How the CIA made Google

[Byrne]

Searching on tinternet became crap after the Scroogle.org search engine was shut down around March 2012. IIRC March 2012 was also the time when there was a major change to Google's policies etc

Scroogle was the work of Daniel Brandt, who was also behind other domains such as namebase.org, google-watch.org & cia-on-campus.org,

[Nordic]

Anyone have experience with duck duck go?

https://duckduckgo.com

Supposedly doesn't track you. I tried it a few times when I first heard about it, and it seemed fine. But I'm lazy and figure I'm being tracked anyway so I usually just use that little search box at the top of the browser which is always Google.

[82_28]

Some things all make sense then. We had a relationship with Medium but all of a sudden the two dudes we were "tight" with and allowed us to explore their offices with a robot went silent. They could tell we were subversives -- the people higher up and told them, I would imagine, to cut off all contact with us. Which is fine.

But why?

I do know that we survived a few days as being an acquisition of (not duck duck go) and are currently still alive I think as being bought out by (not myspace). Shit's nuts. I still do not understand why law abiding, moral citizens must be monitored, tracked at all.

[Nordic]

Some things all make sense then. We had a relationship with Medium but all of a sudden the two dudes we were "tight" with and allowed us to explore their offices with a robot went silent. They could tell we were subversives -- the people higher up and told them, I would imagine, to cut off all contact with us. Which is fine.

But why?

I do know that we survived a few days as being an acquisition of (not duck duck go) and are currently still alive I think as being bought out by (not myspace). Shit's nuts. I still do not understand why law abiding, moral citizens must be monitored, tracked at all.

Because they're scared of us.

Because they know they're guilty.

In the Slave South the owners were constantly scared of slave insurrections and having their throats slit in their sleep, or being poisoned. It's kind of like that.

[Elvis]

Anyone have experience with duck duck go?

https://duckduckgo.com

Supposedly doesn't track you. I tried it a few times when I first heard about it, and it seemed fine. But I'm lazy and figure I'm being tracked anyway so I usually just use that little search box at the top of the browser which is always Google.

I set DuckDuckGo as my home page, and for some searches it's okay, but alas Google is much more thorough; for example, for image searches I always go to that little "google" box (compared to Google Images, DuckDuckGo completely sucks). Google is way more 'nuanced' but with DuckDuckGo you don't start seeing ads everywhere online for something you searched. Hard to get away from the Google.

[Lord Tsukasa]

thanks Nordic

Reptilian Illuminati on steroids....sorry but that's just how I feel

I'm a little curious as to where the article enters that territory.

[Wombaticus Rex]

thanks Nordic

Reptilian Illuminati on steroids....sorry but that's just how I feel

I'm a little curious as to where the article enters that territory.

It was arch sarcasm related to long-running interpersonal disputes here at RI. Nobody is suggesting this remarkable report is confabulated material.

[Nordic]

The other night I was on my desktop computer researching about Zion Oil for the thread I put up here

I finally got a nice fast cable connection with presumably different DNS servers than I used to have, which gave me weird weird trouble in the past (which I've written about here). Different provider all together.

Anyway things were zipping along nicely when I decided to google search a map for regions under ISIS control.

Things suddenly came to a screeching halt. Google just sat there and spinned, almost like I'd lost my connection. But I hadn't. My iPhone and my sons computer were still zipping along. But on the desktop everything was moving at a crawl. I switched to Duck Duck Go and tried the same search. It also sat and spun for a while then suddenly the screen acted very stranges with this flash and it looked like a crash, then actual results popped up.

I got a little freaked out and dhit everything down and rebooted it all.

[Lord Tsukasa]

thanks Nordic

Reptilian Illuminati on steroids....sorry but that's just how I feel

I'm a little curious as to where the article enters that territory.

It was arch sarcasm related to long-running interpersonal disputes here at RI. Nobody is suggesting this remarkable report is confabulated material.

