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Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

362 points by rcamera 12y ago

state 12y ago
I don't see the point. Just read the original text. https://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt.html https://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt.htm...
- Fuzzwah 12y ago
  Because the linked article includes a lot more than just the details of that meeting.
  - state 12y 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.
yuhong 12y 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=7623873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156005
lern_too_spel 12y 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.
- dismal2 12y ago
  Please let us know how it has been debunked.
  - lern_too_spel 12y 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-companies-bristling-concede-to-government-surveillance-efforts.html?_r=0 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).
    - dismal2 12y ago
      I believe he is referring to XKeyscore, not PRISM, which is as insane as it sounds, unless you believe the NSAs denial.
      - lern_too_spel 12y ago
        No, he is very clearly referring to Greenwald's PRISM fantasy. From the article: "Caught red-handed last year making petabytes of personal data available to the U.S. intelligence community through the PRISM program...."
      - dismal2 12y ago
        You are arguing semantics and I'm talking about what the NSA is actually capable of. Please read this paragraph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore#Capabilities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore#Capabilities
        lern_too_spel 12y ago
        You are arguing about a program that has nothing to do with Assange's thesis that Google is an arm of the US State Department. This isn't merely semantics.
        valas 12y ago
        The original story tries to implicate Google in opening their servers for "full take" data feed. XKeyscore was a program to analyse data siphoned from wiretaps. This is what caused that infamous ppt slide "SSL Removed Here ;-)" which, among other reasons, caused Google to start encrypting all of the inter-data center links.
- grecy 12y 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 12y 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.
    - contingencies 12y ago
      European Parliament report was issued in 2001. The difference back then was that everyone in the general population considered you a nutcase if you described it to them. These days, only perhaps 60% of people consider you a nutcase.
  - mpyne 12y 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.
    - 12y ago
- api 12y 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 12y 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.
    - xnull2guest 12y ago
      Can you speak more about NDAA? Oh man there's so many things I want to add to your list.
- CyberDildonics 12y ago
  Debunked?
- runjake 12y 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.
  - api 12y 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.
    - mpyne 12y ago
      Is "establishmentarian" supposed to be the new "statist shill"?
      - olefoo 12y ago
        I rather think it was a play on the word "antidisestablishmentarian" which technically would be one who is opposed to the disestablishment of the Anglican church as the official church of those lands governed by the queen of England. [1] In this case an establismentarian would be presumed to be anyone who favors the current order of things; whether it be a democracy, a cryptocracy or a kakistocracy. So, yes. A statist shill. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antidisestablishmentarianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antidisestablishmentarianism
- mkal_tsr 12y ago
  That's a lot of citations there, thanks for backing up your claims!
  - lern_too_spel 12y ago
    It's in TFA. What citations do you need?
- dismal2 12y ago
  Please read up on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore It actually does what you claim was Greenwald's fantasy/lunacy
  - lern_too_spel 12y ago
    I know all about Xkeyscore: https://medium.com/state-of-play/getting-xkeyscore-right-f49beeaf6a9c 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 12y ago
  This comment reads like the ravings of a deluded government stooge.
deleted 12y ago
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chiaro 12y 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.
- nickff 12y 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).
  - chiaro 12y ago
    1. 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. 2. 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.
AshleysBrain 12y 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 12y ago
  Happening to me. Unreadable.
- redthrowaway 12y 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.
incision 12y 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 12y 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.
  - serf 12y 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.
deleted 12y ago
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TheMagicHorsey 12y 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 12y 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.
- justicezyx 12y ago
  There is no consipiracy, it's just powerful people excercise their influence through the powerful channels. It's no difference than the culture revolution happened in Chian's 1970's. The difference is just the influence is excercised in rather different form and manners.
- deleted 12y ago
HonorSworn 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.
pedalpete 12y 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 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.
pandatigox 12y 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 12y 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.
cromwellian 12y 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.
- contingencies 12y 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.
  - pedalpete 12y 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?
    - contingencies 12y ago
      would your argument change This is a tangent. I don't think there's any argument. The statements were well supported.
pkrs 12y 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."
- dalke 12y 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-the-fast-world.html?src=pm&pagewanted=8 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' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Olive_Tree' .
ebgfkjnbe 12y 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.
- pedalpete 12y ago
  We're all real people, you're the one who created a throwaway account to question other peoples motives.
modifier 12y 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.
- krapp 12y 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...
  - modifier 12y 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.
    - krapp 12y ago
      The suggestion that the thread must be full of Google shills and that critics can be dismissed out of hand as part of the conspiracy is also an emotional argument unsupported by evidence.
      - smokeyj 12y ago
        We can agree this thread is full of shills, just possibly not google shills.
        krapp 12y ago
        How do you tell the difference between a shill and someone who actually holds an opposing point of view? It might be true, but Hacker News has a diverse userbase and it might as well be false. Using the term seems to me to be just a way to dismiss the credibility of critics - it's a thought terminating cliche.
hardwaresofton 12y 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_tsr 12y 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 12y 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.
  - hardwaresofton 12y 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).
dwd 12y 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/conspiracies.pdf http://estaticos.elmundo.es/documentos/2010/12/01/conspiraci... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/urizenus-sklar/understanding-conspiracy-_b_793463.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/urizenus-sklar/understanding-c...
bane 12y 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_term%22%3A%22GOOGLE+INC.%22%7D http://www.usaspending.gov/search?form_fields=%7B%22search_t... https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?indexName=awardfull&templateName=1.4.4&s=FPDSNG.COM&q=google https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?indexName=awardfull&... Of course they want to sell to the government. The government has money.
- colordrops 12y 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?
  - bane 12y 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.
- serf 12y 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 12y 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_spel 12y 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 12y 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-operation-social-networks http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope... [2]: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula... [3]: http://youtu.be/fwcl17Q0bpk?t=14m36s http://youtu.be/fwcl17Q0bpk?t=14m36s
anonbanker 12y 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 12y ago
  It was actually Scott McNealy who said that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_McNealy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_McNealy
  - anonbanker 12y ago
    I stand corrected. thank you.
xnull2guest 12y ago
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 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/NoPlaceToHide-Documents-Compressed.pdf 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-plans-use-economic-espionage-benefit-american-corporations/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/05/us-governments...
auggierose 12y ago
Here you might have the real explanation for why Eric Schmidt stepped down.
harry8 12y 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 12y 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..

