Google & the CIA (In Q Tel P2) | 010 CargoCult Podcast

Transcript

popular discourse about like our lack of privacy is like oh Google makes it so hard to turn off location tracking because they just want to serve Us ads and it's like yeah they definitely do want to make money but it's also more than that yeah it's more than just serving you targeted ads again this is why it kind of makes sense that Google is blocked in China not because China [ __ ] hates Freedom which is just like a vague that idea really only works on Americans but probably because the Chinese government understands that Google is effectively one of the many arms of the US intelligence apparatus again it's not the only one I mean you have Amazon being paid 600 million dollars by the CIA to develop software but it is an arm of the intelligence apparatus and even though many other corporations also have deep relationships with the federal government the relationship with Google is pretty special and pretty interesting [Music] do you want this I have a someone left this at my house it's weed I think it's a jewel yeah and then I also have this I collect which is tobacco happy birthday welcome back to cargo cult friends welcome I'm Michelle Greenstein and I'm Naomi caravani and we're going to talk about the roots of Google that may or may not be connected to certain intelligence operations in the United States to part two on our ink utel series there's a lot of companies that have interesting connections to the CIA and its Venture Capital arm and the one we're going to be talking about today is called Google inqutel is the Venture Capital harm of the CIA the invest in startups who are making technology that aligns with the mission needs of the CIA and the rest of the intelligence Community Google is probably in qutel's biggest success story like when into inqutel goes to parties and people are like what do you do they're like oh um I helped me Google because Google's a household name but yeah we're doing this at a special time when the CIA is celebrating Pride you know the lgbtq CIAA Festival acronym I will assassinate I will torture I will coo I will do illegal spying including of U.S civilians but I draw the line at bigotry yes that's where we draw the line foreign Google is not just a search engine but it's kind of become the search engine right we we even made Google into a verb right no one says oh I'm going to do a web search on this we say we're going to Google it except maybe if you're in China but by the end of this episode you may understand why Google is blocked in China yeah yeah and they have you know a similar search you can search through web there right but you don't use the word Google yeah to say I'm gonna search something that immediately puts you on a list yeah but yeah if you like the cia's work you're gonna love uh this episode you're gonna love hearing about all the fun stuff Google's doing and if you do not [ __ ] with the CIA you will be very disappointed to hear [Music] the Central Intelligence Agency created in 1940 by the National Security Act um they really got to work right away as soon as the CIA was created they immediately started interfering with foreign government politics I mean the list goes on and on but the basic mission of the CIA in the beginning at least and and ostensibly now it's just freedom of democracy but still probably is was to stop the spread of global communism they conducted a ton of illegal spying including on U.S citizens and a lot of this um Behavior was exposed by the church Committee in the Senate and the pike Committee in the house and then after that you kind of saw some new forms of oversight take place over the CIA but also responsibility was kind of um diffused into different intelligence agencies so there's like 18 intelligences I mentioned this in the last episode but when incutel is asked Are You The Venture Capital arm of the CIA they're like No And we work with all intelligence agencies like actually we work with oh and but I've said it before and I've said it I'll say it again like it's an Open Secret that the CIA is the top dog in the intelligence Community even though technically they're one of many agencies and you know what we'll probably never know the full extent of CAA operations like that's is the whole point of the agency is covert operations but we do know a little bit right and I think another important part of this story is the fact that even though that diffusion took place after the church committee and the pike committee um and we had you know new oversight by Congress sort of whatever a lot of that started to fade after 9 11. so now we're in kind of an era where that power has uh re-brodden yes exactly a little bit and now they're like yeah just tell us whichever neighbor you're suspicious of we will investigate so this episode and my father was one of them after 9 11. yeah he was investigated after 9 11. which never like ratted out that there was a brown guy next door sometimes you'll see right Wingers talk about how like Draconian policies are coming like you know just get ready we're gonna live in a police state soon and it's like this has been here like if you were Brown like in the age after 9 11 like you already lived under that Draconian police state sometimes you were jailed um for no reason sometimes you were literally sent to an offshore torture facility in Cuba yeah over like a thousand detainees they had after 9 11. none of them led to any information but to be fair my dad that is a pretty suspicious looking guy pull up he's like a chain smoking cigarettes he's uh he's like the cartoon yeah he's the cartoon version of a terrorist and like right before um he you know was tipped off to the uh some neighbor tipped the FBI that there was a suspicious Brown guy living next door um he like had a window removed from his home he really plastered over a window and I'm like Dad why did you get rid of a window and he's like the reflection on the TV and I'm like Dad why didn't you move the TV and he looked at me like I was I had three heads and it's like if you think about it that is like the first renovation that terrorists would do when they like move into his