*(1) Big Business and Big Banks freak out over end of DACA **(2) Dreamers; Morgan Chase, Fargo, Facebook, Google, Microsoft protest end of DACA**(3) Gerry Harvey vs Dick Smith on Immigration to Australia **(4) Google ties to NSA, CIA, CFR, State Dept, US Military, Bilderberg, Soros & NGOs**(5) Google Is Not What It Seems, by Julian Assange **(6) Google pressures Think Tank it funds to Fire a Critic **(7) AI will start World War 3 - Elon Musk ****(1) Big Business and Big Banks freak out over end of DACA***http://www.breitbart.com/economics/2017/09/05/big-business-and-big-banks-freak-out-over-end-of-daca/by JOHN CARNEY5 Sep 20171,022Top executives at some of America's largest companies and business groups denounced the Trump administration's decision to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program that exempted certain illegal immigrants from America's immigration laws.J.P. Morgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon was among the first to voice his opposition to the end of DACA.'America always has been a country of immigrants,' Dimon said in a statement from the Business Roundtable, a big business pressure group, which he chairs. ‚'And, when people come here to learn, work hard and give back their communities, we should allow them to stay in the United States.'‚'Wells Fargo believes young, undocumented immigrants brought to America as children should have an opportunity to stay,' Wells Fargo spokewoman Jennifer Dunn said in a statement to Bloomberg News. ‚'DACA is relevant to our team members and the communities we serve.'Javier Palomarez, the chief of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, resigned from the president's National Diversity Coalition group.'The USHCC vehemently opposes the President's inhuman and economically harmful decision to terminate DACA,' Palomarez said in a statement.Lloyd Blankfein@lloydblankfeinImmigration is a complex issue but I wouldn't deport a kid who was brought here and only knows America. Congress must address. #DACA 6:47 AM - Sep 6, 2017Executives from *Facebook, Google, and Microsoft also proclaimed their opposition*.'This is a sad day for our country,' Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.*(2) Dreamers; Morgan Chase, Fargo, Facebook, Google, Microsoft protest end of DACA ***http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/09/05/punish-americans-heritage-reward-dreamers-daca-outrage-exposes-left/Punish Americans for Their Heritage, but Reward 'Dreamers': How DACA Outrage Exposes the Leftby RAHEEM KASSAM5 Sep 20178,229By now it is crystal clear: the *Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA)* was simply a way for President Obama to force his successor to make an unpopular decision.For all the pejorative ‚'populist' talk about President Trump, his predecessor could not countenance something he regarded as unpopular, especially to his base, and a potential future base of the Democrat Party.The Obama doctrine across many aspects of his presidency was simply to kick the can down the road. That's why within months we have heard of Trumpism, even Bannonism, but rarely did the world ever contemplate what 'Obamaism' was. The man was just another in a long line of tepid presidents since Ronald Reagan.But kicking the can down the road on DACA was in the policy's very name. Deferred. Not cancelled. Postponed. Not abolished.Even so, the conditions under which DACA beneficiaries were allowed to remain the country were scarcely heinous on either side, if you set aside the rule of law, forget that these sorts of policies impact different states differently, and of course want to persuade the world that your legal immigration system is obviously the worst route through which to pursue U.S. residency.Besides all that, the policy is perfectly reasonable.If you didn't sense the sarcasm there, you're probably a liberal. The former president and his advisors clearly also saw no problems with any of this.Most importantly however, now, for the left, is its own cognitive dissonance on the matter of heritage, history, and accountability.Over the past few months we have had it battered into our heads ‚Äî in some cases quite literally ‚Äî that the beneficiaries of acts of immorality, illegality, or even just contextualised normality should be punished for the actions of their forebears.The white man especially, we are told, should bear responsibility for the actions of his great grandparents. Even when the actions were nothing but remaining silent in the face of what only now seems to us to be such obviously craven and deplorable behaviour.I am of course talking about slavery, and the demands the United States faces from the left and the minorities they have co-opted for their Marxist cause. Tear down statues. Rewrite history. Destroy whitey.Well, they're at least thinking that last one.For you, reading this, are probably the benefactor of centuries of iniquity and you must be punished. Your ancestors didn't break the law as it was at the time. But they broke the law as it is now. So you are culpable. What's the use in imprisoning a corpse? Let's flog America instead.And while the moral concerns regarding slavery versus the illegal crossing of a border are scarcely comparable ‚Äî the notion of collective and/or hereditary punishment surely should give us pause.If the argument goes that ‚'Dreamers' should not be punished for the actions of their parents, then why should modern Americans be punished for the actions of their grandparents, or even their European ancestors?Is it the scale of the crime committed? If so, which crime was committed at the time slavery was legal? None. Sure, we all think of it as repugnant now. But how could one seek to pass punitive measures on a few generations, if one is comfortable dismissing actual crimes committed by parents just a few decades on?It is this conundrum, this duplicity, and this anti-intellectualism that sets real America so drastically apart from the liberal left.While New York's ‚'elite' would have you believe it they are smarter than the average American, it is the latter that instinctively understand ‚'fairness' as a concept, and are able to strike the balance between morality, constitutionality, and common sense.For Obama and his army of shrieking bleeding hearts ‚Äî including many Republican legislators ‚Äî the first of these notions is misplaced, and the last two are seemingly non-existent.Not only should DACA be rescinded, it should become a test case for the facts that firstly: you may not seek to penalize descendants for non-crimes; secondly, you may not directly benefit from criminal acts (as Dreamers do) and expect special treatment.At this point, I think DACA beneficiaries are lucky that the right is not floating the idea of retroactive prosecutions for breaking U.S. law. But then again, America is instinctively fair, and the right rarely ever goes for low blows ‚Äî which that would inherently be ‚Äî like the left.Raheem Kassam is the Editor in Chief of Breitbart London and author of No Go Zones: How Shariah Law is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You*(3) Gerry Harvey vs Dick Smith on Immigration to Australia***http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/australias-going-to-be-an-asian-country-gerry-harvey-says-immigration-cant-be-stopped/news-story/84daa2cf74c10dacc56ac88701d244b9'Australia's going to be an Asian country': Gerry Harvey says immigration can't be stoppedTHERE'S ‚'no chance in hell' Australia's immigration can be dialled back according to one of Australia's most vocal commentators.BILLIONAIRE retailer *Gerry Harvey has predicted Australia will become an ‚'Asian country' with a population of 100 million* in the next century, saying there is ‚'not a chance in hell' immigration can be dialled back.Earlier this month, outspoken entrepreneur Dick Smith launched a $1 million ‚'Grim Reaper' ad, calling for Australia's net migration intake to be scaled back from its current level 210,000 people a year to its historical average of 70,000.Mr Smith joined a growing number of commentators, economists and politicians blaming ‚'unsustainable' record high immigration for declining living standards and skyrocketing house prices, with retailers such as Harvey Norman accused of pushing a ‚'pro-growth' agenda.Mr Harvey, speaking to news.com.au as the furniture and electrical goods retailer announced a record full-year profit, said he had 'always held the same view' that Australia was a ‚'great big place and no one lives here'.'If I was God and I looked down on the Earth, I would see 1.3 billion Indians, 1.4 billion Chinese, 240 million Indonesians, these great big continents, America, Europe, and one funny little country, Australia,' he said.'It's not possible you can maintain a population of 25 to 30 million people. In 100 years from now Australia will have a population of 50 to 100 million people. That's going to happen regardless of what Dick Smith thinks, I think or you think, it's just inevitable.'The people that exist today, me and you, we all have our view, but we'll be long gone.'Mr Harvey said i*mmigration and population growth were impossible to control. 