An interesting article.
Foxes in the Hen House for certain.
In my opinion the problem goes back to that time when Humans first
formed words out of their guttural sounds. Words, it turned out, were
often more effective than whacking another across the head with a
stone axe.
Humans developed an ability to charm one another with the sounds and
tones they uttered.
And of course it makes sound sense for those who have gained control
over the lives of their fellow Humans, that they, the Controllers,
would say and write stuff that kept their fellow Humans in bondage.
I've always understood that the daily newspapers were favorably biased
toward their owners and their advertisers. Any information I read in
my daily paper, or heard on the radio...and later, the TV, were
assumed, by me, to be slanted toward benefiting the current
Establishment. Don't we think we would be stunned if we turned on the
news and learned that the Drug Companies were supporting a bill to
place limits on how much profit they could make? Or what if we picked
up the papers and learned that Boeing was backing a piece of
legislation that would cut the Military Budget, and place a ceiling
on what could be charged for war products? What should concern
Americans above all else is what has happened to our ability to think?
Have we been spoon fed for such a long time that we no longer have a
part of our brain that asks questions? Will the next generation of
Humans morph into, "RoboMan"?
Carl Jarvis
On 12/31/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Foxes in the henhouse
Social Media and Social Control: How Silicon Valley Serves the US State
Department
Facebook isn’t the only Silicon Valley firm with partisan oversight of what
we see: the bipartisan billionaire class and their security state have
partnered with tech firms since the dawn of the internet to control the
parameters of users’ thinking.
by Morgan Artyukhina
December 25th, 2019
By Morgan Artyukhina @LavenderNRed
Share to FacebookFacebookShare to TwitterTwitterShare to RedditRedditShare
to EmailEmailShare to MoreMore1.7K
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is in the spotlight for “dining with far-right
figures,” and their influence over the information that appears in your feed
is apparent. However, Facebook isn’t the only Silicon Valley firm that’s
masquerading as nonpartisan as it curates the “facts” you see in ads, posts,
or searches: Google, Twitter, Microsoft, and others are deeply wedded to the
U.S. security state and the billionaires it upholds.
Walter Lippmann’s groundbreaking 1922 study of the news media, “Public
Opinion,” begins with a chapter titled, “The World Outside and the Pictures
in our Heads,” in which he presents the media as a bottleneck through which
information about the world beyond the perception of our senses must pass.
Aside from the question of which stories get passed through that bottleneck,
which information about an event that survives the crucible of condensation
into an article, news bulletin or wire is determined by the biases of the
writer and editor. In turn, control over that information bottleneck gives
the controller incredible power to shape the consciousness of readers about
“the world outside” – the “manufacturing of consent,” as Lippmann originally
described it.
The depth of information about the world made available by the internet
seems to remove the bottleneck about which Lippmann fretted — indeed, a
generation of techie evangelists tried to present it in just such a manner —
but the truth is that it only further obscured both the bottlenecks and the
crucibles that distill information for our consumption.
The media giants that control our access to information, from search engines
like Google to social media like Facebook, have turned themselves into
portals to the world and present themselves as impartial in that role.
However, behind a facade of separateness, strong connecting links bind the
tech giants to the oligarchy and security state on which they rely, giving
the interests of the elite determinative influence over which information we
access.
This article will expose and discuss some of the many ways this shady web of
influence and oversight operates.
The revolving door between these tech companies and intelligence agencies,
think tanks, defense contractors and security companies is constantly
revolving, especially at the higher echelons of important departments, like
cybersecurity. Notably, many of these companies cater along partisan lines
depending on the political proclivities of their owners, in a bid to tip the
scales toward their point of view.
They have embraced this role as an information portal, offering special
“news” sections on their platforms. They are rolling out new apps to judge
the trustworthiness of news sources. Facebook and Google, in particular,
have also become two of the largest funders of journalism around the world,
helping to further entrench State Department-approved models of truth in key
hotspots of geopolitical interest.
This cyberpunk dystopia isn’t a new perversion of a previously free
internet, though – in fact, it is the internet’s raison d’être in the first
place.
It’s astory so old, it goes back to the very origins of computing, as a tool
for census counting in pursuit of racist immigration policies, and the
internet, born of the Pentagon’s attempt to model whole societies for the
purposes of improving counterinsurgency warfare in Southeast Asia.
Right hook
Facebook has been under fire, most memorably from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio
Cortez, since news broke from Politico that Mark Zuckerberg, the great
Facebook wunderkind, has been palling around with right-wing figures for
quite some time. Politico documented how Zuckerberg’s private dinners have
fed a whos-who of conservative talking heads and hosts from across the
corporate media, including Fox’s Tucker Carlson, Washington Free Beacon
editor Matt Continetti, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, and Byron
York, The Washington Examiner’s chief political correspondent, and others.