Al-Qaeda comes in there yes way too many windows we have to get rid of her stuff let's get into it Google let's [ __ ] 282.8 billion dollars in Revenue in 2022 it's parent company alphabet one of the highest valued companies on Earth through Gmail Google has access to most of the world's emails um and then also Google has access to a large set segment of general internet traffic like a large segment of internet traffic goes through Google servers so as journalists and author Joshua Levine put it the company is not just connected to the internet it is the internet 1990s you have Alta Vista you have Yahoo I was Michelli bellyboomboom at yahoo.com I was like graffiti 19 I just thought graffiti was like a cool word oh the internet before Google imagine a world wide web where all the searches were based on keywords so you would search say something like broccoli and the page that would come up the first would probably be the page that mentions broccoli the most and where broccoli is the most important but anyways 1990s these two Stanford Whiz Kids Larry Page and Sergey bran they start on this web crawling application that crawls the web and then ranks Pages basically as the internet is starting to take off they decide or they are told who knows but they start working on a way to make all the stuff that's on the web easy to access and easy to analyze and already you can kind of see how an intelligence agency would want that kind of tool as well you want to be able to access everything that's out there and analyze it official story is that what makes them genius boys is they went to Montessori schools and that's a you know that's a school where kids can like kind of guide their own lessons and kind of do whatever they want part of the official story is that they like didn't like each other they butted heads and and then but later they became had this symbiotic relationship and they were just two Geniuses in a vacuum that or not a vacuum but in a garage that created this amazing search engine that we used today and yeah that's the official story but what's left out is that the research at Stanford was actually funded by the NSA and the CIA and Sergey Brin even reported on his progress to people at the CIA office of research and development to people who had no role at Stanford right no role in the actual University that was Rick steinheiser that Brynn reported to raise income right pravani for raising him this phenomenon of the approximation of the pronunciation bhavani and Rick we don't even need to go into last names so yeah it wasn't super uncommon for the intelligence Community to be injecting money into University Research like this but completely left out of the official story of Google's founding is the fact that the co-founder was literally reporting to the intelligence community on his progress while they were developing Google's main search rank algorithm what is included in the official story is the digital libraries Grant which was a DARPA grant that was given to a lot of elite universities basically the government wanted help organizing academic information like how can we uh you know search Journal articles very quickly but also another grant that was received and the grant that was part of the intelligence Community was the mdds grant or massive Digital Data Systems and so this was the problem in the 90s like there's too much data they how do we organize it how do we search it but also how do we keep it secret how can we prevent data breaches that's what they were worried about at this point in time and so they would visit universities and kind of see the progress and bhavani um I'm not going to even try to say the last name anymore but bhavani uh this nice Indian woman who worked for the CIA would get presentations from Sergey Brin who would like ride in on roller skates or sorry rollerblades and give his PowerPoint and then like skate on out of there and the interesting thing is like bhavani uh after nafis Ahmed put out this article linking the CIA to um the very beginnings of Google uh bhavani was interviewed by nafizamed and later said that he misconstrued her uh information and that the CIA was not part of this operation the CIA didn't fund Google it funded Stanford but they obviously did have a role in nurturing the very beginnings of this right I mean the CIA funded Stanford but not just funded the University's Auditorium or their lunches they funded This research which led to the formation of Google so it's kind of like um semantics yeah you weren't writing checks to these two kids on Rollerblades yeah you weren't funding their textbooks like you were funding their research yeah they knew what they would do with that money they would just go to Burning Man which yeah Sergey Brin was like such a big fan of Burning Man he was a big Burning Man Fan you could tell you know he was Google's founding Playboy and had a lot of relationships with the employees apparently there weren't locks on the doors in Google's early days and like other before they moved on to the open floor plan with no doors no doors so yeah they went from like walking in on Sergey Brin having sex with employees I love the open Office plan I mean Google was like a famously sexist workplace but besides you know having rampant sexual harassment and like Sergey Brin like uh you know picking his lovers from his staff you also had like a paid disparities and at one point uh there was like a government investigation into the pay the the wage gaps at Google and um and then Google like said it would just be too much too expensive to give you the data to look for the data of salaries of females at the company yeah and they were like this is just data we can't manage um we are busy like working on every citizens data that we cannot go into the females who work here I mean come on so Brynn was kind of a Playboy he was kind of a Playboy so not only were they not working out of garage they were working out of the house of this woman and her sister Anna wojcicki who would later go on and found 23andMe married Sergey Brin in 2007.