'The problem is you can't control it,*' he said. ‚'The rest of the world at some stage is not going to let you control it. Sometimes when you smell the inevitable you've got to go along with it.'You're going to come under immense pressure, it may be like boat people coming in huge numbers. It's a utopian idea that some people have, in a lot of ways I can see the worth of it, but will you ever be able to hold it to some number under 25 to 30 million? Not a chance in hell.'It was obvious to me [since] university. Australia is going to become an Asian country, 100 per cent for sure. It's just a matter of when. You might have close to four billion Asians in the world, where do you think they're going to live?'*(4) Google ties to NSA, CIA, CFR, State Dept, US Military, Bilderberg, Soros & NGOs ***http://www.batr.org/terror/090517.htmlGoogle is the Master Spy of the Intelligence CommunityIs there anyone on the planet that does not have their personal lives exposed to the data collection behemoth of the corporatist and government partnership? Google was developed with and under the intelligence funding of the deep state. The marvel of a premier digital search engine was welcomed as a tremendous achievement by everyone who longed for a definitive method to secure access to sites that reflected market or research results. Few companies names become synonymous with the product or service provided. Who does not refer to making a copy reproduction as Xerox the document? Likewise, as a pure commercial function, Google defined the designation for internet searches. Fast forward to the current state of draconian governance. What stands out is that the systematic rewriting of history and access to a free exchange of ideas and questioning has been supplanted by an approved filter with limited options.In order to appreciate just how information seekers have been corralled into the pens of sheeple dipping now produces a "PC" alternate identity in order to be part of society. Optimally such changes should have made people's lives much better than before but in fact people's existence is really worse in many ways.Wikileaks Julian Assange argues in Google Is Not What It Seems that "long before company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired Schmidt in 2001, their initial research upon which Google was based had been partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).""In 2003 the US National Security Agency (NSA) had already started systematically violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) under its director General Michael Hayden.These were the days of the ‚'Total Information Awareness' program. Before PRISM was ever dreamed of, under orders from the Bush White House the NSA was already aiming to ‚'collect it all, sniff it all, know it all, process it all, exploit it all.' During the same period, Google‚Äîwhose publicly declared corporate mission is to collect and ‚'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful'‚Äîwas accepting NSA money to the tune of $2 million to provide the agency with search tools for its rapidly accreting hoard of stolen knowledge."Nafeez Ahmed writes in Part I of the report, How the CIA made Google - Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet. He provides extensive documentation to substantiate his expose."In reality, Google is a smokescreen behind which lurks the US military-industrial complex.The inside story of Google's rise, revealed here for the first time, opens a can of worms that goes far beyond Google, unexpectedly shining a light on the existence of a parasitical network driving the evolution of the US national security apparatus, and profiting obscenely from its operation."Now this connection with the elements of the omnipotent surveillance state might appear to be a conclusion of a conspiracy theorist. However, for those who still adhere to factual analysis and truthful corroboration, the disintegration of neutrality towards free speech is so well established that Google can no longer maintain that they are a trusted custodian of the unrestricted flow and ongoing stream of the first edition version for history.Dave Hodges in GOOGLE WILL SOON BE THE PURVEYOR OF ALL INFORMATION, warns that even the Liberal Outlets are Under Attack. He lists a sample of what Google is doing to the traffic on these leftist sites.* alternet.org fell by 63 percent * globalresearch.ca fell by 62 percent * consortiumnews.com fell by 47 percent * mediamatters.org fell by 42 percent * commondreams.org fell by 37 percent * internationalviewpoint.org fell by 36 percent * democracynow.org fell by 36 percent * wikileaks.org fell by 30 percent * truth-out.org fell by 25 percent * counterpunch.org fell by 21 percent * theintercept.com fell by 19 percentWhy would Google want to see the volume of such well established brands shrink in presence when their own ad revenues would suffer? Leave it the UK press to help provide an answer in DOWN THE 'TUBEYouTube accused of CENSORSHIP over their controversial new bid to 'limit' access to videos. Ask yourself, what is censorship? Submit it is an attempt to strain out the critical and only maintain the party line of the spooks who are only concerned with perfecting their control over the social order.For those who depend upon honest ranking of their internet sites within Google searches, the alarm bells are going off in every corner of the web. Even the most powerful publishers are in danger of Google extortion as cited in "Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesn't Like - I Know Because It Happened To Me"."The Google salespeople were encouraging Forbes to add Plus's ‚'+1" social buttons to articles on the site, alongside the Facebook Like button and the Reddit share button. They said it was important to do because the Plus recommendations would be a factor in search results‚Äîa crucial source of traffic to publishers.This sounded like a news story to me. Google's dominance in search and news give it tremendous power over publishers. By tying search results to the use of Plus, Google was using that muscle to force people to promote its social network.I asked the Google people if I understood correctly: If a publisher didn't put a +1 button on the page, its search results would suffer? The answer was yes."After writing a critical article about Google, ‚'Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers', the shakedown stakes were raised."It escalated quickly from there. I was told by my higher-ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down. The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News."This illustrates how the spy technocrats at Google mirror the strong arm tactics that their intelligence masters operate under. The objective is to shape the public narrative and demand concessions from even an icon of financial reporting, like Forbes.Another example of the protective demands for shaping an unreal image of the tech giant is found in GOOGLE-FUNDED THINK TANK FIRED GOOGLE CRITICS AFTER THEY DARED CRITICIZE GOOGLE."THE NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION'S Open Markets group was a rare, loud voice of protest against Google's ever-growing consolidation of economic and technological power around the world. But New America, like many of its fellow think tanks, received millions in funding from one of the targets of its anti-monopoly work, and according to a New York Times report today, pulled the plug after the company's chief executive had enough dissent."Google thrives on forging the rules of their Terms of Service. But what they do not tell you is that the real definition of their service requires a total surrender to their snooping. Is Google a mere business who data mines oodles of information for profit or is it a mere quasi front for the CIA and NSA to benignly manage the extraction of the patterns and preferences from the public?Patently, the partnership with the Intel Sleuths is a relationship made in Hades. Years ago Wired revealed the "Recorded Future" in Google, CIA Invest in 'Future' of Web Monitoring. So it should not be astonishing when Eric Sommer concludes."Google acquired Keyhole Inc. in 2004. The same base technology is currently employed by U.S. military and intelligence systems in their quest, in their own words, for "full-spectrum dominance" of the planet.Moreover, Googles' connection with the CIA and its venture capital firm extends to sharing at least one key member of personnel. In 2004, the Director of Technology Assessment at In-Q-Tel, Rob Painter, moved from his old job directly serving the CIA to become 'Senior Federal Manager' at Google.As Robert Steele, a former CIA case officer has put it: Google is "in bed with" the CIA."Read what Mr. Steele reasons in The Google Conspiracy ‚Äì is the search engine on the verge of becoming self-aware? " In 2012, Jon King cited evidence that Google received a huge amount of development funding from In-Q-Tel, which