There’s no word on whether Zuckerberg made them slaughter their own meat,
however.
One Silicon Valley cybersecurity researcher and former government official
is quoted as saying “the fear is that Zuckerberg is trying to appease the
Trump administration by not cracking down on right-wing propaganda.”
“For years, Mark Zuckerberg has met with elected officials and thought
leaders all across the political spectrum,” a Facebook spokesperson said.
Yet when The Intercept put that claim to the test, they couldn’t find a
single left-wing figure invited to his private California estate for one of
these wine and dine symposia on free speech.
Facebook News
Zuckerberg’s swearing off a right-wing bias rang hollower still when
Facebook debuted a specialized news tab on its app later in October 2019
that included stories from the right-wing site Breitbart, once described by
co-founder Steve Bannon, Trump’s former top adviser, as “the platform for
the alt-right.”
Zuckerberg reassured journalists at a “fireside chat” that Facebook has
“objective standards” for news, calling the new tab “a space that is
dedicated to high-quality and curated news.”
Breitbart, mind you, has defended the “glorious heritage” of the Confederate
flag, arguing that the banner of a rebel state founded on the basis of
protecting the enslavement of Black people wasn’t racist. Some other
heinously incendiary headlines include “The Solution to Online ‘Harassment’
is Simple: Women Should Log Off”; “World Health Organization Report:
Tr*nnies 49xs Higher HIV Rate”; and “Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control
Movement’s Human Shield.” That’s in addition to its more mundanely
inaccurate reporting, such mistaking German soccer star Lucas Podolski for
the leader of a Spanish human trafficking ring. It’s also where Trump’s
immigration war chief Stephen Miller trafficked white nationalism to a
mainstream audience
Russiagate creates the ‘troll army’ narrative
For the social media giants, a new opportunity to double down on methods of
social control came from the rise of the Russiagate conspiracy, promulgated
by a growing corporate media-Democratic Party-intelligence community
rallying cry that Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory was the work of
Russian meddling rather than the United States’ outdated Electoral College
system that was created as a progressive roadblock by the country’s
founders.
The opening shot of this information war was the accusation by U.S.
intelligence that hacker Guccifer 2.0 had worked on behalf of Russia to hack
the Democratic National Committee’s servers and steal damning emails
exposing the corrupt inner workings of the DNC — particularly how it cooked
the books for Hillary Clinton in the primary race — to whom the DNC had
become deeply financially indebted. When the emails were published by
WikiLeaks in the summer and fall of 2016, U.S. intelligence claimed the site
was also controlled by the Kremlin.
Further fuel for the Russiagate fire came in the form of accusations that
the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) had flooded U.S.
social media with trolls, sinking hundreds of thousands of dollars into
advertisements intended to sway voters toward Trump and away from Clinton,
as well as more generally sow social chaos by promoting discussion of
divisive topics such as racial, gender, and class inequalities.
Russia Facebook ads
Facebook ads linked to a purported Russian campaign are displayed at a House
Intelligence hearing, Nov. 1, 2017. Manuel Balce Ceneta | AP
Popular pressure on social media companies to prune users’ news feeds grew
dramatically in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In January
2017, a report supposedly based on the conclusions of 17 intelligence
agencies, but in reality, drafted almost exclusively by the fiercely
anti-Trump CIA, presented the narrative of a “Russian influence campaign,”
setting the stage for vetting the veracity of newsfeed information based on
standards set out by the security state.
A year later, the Pentagon and White House announced a shift in global
strategy toward “great power competition” with Russia and China, saying that
“Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary
concern in US national security.”
Facebook first outlined their response in an April 2017 white paper on
combating “false news,” recognizing that bots and spam accounts could spread
a particular narrative quickly across the platform. The white paper didn’t
mention any countries, and Facebook initially denied that a Russian
influence operation had taken place, but soon the social media giant stepped
into line with the intelligence community by claiming later that year to
have uncovered proof that a relative handful of ads bought with Russian
rubles had tipped the scales in favor of Trump.
“Social media trolls,” and the “disinformation campaigns” they ostensibly
waged, soon became the generalized tocsin for widening control over social
media news feeds. The intelligence community, which has formed an anti-Trump
faction of the U.S. security state, warned against future attempts to
influence elections in 2018 and 2020 – attacks that have never
materialized.
The irony was that some of the gamekeepers were already poaching, with
cybersecurity firm New Knowledge launching a far more potent troll campaign
in Alabama’s 2017 special election, which it then sought to blame on Russian
actors.