Complete misunderstanding. My apologies.

I agree that this is a remarkable article and it is amazing (and telling) that the Highlands Forum has received virtually no attention from the alternative media until now.

For what it's worth, both of Page's parents taught at Michigan State University, which had fairly close CIA ties:

Lawrence Edward Page was born in Lansing, Michigan. His father, Dr. Carl Victor Page, was a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State University, where Lawrence's mother, Gloria, also taught computer programming.

http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/pag0bio-1

The University on the Make by Warren Hinckle (Ramparts, April 1966)
http://www.namebase.org/campus/msu.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_S ... sory_Group

Brin's parents live in the suburbs of D.C. and his mother is a research scientist for NASA:

That evening, by coincidence, I am meeting with Sergey’s parents at their home in the suburbs of Washington, DC.

...

Michael, 59, a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his wife, Eugenia, 58, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, are gracious and down-to-earth and still somewhat astonished by their son’s success.

http://web.archive.org/web/201301210551 ... ature.html

[cptmarginal]

Reading "Why Google made the NSA" right now...

Barnett’s vision is neoconservative to the root. He sees the world as divided into essentially two realms: The Core, which consists of advanced countries playing by the rules of economic globalization (the US, Canada, UK, Europe and Japan) along with developing countries committed to getting there (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and some others); and the rest of the world, which is The Gap, a disparate wilderness of dangerous and lawless countries defined fundamentally by being “disconnected” from the wonders of globalization. This includes most of the Middle East and Africa, large swathes of South America, as well as much of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. It is the task of the United States to “shrink The Gap,” by spreading the cultural and economic “rule-set” of globalization that characterizes The Core, and by enforcing security worldwide to enable that “rule-set” to spread.

These two functions of US power are captured by Barnett’s concepts of “Leviathan” and “System Administrator.” The former is about rule-setting to facilitate the spread of capitalist markets, regulated via military and civilian law. The latter is about projecting military force into The Gap in an open-ended global mission to enforce security and engage in nation-building. Not “rebuilding,” he is keen to emphasize, but building “new nations.”

Funny and ironic that the supposedly "disconnected" countries happen to be those that use social media and internet communication tools ubiquitously and for pragmatic purposes in their daily lives. Yeah, the people who live in countries in the Middle East and Eastern Europe are so "disconnected" and China & Russia are just "getting there." I know that this was written twenty years ago but some variant of that attitude still seems prevalent.

It's more like the rule-set he's talking about doesn't involve neo-liberal globalization policies or resource extraction per se. Instead (or ultimately) it seems to be about "cultural assault" on supposedly dysfunctional "noncompetitive cultures"

Ralph Peters' "Constant Conflict"

Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable. How can you counterattack the information others have turned upon you? There is no effective option other than competitive performance. For those individuals and cultures that cannot join or compete with our information empire, there is only inevitable failure (of note, the internet is to the techno-capable disaffected what the United Nations is to marginal states: it offers the illusion of empowerment and community). The attempt of the Iranian mullahs to secede from modernity has failed, although a turbaned corpse still stumbles about the neighborhood. Information, from the internet to rock videos, will not be contained, and fundamentalism cannot control its children. Our victims volunteer.

These noncompetitive cultures, such as that of Arabo-Persian Islam or the rejectionist segment of our own population, are enraged. Their cultures are under assault; their cherished values have proven dysfunctional, and the successful move on without them. The laid-off blue-collar worker in America and the Taliban militiaman in Afghanistan are brothers in suffering.

[...]