invests in IT and communications technologies for the CIA. Interestingly ‚Äì and disconcertingly ‚Äì Google Earth began life as a CIA-funded company."The experience of the unceasing leaks coming out of the intelligence agencies since Trump was elected is a sure sign that their domestic control of an indifferent public has been threatened. The seemingly self destructive clamp down by Google on those, who do not regurgitate the orthodox reality, constructed by the shadow government makes sense when one understands that Google exists to serve the patrician interests of the supra elite operatives.Who among us can go cold turkey and cut the cord or block the WiFi when Google provides an endless supply of free internet services? Such a dilemma can only be resolved with a total Google break from the Intelligence Community. Search for an answer on how that can be achieved and you will get an "HTTP 404 - File not found" error message.SARTRE - September 5, 2017*(5) Google Is Not What It Seems, by Julian Assange***https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/Google Is Not What It Seems   by Julian AssangeGoogle Chairman Eric Schmidt shares a joke with Hillary Clinton during a special "fireside chat" with Google staff. The talk was held on 21 Jul 2014 at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California.In this extract from his new book When Google Met Wikileaks, WikiLeaks' publisher Julian Assange describes the special relationship between Google, Hillary Clinton and the State Department -- and what that means for the future of the internet. WikiLeaks readers can obtain a 20 percent discount on the cover price when ordering from the OR Books website by using the coupon code "WIKILEAKS".* * *Eric Schmidt is an influential figure, even among the parade of powerful characters with whom I have had to cross paths since I founded WikiLeaks. In mid-May 2011 I was under house arrest in rural Norfolk, about three hours' drive northeast of London. The crackdown against our work was in full swing and every wasted moment seemed like an eternity. It was hard to get my attention. But when my colleague Joseph Farrell told me the executive chairman of Google wanted to make an appointment with me, I was listening.In some ways the higher echelons of Google seemed more distant and obscure to me than the halls of Washington. We had been locking horns with senior US officials for years by that point. The mystique had worn off. But the power centers growing up in Silicon Valley were still opaque and I was suddenly conscious of an opportunity to understand and influence what was becoming the most influential company on earth. Schmidt had taken over as CEO of Google in 2001 and built it into an empire.1I was intrigued that the mountain would come to Muhammad. But it was not until well after Schmidt and his companions had been and gone that I came to understand who had really visited me.* * *The stated reason for the visit was a book. Schmidt was penning a treatise with Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, an outfit that describes itself as Google's in-house ‚'think/do tank.' I knew little else about Cohen at the time. In fact, Cohen had moved to Google from the US State Department in 2010. He had been a fast-talking ‚'Generation Y' ideas man at State under two US administrations, a courtier from the world of policy think tanks and institutes, poached in his early twenties. He became a senior advisor for Secretaries of State Rice and Clinton. At State, on the Policy Planning Staff, Cohen was soon christened ‚'Condi's party-starter,' channeling buzzwords from Silicon Valley into US policy circles and producing delightful rhetorical concoctions such as ‚'Public Diplomacy 2.0.'2 On his Council on Foreign Relations adjunct staff page he listed his expertise as ‚'terrorism; radicalization; impact of connection technologies on 21st century statecraft; Iran.'3{photo} Director of Google Ideas, and "geopolitical visionary" Jared Cohen shares his vision with US Army recruits in a lecture theatre at West Point Military Academy on 26 Feb 2014 (Instagram by Eric Schmidt)It was Cohen who, while he was still at the Department of State, was said to have emailed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to delay scheduled maintenance in order to assist the aborted 2009 uprising in Iran.4 His documented love affair with Google began the same year, when he befriended Eric Schmidt as they together surveyed the post-occupation wreckage of Baghdad. Just months later, Schmidt re-created Cohen's natural habitat within Google itself by engineering a ‚'think/do tank' based in New York and appointing Cohen as its head. Google Ideas was born.Later that year the two co-wrote a policy piece for the Council on Foreign Relations' journal Foreign Affairs, praising the reformative potential of Silicon Valley technologies as an instrument of US foreign policy.5 Describing what they called ‚'coalitions of the connected,'6 Schmidt and Cohen claimed thatDemocratic states that have built coalitions of their militaries have the capacity to do the same with their connection technologies. . . . They offer a new way to exercise the duty to protect citizens around the world [emphasis added].7In the same piece they argued that ‚'this technology is overwhelmingly provided by the private sector.' Shortly afterwards, Tunisia. then Egypt, and then the rest of the Middle East, erupted in revolution. The echoes of these events on online social media became a spectacle for Western internet users. The professional commentariat, keen to rationalize uprisings against US-backed dictatorships, branded them "Twitter revolutions." Suddenly everyone wanted to be at the intersection point between US global power and social media, and Schmidt and Cohen had already staked out the territory. With the working title ‚'The Empire of the Mind,' they began expanding their article to book length, and sought audiences with the big names of global tech and global power as part of their research.They said they wanted to interview me. I agreed. A date was set for June.{photo} Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google, at the "Pulse of Today's Global Economy" panel talk at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting, 26 Sept. 2013 in New York. Eric Schmidt first attended the CGI annual meeting at its opening plenary in 2010. (Photo: Mark Lennihan)By the time June came around there was already a lot to talk about. That summer WikiLeaks was still grinding through the release of US diplomatic cables, publishing thousands of them every week. When, seven months earlier, we had first started releasing the cables, Hillary Clinton had denounced the publication as ‚'an attack on the international community' that would ‚'tear at the fabric' of government.It was into this ferment that Google projected itself that June, touching down in a London airport and making the long drive up into East Anglia to Norfolk and Beccles. Schmidt arrived first, accompanied by his then partner, Lisa Shields. When he introduced her as a vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations‚Äîa US foreign-policy think tank with close ties to the State Department‚ÄîI thought little more of it. Shields herself was straight out of Camelot, having been spotted by John Kennedy Jr.'s side back in the early 1990s. They sat with me and we exchanged pleasantries. They said they had forgotten their dictaphone, so we used mine. We made an agreement that I would forward them the recording and in exchange they would forward me the transcript, to be corrected for accuracy and clarity. We began. Schmidt plunged in at the deep end, straightaway quizzing me on the organizational and technological underpinnings of WikiLeaks.Some time later Jared Cohen arrived. With him was Scott Malcomson, introduced as the book's editor. Three months after the meeting Malcomson would enter the State Department as the lead speechwriter and principal advisor to Susan Rice (then US ambassador to the United Nations, now national security advisor). He had previously served as a senior advisor at the United Nations, and is a longtime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. At the time of writing, he is the director of communications at the International Crisis Group.8At this point, the delegation was one part Google, three parts US foreign-policy establishment, but I was still none the wiser. Handshakes out of the way, we got down to business.