New knowledge, old tactics
A key December 2018 report that claimed to lay out the “tactics & tropes” of
the IRA, and blasted Facebook and Google for their lack of cooperation with
the Russiagate probe, was prepared by New Knowledge, a cybersecurity company
revealed just weeks later to have helped orchestrate massive election
meddling in Alabama’s 2017 special election.
Facebook suspended the account of New Knowledge CEO Jonathon Morgan, who is
also a former special adviser to the State Department, for having directed a
crew of political functionaries who pushed story after fake news story, even
posing as Alabama Republicans in order to tarnish their image, all in an
effort to convince voters not to vote for Republican candidate and slavery
and pedophilia defender Roy Moore.
In three weeks’ time, New Knowledge spent the same amount of money on ads
that the IRA was supposed to have spent during several years of the U.S.
presidential campaign: $100,000. Then on top of it all, New Knowledge turned
around and tried to cover their tracks by painting the disinformation op as
the work of “Russian trolls.”
Bad actors
Fast forward to August 2018: along with other social media platforms with
whom it shares tips and information, Facebook has begun targeting voices
from, and in defense of, nations targeted by the U.S. State Department for
regime change. However, it’s not just Russians any more: some of the voices
silenced in the semi-regular sweeping round of bans include Cubans,
Venezuelans, Iranians, and Chinese as well. Frequently, these bans coincide
with elections in the U.S., though Facebook typically avoids citing election
interference in its press releases, giving the media free reign to
speculate.
Standard fare is for tips on “inauthentic content” to come from one of two
places: the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRL) or
cybersecurity firm FireEye. These firms are anything but impartial and
independent.
The first such tip came in August 2018 in a report by FireEye on Iranian and
Russian “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” according to Nathaniel Gleicher,
Facebook’s tsar of Cybersecurity Policy and former neocon think tanker.
FireEye expressed “moderate confidence” in its findings, with TechCrunch
noting at the time that “the Iranian networks were not alleged to be
necessarily the product of state-backed operations, but of course the
implication is there and not at all unreasonable.”
FireEye Iran graph
A FireEye graphic purporting to show components of a suspected Iranian
influence operation
The U.S. State Department’s Iran Action Group later cited the Facebook and
Twitter takedowns in a September 2018 report titled “Outlaw Regime: A
Chronicle of Iran’s Destructive Activities,” in which it attempted to lay
out the ideological groundwork for its present offensive against Iran.
Curiously, the State Department’s report didn’t mention FireEye’s report.
The sweeps soon became regular, following a standard pattern. Another
takedown in May 2019 saw Twitter and Facebook cooperate to cull “more than
2,800 inauthentic accounts originating in Iran,” according to Twitter Site
Integrity Chief Yoel Roth, as well as 51 accounts, 36 pages, seven groups
and three Instagram accounts on Facebook, according to Gleicher. The tip
came from FireEye. Sputnik News noted the shady nature of the move, with
Facebook admitting it never looked at the FireEye report before acting – a
report that expressed low confidence in the researchers’ findings.
In a previous takedown in February, Facebook and Twitter again shared intel,
this time from the DFRL, showing the accounts were involved in “attempted
influence campaigns” by Iran, Venezuela and Russia. However, on a conference
call with reporters, Gleicher was forced to admit that Facebook couldn’t
actually tie any of the activity to the Iranian government, saying only “we
can prove and feel confident” in their origins, without providing further
evidence.
FireEye and DRFL
FireEye isn’t just some well-meaning cybersecurity startup, though: since
2009, FireEye has collected venture capital funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s
investment arm. In a statement at the time, In-Q-Tel said it would maintain
a “strategic partnership” with FireEye, calling it a “critical addition to
our strategic investment portfolio for security technologies.”
Started as In-Q-It in 1999 with CIA seed money, In-Q-Tel’s investment has
poured money into firms judged useful to the U.S. intelligence service, such
as the failing company Keyhole, which it bought in 2003. Spun off from a
video game outfit, Keyhole aimed to stitch together satellite images and
aerial photographs of the planet to form a 3-D digital world that users
could navigate.
Buttressed with CIA funds, Keyhole partnered with the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to provide essential services for the 2003
U.S. invasion of Iraq. Google bought the company the following year,
redubbing it as Google Earth, and acquiring with it In-Q-Tel executive Rob
Painter, who sat on Keyhole’s board of directors and provided a new link
between Google and the U.S. intelligence and defense contracting spheres.
The other tip source, the Digital Forensic Research Lab, is a division of
the Atlantic Council which, while a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit, is only
proforma independent of the U.S. state as one of the preeminent Washington
think tanks influencing foreign policy.