The foreign twin is the Islamic, or sub-Saharan African, or Mexican university graduate who faces a teetering government, joblessness, exclusion from the profits of the corruption distorting his society, marriage in poverty or the impossibility of marriage, and a deluge of information telling him (exaggeratedly and dishonestly) how well the West lives. In this age of television-series franchising, videos, and satellite dishes, this young, embittered male gets his skewed view of us from reruns of Dynasty and Dallas, or from satellite links beaming down Baywatch, sources we dismiss too quickly as laughable and unworthy of serious consideration as factors influencing world affairs. But their effect is destructive beyond the power of words to describe. Hollywood goes where Harvard never penetrated, and the foreigner, unable to touch the reality of America, is touched by America's irresponsible fantasies of itself; he sees a devilishly enchanting, bluntly sexual, terrifying world from which he is excluded, a world of wealth he can judge only in terms of his own poverty.

Most citizens of the globe are not economists; they perceive wealth as inelastic, its possession a zero-sum game. If decadent America (as seen on the screen) is so fabulously rich, it can only be because America has looted one's own impoverished group or country or region. Adding to the cognitive dissonance, the discarded foreigner cannot square the perceived moral corruption of America, a travesty of all he has been told to value, with America's enduring punitive power. How could a nation whose women are "all harlots" stage Desert Storm? It is an offense to God, and there must be a demonic answer, a substance of conspiracies and oppression in which his own secular, disappointing elite is complicit. This discarded foreigner's desire may be to attack the "Great Satan America," but America is far away (for now), so he acts violently in his own neighborhood. He will accept no personal guilt for his failure, nor can he bear the possibility that his culture "doesn't work." The blame lies ever elsewhere. The cult of victimization is becoming a universal phenomenon, and it is a source of dynamic hatreds.

It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry "American culture," with our domestic critics among the loudest in complaint. But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance, replaced by cognitive-practical elites--figures such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful politicians--human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary. Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such as those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught by adaptive behaviors, most are not. The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people's culture. It stresses comfort and convenience--ease--and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx's dream, and his nightmare.

Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can't wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather "Baywatch." America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no "peer competitor" in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the addicted--men and women everywhere--clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.

American culture is criticized for its impermanence, its "disposable" products. But therein lies its strength. All previous cultures sought ideal achievement which, once reached, might endure in static perfection. American culture is not about the end, but the means, the dynamic process that creates, destroys, and creates anew. If our works are transient, then so are life's greatest gifts--passion, beauty, the quality of light on a winter afternoon, even life itself. American culture is alive.

This vividness, this vitality, is reflected in our military; we do not expect to achieve ultimate solutions, only constant improvement. All previous cultures, general and military, have sought to achieve an ideal form of life and then fix it in cement. Americans, in and out of uniform, have always embraced change (though many individuals have not, and their conservatism has acted as a healthy brake on our national excesses). American culture is the culture of the unafraid.

That's funny - the type of American culture he's talking about feels dull, ugly, fearful and perpetually near-death to me. The cultures he's deriding and talking about supplanting feel to me like a lifeline, and I try to stay in touch with their trivial mass-media cultural signposts every single day. Whatever floats your boat, I guess...

-

Amazing that bullshit like this was printed in the US Army War College Quarterly. Or sadly predictable, you choose:

Image trumps text in the mass psyche, and computers remain a textual outgrowth, demanding high-order skills: computers demarcate the domain of the privileged. We use technology to expand our wealth, power, and opportunities. The rest get high on pop culture. If religion is the opium of the people, video is their crack cocaine.

More disgusting bullshit, proven wrong already:

Fear not. We are already masters of information warfare, and we shall get around to defining it eventually. Let the scholars fuss. When it comes to our technology (and all technology is military technology) the Russians can't produce it, the Arabs can't afford it, and no one can steal it fast enough to make a difference. Our great bogeyman, China, is achieving remarkable growth rates because the Chinese belatedly entered the industrial revolution with a billion-plus population. Without a culture-shattering reappreciation of the role of free information in a society, China will peak well below our level of achievement.