{photo} Google's Chairman, Eric Schmidt, photographed in a New York elevator, carrying Henry Kissinger's new book, "World Order", 25 Sep 2014Schmidt was a good foil. A late-fiftysomething, squint-eyed behind owlish spectacles, managerially dressed‚ÄîSchmidt's dour appearance concealed a machinelike analyticity. His questions often skipped to the heart of the matter, betraying a powerful nonverbal structural intelligence. It was the same intellect that had abstracted software-engineering principles to scale Google into a megacorp, ensuring that the corporate infrastructure always met the rate of growth. This was a person who understood how to build and maintain systems: systems of information and systems of people. My world was new to him, but it was also a world of unfolding human processes, scale, and information flows.For a man of systematic intelligence, Schmidt's politics‚Äîsuch as I could hear from our discussion‚Äîwere surprisingly conventional, even banal. He grasped structural relationships quickly, but struggled to verbalize many of them, often shoehorning geopolitical subtleties into Silicon Valley marketese or the ossified State Department microlanguage of his companions.9 He was at his best when he was speaking (perhaps without realizing it) as an engineer, breaking down complexities into their orthogonal components.I found Cohen a good listener, but a less interesting thinker, possessed of that relentless conviviality that routinely afflicts career generalists and Rhodes scholars. As you would expect from his foreign-policy background, Cohen had a knowledge of international flash points and conflicts and moved rapidly between them, detailing different scenarios to test my assertions. But it sometimes felt as if he was riffing on orthodoxies in a way that was designed to impress his former colleagues in official Washington. Malcomson, older, was more pensive, his input thoughtful and generous. Shields was quiet for much of the conversation, taking notes, humoring the bigger egos around the table while she got on with the real work.As the interviewee I was expected to do most of the talking. I sought to guide them into my worldview. To their credit, I consider the interview perhaps the best I have given. I was out of my comfort zone and I liked it. We ate and then took a walk in the grounds, all the while on the record. I asked Eric Schmidt to leak US government information requests to WikiLeaks, and he refused, suddenly nervous, citing the illegality of disclosing Patriot Act requests. And then as the evening came on it was done and they were gone, back to the unreal, remote halls of information empire, and I was left to get back to my work. That was the end of it, or so I thought.* * *Two months later, WikiLeaks' release of State Department cables was coming to an abrupt end. For three-quarters of a year we had painstakingly managed the publication, pulling in over a hundred global media partners, distributing documents in their regions of influence, and overseeing a worldwide, systematic publication and redaction system, fighting for maximum impact for our sources.But in an act of gross negligence the Guardian newspaper‚Äîour former partner‚Äîhad published the confidential decryption password to all 251,000 cables in a chapter heading in its book, rushed out hastily in February 2011.10 By mid-August we discovered that a former German employee‚Äîwhom I had suspended in 2010‚Äîwas 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. At the rate the information was spreading, we estimated that within two weeks most intelligence agencies, contractors, and middlemen would have all the cables, but the public would not.I decided it was necessary to bring forward our publication schedule by four months and contact the State Department to get it on record that we had given them advance warning. The situation would then be harder to spin into another legal or political assault. Unable to raise Louis Susman, then US ambassador to the UK, we tried the front door. WikiLeaks investigations editor Sarah Harrison called the State Department front desk and informed the operator that ‚'Julian Assange' wanted to have a conversation with Hillary Clinton. Predictably, this statement was initially greeted with bureaucratic disbelief. We soon found ourselves in a reenactment of that scene in Dr. Strangelove, where Peter Sellers cold-calls the White House to warn of an impending nuclear war and is immediately put on hold. As in the film, we climbed the hierarchy, speaking to incrementally more superior officials until we reached Clinton's senior legal advisor. He told us he would call us back. We hung up, and waited.Sarah Harrison and Julian Assange call the U.S. State Department in September 2011.When the phone rang half an hour later, it was not the State Department on the other end of the line. Instead, it was Joseph Farrell, the WikiLeaks staffer who had set up the meeting with Google. He had just received an email from Lisa Shields seeking to confirm that it was indeed WikiLeaks calling the State Department.It was at this point that I realized Eric Schmidt might not have been an emissary of Google alone. Whether officially or not, he had been keeping some company that placed him very close to Washington, DC, including a well-documented relationship with President Obama. Not only had Hillary Clinton's people known that Eric Schmidt's partner had visited me, but they had also elected to use her as a back channel. While WikiLeaks had been deeply involved in publishing the inner archive of the US State Department, the US State Department had, in effect, snuck into the WikiLeaks command center and hit me up for a free lunch. Two years later, in the wake of his early 2013 visits to China, North Korea, and Burma, it would come to be appreciated that the chairman of Google might be conducting, in one way or another, ‚'back-channel diplomacy' for Washington. But at the time it was a novel thought.11{photo} Eric Schmidt's Instagram of Hillary Clinton and David Rubinstein, taken at the Holbrooke Forum Gala, 5 Dec 2013. Richard Holbrooke (who died in 2010) was a high-profile US diplomat, managing director of Lehman brothers, a board member of NED, CFR, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg steering group and an advisor to Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. Schmidt donated over $100k to the the Holbrooke ForumI put it aside until February 2012, when WikiLeaks‚Äîalong with over thirty of our international media partners‚Äîbegan publishing the Global Intelligence Files: the internal email spool from the Texas-based private intelligence firm Stratfor.12 One of our stronger investigative partners‚Äîthe Beirut-based newspaper Al Akhbar‚Äîscoured the emails for intelligence on Jared Cohen.13 The people at Stratfor, who liked to think of themselves as a sort of corporate CIA, were acutely conscious of other ventures that they perceived as making inroads into their sector. Google had turned up on their radar. In a series of colorful emails they discussed a pattern of activity conducted by Cohen under the Google Ideas aegis, suggesting what the ‚'do' in ‚'think/do tank' actually means.Cohen's directorate appeared to cross over from public relations and ‚'corporate responsibility' work into active corporate intervention in foreign affairs at a level that is normally reserved for states. Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google's ‚'director of regime change.' According to the emails, he was trying to plant his fingerprints on some of the major historical events in the contemporary Middle East. He could be placed in Egypt during the revolution, meeting with Wael Ghonim, the Google employee whose arrest and imprisonment hours later would make him a PR-friendly symbol of the uprising in the Western press. Meetings had been planned in Palestine and Turkey, both of which‚Äîclaimed Stratfor emails‚Äîwere killed by the senior Google leadership as too risky. Only a few months before he met with me, Cohen was planning a trip to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan to ‚'engage the Iranian communities closer to the border,' as part of Google Ideas' project on ‚'repressive societies.' In internal emails Stratfor's vice president for intelligence, Fred Burton (himself a former State Department security official), wrote,Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing 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 foaming up-risings, to be blunt. The US Gov't can then disavow knowledge and Google is left holding the shit-bag.14In further internal communication, Burton said his sources on Cohen's activities were Marty Lev‚'Google's director of security and safety' and Eric Schmidt himself.15 Looking for something more concrete, I began to search in WikiLeaks' archive for information on Cohen. State Department cables released as part of Cablegate reveal that Cohen had been in Afghanistan in 2009, trying to convince the four major Afghan mobile phone companies to move their antennas onto US military bases.16 In Lebanon he quietly worked to establish an intellectual and clerical rival to Hezbollah, the ‚'Higher Shia League.'17 And in London he offered Bollywood movie executives funds to insert anti-extremist content into their films, and promised to connect them to related networks in Hollywood.18Three days after he visited me at Ellingham Hall, Jared Cohen flew to Ireland to direct the ‚'Save Summit,' an event cosponsored by Google Ideas and the Council on Foreign Relations. Gathering former inner-city gang members, right-wing militants, violent