
Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems - rcamera
http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447
======
hardwaresofton
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.

~~~
valas
How do you define a "lie"?

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

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

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

Some examples of omission/misinformation:

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

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

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

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

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

I could go on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
donkeyd
You are correct that omissions are not lies. However, when you need to make
decisions based on information you need all possible information, not half of
it. So it's not presenting different interpretations, he's providing context.

If I tell you about somebody wearing a rain coat and using an umbrella on a
sunny day, you might conclude that person is a nutcase. If I add the context
that this person is highly sensitive to sunlight and is protecting himself,
you will probably conclude differently.

Yes, this happens a lot in politics, but that doesn't mean it's ok.

~~~
Argorak
I could argue that adding the fact that a lot of PhD students receive DARPA
funding and trying to mingle it with corporate funding is problematic on the
same grounds, as it adds context that I don't feel worthwhile, because it
distracts.

The attempt to put all context into all discussions is obviously futile.
Adding relevant context is a worthwhile way of debate, but not necessarily
part of any particular statement. Assange doesn't see that piece of info as
relevant.

Trying to turn this on the person is not a way to go in my opinion. Prove a
lie before.

Interacting with his statements (and be it "I think he's overinterpreting and
I won't further engage"), is the way to go.

(To add context: I live in Berlin, a person in a rain coat and an umbrella on
a sunny day is nothing special.)

------
TheMagicHorsey
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
colordrops
In essence you are saying that you don't agree with Assange so his name should
be smeared to keep his opinions from reaching the public. You are claiming
that you are able to parse and analyze his statements for their truthfulness,
whereas the rest of the public will be hoodwinked. What an arrogant and
elitist way to think.

Arguments should stand or fall based on merit, not on labels like "nutjob" or
"conspiracy theorist".

~~~
alexqgb
"In essence you are saying that you don't agree with Assange so his name
should be smeared to keep his opinions from reaching the public."

Nope. And even if I did think smearing people was okay, there's no need for
dishonest characterizations when the man is openly making a fool of himself.
If honest discussion about what he's actually doing makes him look bad then
the fault lies with him, and not the people who are simply noticing that he's
losing the thread.

"You are claiming that you are able to parse and analyze his statements for
their truthfulness, whereas the rest of the public will be hoodwinked"

Oh really? Do say where.

"Arguments should stand or fall based on merit,"

Well, at least you're right about one thing. And speaking of arguments falling
on merit, yours begins by distorting something I said to assert something I
neither said nor even implied, then departs even further from reality by
asserting I'm "claiming" something about my own abilities in relation to those
of "the rest of the public" even though I made precisely zero mention of
either. Seriously, at this point you're just making shit up. So of all the
faults in your position, I'd say basic dishonesty tops the list. And that's a
bit rich coming from a guy who started by railing against "smears."

But thanks for playing.

------
chiaro
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.

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

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

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

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8443796](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8443796)

~~~
mindslight
> _What are they [Google] suppose to do?_

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

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

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

~~~
smtddr
Basically, you're saying to just not create a business like Google. That's not
a practical solution because... money. If there's an opportunity to make
money, it will be taken. Even the illegal & immoral ones, not to even talk
about perfectly legal avenues.

More tangible problems with your idea of never collecting huge amounts of
userdata are:

\- If Google didn't collect userdata, I suspect their search wouldn't be
working even half as good as it does now.

\- Gmail, or any email provider?

\- Amazon's shopping history with your address and CC recorded?

\- Youtube?

\- cellphone service provider? (yeah, you could avoid logging conversations &
SMS but you're still the kind of company the NSA would come to for spying on a
person simply because you'd be a major hub of communication)

~~~
mindslight
Yes. Users wising up will hopefully put an end to that money. Your statement
is similar to saying that ending the NSA is not a practical solution because
"power". So our personal autonomy is fucked because money and power - I'm
willing to admit that this may be the inevitable answer, but in what way is it
productive?

It's indeed hard to imagine a world in which users control their data - that
is the extent of how hard we've been pwned.