and but later uh in 2013 they separated because Sergey Brin was having an affair with a amateur comedian and head of Google Glass Amanda Rosenberg a Chinese slash British woman um yeah those half asian women can't trust him also Jewish it was very important that Sergey Brin announced his separation to his wife Anna wojitski head of 23andMe because he had to go to Burning Man with Amanda Rosenberg so he didn't want to show up at Burning Man and everybody be confused is that true or is that just a joke it's a no that's true so he announced it and then was seen at Burning Man with Anna with the Amanda Rosenberg Chinese Brit she calls herself a chew Chinese Jew oh oh Amanda Rosenberg is now a TV writer that has written for Netflix basically she has my job what did she write anything we would know she did a web series that was like I'm stuck in my apartment and I don't like to go out and it's annoying to put clothes on and that kind of [ __ ] um and like a little bit of roommate drama that kind of stuff I watch Wait so okay so how many wives did Sergey Brin have he has an another wife now her name is Nicole Shanahan Nicole Shanahan so Nicole Shanahan um there were rumors that she and Elon Musk were having an affair but apparently they like they both deny it um and they probably weren't but I think they were seen together at a party yeah and then there were like rumors that Elon Musk was sleeping with Sarah gabrin's wife and Elon tweeted haven't had sex in ages Psy Sergey and I are friends and we're at a party together last night oh damn like he had to have his like weird in-cell comment they might be Polly and have orgies you never know but she was the head of Google Glass which yeah of course yeah a lot of photos of her yeah and but this was like a pattern survey brand you're talking about Amanda glass yeah not Nicole not Nicole Nicole is the current wife maybe she's sleeping with Elon I don't know I don't know apparently the Wall Street Journal reported that musk was involved in a quote brief affair with Nicole um but that's a Wall Street Journal yeah oh my God I didn't know they were getting into gossip they're like nobody's gonna read the paper these days if we don't remember this yeah they're basically the New York Post now but I guess yeah when you're talking about Elon Musk the richest man in the world and then Sergey Brin who's like I think seventh or eighth they're like this is financial news not gossip okay yeah the Silicon Valley Reporter must be so busy going from orgy to orgy each night and taking notes on who's [ __ ] who slept in weeks there's there was a human said to be last night I'm gonna have to not going to be able to answer my emails today shout out to Tom wamsgams who did not sleep for a week straight and still ended up on top in succession yeah Mom scams will be hailed as a hero over time he gave us the representation we need which is people who pull all-nighters so Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed this page ranking system so they're not totally in a vacuum or a garage they're in the bedrooms of this women's apartment with some stolen Stanford computers and yeah they basically like would intercept the delivery trucks and like take computers and I was like wow these guys just were real entrepreneurs and um so their pain drinking system basically worked in a way where they would value a page higher if it linked to more pages so like in the case of Journal articles like a journal article would be better and more important than Joe apparent search results if it was cited in more papers right you can go look up like what the pagerank formula was if you don't understand math here is how you would understand it um it's one minus a damping Factor Plus for every link into the page except for links to the page itself add the page rank of that page divided by the number of outbound links on the page and reduced by the damping Factor so it looks like w little I equals open parenthesis 1 minus D close parenthesis plus d it's just a straightforward formula I think I explained it fine I don't know why we went into the formula I just wanted to be funny okay well I'm glad we got the formula out there for all the mathematicians listening prt1 slash C open parenthesis t one close parenthesis all right I'm cutting you off but this paid drinking system didn't come out of nowhere there was also another guy Ryan Lee who worked on a page ranking system and was cited in Larry Page's research and he would go on to make the Chinese version of Google Baidu by the way pagerank obviously named a little bit after the idea of a web page but also kind of named after Larry Page yeah and Sergey Brin and Larry Page they both come from like academic families like their parents were mathematicians or uh computer scientists a lot of what's the word advantages so the page ranking system um was nicknamed backrub which I guess would foreshadow the massage table and Sergey friends office where he would have sex with Amanda Rosenberg I'm not kidding that was the the nickname of back rub and yeah pagerank was the algorithm and then in 97 Sean Anderson another computer scientist who was working with Larry Page and Sergey Brennan came up with the word Google Plex but he was like a dyslexic guy or something and just misspelled Google the correct spelling is g-o-o-g-o-l which stands for 10 to the hundredth power like one with 100 zeros another name that was kicked around was what box but they were worried it sounded a little bit like wed box that's a little sexual yeah and it's like people are obviously coming here to look for that we can't be so on the nose on the nose with that so yeah they I guess went with back rub so Larry Page and Sergey bran were famously condescending rude computer scientists who to when they were faced with investors would you know talk down to them and yeah like you want us and yeah you guys don't get it we were created by the CIA we're gonna be doing this wither without you so get the [ __ ] on board or kill yourselves yeah but finally in 1998 they get an investment from Andy bechtelsheim who is the founder uh co-founder of some Microsystems yes which is like this is kind of just a flash point to show like how much of a musical chair system this whole big Tech World especially in the early 2000s was like sun Microsystems