This is about potential Google involvement in political activities outside the US, where Assange claims it is acting as a proxy rather than requiring direct US intelligence involvement. While Assange didn't name them, some specific instances of what he is talking about are the "Color revolutions" in Eastern Europe and the Arab Spring.

While this seems preposterous on the surface there is enough evidence to make it worth considering. The Georgian "color revolution" obtained significant funds from a body funded by George Soros[1], so private involvement isn't unprecedented.

It is also well known that Wael Ghonim (who was instrumental in fueling the Egyptian revolution) was employed by Google at the time[2] although he was acting in a private capacity.

OTOH, it isn't at all clear is the US intelligence complex would have wanted the Egyptian revolution to occur at all, and Assange doesn't go deep enough to explain that.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution#Soros_foundat...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wael_Ghonim

http://www.google.com/ideas/projects/

Google Ideas is a think/do tank that explores how technology can enable people to confront threats in the face of conflict, instability or repression.

Their list of projects makes much more sense in that light.

In a sense you can understand the perspectives of some western governments, because they think that we are better off than under-developed nations. And as long as they think that I believe two things will continue to happen. The hegemony will prevail, and its denizes will remain apathetic to its off shore actions.

Speak for yourself. Most people would be out of their homes pronto is they didn't work 6-7 day weeks -- and tons of them already are on the streets or trailers...

http://www.google.com/ideas/projects/arms-visualization/

> "Global illicit networks — from drug smuggling and arms dealing to human trafficking and organ harvesting — affect millions of people across the world, generating over $2.1 trillion every year. Existing, publicly available information about illicit networks is often not presented in a format that allows the patterns of trade to be easily understood. Applying the power of data visualization to this information can enable a greater understanding of the underlying mechanics of these networks, which in turn can lead to much more targeted and effective efforts to counter them."

This paragraph makes it sounds like they are interested in illicit activity in a general and abstract sense and are considering participating in the War on Drugs.

I wonder who else, besides Google, has "big data" that they'd like to analyze...

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.ha...

Basically, when a company needs to hand over data, they copy it and put it somewhere for law enforcement to pick up, and apparently the Chinese hackers got access to the drop box.

"Backdoor" makes it sound like Google built a query page that allows the NSA to enter in an arbitrary account name and just get the data -- on anyone.

Now there's an idea. Now let's hope it's an original thought and nobody has had that idea before you.

So some suspects had their data stolen by chinese hackers from a government agency.

The intentions behind it matter very little for those whose data is now in someone else's hands.

You probably won't continue to hear, "Since you've gotta' trust somebody, I trust Google."

Unless Google does something drastic, this could destroy all the goodwill Google built into its brand. It could turn Google into Microsoft.

Only if we tell all the people we encouraged to use google that we were wrong. I speak for myself here, but I've encouraged a lot of google adoption in my friends and relatives. I regret it deeply, and don't know what to recommend to them now.

Right now the CommonCrawl data set is so big and the cost of setting up all the infrastructure to work on it is so expensive, that few people have the luxury to explore how search engines might work differently.

I don't know how the search algo team does its job at Google, but it would be awesome if the interface made available to them was offered as a service that anyone could build a search business off of. That would be a great first step in allowing specialized search engines for specific verticals/domains to take off.

I think it is not a pipe dream. Some social and organizing groundwork needs to be done. :)

Apache provided value to its corporate sponsors. Free software that you run on your system, like your phone, doesn't put money in the pockets of any corporations, except possibly the cell carriers who have not been at all ashamed of their cosy relationship with the NSA.

Trading favors is the name of the game. One may argue that lobiying dollars are the favor Google is offering. But one may not realize that dollars are merely the cost of a ticket to participate. It is not the sole price.

There are many examples throughout history that this is the way things work. There are two possibilities. Either Google's and governments relationship works the way Assange has described OR US governments in the last fifteen years are completely different (more honorable?) than all the governments throughout the world before that.

What do you think is more probable?

The way things typically work here is that you hire a bunch of lobbyists and put money in the pockets of various government officials in exchange for favors. So the quid is generally just $$$.

I'd offer anti-trust action as one of those things. Thus far Google has been let off very lightly in most cases involving the DoJ or FTC, in most cases with fines that wouldn't amount to a few days of revenue for it.

In contrast, the European Commission is adopting a much stricter approach towards it's market dominance.

But from the tone of your post it would appear that you have participated in these deals yourself. So tell me are you a lobbyist, someone who hired a lobbyist or a government official?

Oh, you are no different than me - you have no data beyond your faith.

