* Thiel founded Palantir [0], which has a very deep and ongoing relationship providing counter-terrorism info and analytics to 3-letter agencies. His comments are likely an attempt to protect Palantir's contracts from Google.
* Google recently (2018) had trouble with employees exposing a censored search engine project targeted for China, and quitting over it [1]
Palantir's clients might be public info, but AFAIK, there is no evidence that Google has completely terminated their relationship with the NSA and the CIA. Also to be super fair, it may well be that Google has no choice in this matter. But in any case, the 'treasonous' claim seems to be a whole lot of hot air. Google will be shut-down before they give China any direct access that assists their intelligence ops.
>Google will be shut-down before they give China any direct access that assists their intelligence ops.
Their Dragonfly project was going to be providing this kind of surveillance to the Chinese government until Googlers (indeterminately) put a stop to it?
I don't know what you mean by "this kind" of surveillance. What was reported was they were going to give the Chinese government the ability to remove links from their index. Any business in China has to operate in accordance with the local law. Yes, thats probably incompatible with the morality of some people, but doesn't sound like some crazy surveillance scheme to me. Also, as an aside, nobody (especially in the west) seems to be willing to take a personal hit on this. Have the people who oppose this stopped buying stuff from China? Buying Chinese made goods is just sending more cash to the Chinese government. Has Google stopped manufacturing their phones in China? Has Apple or anyone else? Its all fake concern and useless posturing for PR as far as I am concerned.
On that note it would be paradoxically a conflict of interest for the CIA/NSA to investigate Google and yet of course they have because of their working relationship. So any penetration from China should theoretically be detected by them anyway or at least on their radar.
I don't have the signed contract handy, but its probably a one sided relationship. :)
"Facebook, Google, Apple, and six other leading online services have all gone on record as having given their customers’ data to the NSA, as legally required by the “PRISM” program. Data shared includes emails, messages, and documents."
"MUSCULAR and TURMOIL – Headed by the GCHQ with help from the NSA, these programs collect data (thought to be twice as much as PRISM) indiscriminately from Google and Yahoo internal data networks and share it with the NSA, who then scan it for anything ‘suspect’. Even though the data from Google and Yahoo are supposed to be encrypted, it’s intercepted during internal transfers, during which time it’s not encrypted at all."
"XKeyscore – Run by the NSA but shared with all Five Eyes nations as well as Japan, Germany and Sweden, XKeyscore is the comprehensive program that analyses all the data from all the above programs (plus others) and creates a searchable database. Targets can be searched for using name, email, or phone number, but can also be found using other criteria, such as unusual words they use often, locations they visit using Google Maps, or using another country’s language often."
None of those involve any interaction between Google and the NSA. PRISM ingests data collected by the FBI from those companies under court order for wiretapping specific accounts. MUSCULAR is run by neither Google nor the NSA. XKeyscore is a frontend for a database of data collected elsewhere.
Snowden and Greenwald can't read. The FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit is right there on the slides they released: https://i.imgur.com/setOJIm.jpg
This was well-known and commented on at the time Greenwald's articles were being published, with the NYT reporting on the program correctly the very next day by interviewing people actually involved in the program (verifying claims like real journalists — why didn't The Guardian think of that?).
In response, Greenwald doubled down on his incompetent misreading of the slides without providing any evidence to support his obviously ridiculous assertions.
"We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links, especially the links in the slide. We do not provide any government, including the U.S. government, with access to our systems. We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform.”
First they say that they were concerned about the possibility.
"Google's request, made in a public letter written by its chief legal officer, David Drummond, comes after the government last Saturday publicly acknowledged that Internet content companies had received secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requests about the activities of their users."
Then they say that they handed over the data as legally required.
The only point worth mentioning is the difference between 'access and 'unfettered access'. Google claims the latter never happened, only the former.
>There is no evidence that they have been coerced into cooperating with the NSA on anything.
Okay, you believe what you want to believe. This conversation doesn't seem tb be going anywhere. Goodbye, and have a nice day.
>which has a very deep and ongoing relationship providing counter-terrorism info and analytics to 3-letter agencies.
I mean it borderlines on his job to be interested in the subject matter of Chinese spying or whatever. Who watches Google? This all might come to nothing, but having tech companies watch each other would be advantageous for the public.