nationalists, and ‚'religious extremists' from all over the world together in one place, the event aimed to workshop technological solutions to the problem of ‚'violent extremism.'19 What could go wrong?Cohen's world seems to be one event like this after another: endless soirees for the cross-fertilization of influence between elites and their vassals, under the pious rubric of ‚'civil society.' The received wisdom in advanced capitalist societies is that there still exists an organic ‚'civil society sector' in which institutions form autonomously and come together to manifest the interests and will of citizens. The fable has it that the boundaries of this sector are respected by actors from government and the ‚'private sector,' leaving a safe space for NGOs and nonprofits to advocate for things like human rights, free speech, and accountable government.This sounds like a great idea. But if it was ever true, it has not been for decades. Since at least the 1970s, authentic actors like unions and churches have folded under a sustained assault by free-market statism, transforming ‚'civil society' into a buyer's market for political factions and corporate interests looking to exert influence at arm's length. The last forty years has seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy.It is not just obvious neocon front groups like Foreign Policy Initiative.20 It also includes fatuous Western NGOs like Freedom House, where na√Øve but well-meaning career nonprofit workers are twisted in knots by political funding streams, denouncing non-Western human rights violations while keeping local abuses firmly in their blind spots. The civil society conference circuit‚Äîwhich flies developing-world activists across the globe hundreds of times a year to bless the unholy union between ‚'government and private stakeholders' at *geopoliticized events like the ‚'Stockholm Internet Forum' simply could not exist if it were not blasted with millions of dollars* in political funding annually.Scan the memberships of the biggest US think tanks and institutes and the same names keep cropping up. Cohen's Save Summit went on to seed AVE, or AgainstViolentExtremism.org, a long-term project whose principal backer besides Google Ideas is the Gen Next Foundation. This foundation's website says it is an ‚'exclusive membership organization and platform for successful individuals' that aims to bring about ‚'social change' driven by venture capital funding.21 Gen Next's ‚'private sector and non-profit foundation support avoids some of the potential perceived conflicts of interest faced by initiatives funded by governments.'22 Jared Cohen is an executive member.{photo} Jared Cohen on stage with the delegates at the New York City inaugural summit for the Alliance of Youth Movements, in 2008Gen Next also backs an NGO, launched by Cohen toward the end of his State Department tenure, for bringing internet-based global ‚'pro-democracy activists' into the US foreign relations patronage network.23 The group originated as the ‚'Alliance of Youth Movements' with an inaugural summit in New York City in 2008 funded by the State Department and encrusted with the logos of corporate sponsors.24 The summit flew in carefully selected social media activists from ‚'problem areas' like Venezuela and Cuba to watch speeches by the Obama campaign's new-media team and the State Department's James Glassman, and to network with public relations consultants, ‚'philanthropists,' and US media personalities.25 The outfit held two more invite-only summits in London and Mexico City where the delegates were directly addressed via video link by Hillary Clinton:26You are the vanguard of a rising generation of citizen activists. . . . And that makes you the kind of leaders we need.27{photo} Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressing the delegates to the 2009 Alliance of Youth Movements Annual Summit in Mexico City, on 16 Oct 2009, via videolink.In 2011, the *Alliance of Youth Movements rebranded as 'Movements.org*.' In 2012 Movements.org became *a division of ‚'Advancing Human Rights,' a new NGO set up by Robert L. Bernstein* after he resigned from Human Rights Watch (which he had originally founded) because he felt it should not cover Israeli and US human rights abuses.28 Advancing Human Rights aims to right Human Rights Watch's wrong by focusing exclusively on ‚'dictatorships.'29 Cohen stated that the merger of his Movements.org outfit with Advancing Human Rights was ‚'irresistible,' pointing to the latter's ‚'phenomenal network of cyberactivists in the Middle East and North Africa.'30 He then joined the Advancing Human Rights board, which also includes Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in occupied Afghanistan.31 In its present guise, Movements.org continues to receive funding from Gen Next, as well as from Google, MSNBC, and PR giant Edelman, which represents General Electric, Boeing, and Shell, among others.32{photo} A screen capture of the "Supporters and sponsors" page at movements.org.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 pi√±ata of attendees: US officials, telecom magnates, security consultants, finance capitalists, and foreign-policy tech vultures like Alec Ross (Cohen's twin at the State Department).33 At the hard core are the arms contractors and career military: active US Cyber Command chieftains, and even the admiral responsible for all US military operations in Latin America from 2006 to 2009. Tying up the package are Jared Cohen and the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt.34I began to think of Schmidt as a brilliant but politically hapless Californian tech billionaire who had been exploited by the very US foreign-policy types he had collected to act as translators between himself and official Washington‚Äîa West Coast‚ÄìEast Coast illustration of the principal-agent dilemma.35I was wrong.* * *Eric *Schmidt was born in Washington*, DC, where his father had worked as a professor and economist for the Nixon Treasury. He attended high school in Arlington, Virginia, before graduating with a degree in engineering from Princeton. In 1979 Schmidt headed out West to Berkeley, where he received his PhD before joining Stanford/Berkley spin-off Sun Microsystems in 1983. By the time he left Sun, sixteen years later, he had become part of its executive leadership.Sun had significant contracts with the US government, but it was not until he was in Utah as CEO of Novell that records show Schmidt strategically engaging Washington's overt political class. Federal campaign finance records show that on January 6, 1999, Schmidt donated two lots of $1,000 to the Republican senator for Utah, Orrin Hatch. On the same day Schmidt's wife, Wendy, is also listed giving two lots of $1,000 to Senator Hatch. By the start of 2001 over a dozen other politicians and PACs, including Al Gore, George W. Bush, Dianne Feinstein, and Hillary Clinton, were on the Schmidts' payroll, in one case for $100,000.36 By 2013, Eric Schmidt‚Äîwho had become publicly over-associated with the Obama White House‚Äîwas more politic. Eight Republicans and eight Democrats were directly funded, as were two PACs. That April, $32,300 went to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. A month later the same amount, $32,300, headed off to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Why Schmidt was donating exactly the same amount of money to both parties is a $64,600 question.37It was also in 1999 that Schmidt joined the board of a Washington, DC‚based group: the New America Foundation, a merger of well-connected centrist forces (in DC terms). The foundation and its 100 staff serves as an influence mill, using its network of approved national security, foreign policy, and technology pundits to place hundreds of articles and op-eds per year. By 2008 Schmidt had become chairman of its board of directors. As of 2013 the New America Foundation's principal funders (each contributing over $1 million) are listed as Eric and Wendy Schmidt, the US State Department, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Secondary funders include Google, USAID, and Radio Free Asia.38*Schmidt's involvement in the New America Foundation places him firmly in the Washington establishment* nexus. The foundation's other board members, seven of whom also list themselves as members of the Council on Foreign Relations, include Francis Fukuyama, one of the intellectual fathers of the neoconservative movement; Rita Hauser, who served on the President's Intelligence Advisory Board under both Bush and Obama; Jonathan Soros, the son of George Soros; Walter Russell Mead, a US security strategist and editor of the American Interest; Helene Gayle, who sits on the boards of Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive, the Rockefeller Foundation, the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Unit, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the White House Fellows program, and Bono's ONE Campaign; and Daniel Yergin, oil geostrategist, former chair of the US