Saying otherwise is a bold claim.

your TL;DR doesn't match the article, seems you didn't read to the point there Stratfor docs mentioned.

http://mondoweiss.net/2012/03/wikileaks-mossad-and-google-ca...

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Did they block an entire country?

Looks like a configuration mistake confusing some requests for a Ddos attack.

So just how close is Google to the US securitocracy? Back in 2011 I had a meeting with Eric Schmidt, the then Chairman of Google, who came out to see me with three other people while I was under house arrest. You might suppose that coming to see me was gesture that he and the other big boys at Google were secretly on our side: that they support what we at WikiLeaks are struggling for: justice, government transparency, and privacy for individuals. But that would be a false supposition. Their agenda was much more complex, and as we found out, was inextricable from that of the US State Department. The full transcript of our meeting is available online through the WikiLeaks website.

The pretext for their visit was that Schmidt was then researching a new book, a banal tome which has since come out as The New Digital Age. My less than enthusiastic review of this book was published in the New York Times in late May of this year. On the back of that book are a series of pre-publication endorsements: Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Michael Hayden (former head of the CIA and NSA) and Tony Blair. Inside the book Henry Kissinger appears once again, this time given pride of place in the acknowledgements.

Schmidt’s book is not about communicating with the public. He is worth $6.1 billion and does not need to sell books. Rather, this book is a mechanism by which Google seeks to project itself into Washington. It shows Washington that Google can be its partner, its geopolitical visionary, who will help Washington see further about America’s interests. And by tying itself to the US state, Google thereby cements its own security, at the expense of all competitors.

Two months after my meeting with Eric Schmidt, WikiLeaks had a legal reason to call Hilary Clinton and to document that we were calling her. It’s interesting that if you call the front desk of the State Department and ask for Hillary Clinton, you can actually get pretty close, and we’ve become quite good at this. Anyone who has seen Doctor Strangelove may remember the fantastic scene when Peter Sellers calls the White House from a payphone on the army base and is put on hold as his call gradually moves through the levels. Well WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison, pretending to be my PA, put through our call to the State Department, and like Peter Sellers we started moving through the levels, and eventually we got up to Hillary Clinton’s senior legal advisor, who said that we would be called back.

Shortly afterwards another one of our people, WikiLeaks’ ambassador Joseph Farrell, received a call back, not from the State Department, but from Lisa Shields, the then girlfriend of Eric Schmidt, who does not formally work for the US State Department. So let’s reprise this situation: The Chairman of Google’s girlfriend was being used as a back channel for Hillary Clinton. This is illustrative. It shows that at this level of US society, as in other corporate states, it is all musical chairs.

That visit from Google while I was under house arrest was, as it turns out, an unofficial visit from the State Department. Just consider the people who accompanied Schmidt on that visit: his girlfriend Lisa Shields, Vice President for Communications at the CFR; Scott Malcolmson, former senior State Department advisor; and Jared Cohen, advisor to both Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, a kind of Generation Y Kissinger figure — a noisy Quiet American as the author Graham Greene might have put it.

Google started out as part of Californian graduate student culture around San Francisco’s Bay Area. But as Google grew it encountered the big bad world. It encountered barriers to its expansion in the form of complex political networks and foreign regulations. So it started doing what big bad American companies do, from Coca Cola to Northrop Grumman. It started leaning heavily on the State Department for support, and by doing so it entered into the Washington DC system. A recently released statistic shows that Google now spends even more money than Lockheed Martin on paid lobbyists in Washington.

Jared Cohen was the co-writer of Eric Schmidt’s book, and his role as the bridge between Google and the State Department speaks volumes about how the US securitocracy works. Cohen used to work directly for the State Department and was a close advisor to both Condolezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. But since 2010 he has been Director of Google Ideas, its in-house ‘think/do’ tank.

Documents published last year by WikiLeaks obtained from the US intelligence contractor Stratfor, show that in 2011 Jared Cohen, then (as he is now) Director of Google Ideas, was off running secret missions to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan. In these internal emails, Fred Burton, Stratfor’s Vice President for Intelligence and a former senior State Department official, describes Google as follows:

“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”

In further internal communication, Burton subsequently clarifies his sources on Cohen’s activities as Marty Lev, Google’s director of security and safety and.. Eric Schmidt.

WikiLeaks cables also reveal that previously Cohen, when working for the State Department, was in Afghanistan trying to convince the four major Afghan mobile phone companies to move their antennas onto US military bases. In Lebanon he covertly worked to establish, on behalf of the State Department, an anti-Hezbollah Shia think tank. And in London? He was offering Bollywood film executives funds to insert anti-extremist content into Bollywood films and promising to connect them to related networks in Hollywood. That is the Director of Google Ideas. Cohen is effectively Google’s director of regime change. He is the State Department channeling Silicon Valley.