And the article actually glanced at but didn’t elaborate on
- Google decided to open a new AI research center in China, expanding its existing presence there. This in the face of expanding AI assisted surveillance in xinjiang and its 10 million population.
- Google decided not to renew its contract for project maven, a way to analyze drone footage using AI, for the US DoD
> Google decided to open a new AI research center in China, expanding its existing presence there. This in the face of expanding AI assisted surveillance in xinjiang and its 10 million population.
What does the first point have to do with the second? Is Google assisting in surveillance in Xinjiang?
A more direct connection is Apple handing over access to all Chinese users' iCloud data to the PRC, despite knowing about the mass surveillance and detentions in Xinjiang that this data transfer enables. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/02/5-things-you-...
Perhaps because if it were really a tech anti-trust summit, ISPs would be the chief topic. Or at least discussed somewhere. So a better description is tech contribution shake down.
I do remember these 600-comments threads regarding net neutrality and how it will be the end of the world once repealed because evil ISP will charge folks for each bit.
2 years ago net neutrality was repealed.
1. Has anything changed to the worse, consumer-wise?
2. Was there any postmortem acknowledging the fact that the end of net neutrality, unlike predicted, isn't the end of the world?
Many groups, including the EFF, engaged in fear-mongering claiming the most important reason for Net Neutrality was to prevent ISPs from de-platforming and censoring free speech. It turns out the ISPs never engaged in that kind of activity, and instead the organizations that increasingly engage in and rationalize such infringements are the ones that lobbied for NN.
The monopolies' _claim_ of benevolence is irrelevant. Nor does it mater what anonymous voices on HN said. I at least have the limited option of using Bing and DuckDuckGo for search. But I have no choice for ISPs.
Demanding a free market in America did not use to be controversial. But for two years now, under a sea of double think, it's just used as cover for political cronyism and contribution shakedowns.
It is the regulations themselves, not the lack of them, that have allowed for these de facto monopolies to form. These have been at the local level, where practical considerations were relevant (my local company often has a cable mess going on 30ft up these poles), but they went overboard. Should a given city allow 30 companies to string cable across their poles? I think it is up to the city, but if they make a mistake it shouldn't be the company that is punished. Local governments often disrupt free enterprise with their regulations for a reason, but when they get things wrong we should acknowledge that.
We don't need 30 duplicate lines across country for competition so we don't need them for the last mile. And quite a few municipalities do allow multiple wires. But even so ISPs don't invade each others territory. The over-regulation stories, among others, are simply untruths promulgated to provide plausible pro-monopoly sentiment.
If the US wants something that works, then just do something that works. For example [1]
At any rate, the ISP arguments are well known. And are about as moot as appeals to a free market or the public good. In the current environment, no amount of evidence concerning monopolies will change policy that is fundamentally based solely on political favoritism and retribution.
In the colloquial sense of that phrase, certainly not. Any honest calculation about the ends includes _all_ events that cause it. That necessarily includes the costs of the means.
> If you do, we are not talking about anything other than straight civil war.
I don't believe that is possible under any circumstances. The pattern being followed in the US is not at all unique. It is essentially identical to several other nations which are going or have gone down this path. There was never more than a broken window and burning trash can or two. (which of course are always portrayed as world ending violence justifying yet more authoritarian behavior)
In the end, either the public notices the situation in time and somehow gets enough ballots counted that they return the country to sanity (enough ballots to overcome gerrymandering, the electoral college, the unbalanced senate, systematic disfranchisement and foreign interference)
Or the country follows the same path that Hungary and Poland are on now, towards a hyper nationalistic, xenophobic kleptocracy. Essentially the same choice soon to be faced by several other western countries (and India and Turkey btw).
America is based on an idea, not historical aristocracy or genealogy (i.e. blood and soil). We were founded on freedom. The US, as the first start-up country is simply not comparable to other countries. This is why an American conservative is not comparable to a European conservative. Certain degenerates are attempting to import these European ideas into the US (e.g. Bannon), but I will not condone these illiberal policies that are contrary to the founding of America.