was the company we talked about in the earlier episode that Oracle bought which like allowed it to become like the giant that it is and that was the uh acquisition that the European commission first didn't want to approve but we know from Wikileaks cables that the U.S pressured the EU to approve it which it did yeah so they get their first hundred thousand dollars and then immediately go to Burning Man to celebrate and they put the Burning Man logo on the Google web homepage it was like the first Google doodle they're like yeah to the desert and to you know dance around happening and then Google launched AdWords in 2000 where they allow advertisers to bid on keywords so this is then basically allowing anyone with a web page to show up sooner by paying for it so it wasn't just the pure pagerank algorithm anymore now they're monetizing it so that you can pay to rank higher and search and in interestingly in 1995 Sergey Brin writes an article that's like um if web searches were ever to be monetized by advertisers it would corrupt search results and you wouldn't have you wouldn't have easy access to the most important information yeah um but it's one thing to write a paper in 1995 it's another thing to literally have the opportunity to make all of that money right in front of you and then keep your principles the same so they have tons of money and by 2001 investors are losing patience and they they want to get an adult in the room like they're tired of these Burning Man fans bouncing around on balls and [ __ ] on massage tables uh Sequoia Capital basically basically threatens them they're like we're gonna pull our 12 million so Sergey bran and Larry Page go to birming man to look for a CA they get us exactly they find their CEO in 2001 from a literally Burning Man and they're like look this old guy can juggle fire so he's gonna be our CEO But Eric Schmidt was chosen in 2001 basically because he was an old dude who went to burning man yeah and also he was a CEO of Novel and Sun Microsystems work there and he uh you know as soon as he joins Google he installs a uh you know children's playground slide to visit his office with also in 2001 um after they named Eric Schmidt as CEO Larry and Sergey go and do their first ever interview on TV with Charlie Rose let's take a listen currently Google handles over 100 million search requests every day the Wall Street Journal is called Google everything a search engine should be thorough smart speedy and honest I'm pleased to welcome to this table for the very first time those two founders of this company um let me just start with the sounds like you forgot their names no I'm pleased to welcome for the very first time those two guys idea what happened tell me one more time because Google is whoa Charlie was not prepped for this interview for you guys Google is Google so we didn't even intend to build a search engine we just sort of fell into it yeah and we started downloading everything on the web and we started um doing interesting research on it and eventually uh we actually started a company we finally we finally broke down and so we're not quite gonna finish our phds right away we're going to start a company to get this thing out into the world tell us about the name Google um Google comes from the number Google however it was coined before we had the Google spell check feature in fact the number is spelled g-o-o-g-o-l but the company is g-o-o-g-o-e as Google is is growing and developing we have another company called Keyhole and so Keyhole comes from a video game company called intrinsic Graphics that operated in the late 90s created a 3D gaming software libraries that allowed you to spin globe and then zoom in on a certain part that so they were basically developing mapping Technologies later intrinsic Graphics decided that they wanted to concentrate on video games whereas part of the company wanted to create a more commercially successful thing that could be applied to many uses like real estate urban planning and of course defense and intelligence so they created a product called the keyhole Earth viewer which was basically CDs that they could sell to real estate firms and defense firms Etc right and that division of the company becomes Keyhole Inc which is not about video games at all and incutel gives money to that division in 2003 along with the National geospatial Intelligence Agency whose job it is to provide the intelligence community and the Pentagon so the CIA and the Pentagon with satellite-based intelligence and they wanted to know the Earth in fact the motto of the NGA was know the Earth yeah step two destroy the Earth who what why when where at the National geospatial Intelligence Agency the answers to these questions form the foundation of our mission everything on Earth from its watery depths to its highest peaks can be measured in space and time NGA is a unique combination of intelligence agency and combat Support Agency so after the CIA or after inqutel rather gives money to keyhole in 2003 the CIA customizes the keyhole product to meet the cia's needs and the nga's needs and according to journalist Yasha Levine quote months after incutel's investment Keyhole Software was already integrated into operational service and deployed to support U.S troops during operation Iraqi Freedom intelligence officials were impressed with the video game-like Simplicity of its virtual Maps they also appreciated the ability to layer visual information over the intelligence so you could see why an intelligence agency would love a product like this now it's almost like of course the CIA has a product like this but back then it was groundbreaking technology to have this kind of digital map and then to layer over intelligence like troop movements what weapons are where real time weather conditions you have mobile phone data of people that you're tracking and you can layer all of that over the map so you have this like great bird's eye view of what's going on in whatever country we're trying to invade at the moment um even information like intercepted emails like you could layer over that data over the map soup you could be like oh this is Naomi's house and she talked to dino