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Comment by adenverd | Hacker News Reader

This article omits some pretty relevant info:

* Thiel founded Palantir [0], which has a very deep and ongoing relationship providing counter-terrorism info and analytics to 3-letter agencies. His comments are likely an attempt to protect Palantir's contracts from Google.

* Google recently (2018) had trouble with employees exposing a censored search engine project targeted for China, and quitting over it [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/technology/google-employe...

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Palantir's clients might be public info, but AFAIK, there is no evidence that Google has completely terminated their relationship with the NSA and the CIA. Also to be super fair, it may well be that Google has no choice in this matter. But in any case, the 'treasonous' claim seems to be a whole lot of hot air. Google will be shut-down before they give China any direct access that assists their intelligence ops.

>Google will be shut-down before they give China any direct access that assists their intelligence ops.

Their Dragonfly project was going to be providing this kind of surveillance to the Chinese government until Googlers (indeterminately) put a stop to it?

https://theintercept.com/collections/google-dragonfly-china/

I don't know what you mean by "this kind" of surveillance. What was reported was they were going to give the Chinese government the ability to remove links from their index. Any business in China has to operate in accordance with the local law. Yes, thats probably incompatible with the morality of some people, but doesn't sound like some crazy surveillance scheme to me. Also, as an aside, nobody (especially in the west) seems to be willing to take a personal hit on this. Have the people who oppose this stopped buying stuff from China? Buying Chinese made goods is just sending more cash to the Chinese government. Has Google stopped manufacturing their phones in China? Has Apple or anyone else? Its all fake concern and useless posturing for PR as far as I am concerned.

On that note it would be paradoxically a conflict of interest for the CIA/NSA to investigate Google and yet of course they have because of their working relationship. So any penetration from China should theoretically be detected by them anyway or at least on their radar.

This is nonsense. They wouldn’t have live pcaps of every router and endpoint at Google.

Yes, live pcaps of every router does sound like nonsense doesn't it? I'm sure you too can imagine a far more saner scenario.

What is Google's relationship with the NSA and the CIA?

I don't have the signed contract handy, but its probably a one sided relationship. :)

"Facebook, Google, Apple, and six other leading online services have all gone on record as having given their customers’ data to the NSA, as legally required by the “PRISM” program. Data shared includes emails, messages, and documents."

https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/8-ways-the-nsa-spies-on-you/

"MUSCULAR and TURMOIL – Headed by the GCHQ with help from the NSA, these programs collect data (thought to be twice as much as PRISM) indiscriminately from Google and Yahoo internal data networks and share it with the NSA, who then scan it for anything ‘suspect’. Even though the data from Google and Yahoo are supposed to be encrypted, it’s intercepted during internal transfers, during which time it’s not encrypted at all."

"XKeyscore – Run by the NSA but shared with all Five Eyes nations as well as Japan, Germany and Sweden, XKeyscore is the comprehensive program that analyses all the data from all the above programs (plus others) and creates a searchable database. Targets can be searched for using name, email, or phone number, but can also be found using other criteria, such as unusual words they use often, locations they visit using Google Maps, or using another country’s language often."

https://www.valuewalk.com/2019/07/espionage-operations-digit...

https://www.cnet.com/news/nsa-surveillance-programs-prism-up...

None of those involve any interaction between Google and the NSA. PRISM ingests data collected by the FBI from those companies under court order for wiretapping specific accounts. MUSCULAR is run by neither Google nor the NSA. XKeyscore is a frontend for a database of data collected elsewhere.

Where is it documented that PRISM is an FBI feed ingest? I’ve never heard that from the Snowden docs

Snowden and Greenwald can't read. The FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit is right there on the slides they released: https://i.imgur.com/setOJIm.jpg

This was well-known and commented on at the time Greenwald's articles were being published, with the NYT reporting on the program correctly the very next day by interviewing people actually involved in the program (verifying claims like real journalists — why didn't The Guardian think of that?).

https://www.cnet.com/news/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-...

https://medium.com/@alecmuffett/how-to-talk-about-prism-and-...

https://medium.com/prism-truth/the-prism-details-matter-82a1...

In response, Greenwald doubled down on his incompetent misreading of the slides without providing any evidence to support his obviously ridiculous assertions.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/14/nsa-pa...

I find it hard to believe that Google had no idea about this. In any case, I recognize that co-operation with the NSA is.. as they say.. non-optional.

> I find it hard to believe that Google had no idea about this.

Had no idea about what? There is no evidence that Google has cooperated with the NSA on anything except tracking down Chinese hackers.

> I recognize that co-operation with the NSA is.. as they say.. non-optional.

There is no evidence that they have been coerced into cooperating with the NSA on anything.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/googl...

"We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links, especially the links in the slide. We do not provide any government, including the U.S. government, with access to our systems. We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform.”

First they say that they were concerned about the possibility.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323949904578539...

"Google's request, made in a public letter written by its chief legal officer, David Drummond, comes after the government last Saturday publicly acknowledged that Internet content companies had received secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requests about the activities of their users."

Then they say that they handed over the data as legally required.

The only point worth mentioning is the difference between 'access and 'unfettered access'. Google claims the latter never happened, only the former.

>There is no evidence that they have been coerced into cooperating with the NSA on anything.

Okay, you believe what you want to believe. This conversation doesn't seem tb be going anywhere. Goodbye, and have a nice day.

What relationship? The relationship they are forced into?

>which has a very deep and ongoing relationship providing counter-terrorism info and analytics to 3-letter agencies.

I mean it borderlines on his job to be interested in the subject matter of Chinese spying or whatever. Who watches Google? This all might come to nothing, but having tech companies watch each other would be advantageous for the public.

I agree there's politicing involved here.

And the article actually glanced at but didn’t elaborate on

- Google decided to open a new AI research center in China, expanding its existing presence there. This in the face of expanding AI assisted surveillance in xinjiang and its 10 million population.

- Google decided not to renew its contract for project maven, a way to analyze drone footage using AI, for the US DoD

> Google decided to open a new AI research center in China, expanding its existing presence there. This in the face of expanding AI assisted surveillance in xinjiang and its 10 million population.

What does the first point have to do with the second? Is Google assisting in surveillance in Xinjiang?

A more direct connection is Apple handing over access to all Chinese users' iCloud data to the PRC, despite knowing about the mass surveillance and detentions in Xinjiang that this data transfer enables. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/02/5-things-you-...

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