That Google was taking NSA money in exchange for handing over people’s data comes as no surprise. When Google encountered the big bad world, Google itself got big and bad.

The Guardian strongly implies that this contradicts their earlier denials about knowing anything about PRISM. But PRISM could just be the NSA's internal name for the program that collects data obtained from companies via court order. From the companies' perspective, they're just complying with court orders. Theres nothing in the Guardian's reporting that contradicts that, at least as far as I can see.

Assange's implication that getting reimbursed for court costs is some sort of business model for Google ("taking NSA money in exchange for handing over people's data") is absurd. They take advertisers' money for handing over people's data, not the government's.

Guardian's report: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-costs...

Guardian had to publish a correction. They also mindlessly copied the press release from Consumer Watchdog and tried to connect the subject to PRISM, which it has nothing to do with (this is about automated Gmail ads).

"Consumer Watchdog, the advocacy group that uncovered the filing, called the revelation a "stunning admission." It comes as Google and its peers are under pressure to explain their role in the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance of US citizens and foreign nationals."

However, the Consumer Watchdog responsible for the misleading press release is not an advocacy group (there are two of them), it is actually an astroturfer with a heavily anti-Google bias, most likely funded by Microsoft out of a range of such organizations MS runs: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/08/28/microsofts-secret-scr... And some evidence here: http://techrights.org/2009/05/04/consumer-watchdog-exposed/

Point is, the Guardian make a factual error, and at the same time, copy-pasta'ed an astroturfer.

Your second link in that paragraph is to a conspiracy site that basically declares anyone who ever is on the same side as Microsoft on any issue to be a Microsoft astroturfer or to have been infiltrated by Microsoft. Among things they claim are under the control of Microsoft: NPR, the Department of Education, the White House, the French government, all major newspapers, Amazon, Yahoo. The page you linked to is up to their usual standards--they base their argument on a Google search showing the CW has criticized Google more than it has criticized Microsoft, and on CW hosting its site on a hosting service that is part of a company that provides services for managing and contacting people.

It's probably best to start with more mainstream sites when researching something, such as the Wikipedia entry for the thing you are researching [1], rather than heading right to the conspiracy sites like Boycott Novell.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Watchdog

Consumer Watchdog isn't just critical of Google, they are rabidly so to a deranged order. They've got an entire site, http://insidegoogle.com/ dedicated to nothing but 100% Google attacks.

This is the smoking gun modus operandi of astroturf. Does other consumer groups, like Consumers Union/Reports, or Center for Science In the Public Interest maintain sites exclusively dedicated to attacking a single company? They claim their issue is privacy, but if you look on their sight, they attack Google pretty much on everything, for example, they side against consumers and with publishers on Google Books.

Whatever other projects they've got going, it smells fishy. It smells like astroturf.

The motivation for all this freelance diplomacy doesn't even need to be for specific favors - it can be to raise his and Google's stature with the world's political power machinery.

Consider that, while it doesn't make it any less troubling, they might even have good intentions in what they're doing. I'm not trying to be an apologist for it, just thinking about what would motivate a company like Google -or rather, people at the top- to do stuff like this.

Industrial sector elite: control of resources

Intelligence elite: control over people

Google elite: I don't know if they know yet but they are probably trying to find their place in the future. Maybe control of data?

Either way you can see how they all might be able to help each other out.

I have no doubt that Google is trying to stay on Congress's good side, after all, Microsoft funded an array of lobbyist organizations trying to get the government to shakedown Google, and their increase in lobbying spending is no doubt a response. It's pretty clear how this game works with regulatory capture, Congress threatens to regulate your business, you in turn, are forced to donate to their re-election campaign for 'protection'.

Less clear is whether playing nice with the State Department buys you anything. Assange makes it sound like Chomsky's conspiracy theories over pipelines, that Google has fruit plantations or oil pipelines abroad that need State Department protection, and somehow the State Department has some quid pro quo. But what can the State Department actually offer Google? They have no control over some of Google's biggest foreign issues: Chinese and Russian markets, foreign taxes. At best, the executive branch could back off investigations or approve mergers. But the evidence is mixed. Obama just veto'ed the Samsung ban on Apple, but allowed Apple's ITC ban on some Motorola devices to continue.

And what to make of the Cohen thing. So, Google is supposedly being contracted by the State Department or CIA to cause foreign uprisings now? Isn't it far more likely that the social, economic, and culture conditions that are fueling these uprisings have been boiling for years and that Google had little to do with them? Google, Facebook, and Twitter basically want users, and to promote digital media, and these uprisings which heavily used their services actually was good PR for social media overall.