yesterday call back she talked to dino yesterday and they mentioned this weapon and their email exchange like I don't like this hypothetical example where I get bombed but yeah so they helped Kyo help direct the Iraqi of the invasion in 2003 and then soon Kehoe gets the intention attention of a small company called Google so Google buys keyhole in 2004 and by buying Keyhole they're also buying this relationship with CIA Personnel here's another quote from Yasha Levine when Google bought keyhole It also acquired an inqutel executive named Rob painter who came with deep connections to the world of intelligence and Military Contracting including U.S Special Operations the CIA and major defense firms among them Raytheon Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin at Google painter was planted in a new dedicated sales and lobbying division called Google Federal located in Reston Virginia a short drive from CIA headquarters his job was to help Google grab a slice of the lucrative Military Intelligence Contracting Market Google Federal which was created in 2006 had so many NSA staff on it that they literally nicknamed it NSA West yeah and at some point Google like sued the government because they were mad that Microsoft got contracts that they thought they were entitled to so we can see how this relationship between Google and the state continued right right it wasn't just you know the the beginning money for keyhole or it wasn't just the original research at Stanford this relationship really continues in 2007 Google and Lockheed Martin partnered to make an intelligence system for the NGA that basically displayed U.S military bases in Iraq in 2008 Google got a contract to run the servers and search technology that powers the cia's in telepedia which is basically their version of Wikipedia it's like an intelligence data database literally modeled after Wikipedia this is something that's collaboratively edited by Intel employees yeah imagine how many but yeah this is obviously only accessible if you have intelligence Community credentials and so we cannot see intellipedia but we do kind of have an idea of what it might look like because at one point I think someone foiled a page about the Vatican so we got to see like the layout of the website and it does basically look like Wikipedia so more on the relationship between Google and the state Google's logo was on the launch rocket of a private spy satellite called GOI which was launched in partnership with the NGA in 2008 Google got exclusive use of that data for its online mapping so in 2010 Google got 27 million dollars to provide the NGA with geospatial visualization Services basically making as the actual living put it Google the eyes of America's defense and intelligence apparatus also in 2010 the NSA and Google enter into this information exchange partnership where the Google or the Google where Google is providing the NSA with all of its traffic data then in 2011 we see this relationship grow even more you have the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which is the U.S agency that is tasked with researching weather and the environment they started using Google in 2011. I wonder if they have any balloons probably I don't know let's see National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration NOAA Federal agency focus on the conditions of the oceans and the atmosphere uh oh libtard agency it's an agency of the U.S Department of Commerce budget of 6.1 billion dollars in 2022 okay so kind of a mid-tier government agency what I wonder about Google weather is like why are they always wrong are the precipitation they always get the precipitation wrong weather.com is different so when I'm looking up weather I'm always like are you trying to manipulate me are you in the pocket of the raincoat industry no but I just looked it up and it looks like a lot of people share your frustration Google weather completely inaccurate so frustrating I'm about to jump on the wagon with all those other people who are erasing Google from their lives Google I just had a thought and you fact checked it so this moves on to but I think this moves on nicely to how we're going to talk about how Google might be trying to manipulate us so it's not necessarily that we're getting the information totally based on the algorithm that would would give you know the most important information to us or the most relevant and Nation but maybe the information that's going to make us behave in a certain way or vote for a certain person or not vote for a certain person or buy a certain product right like umbrellas so according to documents that were published by Wikileaks in 2012 Jared Cohen was running around not not as much as Sergey Brin oh wait what do you mean because he's running dating that's like another word for cheating oh I thought it was a reference to his rollerblades oh Jared Cohen according to Julian Assange or not really according to documents published by Wikileaks but then explained by Julian Assange um Jared Cohen was quote off running secret missions to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan so as our Rajan you know country that borders Iran Cohen used to work for the state department he was a close advisor to Hillary Clinton friend of the Pod Condoleezza Rice great friend of the Pod um and but since 2010 he was director of Google ideas which was basically Google's like in-house think tank or jigsaw and I think what's interesting is yeah they rebranded as jigsaw uh Jared Cohen and his wife is working for the state department at the time that he goes to meet with Eric Schmidt he goes to meet Julian Assange who's under house arrest right in 2011 in the UK which is like oh we're not supposed to think Julian Assange is a serious journalist we're not supposed to talk to him or enter act with him but some of the most important players are going to meet with him June 23 2011 five hour meeting took place between Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange who was under house arrest in the UK and Google CEO Eric Schmidt also in attendance was Jared Cohen former Secretary of State adviser to Hillary Clinton um also Scott malcolmson director