Yes, foreign cultures are reasserting their threatened identities--usually with marginal, if any, success--and yes, they are attempting to escape our influence. But American culture is infectious, a plague of pleasure, and you don't have to die of it to be hindered or crippled in your integrity or competitiveness. The very struggle of other cultures to resist American cultural intrusion fatefully diverts their energies from the pursuit of the future. We should not fear the advent of fundamentalist or rejectionist regimes. They are simply guaranteeing their peoples' failure, while further increasing our relative strength.

It remains difficult, of course, for military leaders to conceive of warfare, informational or otherwise, in such broad terms. But Hollywood is "preparing the battlefield," and burgers precede bullets. The flag follows trade.

I appreciate some honesty, though - warped as it is:

The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.

We are building an information-based military to do that killing. There will still be plenty of muscle power required, but much of our military art will consist in knowing more about the enemy than he knows about himself, manipulating data for effectiveness and efficiency, and denying similar advantages to our opponents. This will involve a good bit of technology, but the relevant systems will not be the budget vampires, such as manned bombers and attack submarines, that we continue to buy through inertia, emotional attachment, and the lobbying power of the defense industry. Our most important technologies will be those that support soldiers and Marines on the ground, that facilitate command decisions, and that enable us to kill accurately and survive amid clutter (such as multidimensional urban battlefields). The only imaginable use for most of our submarine fleet will be to strip out the weapons, dock them tight, and turn the boats into low-income housing. There will be no justification for billion-dollar bombers at all.

[cptmarginal]

I can see some of these Highlands Forum types taking stuff like this as a victory:

Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet

...without even taking into account what those people are specifically using social media for. I'm betting it's mostly not to talk about awful American reality shows or superhero movies, nor is it about organizing protests. Cultural assault, my ass

[Elvis]

Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet

Excellent article! -- someone should post the whole thing in the 'Evil Facebook thread'...will try later when I have time.

[cptmarginal]

Facebook’s 2008 round of funding was led by Greylock Venture Capital, which invested $27.5 million. The firm’s senior partners include Howard Cox, another former NVCA chair who also sits on the board of In-Q-Tel. Apart from Breyer and Zuckerberg, Facebook’s only other board member is Peter Thiel, co-founder of defense contractor Palantir which provides all sorts of data-mining and visualization technologies to US government, military and intelligence agencies, including the NSA and FBI, and which itself was nurtured to financial viability by Highlands Forum members.

Palantir co-founders Thiel and Alex Karp met with John Poindexter in 2004, according to Wired, the same year Poindexter had attended the Highlands Island Forum in Singapore. They met at the home of Richard Perle, another Andrew Marshall acolyte. Poindexter helped Palantir open doors, and to assemble “a legion of advocates from the most influential strata of government.” Thiel had also met with Gilman Louie of In-Q-Tel, securing the backing of the CIA in this early phase.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/16/ ... valuation/

Palantir, Valued at $15 Billion, Is Raising More Money

Jan 16, 2015

Palantir Technologies, one of the more secretive companies in Silicon Valley, was valued at $15 billion in November and is currently raising a new round of funding, according to people familiar with the matter.

The 11-year-old company, which sells software to the U.S. government and Wall Street to mine large amounts of data, raised a total of $500 million last year, one of the people said.

Venture-capital firms previously valued Palantir at $9 billion in December 2013. The latest valuation, which the company didn’t previously disclose, makes Palantir the third most valuable company backed by venture capitalists in the world, below car-hailing service Uber and smartphone maker Xiaomi.

Palantir has built a popular data-mining tool that lets government agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigations quickly visualize and link relationships among large amounts of data. The input could be anything – phone numbers, bank records, friend lists, photos of license plates. Palantir’s software reportedly was used by the U.S. government to track down Osama bin Laden.

According to USAspending.gov, a federal site that publishes government contracts, since 2009, Palantir has received over $215 million dollars contracts with the FBI, the Defense Department and Homeland Security. Today much of the company’s business also comes from deals in banking, insurance, retail, healthcare and oil and gas.