Clearly Trump's party is crucially different than John McCain's. It's unimaginable that McCain would keep kids in cages, call the press "enemy of the people", lead chants to lock up political opponents, undermine NATO, or encourage hostile powers to assist his candidacy. I may not be a conservative, but whatever else may be said of the old McCain-Regan-Rockefeller party, they would certainly never, ever engage in any of these obscene activities.
And I entirely agree, the US does have some considerable advantages:
- the "blood and soil" ideology is very alien (though not unprecedented as seen by the first, more obvious, "America first" movement [1] and later by John Birch)
- it's had 240 years of voting and some notion of civil-personal rights
- there's nice separation of powers. (Although it's becoming apparent that a president with >33% of the Senate can exercise almost unlimited authority.)
But these advantages are not automated, people have to use and defend them. The judiciary is especially delicate, it's been the first thing targeted by the other neo-autocrats.
Also there is a possibility of over confidence in these institutions ("it can't happen here"). And there's an unfortunate dose of denial ("he did not mean that literally"). And inexperience (modern Germans know exactly what the AfD is and how dangerous it is)
But absolutely, the future is not written yet and certainly I too am never going to be shut up.
By the way, the Bannon influence is so obvious (and 1930's obsessed) that you see Trump threatening opponents with half understood ideas of a paramilitary somehow made out of "bikers and police"[2]
Yes, most of the horrible things that were claimed came to pass. Data caps, getting paid twice for the same stream. Data prioritization, deep packet inspection, DNS injection. Every way imaginable things have gotten worse for consumers save for token and widely woefully poor increases in Internet speeds that most other countries beat for a fraction of the price. Internet prices have also nearly doubled in my area.
Just incidental that an overwhelming majority of tech giants' employees pledge allegiance to the left, while having unregulated, monopoly control over information dissemination? When was the last time an ISP de-platformed someone for their politics?
So yes, the "anti-trust" talk is politically motivated? And proudly so because the employees have "pledged allegiance to the left"?
Strangely, there seems to be a very large number of people who decry google's information "monopoly" because of the blogs and youtube(!) videos they found while googling. A group that, given their power in government, is certainly not being oppressed.
And as a side note, I use no Alphabet product and obviously run an ad blocker. You'll find there are a great many technologists that do so. So, while there are certainly issues, the monopoly talk is obviously intentional hyperbole promulgated for political reasons.
As compared to, say ISPs which actually are monopolies. Or even Sinclair broadcasting which actually does control all media in some regions. But those genuine monopolies are not objectionable because they align politically with the party in power.
This pattern does correspond with some political systems but certainly not democratic, rule-of-law forms.
It's a deeply disappointing realization that to a lot of people, basic human decency, integrity in disseminating truth, and a consistent view of facts has become a partisan issue because of the Republican party.
Please don't take HN threads further into partisan flamewar.
Also, it looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle. Important though those issues are, we ban accounts that do that on HN, because it's not what this site is for and destroys the curiosity that it is for. If you would review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended, we'd be grateful.
Or the fact that what was once a cornerstone of American Conservatism has now disappeared entirely, the free market economy. "I can't compete in the marketplace of ideas, I need government intervention, subsidies, import tariffs to break up those big bad 'leftist' companies, I'm not smart/strong/good enough to do it myself."
The alt right isn’t being deplatformed because of their politics, so much as because they are trolls. Triggering the libs necessarily antagonizes a significant portion of the user base, which tarnishes the brand and subtracts value.
Note that a mirror image of these types exist on the left, and they also tend to be despised. Again it’s not about the politics. It’s about being an unpleasant person.
I think there are real questions about what to do - if anything, because doing nothing is also a legitimate point of view - with some of these tech giants, but it's very disheartening to see it all get caught up in partisan politics. There's a lot going on already that makes it difficult to think about consequences and potential unintended consequences without making companies take "sides".
It's worth noting that in previous years an American businessman publicly attacking his rivals as treasonous would be regarded as engaging in unseemly conduct more appropriate to a citizen of more authoritarian nations.
The conclusion one can draw from this should be obvious.
What is Thiel’s current stake in $FB? I’m wondering if this was a play out of the GOP playbook, accusing your opponent of the things you’re actually doing.
