Assange Makes Case against Google Overreach
November 17, 2014
True to his values, Julian Assange (of WikiLeaks fame) presents a wealth of facts and connections in his Newsweek article, “Google Is Not What It Seems.” It is a lengthy piece, and my summary can hardly do it justice. Anyone interested in the details of Assange’s assertions should check it out for yourselves. The piece begins with the tale of how Assange met Google CEO Eric Schmidt in 2011, then lays out the evidence that a very close relationship exists between the company and the U.S. government. In fact, he asserts, Schmidt and the Brin/Page-led Google each independently forged these bonds with the feds long before Schmidt joined the company in 2001. Assange writes:
“The company’s reputation is seemingly unassailable. Google’s colorful, playful logo is imprinted on human retinas just under 6 billion times each day, 2.1 trillion times a year—an opportunity for respondent conditioning enjoyed by no other company in history. “Caught red-handed last year making petabytes of personal data available to the U.S. 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. “Nobody 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 U.S. power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation.”
The article concludes with Assange’s dire predictions about the repercussions of Google’s current and future exploits on a global scale. It is a picture of a corporate giant merging with government to take over the world, all in the name of security. Is Assange correct?
Cynthia Murrell, November 17, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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