Call me skeptic or negative, I hope people would use they head and tey to avoid googles services..

Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

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