Not much. This[1] Nov 22, 2017 article states he sold most of his stake shortly after the IPO and then most of the rest on Nov 20 2017. At that point he only held "220,718 Class A Facebook shares and 54,995 Class B shares".
So at $204 a share, that's about $56 million, right? If his reported net worth is correct $2.5 billion, that's around 2% of his net worth.
So, not a huge amount of Facebook nor of his net worth, but still a huge amount of money. I'm not sure how billionaires think, but I suspect to become a billionaire it's usually not "I won't sweat a loss of couple tens of millions of dollars."
Our "billionaire" president paid his son's Boy Scouts fees with charity money rather than his own. People with that kind of money are usually SUPER cheap and REALLY attached to every dollar.
I'm not sure how much a billionaire would care about a significant loss on a $56mm investment either, but it's worth pointing out that pretty close to 2% of his net worth would be in Facebook even if all he did with his money was park it in s&p 500 index funds. it's hard to have a diversified portfolio without owning at least some of one of the most valuable companies in the world.
all things being equal, I'm sure he would care at least a little about a seven or eight figure loss, but I'm not sure it would be worth the opportunity cost of neglecting his other investments.
I think Thiel and Google are both guilty of some questionable dealings. Thiel is only able to cast aspersions because his questionable dealings have been restricted to federal and state government entities.
Can Peter Thiel please just plug himself into his own personal Matrix/brain-in-a-vat VR fantasy where he gets to be John Galt and Howard Roark or whatever and just leave the rest of us alone already?
The only references to nuclear are in relation to the Iranian nuclear deal. Do you have another source that shows the Obama administration allowed the transfer of nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia?
If you're wondering why - it's age-old realpolitik.
They don't lambast the Commander In Chief when the US military drones a US citizen, and we don't lambast the Prince when a Saudi agency butchers a Saudi pundit. The current Prince is relatively more secularist and friendlier to Israel/West than his rivals so that means he gets the realpolitik pass.
Obama didn't say anything about how Iran hanged multiple homosexuals in the same year he arranged the Iran Deal. Under the past few administrations, Russian and Chinese smugglers were allowed to circumvent North Korean sanctions in order to appease unpredictable NK elites, until those smugglers were frozen and sanctioned in 2017-2018. In decades past we did far more to support unsavory activities than simply abstaining from public criticism - all to further what we thought were the lesser of two evils or to avoid conflict.
This is not an endorsement of the efficacy or nobility of that type of diplomacy. Just an explanation.
While I believe in the innate nature of humans as good, there are evil people that had bad things happen to them. Obama's actions simply acknowledge there is evil (which is obvious).
> In an interview Monday with Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson, Mr. Thiel suggested Chinese intelligence agents are likely to have infiltrated Google as it works on an artificial-intelligence project in the country. Mr. Thiel, in the interview, didn’t offer evidence that backed his claims.
I think that's why he used the word "likely".
It's hardly a stretch.
Let's not be naive.
If the Google research in China is anything significant I'd say it's almost a certainty.
How is applied ai for weapons (maven) at all similar to an academic research institute that focuses on fundamental ml research in areas like NLP and ai for education?[0]
I'm sure China would be very interested in anything that advances AI in any direction. The motives can be economic too.
Also military people need to be educated and trained.
If you believe that the Chinese government will never use the AI talents/research incubated by google for military usages, then you also must believe when Beijing proclaimed they would never weaponize South China Sea, and has never stolen US technologies.
You've been using HN primarily for nationalistic battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for or against.
HN is for people, stories, and conversations that are animated by curiosity. Political battle is the opposite. It is destructive of the subtler and lighter things HN exists for. What happens to a garden when tanks roll in? A garden cannot be a battlefield.
If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful. I know that the topic you care about is important and the feelings are strong and genuine, but those are actually reasons why we have to moderate more, not less—or else it and things like it will consume the site completely.
That’s basic espionage. China isn’t the only one that does that. Any competent power who thinks they can siphon know how and make use of it economically or militarily does do this. Some with whom we have ties may not have to by virtue of us sharing tech with them.