In its About Us section, DFRL says its mission is to “identify, expose, and
explain disinformation where and when it occurs using open source research;
to promote objective truth as a foundation of government for and by people;
to protect democratic institutions and norms from those who would seek to
undermine them in the digital engagement space.” Lofty goals, were they not
voiced by a think tank that’s funded by a bevy of defense contractors, Gulf
monarchies, and even the NATO alliance itself.
Facebook has also buttressed its State Department line-towing credentials by
adding to their staff figures like Gleicher, Facebook’s chief of
Cybersecurity Policy, who is also a senior associate at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), another hawkish think tank with
major influence on U.S. foreign policy that’s funded by many of the same
actors as the Atlantic Council. Likewise, Facebook’s new Public Policy
Manager for Ukraine, Kateryna Kruk, is a rabid Russophobe who participated
in the 2014 U.S.-backed coup d’etat that brought the fascist Svoboda party
to power in Ukraine, turning that country’s government against not only
Moscow but their own Russian-speaking Ukrainian minorities.
Guarding you from the news
In August 2018, Microsoft rolled out the NewsGuard app, which vets news
outlets according to a list of highly subjective standards presented as the
site’s “Nutrition Facts,” which include “gathers and presents information
responsibly” and “does not repeatedly publish false content,” among some
more mundane items.
The advisory board that oversees NewsGuard is a whos-who of security state
figures, including Tom Ridge, the first Secretary of Homeland Security under
George W. Bush; Ret. General Michael Hayden, who has headed both the NSA and
CIA; and Richard Stengel, a former TIME editor who served as Barack Obama’s
Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy. In other words, the power over
determining what is true and false about U.S. foreign policy falls on
central figures who helped craft it.
Naturally, NewsGuard has given conservative outlet Fox News a green
checkmark of authenticity and WikiLeaks a red exclamation mark advising
caution because, in their words, “this website generally fails to maintain
basic standards of accuracy and accountability.” This, despite the fact that
NewsGuard later states that “WikiLeaks does not appear to run corrections,”
something it faults the site for, “although it almost exclusively publishes
primary source documents, which have never been shown to be fake.”
Newsguard | Fox News
Newsguard gives Fox News high marks for accuracy.
The third-largest investor in NewsGuard is Publicis Groupe, which also owns
Qorvis Communications, a consulting firm hired by the Saudi Embassy in
Washington “to shape the media coverage of Saudi Arabia” since early 2002,
The Intercept reported. Qorvis has provided vital PR coverage for Riyadh’s
brutal war in Yemen, about which there was an almost total blackout in the
Western media until a U.S.-made bomb dropped from a Saudi plane killed
dozens of school children in August 2018. The Intercept noted that in the
six months following the outbreak of war, Qorvis billed the Saudi government
nearly $7 million for its PR services.
The Saudi monarchy are also major investors in some of the most powerful
think tanks in Washington, including the Atlantic Council, which has a seat
at the table of Facebook’s anti-fake news campaign.
NewsGuard is also backed by the Knight Foundation, a group that receives
funding from the Omidyar Network and Democracy Fund, both part of the
agglomeration of institutions managed and supported by eBay founder Pierre
Omidyar.
Facebook’s Expanding Media Empire
This clique of far-right figures is really johnny-come-lately to Facebook’s
plot to influence your worldview by pruning the information you access on
their platform. Casting the initiative as a fulfillment of its
responsibility as one of the largest distributors of information on the
planet, Facebook began launching in 2017 a slew of ventures that partnered
with the world’s leading consent manufacturers to ensure their platform
didn’t interfere with the carefully manicured information landscape crafted
by billionaire string-pullers like Omidyar and the Saudi Royal family.
By May 2018, Columbia Journalism Review was able to hail Facebook and Google
for having sunk more than half a billion dollars into journalism
initiatives, making them two of its largest funders on the planet.
The Facebook Journalism Project (FJP), launched in collaboration with the
Comcast-dominated Vox Media and the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, aimed
to train journalists in what it called “news literacy.” In describing FJP’s
mission, the New York Times effectively laid out a blueprint for social
control:
“
The effort calls for the company to forge deeper ties with publishers by
collaborating on publishing tools and features before they are released.
Facebook will also develop training programs and tools for journalists to
teach them how to better search its site to report on news and events. And
Facebook wants to help train members of the public to find news sources they
trust, while fighting the spread of fake news across its site.”
FJP’s partnerships include the Knight Foundation, Poynter Institute, the
American Journalism Project, and News Integrity Initiative, all of which are
financially tied to the vast Omidyar media empire. Journalists Alexander
Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal documented in atomic detail how through this
media empire, Omidyar has directed an information war around the world to
further U.S. foreign policy.