Palantir’s data-mining software grew out of technology developed by Paypal, the online payment platform, where engineers built software to uncover fraud.

The company has raised roughly $1 billion from a diverse group of investors such as government intelligence agency In-Q-Tel, venture-capital firm Founders Fund and hedge fund Tiger Global Management.

For some reason I thought they'd disappear or at least rename themselves like Xe (er, "Academi") following the whole embarrassing leaks debacle a few years back

[seemslikeadream]

Google waited six months to tell WikiLeaks about government surveillance - report
Published time: February 12, 2015 23:52 Get short URL
Reuters / Tim Chong Reuters / Tim Chong

Google had a federal magistrate’s approval to inform WikiLeaks employees that their emails had been the subjects of sealed search warrants, but waited six months.

A judge agreed last May to unseal orders issued in 2012, giving the US govt access to the personal accounts of three WikiLeaks journalists, for the limited purpose of informing them that their Gmail and and other intimate data had been compromised, investigative journalist Alexa O’Brien reported this week.

But while Magistrate Judge John F. Anderson authorized Google to make that disclosure on May 15, 2014, according to public records seen by O’Brien, Wikileaks acknowledged recently it was not made aware of the warrants until this past December.

READ MORE: WikiLeaks ‘astonished and disturbed’: Google gave its major staff data to US govt

Copies of the search warrants published by WikiLeaks reveal that in March 2012 the US govt served Google with an order requiring the company to hand over details of accounts opened by Wikileaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson, and two editors — Sarah Harrison and Joseph Farrell — along with gag orders intended to indefinitely prevent their presence from being revealed. Harrison alluded to the warrants during an address at a hacker conference in Germany shortly after Christmas 2014 and further details were revealed during a press conference in Switzerland late last month.

“I believe this is an attack on me. As a journalist for now almost 30 years, I think this is an attack on journalism,” Hrafnsson said in Geneva.


Hrafnsson told RT this week that “Google wasn’t able to tell us, they claim, until a day before Christmas last year, and so they waited for 2.5 years to inform us that they had handed over information.”

“They claim that they tried to resist this,” Hrafnsson told RT, “but we have had no information about that and our lawyers in the US have demanded information from Google pertaining to that.”

READ MORE: 'Attack on journalism': WikiLeaks responds to Google's cooperation with US govt

Attorney for Google, Albert Gidari, told the Washington Post that it has “continued to fight to lift the gag orders on any legal process it has received on WikiLeaks” dating back to 2011.

O’Brien now reports that Google may have been able to reach out to WikiLeaks much earlier.

“Public docketing and confirmations to the clerks in the US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia by the US Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, who was responsible for filing all three search warrants for WikiLeaks staffer’s email content in March 2012, reveal that Google waited six months to disclose the existence of the search warrants by the US Department of Justice,” O’Brien wrote in part.


O’Brien reports that Gidari said he is limited with regards to commenting on the case since he remains bound by a gag order, deferring her to Google HQ.

Wikileaks announced through Twitter Wednesday that “Google hid WikiLeaks search warrants for six months after they were unsealed,” along with a link to O’Brien’s original reporting.

Wikileaks’ attorneys said that they were seeking an explanation from Google as to what effort, if any, went into fighting the gag orders.

“The question I have as their attorney is: what caused this six-month delay in notifying our clients of these search warrants?” Michael Ratner, a US attorney for WikiLeaks, told The Guardian on Thursday.


Julian Assange, the Australian-born founder and editor of WikiLeaks, is among the most public and influential opponents of Google. A book authored by Assange and released last year alleges collusion between Google and the US State Department.

“Google’s business model is the spy. It makes more than 80 percent of its money by collecting information about people, pooling it together, storing it, indexing it, building profiles of people to predict their interests and behaviour and then selling those profiles principally to advertisers, but also others,” Assange told BBC last year.