Some of these systems were in place long before the issue could possibly be on
anyone's radar, and would/will take quite a lot of work to extricate
ourselves. anonymous payments - hard, especially now with Bitcoin on the
scene. cell service - a bit harder, TOR+wifi+bearer payment for programmatic
wifi access. physical address obfuscation - even harder, physical package mix
network backed by repu (fuck, I give up).

But Youtube? You could write a software frontend tomorrow that avoided being
Google's slave by not sending cookies. Comments would be a little harder, but
that's a feature - I think a recent study showed glancing at those _actually
causes brain cancer_. Beyond that, I guess TOR to scrub IPs until a better
(high-latency) mix network comes along.

Email is a broken naive protocol like HTTP which relies on centralized
identities, and can thus never really be secured. But secure messaging itself
is a low hanging fruit. The fact we don't have it already shows that we
seriously need to invest effort into building the ladder.

~~~
smtddr
When I said youtube, I meant the fact that people upload their lives to it.
Not the cookie or IP tracking stuff. Speaking of uploading lives, let me add
Facebook. So there just can't be a Facebook?

Devolving the internet & its services isn't the answer. You'd also have to
just stop using cellphones too. There is no hiding from a corrupt government.
You can't expect the general population to do all this stuff you're talking
about. You have to fix the government. Focus on corruption-in-USgov and NSA,
they are the enemy. Anything else is a distraction because it's not reasonable
to say _" Don't make a useful service for millions of non-technical people"_.
Somebody, something, will always be popular and become a major hub of
communication. To prevent that, is to prevent the evolution of not only the
internet... but even society in general. And you'd be doing all that to avoid
a corrupt-government, which you will fail at because you cannot avoid a
corrupt-government. Anyone who thinks they have is wrong; it's just that
USgov/NSA isn't interested enough in them yet.

The only exception is Snowden, and we all see the sacrifice he had to make to
do it. If we all did that then... well... there is no America anymore. If
that's what you're advocating, then you're asking for a nationwide revolution.
Which is fine, btw. I'm supportive[1] of that. I'm just saying that avoiding a
couple of social sites doesn't put you out of reach of the NSA. You'd have to
get a significant amount of US citizens to go completely off the grid and live
like hermits... or Snowdens. If that happened, I will happily call that a
revolution and celebrate.

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8458114](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8458114)

~~~
mindslight
(for context, I hope for both the NSA and Facebook to go out of business, and
was recently thinking Snowden might make a good Schelling point for a write-in
candidate)

There's always going to be collection of selective disclosure. Some of that
could be changed by a culture of secrecy (youtube videos in skimasks ^_^), but
in general there will be people who post everything to the friendster du jour.
And I don't see how one could ever stop assuming that information will be
archived indefinitely. For this, my hope can only be for a symmetric Brinworld
transparency where it ultimately doesn't matter (and to the extent some does,
people learn to navigate these contours).

But for stuff that doesn't need to be shared, I think you're focused too much
on the NSA, when it's really just the most prominent example. Any
sufficiently-funded intelligence agency is going to have plants that work at
significant corporate information troves. Exfiltration isn't terribly hard
when companies setup geographically diverse data centers on purpose.

And as I said, insurance companies are a far more worrying threat to me as far
as dictating everyday terms of your life - "we noticed you buy an awful lot of
beer. Your auto insurance rates will be doubling unless you let us install a
GPS-enabled breathalyzer in your car". I suppose this _could_ be held back
with legislation if we had a working political process, but I also recognize
that economics tends to win out regardless.

You say 'devolve' when talking about moving to non-centralized services, but
this is a loaded term. I view web toys (also a loaded term, heh heh) as a stop
off from the Internet becoming mainstream-recognized before its application
technologies were really polished to withstand model precession. There's no
reason privacy-preserving technology couldn't have a similar interface, yet be
easily self-administered with the help of any friend who is just slightly
savvy (besides that it's much harder to get such software funded when there's
no point for capital to invest because it rightly takes the middlemen out of
the picture).

