Google was midwifed by the CIA, and former CIA employees hold many influential roles at the world’s most influential company. By Emily Mangiaracina.
Google “fundamentally started as a CIA project,” according to journalist and author of Propaganda in the Information Age, Alan MacLeod, who has warned that tech giants’ ties with intelligence agencies pose big problems for freedom of information as well as freedom of speech. …
A prior investigation by Dr. Nafeez Ahmed found that the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) were “bankrolling” research by Sergey Brin at Stanford University, which “produced Google.”
“Not only that … but his supervisor there was a CIA person. So the CIA actually directly midwifed Google into existence.” [said] MacLeod …
Ahmed explained that Brin and his Google co-founder, Larry Page, developed “the core component of what eventually became Google’s search service” “with funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI),” a program of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, and DARPA.
In addition, the intelligence community’s Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) initiative, a project sponsored by the NSA, CIA, and the Director of Central Intelligence, “essentially provided Brin seed-funding, which was supplemented by many other sources.” …
Ahmed has argued that the involvement of intelligence agencies in the birth of Google, for example, is deeply purposeful: that they have “nurtur[ed] the web platforms we know today for the precise purpose of utilizing the technology … to fight [a] global ‘information war’ — a war to legitimize the power of the few over the rest of us.”
In his own research, MacLeod has found that the CIA’s ties with Google continue today, as “there are dozens and dozens of examples” of former CIA agents who now work at Google, “who had just been parachuted into these positions of extreme importance.”
That is, these former CIA employees often cluster in “trust and safety” roles, which are hugely influential in their management of so-called “misinformation” and “hate speech.” …
Such hiring preferences suggest, MacLeod noted, that either Big Tech is “is actively recruiting from the intelligence services or that there is some sort of backroom deal between Silicon Valley and the national security state.” …
Control search and social media, and you control the narrative:
MacLeod believes U.S. intelligence agencies’ connections with Google, as well as social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, shouldn’t be much of a surprise.
“Social media is enormously important. It really decides what we think about what we see, what we don’t see. It informs everything about our being. And so whenever an entity becomes this powerful, it’s natural that powerful organizations, whether they’re corporations or governments, will start to look at that and try to understand how they can hack it, how they can use it for their own benefits, or how they can even infiltrate it.”
The CIA’s influence on Google is hugely significant, according to MacLeod, because the kind of power that Google has “over modern society” can hardly be overstated.
“Google is really too big to ignore … what comes up in the Google search has huge implications for how people think, for political movements, for public opinion,” MacLeod noted, going so far as to speculate that the company “might be the most important and influential company in the world.”
Indeed, Google is the most-visited website in the world, and has a 92 percent share of the global search engine market …
The behemoth company’s power extends even further through its subsidiary YouTube … the world’s second most visited website. …
It all changed in 2016 after the American people elected Trump:
If YouTube was once under a “golden age” of alternative media, during which its algorithms were “much more neutral,” that is no longer the case, argued MacLeod.
“Unfortunately, that golden age came crashing to a very quick halt in the wake of the 2016 election, whereby the Clinton campaign and … others, [including] the intelligence community, claimed that basically fake news on the Internet sponsored by foreign powers, specifically Russia, was the reason that Trump was able to beat Hillary Clinton,” he told Webb.
“And in the wake of this, we saw YouTube, Google, Facebook and all the other big social media platforms changed their algorithms radically to promote what they said was authoritative content and suppress what they called borderline content,” in what MacLeod called a “coordinated campaign” in the interests of the Democratic Party as well as the national security state.
“But the problem with this is that the outcome wasn’t to take away really low quality conspiracy theories,” said MacLeod, arguing that instead the censorship suppressed “high-quality alternative media websites that had been kicking the ass of corporate media on the Internet for years and years.” …
Webb described intelligence agencies’ grip over Google, YouTube, and other web platforms as a “war on independent information on a massive scale.”
Google is how the globalists control the web. They downrank sites they don’t like, such as this one, into oblivion — so they are much less likely to show up in searches. It’s a hidden form of censorship.
It would appear that Brin and Page are frauds who are not primarily responsible for what are believed to be their own accomplishments, just like Bill Gates and many other famous “successful” entrepreneurs in the tech arena.
It always puzzled me, back when I had access to various tech circles in the 80s and 90s, how vapid and observably not-particularly astute many of the most successful “businessmen” in tech were. …
Andy Grove of Intel was incredibly smart and insightful. Bill Gates struck me as clueless and evasive. …
Increasingly, what are believed to be the differences between “capitalism” and “communism” are proving to be nonexistent. The primary difference between the Chinese “communist” corpocracy and the US “capitalist” corpocracy appears to be that the Chinese openly utilize centralized command-and-control while the US hides its centralized command-and-control behind a false front of a darwinistic free market.