News integrity initiative
In April 2017, around the same time Facebook was laying out its plans to
address the CIA’s claims that Russian bots were spreading election-spoiling
disinformation on their platform, Facebook joined up with the Omidyar-backed
Democracy Fund, the Ford Foundation, and others to launch News Integrity
Initiative, a $14 million consortium rooted in the CUNY School of Journalism
that aimed to “advance news literacy, to increase trust in journalism around
the world and to better inform the public conversation.” To accomplish this,
it would “combat media manipulation” through a network of “journalists,
technologists, academic institutions, non-profits, and other
organizations.”
Some of NewsiIntegrity Initiative’s projects have included helping to fund
the Maastricht-based European Journalism Centre, another journalism training
and funding outfit, as well as Internews, a media outlet that gets
four-fifths of its overall funding from the U.S. government to nakedly
forward U.S. foreign policy from the Middle East to former Soviet
republics.
Integrity initiative
Facebook was also a major funder of a British intelligence media front
ironically named “Integrity Initiative,” which made it their primary
business to push stories hyping up the “Russian threat” to Western Europe.
The outfit got its funding from the U.S. government via the State
Department, the British government via the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
(FCO), the NATO alliance, and Facebook. The tech giant gave one of Integrity
Initiative’s parent organizations, the Smith Richardson Foundation, £100,000
for research and education activities – a scale of funding only outpaced by
the US State Department and NATO’s Public Headquarters Division, which gave
the group £250,000 and £168,000, respectively.
Integrity Initiative, like so many of the other outfits discussed here,
served as a network for journalists and experts, through whom the funders
were able to organize vast disinformation campaigns under the aegis of
themselves fighting disinformation. The organization was essentially forced
to shutter its operations following a damning expose by Anonymous and
persistent investigative journalists in late 2018 and early 2019, but it had
worked on an international scale under the direction of the Scottish think
tank, The Institute for Statecraft, a group masquerading as a charity but
actually cooperating closely with British intelligence.
In some cases, Integrity Initiative milled out its employees to ostensibly
independent reporting outfits, such as the National Endowment for
Democracy-funded Bellingcat; in others, it simply formed media
disinformation hubs, such as the Open Information Partnership (OIP).
Sputnik’s Kit Klarenberg revealed that the OIP partnered with the Atlantic
Council’s Digital Forensic Lab and others to combat “Kremlin disinformation
activities” by protecting “vulnerable audiences” with a slew of ostensible
corrections. However, between peddling stories about the mysterious Skripal
poisoning and amplifying al-Qaeda’s narrative on alleged Syrian government
chemical attacks, the real disinformation activities were clearly the
workings of the Integrity Initiative network itself.
Foxes in the henhouse: fact-checking at Facebook
Direct right-wing influence over Facebook’s newsfeed arrived in April 2018,
when the site began using machine learning to hunt down disinformation
previously identified by humans as such, enlisting artificial intelligence
in its bid to curate the information you access. However, as the Verge noted
at the time, when Zuckerberg goes before Congress and says Facebook’s
harmful content problems are being solved by AI, lawmakers think SkyNet or
C3-PO, when really it’s more like a Google search.
The humans directing this “Disinformation Google Search” across Facebook are
determined by Full Fact, part of the International Fact Checking Network
(IFCN), which provides third-party vetting of myriad institutions it deems
worthy to verify the factuality of news – although ironically, some
fact-checkers apparently weren’t even aware they were supposed to be
verifying advertisements, too.
The IFCN’s choices are sometimes questionable, as when the group approved
Check Your Fact, a subsidiary of The Daily Caller Foundation, a far-right
associated spin site known for hiring white supremacists, as an impartial
judge.
But IFCN isn’t the only group that’s partnered with Facebook to sort through
mountains of data: while the Cambridge Analytica scandal is well-known,
still outside of public awareness is Facebook’s partnership with the
Omidyar-connected Knight Foundation as well as the Charles Koch Foundation,
part of the network of nonprofits funded by the billionaire industrialists,
the arch-conservative Koch Brothers.
Through this partnership, Facebook provided the foundations with a colossal
amount of user data in the interests of preventing disinformation campaigns
that might influence elections. However, these groups are themselves part of
vast billionaire-directed electioneering networks that push the news in
their own direction; that Omidyar and Koch are at opposite sides of the
truncated US political spectrum is irrelevant, they have the same material
interests and utilize ostensibly neutral public policy and
objectivity-promoting groups to forward that.
Facebook dragging its feet in handing over enough user data to them has led
to threats of withdrawal from the program. The group Social Science One,
which has managed the question for Facebook since the AI sorting began in
April 2018, has been hesitant to ‘okay’ data divulgence with Knight and Koch
after what happened with Cambridge Analytica.