of speech writing for the Ambassador Susan Rice at the state department and Lisa Shields who is the vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations just very aligned with Western hegemony very in line with the CIA yeah um and yeah they'll just publish an article every week that's like why Ukraine should join NATO you know I Finland should join NATO exactly why you should be afraid of North Korea anyway so that's 2011 when Jared Cohen is running secret missions to the edge of Iran Fred Burton who was strapped for his vice president for intelligence and a former State Department official described that behavior by Jared Cohen as follows Google is doing the things the CIA cannot do Cohen is going to get himself kidnapped or killed might be the best thing to happen to expose Google's covert role in fomenting uprisings to be blunt the US government can then disavow knowledge and then Google is left holding the ship bag so essentially staying if if Google is exposed to be doing this stuff it can look like Google just did that on its own and not on the on behalf of the United States yeah that is funny they are Jared Cohen when he's assassinated it won't be he won't be celebrated as a political hero he'll just be like oh that that guy Google yeah director of Google ideas which then became Google jigsaw where did he go so um we also know from Wikileaks cables that Cohen while he was working for the state department was in Afghanistan or was in Afghanistan trying to convince the four main major off gone mobile companies to move their antennas onto U.S military bases in Lebanon he covertly worked to establish on behalf of the state department and Auntie Hezbollah Shia Think Tank and in London he was offering Bollywood film Executives funds to insert anti-extremist content into Bollywood films and promising to connect them to related networks in Hollywood that would be so funny if they like took it very literally and they're like so This song is called Don't join Isis dancing This song is called the CIA is here to protect you so that's an excerpt from uh Julian assange's book and he says quote that's the director of Google ideas Cohen Jared Cohen is effectively Google's director of regime change so great example of how embed Google is with the state and honestly in bed I feel like is a phrase that doesn't even quite do it justice because that kind of Paints the picture of two entities who like secretly get into bed together but really those entities are like so intertwined that they're not in bed together like they are the same I think it also comes from the philosophy people like Jared Cohen have where they're like yeah like we can harness all this data collection and manipulation and use it in a way to save the world and this guy yeah he's like they're like excited to run the simulation to see if they can get all the defectors in Syria like they're they're like dude we could feel we they really think they really think like we could solve climate change we could end Wars like yeah they want to be the biggest the top company yeah yeah it's like it kind of shows like in order to be become the Monopoly the biggest game in town you do have to get in bed with the US government as a U.S corporate you have to be a little psychotic to believe that you can solve these world problems but you're like yeah I uh excuse me uh Mr President I have the solution to the problem in Syria like you have to be no one thought of that um but what you were talking about just now uh with them meddling in Syria this was happening in 2012 when uh Google was literally helping the US medal in Syria um obviously 2012 we're in the middle of the United States intelligence community and the defense apparatus uh waging this campaign to overthrow the Syrian government of Bashar al-assad um and then Google coincidentally was also trying to brainstorm ways of doing that um and so jigsaw which used to be like Google ideas but then rebranded to Google jigsaw was planning to put out information about the locations of officials who were loyal to the Syrian government on the TV networks in Syria and so they this was you know a way to help the opposition tactically by being like hey here are those people and then also in a propaganda Vibes way like as a not of confidence to them to instill confidence in the opposition which is coincidentally the side that the U.S wanted to win they were in the anti-government side and then also The Defector thing yeah so Jared Cohen had a great idea to you know end the Syrian Civil War and he was like I'm planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map defections in Syria this is from an email that Wikileaks made public in 2016 it was the 2012 email from Jared coconut Hillary Clinton's people and so which parts of the government these defectors are coming from our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities nobody is visually representing and mapping the defectors which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect to me it just sounds like a tool that would be useful for the people fighting these defectors like here they are maybe the reason no one thought of mapping the locations of defectors from the Syrian government was because the Syrian government might get their hands on that map yeah so all of this to say is like when we think of Google you don't want to just think of you know Android or your Gmail app or a Google search like Google is a major military contractor and a major intelligence contractor like it's literally an arm of the National Security State one of many arms obviously there's also Amazon yeah let's not forget um there's also SpaceX but uh it's one of many arms and again it's like you know it's the privatization of this infrastructure so instead of uh the CIA doing it themselves they now have Google doing it but it's literally acting as if it's an arm of the CIA coincidentally the CIA also wanted to overthrow the Syrian government coincidentally the CIA also wants to overthrow the Iranian government coincidentally the CIA also wants to have all this uh satellite imaging of the entire world so just imagine Sergey Brin rollerblading into Damascus ready to overthrow