Department of Energy's Task Force on Strategic Energy Research, and author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power.39{photo} Google Chairman Eric Schmidt introduces Hillary Clinton as the keynote speaker at the 16 May 2014 conference "Big Ideas for a New America" for the New America Foundation, of which Schmidt is the Chair of the Board and the largest funder.The chief executive of the foundation, appointed in 2013, is Jared Cohen's former boss at the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton law and international relations wonk with an eye for revolving doors.40 She is everywhere at the time of writing, issuing calls for Obama to respond to the Ukraine crisis not only by deploying covert US forces into the country but also by dropping bombs on Syria‚Äîon the basis that this will send a message to Russia and China.41 Along with Schmidt, she is a 2013 attendee of the Bilderberg conference and sits on the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board.42There was nothing politically hapless about Eric Schmidt. I had been too eager to see a politically unambitious Silicon Valley engineer, a relic of the good old days of computer science graduate culture on the West Coast. But that is not the sort of person who attends the Bilderberg conference four years running, who pays regular visits to the White House, or who delivers ‚'fireside chats' at the World Economic Forum in Davos.43 Schmidt's emergence as Google's ‚'foreign minister'‚Äîmaking pomp and ceremony state visits across geopolitical fault lines‚Äîhad not come out of nowhere; it had been presaged by years of assimilation within US establishment networks of reputation and influence.On a personal level, Schmidt and Cohen are perfectly likable people. But Google's chairman is a classic ‚'head of industry' player, with all of the ideological baggage that comes with that role.44 Schmidt fits exactly where he is: the point where the centrist, liberal, and imperialist tendencies meet in American political life. By all appearances, Google's bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgment of the ‚'benevolent superpower.' They will tell you that open-mindedness is a virtue, but all perspectives that challenge the exceptionalist drive at the heart of American foreign policy will remain invisible to them. This is the impenetrable banality of ‚'don't be evil.' They believe that they are doing good. And that is a problem.* * *Google is "different". Google is "visionary". Google is "the future". Google is "more than just a company". Google "gives back to the community". Google is "a force for good".Even when Google airs its corporate ambivalence publicly, it does little to dislodge these items of faith.45 The company's reputation is seemingly unassailable. Google's colorful, playful logo is imprinted on human retinas just under six billion times each day, 2.1 trillion times a year‚Äîan opportunity for respondent conditioning enjoyed by no other company in history.46 Caught red-handed last year making petabytes of personal data available to the US intelligence community through the PRISM program, Google nevertheless continues to coast on the goodwill generated by its ‚'don't be evil' doublespeak. A few symbolic open letters to the White House later and it seems all is forgiven. Even anti-surveillance campaigners cannot help themselves, at once condemning government spying but trying to alter Google's invasive surveillance practices using appeasement strategies.47Nobody wants to acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad. But it has. Schmidt's tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the shadiest of US power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation. But Google has always been comfortable with this proximity. Long before company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired Schmidt in 2001, their initial research upon which Google was based had been partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).48 And even as Schmidt's Google developed an image as the overly friendly giant of global tech, it was building a close relationship with the intelligence community.In 2003 the US National Security Agency (NSA) had already started systematically violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) under its director General Michael Hayden.49 These were the days of the ‚'Total Information Awareness' program.50 Before PRISM was ever dreamed of, under orders from the Bush White House the NSA was already aiming to ‚'collect it all, sniff it all, know it all, process it all, exploit it all.'51 During the same period, Google‚ whose publicly declared corporate mission is to collect and ‚'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful'52‚ was *accepting NSA money* to the tune of $2 million to provide the agency with search tools for its rapidly accreting hoard of stolen knowledge.53In 2004, after taking over Keyhole, a mapping tech startup cofunded by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the CIA, Google developed the technology into Google Maps, an enterprise version of which it has since shopped to the Pentagon and associated federal and state agencies on multimillion-dollar contracts.54 In 2008, Google helped launch an NGA spy satellite, the GeoEye-1, into space. Google shares the photographs from the satellite with the US military and intelligence communities.55 In 2010, NGA awarded Google a $27 million contract for ‚'geospatial visualization services.'56In 2010, after the Chinese government was accused of hacking Google, the company entered into a ‚'formal information-sharing' relationship with the NSA, which was said to allow NSA analysts to ‚'evaluate vulnerabilities' in Google's hardware and software.57 Although the exact contours of the deal have never been disclosed, the NSA brought in other government agencies to help, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.Around the same time, Google was becoming involved in a program known as the ‚'Enduring Security Framework'58 (ESF), which entailed the sharing of information between Silicon Valley tech companies and Pentagon-affiliated agencies ‚'at network speed.'59 Emails obtained in 2014 under Freedom of Information requests show Schmidt and his fellow Googler Sergey Brin corresponding on first-name terms with NSA chief General Keith Alexander about ESF.60 Reportage on the emails focused on the familiarity in the correspondence: ‚'General Keith . . . so great to see you . . . !' Schmidt wrote. But most reports overlooked a crucial detail. ‚'Your insights as a key member of the Defense Industrial Base,' Alexander wrote to Brin, ‚'are valuable to ensure ESF's efforts have measurable impact.'The Department of Homeland Security defines the Defense Industrial Base as ‚'the worldwide industrial complex that enables research and development, as well as design, production, delivery, and maintenance of military weapons systems, subsystems, and components or parts, to meet U.S. military requirements [emphasis added].'61{photo} Google Chairman Eric Schmidt's Instagram video from 2 May 2014, showing an experimental US military troop support drone, the LS3, or "Cujo", designed by Boston Dynamics, newly acquired by GoogleThe Defense Industrial Base provides ‚'products and services that are essential to mobilize, deploy, and sustain military operations.' Does it include regular commercial services purchased by the US military? No. The definition specifically excludes the purchase of regular commercial services. Whatever makes Google a ‚'key member of the Defense Industrial Base,' it is not recruitment campaigns pushed out through Google AdWords or soldiers checking their Gmail.In 2012, Google arrived on the list of top-spending Washington, DC, lobbyists‚Äîa list typically stalked exclusively by the US Chamber of Commerce, military contractors, and the petrocarbon leviathans.62 Google entered the rankings above military aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, with a total of $18.2 million spent in 2012 to Lockheed's $15.3 million. Boeing, the military contractor that absorbed McDonnell Douglas in 1997, also came below Google, at $15.6 million spent, as did Northrop Grumman at $17.5 million.In Autumn 2013 the Obama administration was trying to drum up support for US airstrikes against Syria. Despite setbacks, the administration continued to press for military action well into September with speeches and public announcements by both President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry.63 On September 10, Google lent its front page‚Äîthe most popular on the internet‚Äîto the war effort, inserting a line below the search box reading ‚'Live! Secretary Kerry answers questions on Syria. Today via Hangout at 2pm ET.'64{photo} Google's front page on 10 Sep 2013, *promoting the Obama administration's efforts to bomb Syria*As the self-described ‚'radical centrist'65 New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote in 1999, sometimes it is not enough to leave the global dominance of American