A March 2018 expose by a company whistleblower revealed that political data
firm Cambridge Analytica had gained access to the private information of 87
million Americans via Facebook apps that collected data not only on the
app’s users, but on their friends as well. Funded primarily by Trump’s
fascistic former adviser Steve Bannon and infamous Republican moneyman
Robert Mercer, Cambridge Analytica was hired by Trump’s 2016 election
campaign to crunch numbers on voters.
According to the New York Times, the firm’s goal was to “map personality
traits based on what people had liked on Facebook, and then use that
information to target audiences with digital ads.” However, Facebook for
years attempted to cover up its complacency with this operation, a very
obvious violation of users’ privacy, and even after the expose, continued to
claim it wasn’t a data breach because users had consented to divulge the
information when they downloaded the apps in question.
At its core, Facebook, like all social media as well as Google, is a huge
vacuum for personal information and behavioral data to be used by
advertisers and other actors. That’s their business model: selling your
information to corporations in order to market you products more
effectively, and providing information to the U.S. intelligence community
that can help it identify threats before they appear. In this way, social
media are the true torch-carriers of ARPANET, the first internet, crafted by
the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now called DARPA) to
provide intricate social models for combating communist insurgencies in
Southeast Asia.
ARPANET: counterinsurgency computing
In the wake of the Soviet Union launching the first artificial satellite,
Sputnik 1, in 1957, the U.S. government rushed to close the technological
gap by sponsoring a greater educational focus on the STEM fields on the one
hand, but also the development of a secretive emerging technologies R&D
bureau to imagine, create, and test the high-tech weapons of the future for
the Pentagon to use – what journalist Sharon Weinberger in her history of
(D)ARPA called “the imagineers of war.”
ARPA was created the following year and quickly enlisted in defense of
anti-communist U.S. puppet Ngô Đình Diệm, whose government in South Vietnam
was quickly failing amid a burgeoning communist insurgency led by the
National Liberation Front. ARPA’s first big operation, Project AGILE, began
in 1961 with the goal of enlisting computers, then clunky machines used
primarily for census-counting and artillery trajectory calculations, into
helping sort through huge amounts of personal data on citizens in order to
better determine when, where, and by whom a rebellion is likely to occur.
AGILE’s mission statement, as noted in a 1971 General Accounting Office
report, described the program’s goals in part as “Research and development
supporting the DOD’s operations in remote areas, associated with the
problems of actual or potential limited or subversive wars involving allied
or friendly nations in such areas.”
Project AGILE created one of the world’s first predictive behavior models,
tested on Thai hill tribes and perfected in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, where
the Pentagon used AGILE’s methods in a deadly new pacification offensive.
By the late 1960s, the disastrous U.S. war in Vietnam and the upheavals of
the struggles by Black people for civil rights had helped catapult the U.S.
into an unprecedented social crisis. ARPA, too, had expanded dramatically,
and just like anti-war and other social justice organizers were looking to
the NLF for ideas, so too was ARPA, tasked with crushing the insurgency in
South Vietnam and increasingly being enlisted to crush potential insurgency
back home in the U.S. as well. The network of computers at various college
campuses where ARPA research programs supporting AGILE and other like
programs was first connected in 1969. Dubbed the ARPANET, the network soon
matched up with law enforcement to create shared dossiers on activists from
the Black Panthers to the Redstockings.
A Saigon newspaper headlines a piece about a CIA plan to overthrow the
government of President Diem of South Vietnam, Sept. 2, 1963. Horst Faas |
AP
But if the first internet was such a naked, if not secretive, weapon of
class warfare, how come it’s not seen that way today? Only in the 1980s did
the internet acquire its present-day image of a facilitator of freedom amid
governments’ attempts at control, as a furious rebranding effort sought to
convince Americans that computer networks weren’t the harbingers of a
technocratic dystopia, but rather a cybernetic utopia – a dynamic that
journalist Yasha Levine recounted in his 2018 book “Surveillance Valley: The
Secret Military History of the Internet.” Hierarchies would be a thing of
the past, once the average person could plug into the total knowledge of
humanity at will. This kind of sentiment appealed especially to hardcore
libertarians, especially young techies like Steve Jobs, whose powerful
Macintosh personal computers promised just such a link, complete with
innovative new features like a graphic-user interface and mouse.
ARPANET and other similarly-named networks may have been spun off in
privatization schemes during the 1990s dot-com boom, but despite the public
image makeover, the relationship between internet-based tech firms and the
Pentagon was scarcely different from the early days of ARPA.