362 points by rcamera 12y ago

state 12y ago

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

Fuzzwah 12y ago
Because the linked article includes a lot more than just the details of that meeting.
- state 12y 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.

yuhong 12y 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=7623873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156005

lern_too_spel 12y 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.

dismal2 12y ago
Please let us know how it has been debunked.
- lern_too_spel 12y 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-companies-bristling-concede-to-government-surveillance-efforts.html?_r=0 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).
  - dismal2 12y ago
    I believe he is referring to XKeyscore, not PRISM, which is as insane as it sounds, unless you believe the NSAs denial.
    - lern_too_spel 12y ago
      No, he is very clearly referring to Greenwald's PRISM fantasy. From the article: "Caught red-handed last year making petabytes of personal data available to the U.S. intelligence community through the PRISM program...."
    - dismal2 12y ago
      You are arguing semantics and I'm talking about what the NSA is actually capable of. Please read this paragraph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore#Capabilities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore#Capabilities
      - lern_too_spel 12y ago
        You are arguing about a program that has nothing to do with Assange's thesis that Google is an arm of the US State Department. This isn't merely semantics.
      - valas 12y ago
        The original story tries to implicate Google in opening their servers for "full take" data feed. XKeyscore was a program to analyse data siphoned from wiretaps. This is what caused that infamous ppt slide "SSL Removed Here ;-)" which, among other reasons, caused Google to start encrypting all of the inter-data center links.
grecy 12y 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 12y 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.
  - contingencies 12y ago
    European Parliament report was issued in 2001. The difference back then was that everyone in the general population considered you a nutcase if you described it to them. These days, only perhaps 60% of people consider you a nutcase.
- mpyne 12y 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.
  - 12y ago
api 12y 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 12y 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.
  - xnull2guest 12y ago
    Can you speak more about NDAA? Oh man there's so many things I want to add to your list.
CyberDildonics 12y ago
Debunked?
runjake 12y 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.
- api 12y 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.
  - mpyne 12y ago
    Is "establishmentarian" supposed to be the new "statist shill"?
    - olefoo 12y ago
      I rather think it was a play on the word "antidisestablishmentarian" which technically would be one who is opposed to the disestablishment of the Anglican church as the official church of those lands governed by the queen of England. [1] In this case an establismentarian would be presumed to be anyone who favors the current order of things; whether it be a democracy, a cryptocracy or a kakistocracy. So, yes. A statist shill. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antidisestablishmentarianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antidisestablishmentarianism
mkal_tsr 12y ago
That's a lot of citations there, thanks for backing up your claims!
- lern_too_spel 12y ago
  It's in TFA. What citations do you need?
dismal2 12y ago
Please read up on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore It actually does what you claim was Greenwald's fantasy/lunacy
- lern_too_spel 12y ago
  I know all about Xkeyscore: https://medium.com/state-of-play/getting-xkeyscore-right-f49beeaf6a9c 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 12y ago
This comment reads like the ravings of a deluded government stooge.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