------
cromwellian
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
_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
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
_would your argument change_

This is a tangent. I don't think there's any argument. The statements were
well supported.

~~~
cromwellian
The statements are mostly guilt by circumstance. IMHO, there's a lot of
puffery and bullshit going on at these NGO conferences and meetings, where
self-important people present platitudes in powerpoint slides about vacuous
and abstract solutions for the world's problems. It's the same nonsense we've
seen before. A bunch of bankers go to meet in secret, and all of a sudden
people are talking about Bilderbergers/Trilateral
Commission/Illuminati/FreeMasons secretly ruling the international scene.

If a bunch of Silicon Valley guys go to Davos and meet with say, the
government of Burma, where they talk about how some technical internet thing
is going to help their country, is it nefarious, or is it a naive belief by
people passionate about technology and their own ability, that they can solve
complex problems with stuff they're working on? (The State Department arranges
lots of these "CEO tours" all the time. Are they secretly working on foreign
policy, or, are they trying to open up exports, or sell people on American
capitalism? And so what if the CEOs are talking about the benefits of the Web
or internet technology for an open society? Just because the trip is arranged
on behalf of the State Department doesn't make the agenda _wrong_ )

The desire for the ultra-successful techies to thinkt hey can solve the
world's problems by exporting Silicon Valley is the kind of thinking Mike
Judge lampoons in "Silicon Valley", the naivete' of techies that they can
"change the world" by developing an app or distributing computers to people in
a country with broken civil institutions.

Assange wants to play "connect the dots" to imply something nefarious going
on, but if Angelina Jolie were in the same meetings instead of Eric Schmidt,
what would Assange be saying? Hollywood actors often have the same
narcissistic view.

Nothing in his commentary actually zeros in on anything Google has done based
on these supposed connections that's bad (leaving aside the wrong claims about
how PRISM works)

What would be the incentive for Google to risk a tens of billion-a-quarter
business on some quid-pro-quo for the US Government or Eric Schmidt's vanity?
After all, it is a public company seeking to make a profit. It is not an oil
company, it does not harvest raw resources from foreign companies, and it
doesn't make hardly any revenue from selling services to the US government.
There's not much US government favors can do for it's bottom line. It's
biggest impediments are regulations that block people from using its services
(mainly China). It doesn't have the same incentives that past American
companies needed the American empire for -- to protect its _physical_
interests in oil or resource concessions abroad. You need the US empire for
that, you don't necessarily need it to protect _virtual assets_.

A plausible theory for Google being in bed with the US Government in this
regard would have to provide a compelling motive. You can make the case for
Exxon, or Unilever, Halliburton, or say, companies with manufacturing plants
abroad, that rely on US government protection and contracts, but the only
theory about why Google would even want to be in bed with the US government
would rest on some kind of threat, like the government putting a regulatory
gun to the head of Google threatening onerous restrictions or anti-trust
action that would destroy their business unless they comply -- a huge stick,
not a carrot.

My point is, Google has more important things to worry about on a day to day
basis. They're more worried about competitors like Apple, than some weak ass
benefits some association with bureaucrats might provide.

I think Schmidt's post-Google-CEO career, from writing books, to trying to be
a pseudo-diplomat and tech-utopian ambassador are really harming Google's
brand by association. Bill Gates had the right idea, pick low hanging, high
value, fruit, work on the boring stuff, stay mostly quiet about it while you
get stuff done. Actions speak louder than words.

But I think it's just that -- association. Google Ideas isn't Google, this
Cohen guy is irrelevent to Google's main business lines.

~~~
serf
>The State Department arranges lots of these "CEO tours" all the time. Are
they secretly working on foreign policy, or, are they trying to open up
exports, or sell people on American capitalism?

What's the difference? They both support the agenda of the supporting
governments.

>Just because the trip is arranged on behalf of the State Department doesn't
make the agenda wrong

Right, but without transparency to indicate one or the other people are likely
to perceive the meddling of a specific government within a company that deals
with international business to be troublesome/worrying.

>Assange wants to play "connect the dots" to imply something nefarious going
on, but if Angelina Jolie were in the same meetings instead of Eric Schmidt,
what would Assange be saying?

Does Angelina Jolie have something to do with the world's largest store of
personal information, or do you somehow think that Schmidt's influence comes
from his celebrity rather than his influence inside one of the world's biggest
economic powers?

