Friday, April 17
Big Brother Google: Company Motto Morphs from "Do No Evil" to "Evil Empire"
Robert D. Steele, the former second highest-ranking civilian military intelligence officer, is well versed in the story on Google's relationship with American Spookdom. In 2006, Steele, also a former CIA agent, told internet radio show talks host Alex Jones “that the company was ‘in bed with CIA'.”
Ooppss...That kind of loose info can't be good for the company's stock prices, right? Hardly. Money is following swell at Google's international headquarters in Mountain View, 40 miles north of San Francisco.
As the company "prepares to celebrate its 10th birthday"
Ooppss...That kind of loose info can't be good for the company's stock prices, right? Hardly. Money is following swell at Google's international headquarters in Mountain View, 40 miles north of San Francisco.
Steele raised eyebrows when he confirmed from his contacts within the CIA and Google that Google was working in tandem with "the agency," a claim made especially volatile by the fact that Google was recently caught censoring Alex Jones' [documentary film] Terror Storm and has targeted other websites for blackout in the past.Steele's analysis was spot on. In the 21 October 2007 edition of the London Times, staff writer John Aldridge chronicled how Google, the most recent incarnation of Bay Area-Californian touchie-feelie of lattes, laptops, alpha sprouts and stock splits was hemorgraphing after it continued it corporate descent into good old US fascism.
"I think that Google has made a very important strategic mistake in dealing with the secret elements of the U.S. government - that is a huge mistake and I'm hoping they'll work their way out of it and basically cut that relationship off," said the ex-CIA man.
"Google was a little hypocritical when they were refusing to honor a Department of Justice request for information because they were heavily in bed with the Central Intelligence Agency, the office of research and development," said Steele.
Steele called for more scrutiny to be placed on Google if it continues to engage in nefarious practices, saying, "If Google is indeed starting to do harm then I think it's important that be documented and publicized."
As the company "prepares to celebrate its 10th birthday"
Google has developed serious engine trouble. A series of missteps have left it facing claims that it has gone from a benign project – creating the first free, open-all-hours global library – to the information society’s most determined Big Brother. It stands accused of plotting some sinister link between its computers and us: that it wants, somehow, to plug us into its giant mainframe – as imagined in The Matrix or Terminator.So keep dropping your leftover savings into Google stock, eh?, for what's good for Google is good for Americka, 'k?
The crisis began a few months ago when Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, popped up in London and made some extravagant remarks about the firm’s ambitions.
He declared that the company’s goal was to collect as much personal data as it could on individual users so that it could improve the quality of its search results and even start making recommendations, like a trusted friend.
“We are very early in the total information we have,” he said. “We cannot even answer the most basic question about you because we don’t know enough about you. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask questions such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”
His comments provoked a firestorm. Right-to-privacy campaigners howled that a machine that knows so much about us that it can tell us what to do would be the biggest-ever threat to personal privacy.
No totalitarian regime, no Bond villain had dreamt up anything so creepy.
“At what stage,” one critic asked, “did the company whose motto is ‘Don’t be evil’ evolve into the Evil Empire?”...read more