I dislike the way many people analyze the motivations of those in other nations so as to remove local agency. Those same people will tell you, how dare you, look down on people in these countries, at the same time, viewing all local politics and local agendas as really being driven by the plans of external actors.

If Cohen was meeting with people in Iran and Azerbaijan, why does it have to be for some ominous CIA purpose. Couldn't it have been for existing projects Google Ideas already had? Google has been going all over the developing world evangelizing use of things like Google Maps for tracking local issues, like human, gun, or drug trafficking, environmental degradation, or even vanishing languages. Cohen's previous job would have given him the right contacts to make foreign connections in foreign governments, and is the perfect reason why Silicon Valley companies would hire people from the State Department who have foreign service experience. How many MBA grads working in Silicon Valley actually have any experience navigating say, foreign government officials in Kenya? For the same reason, the government hires Silicon Valley workers to work on government IT projects, because you go where the experience is. (e.g. data.gov)

None of this disproves anything, but I find the dots being connected here to be very tenuous.

I thought he addressed that right off the bat - they aren't seeking money from DC they are seeking favorable treatment from DC by doing favors for DC.

Google's biggest threats come from congressional legislation, hence the lobbying, including to climate change deniers.

My point is, this is all insinuation, tenuous at best.

You mean, like these?

- A tap on a wrist from the FTC for multiple complaints around abuse of market power: http://ftc.gov/opa/2013/01/google.shtm

- A fine of $22.5M for wilfully subverting Apple Safari user's privacy settings: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2012/08/google.shtm

- A fine of $7 million for collecting private user data from unsecured Wi-fi networks: http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20130312-709686.html

On #3, street view cars were collecting already available publicly accessible information that anyone else with a Wifi capable device can collect off of unsecured networks, and the purpose is to map SSID geolocations for Wifi-based Location, like Skyhook ad everyone else. Again, what do you think the fine should be for this?

On the patent issue let's face the facts that this is all motivated as a defensive measure as Apple and Microsoft are patent trolling against Android and Google is trying to put up a fight to bring the others to a negotiated MAD position. I find the FRAND issue somewhat of a smokescreen, since one could argue that multitouch, or rounded corners, et al are 'essential' to a smartphone from a consumers point of view, a defacto standard of consumer expectation. Should Apple be permitted a monopoly on this and block competitors with ITC bans? The FTC treatment of Google, is if anything, preferential towards Google competitors. Obama has done nothing to fix the patent war mess.

Before you can claim they got preferential treatment, you have to put forward a credible argument as to what the original punishment should have been.

Eric Schmidt has been traveling around the globe lately as he was researching for his book, he also went to Burma and a few other places. I'm not really sure what the claims are supposed to be, what was he going to do in NK that the State Department couldn't do themselves? Spy? Negotiate nuclear arms?

When Tom Friedman travels to say, Sri Lanka, is it on behalf of the CIA, or because he wants to write another sappy book on globalization?

Sometimes things are much more mundane. Vice media actually got to meet NK leadership (dinner with Kim Jong Un), but they were really just looking to do gonzo journalism -- even if they were debriefed by the government when they returned.

In that light, Mussolini's quote is as precise today as it was back in the day it was first said. Sad, yet true.

It also appears to be a false attribution and is basically unsourced. It does have a certain glibness to it that makes it suspicious.

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=280606

People need to get as far away from Google as possible. I think they're going to show a nasty side to their personality soon.

There is nothing extraordinary about the government showing interest when even a private citizen is contacting and meeting to interview someone who is wanted by said government on national security grounds.

Google's increased lobbying was dues to their big antirust battle a short while back, these tend to be expensive. Besides this is American and lobbying is a way of life here.

I'm not sure what Cohen was doing in Azerbaijan but is it really strange that he was getting support in a potentially hostile territory.

As for what ostensibly triggered this post, the "revelations" that firms get reimbursed for their troubles enabling surveillance, it's not new, nor is it a money making endeavor, it's basically the only concession by the government made in these wiretap laws, if they are to inconvenience entities with their surveillance they will at least have to pay for it http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/us/nsa-said-to-have-paid-e... Also some targeted surveillance might be necessary the problem is with the dragnet sort, and these revelations don't make a distinction between the two which doesn't automatically mean that it's the worst case scenario.

Assange might not have been pleased with his interview with Schmidt but suggesting that Google started the Arab spring is absurd.

There seem to be a lot of people here determined to argue that google is innocent based on innuendo.