I worked for one of the largest Corporations in technology back in 2005. We opened a facility in China for manufacturing and another smallish one for R&D. Our corporate network was constantly probed from these locations. There were several attempts to access financial data and other sensitive areas of our network. Whenever ever we brought the perpetrators forward to explain their actions, they immediately resigned without saying a word (would just walk out). Even the factory managers would remain quiet. It came to our attention many of the employees were part of the PLA, planted on the inside.
I believe it is impossible to operate a facility in China without having the PLA operatives on the inside. It's part of the risk companies take to do business in China.
Also remember Thiel's Dark Enlightenment[1] ideals and positions which are, arguably, alt-right. He seems like a member of the coterie that Trump would take orders from.
This is blatantly using government power to attack political opponents. Trump, Thiel and other conservatives see Google as left leaning, so they want to hurt it. Thiel also stands to gain economically through Facebook and Palantir.
This is why Thiel's backing Trump was such a smart move, purely in a realpolitik sense.
If Trump had lost, Thiel would have taken a minor reputational hit based on Trump's pre-election behavior, but since no one thought he would win anyway, it could have been written off as him just taking a chance on an outside candidate. None of the really controversial stuff would have happened, so worst case scenario Thiel looks kind of foolish and wasted a bit of money.
If he had backed Clinton and she won, he would just be one of many Silicon Valley backers, with no particular voice over and above the other billionaires.
But now, Thiel is the only person in Silicon Valley who the President will listen to. That's got to be worth way more than the 1.5 million or whatever that he spent on it.
Political machinations like this are one of the reasons most of the population in western democracies do not feel represented in any way whatsoever. The systems designed to balance power between civil servants, the economy, the military and the populace are increasingly bound by the whims an wishes of a selected few.
One can argue that this was always the way of the world -- and it's only coming to light now, but I think that this is a far too cynical view IMO. It neglects the steady decline in political participation, party/union membership and actions a single individual can take.
Keep in mind, that this is not only a problem in the United States -- maybe its just more visible there. My home country Germany has more than enough shady connections between economic execs and the political machine.
Thiel gets way too much credit for being pragmatic (or whatever you want to call it). As far as I have read he has held those views for a long time, whether you like them or not. It wouldn't surprise me if it goes back to his parents or something. It seem mostly just that people don't want to believe that the US has opinionated "media moguls" like Europe.
Agreed. Thiel wasn't playing realpolitik at all. He is adamantly anti-democratic in his political views and appreciated Trump precisely because he lined up neatly with his corporatist-authoritarian views.
Thiel has unusual politics that don't fit neatly along the right-left spectrum and lucked into a candidate that matched them more closely than anyone who had come before.
Users flagged the comment, no doubt because it was unsubstantive and written in the flamewar style. Even when a topic is as politicized and divisive as the current one, users are expected not to post like that. Would you (both) mind reviewing the site guideline and sticking to them when posting here?
I don't know. Thiel will probably be around a lot longer than Trump. Maybe he doesn't need the respect of anyone in SV, but it might end up limiting opportunities. Also, it seems like the chaotic nature of the Trump administration limits its value as an active ally. That is, what is it worth for Trump to be listening to you if nothing turns into a policy or legislation?
Peter Thiel's not in Silicon Valley anymore. He moved to LA, ostensibly because every dollar he invests in SF startups goes to landlords, but more likely because a large number of entrepreneurs and SV power players refused to work with him because of his Trump support.
Whether this ends up being a shrewd move or a strategic blunder remains to be seen. I also thought that it was pretty smart in a realpolitik sense when he did it, but now I'm wondering if he's won the battle but lost the war. There's a lot of tacit power in the heads of various SV engineers, entrepreneurs, and executives, most of which is currently devoted toward making people click on ads, but which could be a force to be reckoned with if their ability to stay in SV and continue getting people to click on ads were ever directly threatened.
Okay, Trump is probably on his way out. And I wonder what all the other people in Silicon Valley think of Thiel, I guess when you have that much money it does not matter. Plus this is mostly grandstanding.
On his way out? I despise Trump and everything he stands for. Polls show his numbers only improving with every new controversy he starts. And he still has a lot of levers to pull leading up to the election that will hurt his opponents and expand his base.
Yeah, I wish he was on the way out. I don't agree that his poll numbers improve with every controversy, but they don't crater the way they should.