tech corporations to something as mercurial as ‚'the free market':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 US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.66If anything has changed since those words were written, it is that Silicon Valley has grown restless with that passive role, aspiring instead to adorn the "hidden fist" like a velvet glove. Writing in 2013, Schmidt and Cohen stated,What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.67This was one of many bold assertions made by Schmidt and Cohen in their book, which was eventually published in April 2013. Gone was the working title, ‚'The Empire of the Mind', replaced with "The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business". By the time it came out, I had formally sought and received political asylum from the government of Ecuador, and taken refuge in its embassy in London. At that point I had already spent nearly a year in the embassy under police surveillance, blocked from safe passage out of the UK. Online I noticed the press hum excitedly about Schmidt and Cohen's book, giddily ignoring the explicit digital imperialism of the title and the conspicuous string of pre-publication endorsements from famous warmongers like Tony Blair, Henry Kissinger, Bill Hayden and Madeleine Albright on the back.Google's Chairman Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State and National Security Council head under President Richard Nixon, during a "fireside chat" with Google staff at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California, on 30 Sep 2013. In the talk, Kissinger says National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden is "despicible".Billed as a visionary forecast of global technological change, the book failed to deliver‚Äîfailed even to imagine a future, good or bad, substantially different to the present. The book was a simplistic fusion of Fukuyama ‚'end of history' ideology‚Äîout of vogue since the 1990s‚Äîand faster mobile phones. It was padded out with DC shibboleths, State Department orthodoxies, and fawning grabs from Henry Kissinger. The scholarship was poor‚Äîeven degenerate. It did not seem to fit the profile of Schmidt, that sharp, quiet man in my living room. But reading on I began to see that the book was not a serious attempt at future history. It was a love song from Google to official Washington. Google, a burgeoning digital superstate, was offering to be Washington's geopolitical visionary.One way of looking at it is that it's just business. For an American internet services monopoly to ensure global market dominance it cannot simply keep doing what it is doing, and let politics take care of itself. American strategic and economic hegemony becomes a vital pillar of its market dominance. What's a megacorp to do? If it wants to straddle the world, it must become part of the original ‚'don't be evil' empire.But part of the resilient image of Google as ‚'more than just a company' comes from the perception that it does not act like a big, bad corporation. Its penchant for luring people into its services trap with gigabytes of ‚'free storage' produces the perception that Google is giving it away for free, acting directly contrary to the corporate profit motive. Google is perceived as an essentially philanthropic enterprise‚Äîa magical engine presided over by otherworldly visionaries‚Äîfor creating a utopian future.68 The company has at times appeared anxious to cultivate this image, pouring funding into ‚'corporate responsibility' initiatives to produce ‚'social change'‚Äîexemplified by Google Ideas. But as Google Ideas shows, the company's ‚'philanthropic' efforts, too, bring it uncomfortably close to the imperial side of US influence. If Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi was running a program like Google Ideas, it would draw intense critical scrutiny.69 But somehow Google gets a free pass.Whether it is being just a company or ‚'more than just a company,' Google's geopolitical aspirations are firmly enmeshed within the foreign-policy agenda of the world's largest superpower. As Google's search and internet service monopoly grows, and as it enlarges its industrial surveillance cone to cover the majority of the world's population, rapidly dominating the mobile phone market and racing to extend internet access in the global south, Google is steadily becoming the internet for many people.70 Its influence on the choices and behavior of the totality of individual human beings translates to real power to influence the course of history.If the future of the internet is to be Google, that should be of serious concern to people all over the world‚Äîin Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the former Soviet Union, and even in Europe‚Äîfor whom the internet embodies the promise of an alternative to US cultural, economic, and strategic hegemony.71A ‚'don't be evil' empire is still an empire.This has been an *extract from Julian Assange's new book When Google Met Wikileaks*, available from OR Books. WikiLeaks readers can obtain a 20 percent discount on the cover price when ordering from the OR Books website by using the coupon code "WIKILEAKS". For reprint rights inquiries, contact rights [at] orbooks.comNotes1 The company is now valued at $400 billion and employs 49,829 people. The valuation at the end of 2011 was $200 billion with 33,077 employees. See ‚'Investor Relations: 2012 Financial Tables,' Google, archive.today/Iux4M. For the first quarter of 2014, see ‚'Investor Relations: 2014 Financial Tables,' Google, archive.today/35IeZ.2 For a strong essay on Schmidt and Cohen's book that discusses similar themes, and that provoked some of the research for this book, see Joseph L Flatley, ‚'Being cynical: Julian Assange, Eric Schmidt, and the year's weirdest book,' Verge, 7 June 2013, archive.today/gfLEr.3 Jared Cohen's profile on the Council on Foreign Relations website, archive.today/pkgQN.4 Shawn Donnan, ‚'Think again,' Financial Times, 8 July 2011, archive.today/ndbmj. See also Rick Schmitt, ‚'Diplomacy 2.0,' Stanford Alumni, May/June 2011, archive.today/Kidpc.5 Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, ‚'The Digital Disruption: Connectivity and the Diffusion of Power,' Foreign Affairs, November /December 2010, archive.today/R13l2.6 ‚*'Coalitions of the connected*' is a phrase apparently designed to resonate with the ‚'*coalition of the willing*,' which was used to designate the 2003 US-led *alliance of states preparing to invade Iraq without UN Security Council approval*.7 The phrase ‚'*duty to protect' is redolent of ‚'responsibility to protect,*' or, in its abbreviated form, ‚'R2P.' R2P is a highly controversial ‚'emerging norm' in international law. R2P leverages human rights discourse to mandate ‚'humanitarian intervention' by ‚'the international community' in countries where the civilian population is deemed to be at risk. For US liberals who eschew the naked imperialism of Paul Wolfowitz (on which see Patrick E. Tyler, ‚'U.S. strategy plan calls for insuring no rivals develop,' New York Times, 8 March 1992, archive.today/Rin1g), R2P is the justification of choice for Western military action in the Middle East and elsewhere, as evidenced by its ubiquity in the push to invade Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2013. Jared Cohen's former superior at the US State Department, Anne-Marie Slaughter, has called it ‚'the most important shift in our conception of sovereignty since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.' See her praise for the book Responsibility to Protect: The Global Moral Compact for the 21st Century, edited by Richard H. Cooper and Juliette Vo√Ønov Kohler, on the website of the publisher Palgrave Macmillan, archive.today/0dmMq.For a critical essay on R2P see Noam Chomsky's statement on the doctrine to the UN General Assembly. Noam Chomsky, ‚'Statement by Professor Noam Chomsky to the United Nations General Assembly Thematic Dialogue on Responsibility to Protect,' United Nations, New York, 23 July 2009, is.gd/bLx3uU.See also ‚'Responsibility to protect: An idea whose time has come‚Äîand gone?' Economist, 23 July 2009, archive.today/K2WZJ.8 The International Crisis Group bills itself as an ‚'independent, non-profit, non-governmental organization' that works ‚'through field-based analysis and high-level advocacy to prevent and resolve deadly conflict.' It has also been described as a ‚'high-level think tank . . . [devised] primarily to provide policy guidance to governments involved in the NATO-led reshaping of the Balkans.' See Michael Barker, ‚'Imperial Crusaders For Global Governance,' Swans Commentary, 20 April 2009, archive.today/b8G3o. Malcomson's International Crisis Group staff profile is available from www.crisisgroup.org, archive.today/ETYXp.9 One might argue that this is living proof of the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. See ‚'Linguistic Relativity,' Wikipedia, archive.today/QXJPx.10 Glenn Greenwald, ‚'Fact and myths in the WikiLeaks/Guardian saga,' Salon, 2 September 