Angelina Jolie, and celebrities like her, are used to influence the public.
Celebrities like Schmidt are powerful because they are leveraging the power of
their respective domains.

If I were Assange, i'd probably conclude that the use of a celebrity like
Angelina Jolie was for the purposes of controlling a populous or influencing
'the masses' opinion -- but i'm not Assange, and Jolie is tangential.

> Nothing in his commentary actually zeros in on anything Google has done
> based on these supposed connections that's bad (leaving aside the wrong
> claims about how PRISM works)

Enduring Security Framework, NSA tool contracts, GeoEye-1 sharing(Both the gov
and Google paid for half of the satelite, but the 16 inch resolution imagery
is only available for gov use. How's that for fair?), Google's membership
within the Defense Industrial Base (“products and services that are essential
to mobilize, deploy, and sustain military operations.”), the rental of
Google's front page to the state ("Live! Secretary Kerry answers questions on
Syria"), and the government support of Schmidt as some sort of official
Ambassador for back-channel influence of negotiating parties.

Did you just skim past all that, or do you think that none of this is cause
for concern?

>it is not an oil company, it does not harvest raw resources from foreign
companies, and it doesn't make hardly any revenue from selling services to the
US government. There's not much US government favors can do for it's bottom
line.

Google harvests raw resources in the form of data-mining, and turns those
resources into a product worth value. The value that it accrues from the US
government is not in the form of revenue, but rather in the form of access --
access to those in power and access to business tactics and resources that are
above and beyond the treatment of most businesses by the US government.

>You need the US empire for that, you don't necessarily need it to protect
virtual assets.

That's far from true. Past large groups did not only depend on the US to
protect their physical product, but also to protect their position in the
market (if government subsidized usually), to protect their methodologies, and
in some cases protect their IP.

Example:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act)

an act, widely considered to have been unconstitutional, voted on by voice,
which was created by the reasoning that "copyright industries are one of the
largest trade surpluses for the state"

If lobbyists can succeed in increasing a held copyright by 50 years to a 120
year total it doesn't take much imagination to understand why a company may
want to be in bed with their host government.

>What would be the incentive for Google to risk a tens of billion-a-quarter
business on some quid-pro-quo for the US Government or Eric Schmidt's vanity?

the continued permission to exist as a company and not a fragmented post anti-
trust mess?

>My point is, Google has more important things to worry about on a day to day
basis. They're more worried about competitors like Apple, than some weak ass
benefits some association with bureaucrats might provide.

Google does, but Schmidt doesn't. That's why the assertion that Schmidt is a
puppet ambassador for the US government came about -- because he and his
highly-political cadre of followers (cabinet?) go from country to country on
state sponsored tours, apparently while espousing pro-US/surveillance talking
points with the world's leaders.

>Google Ideas isn't Google

What? It may not be the _whole_ of Google, but isn't that a bit silly?

~~~
cromwellian
> Geo-Eye high res imagery. Everyone who owns an imagery satellite is pretty
> much forced to give the government preferential access, and offer lower
> resolution to the public. This is not Eric Schmidt wanting to do favors for
> the government, I'm sure all of the competing mapping companies want to
> offer the best, highest resolution maps, but are often regulated by the
> state from doing so.

> Kerry ad on front page.

Seriously? So when YouTube hosts President Obama in a Hangout, you think this
is some quid-pro-quo for foreign missions? You think Twitter hosting
Presidential or Candidate questions, or Facebook doing the same mean something
is going on? Red Bull's epic stratosphere sky dive also was promoted in the
same way. Google wants to promote their services, like G+/Hangouts/YouTube and
the government wants free advertising it's a win-win, and you don't need to
concoct a story that this is payback for Eric Schmidt delivering a message to
Kim Jong Un, or for Google getting a free-pass from the FTC.

This is what I mean by guilty by association. If YouTube hosts a Whitehouse
press conference, there's a product manager in YouTube is supremely happy, but
it is extremely unlikely they had to hand over the keys of their servers to
the NSA to get it. YouTube audience size and demographics alone are reason
enough. In the same manner, Obama went on "Between Two Ferns" not as a favor
to the show because of a State Department mission.

Not every relationship between the government and the private sector needs a
conspiracy. The government needs to buy toilet paper like everyone else.

"Defense Industrial Base"? Oh, you mean, if the US military opens a Google
Apps account, uses Docs, Gmail, and Maps for it's internal planning, suddenly
it's no different than Lockheed Martin? The military and government uses
Powerpoint like crazy, does this make Microsoft part of the "defense
industrial base"? It's a pretty meaningless label then.

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

Here's the contract awards

[http://www.usaspending.gov/search?form_fields=%7B%22search_t...](http://www.usaspending.gov/search?form_fields=%7B%22search_term%22%3A%22GOOGLE+INC.%22%7D)

[https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?indexName=awardfull&...](https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?indexName=awardfull&templateName=1.4.4&s=FPDSNG.COM&q=google)

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