chiaro 12y 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.

nickff 12y 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).
- chiaro 12y ago
  1. 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. 2. 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.

AshleysBrain 12y 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 12y ago
Happening to me. Unreadable.
redthrowaway 12y 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.

incision 12y 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 12y 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.
- serf 12y 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.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

TheMagicHorsey 12y 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 12y 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.
justicezyx 12y ago
There is no consipiracy, it's just powerful people excercise their influence through the powerful channels. It's no difference than the culture revolution happened in Chian's 1970's. The difference is just the influence is excercised in rather different form and manners.
deleted 12y ago

HonorSworn 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.

pedalpete 12y 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 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.

pandatigox 12y 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 12y 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.

cromwellian 12y 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.

contingencies 12y 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.
- pedalpete 12y 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?
  - contingencies 12y ago
    would your argument change This is a tangent. I don't think there's any argument. The statements were well supported.

pkrs 12y 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."

dalke 12y 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-the-fast-world.html?src=pm&pagewanted=8 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' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Olive_Tree' .

ebgfkjnbe 12y 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.

pedalpete 12y ago
We're all real people, you're the one who created a throwaway account to question other peoples motives.

modifier 12y 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.

krapp 12y 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...
- modifier 12y 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.
  - krapp 12y ago
    The suggestion that the thread must be full of Google shills and that critics can be dismissed out of hand as part of the conspiracy is also an emotional argument unsupported by evidence.
    - smokeyj 12y ago
      We can agree this thread is full of shills, just possibly not google shills.
      - krapp 12y ago
        How do you tell the difference between a shill and someone who actually holds an opposing point of view? It might be true, but Hacker News has a diverse userbase and it might as well be false. Using the term seems to me to be just a way to dismiss the credibility of critics - it's a thought terminating cliche.

hardwaresofton 12y 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_tsr 12y 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 12y 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.
- hardwaresofton 12y 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).

dwd 12y 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/conspiracies.pdf http://estaticos.elmundo.es/documentos/2010/12/01/conspiraci... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/urizenus-sklar/understanding-conspiracy-_b_793463.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/urizenus-sklar/understanding-c...

bane 12y 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_term%22%3A%22GOOGLE+INC.%22%7D http://www.usaspending.gov/search?form_fields=%7B%22search_t... https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?indexName=awardfull&templateName=1.4.4&s=FPDSNG.COM&q=google https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?indexName=awardfull&... Of course they want to sell to the government. The government has money.

colordrops 12y 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?
- bane 12y 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.
serf 12y 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 12y 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_spel 12y 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 12y 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-operation-social-networks http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope... [2]: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula... [3]: http://youtu.be/fwcl17Q0bpk?t=14m36s http://youtu.be/fwcl17Q0bpk?t=14m36s

anonbanker 12y 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 12y ago
It was actually Scott McNealy who said that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_McNealy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_McNealy
- anonbanker 12y ago
  I stand corrected. thank you.

xnull2guest 12y ago

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 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/NoPlaceToHide-Documents-Compressed.pdf 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-plans-use-economic-espionage-benefit-american-corporations/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/05/us-governments...

auggierose 12y ago

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

harry8 12y 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 12y 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..