“So the result is that Google, in terms of how it works, its actual practice, is almost identical to the National Security Agency or GCHQ.”

Wikileaks exposure of classified US State Department cables detailing US foreign policy provided by Army leaker Chelsea Manning internationally embarrassed the Obama administration. Manning, 27, is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence as a result of her involvement with WikiLeaks.

[Nordic]

https://medium.com/@DanSanchezV/don-t-s ... 8ae18bc9fe

Don’t See Evil
Google’s boycott campaign against war photography and alternative

What happens when a dynamic company, started by a couple of idealistic friends in grad school, succeeds so wildly that it becomes a mega-corporation that pervades the lives of hundreds of millions? In imperial America, it would seem, it eventually becomes corrupted, even captured. Tragically, that seems to be the unfolding story of Google.

By being the first dot-com to really get the search engine right, Google unlocked the nascent power of the internet, greatly liberating the individual. It is easy to take for granted and forget how revolutionary the advent of “Just Google it” was for the life of the mind. Suddenly, specific, useful knowledge could be had on most any topic in seconds with just a quick flurry of fingers on a keyboard.

This was a tremendous boost for alternative voices on the internet. It made it extremely easy to bypass the establishment gatekeepers of ideas and information. For example, I remember in the mid-2000s using Google to satisfy my curiosity about this “libertarianism” thing I had heard about, since the newspapers and magazines I was reading were quite useless for this purpose. In 2007, by then an avid libertarian, I remember walking through the campus of my former school UC Berkeley, seeing “Google Ron Paul” written in chalk on the ground, and rejoicing to think that hundreds of Cal students were doing just that. A big part of why today’s anti-war movement is more than a handful of Code Pink types, and the libertarian movement is more than a handful of zine subscribers, is that millions “Googled Ron Paul.”

Google and the Security State
In its early years, Google, ensconced in Silicon Valley, seemed to blissfully ignore Washington, D.C. It didn’t have a single lobbyist until 2003. Partly out of the necessity of defending itself against government threats, it gradually became ever more entangled with the Feds. By 2012, as The Washington Post reported, it had become the country’s second-largest corporate spender on lobbying.

Google, once disdainful of lobbying, now a master of Washington influence

How Google learned to stop worrying and mastered the Washington lobbying game.
http://www.washingtonpost.com
And now, as Julian Assange of Wikileaks details, Google has become incredibly intimate with the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the US intelligence community. As The Wall Street Journal recently reported, Google employees have visited the Obama White House to meet with senior officials on average about once a week.

Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

In June 2011, Julian Assange received an unusual visitor: the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, arrived from America at…
http://www.newsweek.com
Google Makes Most of Close Ties to White House

WASHINGTON-As the federal government was wrapping up its antitrust investigation of Google Inc., company executives had…
http://www.wsj.com
As Assange also discusses, Google has become a major defense and intelligence contractor. And a recently leaked series of friendly emails between Google executives (including Eric Schmidt) and the NSA (including Director Gen. Keith Alexander) indicates that Google’s allegedly “unwilling” participation in the government’s mass surveillance program (revealed by Edward Snowden) may not have been so unwilling after all.

In one email, Gen. Alexander referred to Google as “a key member of the Defense Industrial Base”: security state newspeak for the Military Industrial Complex.

Is Google in cahoots with the NSA? Email leak reveals a close relationship

Google's motto has always been, "Don't be evil," and most of the world believes in that promise. Ever since Edward…
http://www.techtimes.com
In 2013, Google even went so far as to enlist in the Obama Administration’s campaign to drum up public support for an air war against Syria. As Assange wrote:

“On September 10, Google lent its front page — the most popular on the internet — to the war effort, inserting a line below the search box reading “Live! Secretary Kerry answers questions on Syria. Today via Hangout at 2pm E.T.”

It goes on, this is just the start, but I'm unable to post it now, just on my phone ... If someone else would like to archive it here please do!!