~~~
colordrops
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
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.

------
incision
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
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
> 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.

------
pandatigox
> 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
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.

------
lotsofmangos
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.

------
HonorSworn
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
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.

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

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

~~~
state
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.

------
lern_too_spel
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.

~~~
grecy
> _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
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
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.

------
oskarth
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
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.

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

Some further reading:
[http://estaticos.elmundo.es/documentos/2010/12/01/conspiraci...](http://estaticos.elmundo.es/documentos/2010/12/01/conspiracies.pdf)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/urizenus-
sklar/understanding-c...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/urizenus-
sklar/understanding-conspiracy-_b_793463.html)

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

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

> It's true that no two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought
> a war since they each got their McDonald's. (I call this the Golden Arches
> Theory of Conflict Prevention.) But globalization does not end geopolitics
> -- the enduring quest for power, the fear of neighbors, the tug of history.
> What globalization does is simply put a different frame around geopolitics,
> a frame that raises the costs of war but cannot eliminate it.

> That is why sustainable globalization still requires a stable, geopolitical
> power structure, which simply cannot be maintained without the active
> involvement of the United States. All the technologies that Silicon Valley
> is designing to carry digital voices, videos and data around the world, all
> the trade and financial integration it is promoting through its innovations
> and all the wealth this is generating, are happening in a world stabilized
> by a benign superpower, with its capital in Washington, D.C.

> The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist --
> McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the
> F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's
> technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine
> Corps. ''Good ideas and technologies need a strong power that promotes those
> ideas by example and protects those ideas by winning on the battlefield,''
> says the foreign policy historian Robert Kagan. ''If a lesser power were
> promoting our ideas and technologies, they would not have the global
> currency that they have. And when a strong power, the Soviet Union, promoted
> its bad ideas, they had a lot of currency for more than half a century.''

See [http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/28/magazine/a-manifesto-
for-t...](http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/28/magazine/a-manifesto-for-the-fast-
world.html?src=pm&pagewanted=8) 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')
.

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

~~~
dalke
If you read the Wikipedia page about the book you'll see Russia-Georgia listed
as 1 of 5 such counter-examples, going back to the US invasion of Panama in
1989.

You'll also see his responses.

But I'm not trying to justify either which way. My point is that there are
certain concepts in geopolitical dialog that are used as short-hand to express
a larger concept. Expressions like "McDonald's cannot flourish without
McDonnell Douglas" are to outsiders as meaningless as "Darmok and Jalad at
Tanagra" or "information wants to be free".

In other words "[Schmidt] struggled to verbalize many of [his politics], often
shoehorning geopolitical subtleties into Silicon Valley marketese or the
ossified State Department micro-language of his companions" can be turned
around - Assage uses a different language than you or I, though he doesn't
struggle to verbalize his politics.

~~~
dragonwriter
Your point about context was well made, my response was a tangent inspired by
your post, not an argument against it.

------
yuhong
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)

------
AshleysBrain
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

~~~
redthrowaway
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.

------
harry8
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.

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

------
pedalpete
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.

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

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

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

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

Seriously?

~~~
mpyne
Yes, seriously. Assange himself stated bluntly that he _told_ Snowden to go to
Russia (not Cuba, nor any of the leftist South American nations).