2011, archive.today/5KLJH. See also Matt Giuca, ‚'WikiLeaks password leak FAQ,' Unspecified Behaviour, 3 September 2011, archive.today/ylPUp. See also ‚'WikiLeaks: Why the Guardian is wrong and shouldn't have published the password,' Matt's Tumblr, 1 September 2011, archive.today/aWjj4.11 Andrew Jacobs, ‚'Visit by Google Chairman May Benefit North Korea,' New York Times, 10 January 2013, archive.today/bXrQ2.12 Jeremy Hammond, a brave and principled young digital revolutionary, was later accused by the US government of ferreting these documents out and giving them to WikiLeaks. He is now a political prisoner in the US, sentenced to ten years after speaking to an FBI informer.13 Yazan al-Saadi, ‚'StratforLeaks: Google Ideas Director Involved in 'Regime Change,'' Al Akhbar, 14 March 2012, archive.today/gHMzq. ...For these emails and more, see the collection of sources at when.google.met.wikileaks.org.15 ‚'Re: GOOGLE's Jared Cohen update,' email ID 398679 (14 February 2011), Global Intelligence Files, WikiLeaks, 14 March 2012, archive.today/IoFw4. This email is included in the collection of sources at when.google.met.wikileaks.org.16 ‚'Using connection technologies to promote US strategic interests in Afghanistan: mobile banking, telecommunications insurance, and co-location of cell phone towers,' canonical ID: 09KABUL2020_a, Public Library of US Diplomacy, WikiLeaks, archive.today/loAlC. This cable is included in the collection of sources at when.google.met.wikileaks.org.In May 2014, WikiLeaks revealed that the *NSA had gained access to all Afghan mobile phone calls and was recording all of them* for later retrieval. See ‚'WikiLeaks statement on the mass recording of Afghan telephone calls by the NSA,' WikiLeaks, 23 May 2014, archive.today/lp6Pl.[...] 63 Sy Hersh has written two articles about the Obama administration's ill-fated case for ‚'intervention' in Syria. See Seymour M. Hersh, ‚'Whose Sarin?' London Review of Books, 19 December 2013, archive.today/THPGh.See also Seymour M. Hersh, ‚'The Red Line and the Rat Line,' London Review of Books, 17 April 2014, archive.today/qp5jB. {...]*(6) Google pressures Think Tank it funds to Fire a Critic***http://thehill.com/policy/technology/348947-google-faces-blowback-after-think-tank-fires-criticGoogle faces blowback after think tank fires criticBY ALI BRELANDGoogle is facing blowback after *one of its most prominent critics was fired from a think tank funded by the tech giant.*The incident is raising new questions about Google's influence over think tanks and academic research.The controversy has caught the attention of lawmakers, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) calling the firing ‚'troubling' and warning academic institutions not to compromise their work for financial backers.Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) also tweeted his support for the researchers pushed out of the think tank.Barry Lynn and his Open Markets team researched economic competition issues as part of the New America think tank. New America has received significant funding from Google and from the family of Google executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt.Lynn has long urged regulators to get tougher on Silicon Valley's giants, calling them new monopolies, and in a post praised European regulators for leveling a record fine on Google.Lynn and his group were fired soon after that post by New America CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter.‚'Google kicked us out of because we said that they're a monopoly,' says Matt Stoller, a fellow on Lynn's Open Markets team.Lynn and his colleagues allege Google threatened to cut donations to the think tank over their post.'I get on the phone with Anne-Marie and she says, 'Google is incredibly upset about [the post]. Eric Schmidt says he wants his name off the board. They're cutting off all funding and this is a terrible thing,' and then she hung up,' Lynn recounted.The New York Times first reported that Schmidt complained to Slaughter about the Open Markets post. A source with knowledge of that conversation confirmed to The Hill that the Google executive shared his displeasure with Slaughter.But Google denies they played a role in the eventual firing.A Google spokesperson told The Hill that it ‚'in no way ousted the Open Markets initiative.''We continue to fund [New America],' the spokesperson noted.On Friday, Slaughter said she would review the think tank's policies for dealing with donors but also defended their independence, The New York Times reported.But the controversy shows no signs of fading.Other tech companies that have clashed with Google in the past seized on the incident.'I've been working on Google antitrust for 6 years. This is both the most shocking & least surprising thing I've read,' Luther Lowe, Yelp's VP of public policy, tweeted on WednesdayAnd many researchers are using the incident to voice their own concerns.Many told The Hill that New America and Google's actions highlight the difficulty in building a wall between independent researchers and their corporate backers.Google says it asks think tanks they fund only to try and show balance and to give some type of notice if they are going to push work critical of the company. But they stress that they want groups they fund to operate independently and freely.In a June 22, 2016 email from Slaughter to Lynn obtained by The Hill, the think tank chief worried she had not given Google enough notice of an Open Markets event where Sen. Warren spoke critically of the company.Lynn said Google is creating an unworkable standard.‚'If Google is saying they expect a heads up, then they do not understand the idea of autonomy and independence,' Lynn said.Google insists they fund think tanks independent of their corporate interests.‚'We support hundreds of organizations that promote a free and open Internet, greater access to information, and increased opportunity,' Google spokesperson Riva Sciuto said in an emailed statement to The Hill.‚'We don't agree with every group 100% of the time, and while we sometimes respectfully disagree, we respect each group's independence, personnel decisions, and policy perspectives.'Google is not alone in the tech industry or in American business. Corporations pump large amounts of money into various research groups across different fields. Like Google, they say the research is conducted without undue influence.Critics remain skeptical.'Google spends a lot but says it's not to influence research, which makes you think they waste a lot of money funding groups,' says Stoller.Asked why it continues to fund think tanks and outside research groups, Google said only that its decisions on funding depend on what is happening in Congress and politically in a given year. Stoller characterized Open Markets' dismissal as an overt example of corporate pull, but he said companies have always had subtle ways of influencing think tanks.‚'The influence operates on a self censorship level,' says Matt Bruenig a former researcher at the liberal think tank Demos, and founder at the People's Policy Project, a crowdfunded think tank.‚'If you're an employee you understand the contours of what you should be writing, what you shouldn't be writing based on what the donors are doing.'Marshall Berman, a researcher at the Roosevelt Institute, said he's never felt pressure to self-censure, but said corporate funding would also limit the freedom of think tanks.‚'We don't get money to do things that donors don't get care about,' Berman said.*(7) AI will start World War 3 - Elon Musk ***https://www.rt.com/usa/401957-ww3-ai-musk-strike/Global race for AI will 'most likely cause' WWIII as computers launch 1st strike - MuskPublished time: 4 Sep, 2017 12:49 Edited time: 4 Sep, 2017 13:38Competition for superiority in Artificial Intelligence at national level will ‚'most likely' cause World War Three, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has said, warning that an AI may deem first use its best chance of winning.'China, Russia, soon all countries with strong computer science. Competition for AI superiority at national level most likely cause of WW3,' Musk tweeted. ...An avid anti-AI crusader, Musk appears to be more frightened by artificial intelligence, a rising phenomenon he is willing to put under control.'If you're not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea,' Musk said in August this year.The entrepreneur has long warned about the perils AI might bring to humankind. He maintains there is a great probability that artificial intelligence, free of any regulation and oversight, is able to *go rogue and turn on humans* in the end.'AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization in a way that car accidents, airplane crashes, faulty drugs or bad food were not. They were harmful to a set of individuals in society of course, but they were not harmful to society as a whole,' Musk said in mid-July during a public event.-- Peter Myerswebsite: http://mailstar.net/index.html

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