Syria and he just seduces Bashar al-assad's wife [Laughter] the way Eric it put it was what Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century technology and cyber security companies like Google will be to the 21st so like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and Boeing and General Dynamics all of these uh weapons manufacturers you know this is the military-industrial complex where you have these companies whose business model literally is getting the United States government to be at War who a majority of their profit every year comes from selling weapons to the US government and sometimes its allies but the Lion's Share of it to the US government so it's all about keeping the us at War and this is how we make money so yeah uh Eric Schmidt is pretty much right because now Google a large portion of their annual revenue comes from selling not maybe not guns and tanks and drones but selling cyber security technology we take what Jared Cohen says with a grain of salt oh I'm sorry we take what Eric Schmidt says with a grain of salt because it's like he's also trying to sell himself so yeah and then you also have um Google not only relationship with the feds but also a relationship with a lot of cities I mean their campus is basically has residential areas yeah it's like a whole economy um and then you also have Boston in 2014 chose Google to run the information and infrastructure for its 76 000 employees like the city of Boston so police officers teachers like all that information is uh being run through Google servers um they even migrated their old emails to the Google Cloud New York City in 2016 chose Google to install and run free Wi-Fi stations across the city really there's free Wi-Fi station this new link NYC 5G kiosk was unveiled on West Burnside Avenue in the Bronx it's similar to the smaller link NYC kiosks you see around the city you can make free phone calls charge a device and connect to Wi-Fi now the city plans to have all 2005g kiosks in the ground by 2026 and that will bring the total link NYC Network to 4 000 locations Citywide they're also getting our tax dollars to right mine our information and manipulate us so there's like very okay vague kind of laws in the U.S that ensure some kind of privacy but it's like we're all up when we're using Google we're all opting in you can opt out a search um opt out of certain tracking features but you can opt out all the way like you're basically volunteering to be part of the machine like clicking and right you think about it we really should be getting a paycheck from Google yeah for how much work we're doing for them I call for a general logic Google strike okay that would never I was not using the internet yeah so no one would just use something yeah so yeah and then um even in the present day you have a strong relationship between Google and the government um with the geofencing controversy yeah the geofencing so there's something called reverse search warrants which is like one of the more dire implications of having all this information being gathered from us and mined from every pore of our body by Google courts can basically ask Google for all the information all the IPS every user that's in an area where a crime is committed let's say you're riding your bike one day it's a nice sunny day you ride past a home that's later burglarized that day sorry you're a suspect I hope you really enjoyed burning those few calories that you did it's worth it I hope it was worth it which this actually did happen to one guy and I'm sure there are more people more innocent people that are caught up in this kind of Dragnet so courts can subpoena Google for a location or a geofence and then get all the users within this one location and then there are added to a suspect pile and it's very it's a very inaccurate way of looking for a suspect like usually you want like hard evidence of somebody who was actually at a crime scene but now if you're in the neighborhood right that could be a problem and you have to imagine like the least technical people who don't realize that they're being tracked or realize why they're being moved like you should have the freedom to [ __ ] move I mean it's the most basic Freedom tenant freedom of movement yeah and then there's also a reverse search warrants where a court can ask not only a person in this location but did a person in this location search how to burn a car um did they search for which countries don't have an extradition treaty for the US right like that that is a common search term when somebody's about to commit a murder and it's like um I kind of like if it lines up but usually reverse warrants either location based or search term based they often bring back too many suspects and we'll just delay any kind of search for somebody who might be actually dangerous so a lot of people have been fighting these reverse search warrants and there's still a lot of resistance to it within the courts it's an interesting question like should the police be able to identify you just because a crime occurred in your area there's a debate going on about whether or not that is a effective method but beyond whether or not it's effective like it seems unconstitutional and that's what lawyers are saying right now Electronic Frontier Foundation recently filed two amicus briefs arguing that that's an unconstitutional search because unlike a traditional warrant like you're not even a suspect and it's not even like oh maybe your device was used by a suspect it's literally like you do literally nothing yeah wrong place wrong time wrong place anytime yeah wrong ZIP code yeah so those are very serious implications of what you know what the dating Mining and the exploitative data practices when they work hand in hand with the government what harm Google can do quoting from an eff report geofence warrants can and have been used in ways that impact fundamental rights including free speech and freedom of Association for example during the protests following the police shooting of Jacob Blake the ATF used at least 12 geofence warrants to collect people's location data during protests in Kenosha Wisconsin one of which encompassed a third of