DDB left WikiLeaks due in part to the ongoing association of WikiLeaks with
authoritarian figures like Israel Shamir.

WikiLeaks could choose to start today and bring "transparency" to an
increasingly opaque Russian situation, especially since Russia has recently
passed laws requiring all media outfits to have no more than 20% foreign
ownership, passed laws requiring bloggers to register themselves with central
authorities, passed laws legalizing Internet surveillance even more extensive
than is legal in the U.S. (and even U.K.) and much more.

WikiLeaks could do this today, there are half a million civil liberties
organizations in the Western world focusing on the Western democracies and
seemingly no powerful groups in Russia.

But despite their stated pro-transparency aims, WikiLeaks refuses to do this.

If it's because Russia has threatened WikiLeaks with _actual_ physical harm
(something the U.S. government has never done) then WikiLeaks shouldn't have
acted as collaborators with Russia by telling Snowden to go there instead of
South America.

But I don't think it's a physical threat at all, the cooperation of WikiLeaks
with Russia since 2010 has gone on for so long (and Assange has been cooped up
in Ecuador for so long) that one would think the physical threat has subsided,
at least enough for WikiLeaks to quietly stay _away_ from Russia instead of
actively assisting them, as they did in 2013.

The most charitable explanation for all of this is that a common enemy (for
WikiLeaks and Russia) makes strange bedfellows... but that doesn't change the
fact that WikiLeaks has been actively collaborating with the Kremlin

------
modifier
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
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
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
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
We can agree this thread is full of shills, just possibly not google shills.

~~~
krapp
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.

~~~
colordrops
Shills are easy to detect, as they out of character with the typical tone and
style of messages on a particular forum. They also tend to have egregious
flaws in reasoning and use emotional and heated personal attacks against the
person or topic in question. The posts often get pushed to the top more
quickly than usual.

It has already been revealed that government agencies use sock puppets and
other techniques to manipulate popular and influential message boards, such as
Reddit and Hacker News:

[https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-o...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-
online-polls-ways-british-spies-seek-control-internet/)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party)

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-
ope...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-
social-networks)

Also, as many of you here on Hacker News should know, marginally ethical
marketing techniques are commonly used by tech and other companies, including
bought articles and opinion pieces, astro turfing, sock puppets, guerrilla
marketing, software to assist in targeting specific forums and message boards,
vote brigading etc. See:

[http://www.blackhatworld.com/](http://www.blackhatworld.com/)

~~~
mpyne
> Shills are easy to detect, as they out of character with the typical tone
> and style of messages on a particular forum. They also tend to have
> egregious flaws in reasoning and use emotional and heated personal attacks
> against the person or topic in question.

So in other words, you're claiming that non-accordance with the groupthink of
that particular forum implies that the poster is a shill.

Furthermore, you claim that using "proper" reasoning and unemotional
informational content is evidence that the poster is likely _not_ a shill, as
if it's that hard to actually shill for something without resorting to
crackpottery or emotional appeals.

I don't accept either premise, and nor should you.

> Also, as many of you here on Hacker News should know, marginally ethical
> marketing techniques are commonly used by tech and other companies,
> including bought articles and opinion pieces, astro turfing, sock puppets,
> guerrilla marketing, software to assist in targeting specific forums and
> message boards, vote brigading etc. See:

The fact that "Commonly-used" techniques exist implies absolutely nothing by
itself about whether a given comment is from a shill, unless you're willing to
believe that the base rate for shill/non-shill is significantly biased towards
shills and sockpuppets on a normal basis.

For instance, Ebola is "common" in Liberia, but someone coming in with the
symptoms of fever and headache are still at least as likely to have flu (or
even Lassa fever) as they are to have Ebola.

------
xnull2guest
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/NoPl...](http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPlaceToHide-
Documents-Compressed.pdf) (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...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/05/us-governments-
plans-use-economic-espionage-benefit-american-corporations/)

------
mikebay
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..

------
anonbanker
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
It was actually Scott McNealy who said that.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_McNealy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_McNealy)

~~~
anonbanker
I stand corrected. thank you.