For example, Facebook’s Building 8 research lab, which lasted from 2016
through 2018, was started up and headed for nearly all of that time by
Regina Dugan, a former director of DARPA. One of the most significant
products of Building 8’s work on AI and VR was the Oculus virtual reality
headset, which DARPA’s Plan X program manager Frank Pound once told Wired
was “like you’re swimming in the internet.” Oculus went to DARPA, which in
2017 turned the VR headset developed by Facebook over to U.S. Cyber
Command.
The cyber network became a social network, too. Google co-founders Larry
Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University’s computer science Ph.D.
program in the 1990s – one of the anchors for ARPANET, where they studied
under some of its progenitors. The search engine they produced was a catalog
for searching through sites on the emerging public internet, but its utility
in tracking the connections made by the Google engine between people and the
items they searched and predicting what someone might search in the future
harkened back to ARPA’s original purpose.
Ok Google, track me
Today, Google’s power over how we gather information about the world and
make our subsequent determinations about it is truly massive.
The work of behavioral research psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein has helped
expose the power Google holds over public opinion: in 2015, he first
described the Search Engine Manipulation Effect in a paper published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and he has continued to
polish the theory ever since.
Epstein wrote in a Politico article at the time titled, “How Google Could
Rig the 2016 Election: Google has the ability to drive millions of votes to
a candidate with no one the wiser,” that “Google’s search algorithm can
easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or
more – up to 80 percent in some demographic groups – with virtually no one
knowing they are being manipulated.”
Google ranks searches according to what it thinks users want to find,
resulting in what the company calls “the 10 blue links,” i.e., the first
page of search results that pop up after hitting the Enter key. According to
a 2014 study, 90 percent of users don’t advance to page 2 of search results,
and a 2019 study found that the first 5 links account for two thirds of page
1 clicks. As a result, high placement grants a much greater likelihood of
being found and clicked on. With Google accounting for more than 79 percent
of all global desktop search traffic, that’s immense power.
While Google CEO Sundar Pichai swore before Congress in December 2018 that
Google doesn’t make manual adjustments to the content it shows people,
claiming that what’s instead responsible is a complex algorithm that takes
into account the search result sites’ traffic, relevant terms searched, and
other items, internal company documents leaked to the Daily Caller in April
2019 showed that humans do still manually prune the search engine’s
blacklists across multiple features on the site.
One such blacklist, the XPA news blacklist, covers nearly every feature
except for the 10 blue links and is governed in part by a “misrepresentation
policy,” which is supposed to involve protecting users from sites that try
to trick you into clicking on links on accident, but which was revealed by
the Caller to include a host of conservative media outlets.
Google fist-in-glove with the Democrats
This is unsurprising, given Google’s extensive liberal leanings. Between
2004 and 2017, 90 percent of political donations from Google employees went
to Democrats and in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, Google’s parent
holding company, Alphabet, Inc., gave 73 percent and 81 percent of its
political contributions, respectively, to Democrats.
Several of Google’s top figures flocked to Clinton’s 2016 campaign as well,
including Stephanie Hannon, who went from being Google’s director of product
management for civic innovation and social impact to being the Clinton
campaign’s Chief Technology Officer, and Osi Imeokparia, who was Google’s
Product Management Director before becoming Clinton’s Chief Product
Officer.
Eric Schmidt US Government
Eric Schmidt meets with Obama-era Defense Secretary Ash Carter in San
Francisco, March 2, 2016. Tim D. Godbee | DoD
Eric Schmidt, then Alphabet’s Executive Chairman, helped organize and fund
Civis Analytics and The Groundwork, two firms that crunched poll numbers and
other data analytics for Team Clinton during the 2016 campaign.
Further, in the runup to the 2016 U.S. election, Google pushed its users
towards Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Epstein’s research, published
in March 2017, found that in the six months from May to November 2016,
Google search results were biased towards Clinton in ways that “could not be
accounted for by the bias in the search terms themselves,” Epstein wrote.
The popular YouTube pop culture channel SourceFed provided further evidence
when it published a video demonstrating that Google’s suggested search
completions favored Democrats and hurt Republicans. For example, typing
“Hillary Clinton crim” into Google would yield the suggested autocomplete
“Hillary Clinton crime bill 1994,” while other search engines like Yahoo and
Bing would show “Hillary Clinton crimes.” Meanwhile, if you had typed
“lying” into Google, the autocomplete suggestion would be “Lying Ted Cruz,”
then-candidate Donald Trump’s derisive nickname for the Republican
competitor. A comparable search of “Crooked Hillary,” Trump’s nickname for
the former secretary of state, gave no similar suggestion.