a major public park for a two-hour window police also used a geofence war in Minneapolis around the time of the protests following the police killing of George Floyd I mean that is interesting that they're they're using it against protesters and in Kenosha and in Minneapolis but it's also like yeah they're getting public parks so you're gonna have like a bunch of toddlers who are just like busy on the swings that day they were like suspects in birming or cop cars I don't think the toddlers don't have [ __ ] phones yeah and hopefully they're on the right side of History so yeah that's how we'll find out so these are geofence warrants right but there's probably more going on even behind the scenes that have nothing like probably more to do with the feds than local police so we know about this local police Scandal but it just shows that this is uh information that Google has so okay it's about the police requesting access to the information Google has that's an issue but I think the even bigger and broader issue is it's this is the information that Google has who cares if the police request it or not Google itself has it and based on the relationship Google has with the state that means the CIA has it um I guess I want to mention the Obama thing so of course we know that there was a revolving door between Google and and the government but under Obama it was like the Golden Age of swinging that door from Google to the White House and uh from 2008 oh [ __ ] sorry from 2008 to 2016. basically almost 200 government employees went to Google and 60 Google Executives went to the government and around 22 White House employees went to Google and 21 went from Google to the White House so that door was swinging there wasn't even a door there wasn't there was an open Archway yeah it is interesting that the Council on Foreign Relations who we just uh mentioned did just put out an article that China is responsible for the fentanyl crisis which was also a point that Tucker Carlson made wow is to blame yeah China's all basically all the root of all our problems is number one our mom but number two Russian China Russia and China like China yeah a lot of people are obsessed with Russia but really the security state is more worried about China it depends on which faction I feel like the Democrat quote-unquote Democratic party faction like the national Democratic Institute which is a Council on Foreign Relations affiliate more obsessed with Russia and then you have the Heritage Foundation and the more quote unquote right-wing even though we see both of both parties as right-wing but the even more right-wing side is definitely more focused on China whoever you are focused on it's definitely not Google and it's definitely not the United States yeah and I think Google is like aware of how how conscious we are of how it's exploiting our data they actually at one point Sergey Brin was like uh we gotta stop the the ticker of numbers that shows how many searches there were because it just like it was looks so bad it just makes it look too powerful it makes us look way too powerful and the thing with surveillance capitalism just one point I think we need to make is that yeah what is Google really making is it like a productive part of the economy or is it totally extractive like they're just taking our data we are the productive part of it we are the clicking we are teaching the algorithm every day and day out I'm teaching an algorithm I might be unemployed right now but but I'm working for Google I am a Google employee it'd be funny to be like at a party and someone's like oh what do you do I work for Google yeah I work for you in just one cafeteria like I have no idea I actually did meet someone at a party yesterday who or Friday two days ago who mentioned he was working for Google and then like I kind of tried to dig deeper I was like oh what do you do what do you do and then and then it turns out like he I mean he does technically work for Google but he definitely tried to be vague in the beginning to make it sound like he did something more impressive because he works for Google's event coordination Services he's a waiter for Google parties which is like who gives a [ __ ] go get your bag but it was just funny how he was cagey about that information in the beginning I provide nourishment and uh coordinate I coordinate use the nutritional enrichment you got all the bullet points of his resume before you're like that sounds like waiter he's like yeah I work for their events Division I was like okay and also we need to mention this that in the EU there's a thousand more privacy protections that Google is actually happy to pay you countries every time they get a penalty they pay up they cough it up they they pout a little bit but they pay as as much in penalties as they do in taxes in the EU like they do not give little [ __ ] they're like no give us the privacy laws give send us to court we don't give a [ __ ] we can pay for it but in the US they're just allowed to do it and get away with it because the government is ultimately going to explain that information too yeah the government is literally depend like the machine the US machine runs on these tech companies it's a mutually beneficial relationship um benefiting everyone but the taxpayer basically well I think that's a good place to leave off [Music] I I came from a luncheon and we had a discussion we said what's the conclusion was we can address the issues which we have to confront in the world not just in the rational ways World in some way has to digest this tremendous speed of change complexity of change which creates an emotional turmoil so we have to respond much more also with values and not just with rational answers and what what would be your values or what are your thriving values not having been a Davos in years or so I'm like kind of even confused in a good way uh you know because they're all these you know business Executives and CEOs and everybody everybody's wondering well how are you know our people gonna find purpose and what about all these you know Refugee what about income inequality I kind of feel like I'm a Burning Man but um almost except we're all wearing clothes