But maybe that's understandable, too. "The squad" has become the face of the Democratic Party, and the squad and Trump are neck-and-neck in a race to appeal to two-year-olds. Seems like both sides forgot that two-year-olds can't vote. If the Democrats had the appearance of competence and sanity, they should easily beat Trump, but at the moment, they look equally insane.
If the primary process produces someone who is not extremely left, someone who can look "presidential" rather than getting into a name-calling war with Trump, and someone that actually sounds like they care about the blue-collar voters, Trump should be gone.
Take Pelosi, for instance. It can't be Pelosi, nor someone like her. Pelosi seems to stand for Pelosi being the speaker. She doesn't seem to stand for any particular policies, other than "not Trump, but not something that's going to cost me the speaker job (even if by killing the Dems in the 2020 elections)". That doesn't win many votes in the Rust Belt.
I believe Pelosi will relinquish her speakership in 2020 no matter the outcome of the election. Those are the conditions under which she was voted as Speaker in the first place.
[Even though I do not necessarily agree with you exactly, I tried to restore your comments visibility because of your long standing, seemingly in earnest, HN contributions.]
Speaking on Fox Business Network on Monday, Larry Kudlow,
director of the National Economic Council, said he doesn’t
believe Google is treasonous. “I meet with Google’s CEO on
a regular basis. I think they’re working for America, for
our military, not for China,” he said.
“Peter Thiel’s a good man. He’s been a great supporter of
the Trump administration. He’s a very smart guy,” Mr.
Kudlow said. “I’m just not sure where he’s going on this,
so I have my doubts, but one never knows.”
I spend a little more time than is probably healthy trying to mentally "stack rank" the crazies these days, having Larry Kudlow politely call this out makes Thiel one of the high-velocity candidates of the week on the crazy movers & shakers scale.
What you said is true, but Project DragonFly is a real thing and its quite likely DragonFly has state-sponsored spies working on it. (Possibly without google's knowledge)
It doesn't work that way. You have an extraordinary claim? You need extraordinary proof. Show me the evidence.
And not all attacks are ad hominem. Reputation matters. You can't always separate claims from those making them. If someone has clear biases/something to gain from the claim, it would be unwise to simply to take their statements on at face value.
That's my (what I consider) rational and logical counter.
So you're dismissing Thiel's claims based on reputation. I'd argue that, based on his reputation, on what he has done in this industry and his trajectory, they have even more weight.
When somebody claims something, they should provide proof.
I can call you a thief, but until I bring any proof for my claim, you are innocent. We are not Google, so don't expect a comment that proves Thiel wrong. Furthermore, I don't know what proof can Google come up with to prove they are not doing anything wrong.
Read up on the burden of proof:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)#P...
That's not proof. Alright, here's my understanding of the situation but you can stay as paranoid as you wish about things:
Google is among the companies which doesn't do much business in China while many others tech or otherwise (including Trump's) do. China is a big and lucrative market but puts many restrictions on foreign businesses. Google was exploring providing web search and perhaps AdWords to increase its revenue stream as its hard stance against China a decade ago only resulted in domestic Chinese search engines. Working in Chinese market means abiding by their censorship rules. Some idealistic employees who didn't approve of it leaked the effort and it turned into a news cycle. Google eventually decided it's not worth it
Separately, another group of activist/idealistic employees felt Google shouldn't be in the war business (unlike IBM which used to sell to Germany half a century ago) and didn't want such research and development work to be used in applications such as drone strikes. So they also teamed up and through various means pushed the upper level management to forgo the military contracts.
I'm not approving or disapproving of these decisions but that's how things are. There's no convoluted and dramatic conspiracy
He spoke, with no substantiation, at a conservative conference denouncing a contributor to the democratic party.
Not only is that venue suspicious but any real counter intelligence conversation is done discretely. So perhaps the burden of proof is actually on him. And perhaps the requirements for such are rather high. And if anything, his actions strongly discount rather than support his claim.
* Thiel founded Palantir [0], which has a very deep and ongoing relationship providing counter-terrorism info and analytics to 3-letter agencies. His comments are likely an attempt to protect Palantir's contracts from Google.
* Google recently (2018) had trouble with employees exposing a censored search engine project targeted for China, and quitting over it [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/technology/google-employe...