Assembling Google News Initiative
In 2015, Google launched its own media pruning organs, First Draft and the
Google News Lab, in conjunction with Facebook, Twitter, the George
Soros-funded Open Society Foundations, the Omidyar-funded Knight Foundation,
the Ford Foundation, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies, another billionaire
philanthropist known for founding the website Craigslist. The two projects’
goals will by now sound familiar: aiming to coordinate “efforts between
newsrooms, fact-checking organizations, and academic institutions to combat
mis- and disinformation.”
That same year, Google launched its Digital News Innovation Fund, which was
later folded into the much larger Google News Initiative along with Google
News Lab. Through DNI, Google funneled €115 million to 447 European media
outlets in every single European Union member state to “support high-quality
journalism through technology and innovation.” However, with a majority of
the funds going to media establishment staples like The Thomson Reuters
Foundation and Telegraph Media Group, the move was widely interpreted as
Google’s attempt to woo European media into a more friendly disposition.
That expanded to a much larger $300 million commitment in April 2018, when
Google News Initiative was launched, and included a program to mass-train
tens of thousands of fact-checkers to “monitor disinformation” in elections
around the world. This kind of talk is really code-speak for what in the
minds of security state thought police has become the perennial bugbear of
Western civilization: “Russian meddling.”
Pentagon-Google cooperation
Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt, too, is connected to the U.S. security state as
well as to the Democratic Party, again proving that a cross-party link is
established where the material interests of the billionaire class are
shared. A man who joined the Google team early-on in 2001, by 2011 Schmidt
was able to step down from Google’s Chief Executive Officer to be the
Executive Chairman of its Board of Directors with a $100 million equity
award. He maintained that position through the 2015 restructuring of Google
into the holding company Alphabet, Inc., stepping down in 2017 only to
become chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board, an advisory
committee to the Secretary of Defense.
However, he stayed on at Alphabet as its technical advisor, swearing to
Defense One that “there’s a rule” that he wasn’t allowed to be briefed on
Google’s ongoing bid for the massive JEDI cloud computing contract from the
Pentagon. Google has in the past also worked directly with the Defense
Department on the drone intel analysis AI dubbed “Project Maven,” as well as
its present contract for the AI Next project with DARPA, the Google Earth
project mentioned previously, and a host of other projects. The $10 billion
JEDI contract was eventually given to Microsoft last month.
Likewise, Alphabet has been happy to oblige the State Department in
conducting content purges similar to Twitter and Facebook, disabling
accounts and channels it claims are “coordinated influence operations.” One
incident in August 2019 saw YouTube disable 210 accounts for promoting
content critical of the anti-Beijing protests in Hong Kong; the tech giant
claimed on shaky evidence that the accounts were operating from mainland
China.
Shane Huntley heads up Google’s Threat Analysis Group, which identified the
“threat” and made the call to disable the accounts; before joining Google in
2010, he worked as a computer security research scientist for Australia’s
Defence Science and Technology Organisation and then for the Australian
government directly as a security software engineer. One of the so-called
“Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing countries, Australian intelligence
cooperates closely with New Zealand, the U.S., Canada and UK intelligence
services, and has played a major role in forwarding the U.S.-led effort to
undermine continued Chinese development.
We don’t need you to type at all…
“One of the things that eventually happens … is that we don’t need you to
type at all because we know where you are,” Schmidt, Google’s then-CEO, said
of the company in a 2010 interview with The Atlantic. “We know where you’ve
been. We can more or less guess what you’re thinking about.” He later added,
“One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict
the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing
that.”
On the internet, as in the realm of foreign policy, the U.S. security state
is bipartisan in its bid to control the boundaries of acceptable behavior
and thought, shepherding them by hook or crook into compliance.
The security state has sought to master this craft for more than half a
century by sweeping through massive amounts of sociological data, tracking
the attitudes, movements, and demographics of vast numbers of people in a
bid to better map the tendency toward rebellion before it occurs. Tracking
how billions of people navigate the internet, innocent of the knowledge
they’re even being watched, has provided the security state with the
greatest petri dish it could have asked for.
Facebook and Google have emerged as two of the leading access portals
between users and the outside world, and far from the image of impartiality
they project, this prominence had made them central figures in governing
which information from that world we are able to access. The ties between
these firms and the U.S. defense and intelligence spheres are myriad, not
only harnessing for their own ends the high-tech R&D these firms develop for
their own platforms, but also ensuring the manufacturing of consent over
issues both at home and abroad that are favorable to the imperialist
oligarchy and their security state.
Feature photo | Graphic by Claudio Cabrera for MintPress News
Morgan Artyukhina is a Washington DC-based journalist and activist covering
imperialism and war for Sputnik News, Liberation News, and other outlets.
Follow Morgan on Twitter @LavenderNRed.
