Google and Meta Function as Extensions of the US Intelligence Community | Hacker News Reader

Google and Meta Function as Extensions of the US Intelligence Community

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54 pointstomohawk40 comments

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It would be shocking if there weren't dozens of former employees of each working at the others.

Employees per employer

Meta - 86,482

Google - 156,500

CIA - 21,575

FBI - 35,000

Dept of Defense - 747,809 (civilians)

Dept of State - 13,000

Large companies with global operations end up hiring people with backgrounds in security and geopolitics. They go to conferences apparently.

Concluding "the CIA's substantial control over online censorship" is a wild claim based on the evidence provided.

This critique can only be sustained if you hide in statistics and avoid mentioning specific people and their specific positions. Then, after you mention specifics, it becomes a "complicated conspiracy theory."

What does mentioning specific people change? Those stats all represent individuals. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. "Hey, here's a picture of Meta employees with a retired guy that spoke at a conference" is not that.

As does Microsoft, Apple, AT&T and every other company involved in the PRISM program. The issue is that people just do not seem to care.

This is not surveillance. This is content shaping and censorship.

How do they know what to shape and what to censor if they are not surveilling?

This is basically how the 1st Amendment is "backdoored" in this country.

The government cannot be so brazen in curtailing freedom of speech directly so they use Big Tech as the cat's paw. Any complaint over Big Tech's censorship/narrative control can then be met with the “it’s a private company, they can do what they want” retort.

Not just the First. Second and Fourth too.

funnily enough my monthly NRA magazine is the only “mainstream” media source i have actually seen calling attention to this

Are the encryption-rights/privacy-rights crowds finally converging with the firearm-rights crowds?

It’s been happening for years, but does seem to be speeding up a bit recently.

Although the CIA and State Department have unquestionably done a lot of bad stuff, I can't help but feel this may be a good thing. Online discourse has gotten extremely toxic and divisive. Moreover, it's quite likely that much of what we're seeing is the work of foreign adversaries. Encouraging bridges between Google/Meta and the US Intelligence Community, if it indeed helps reduce the sort of online discourse that is tearing the US apart (which I suspect it will), is something that I would feel extremely relieved to see.

Why do you assume their objective is to decrease toxicity and divisiveness?

Wouldn't the CIA want to increase love of country? I think decreasing toxicity and divisiveness within the country might help with that.

They might want to increase our division against enemy countries, but decrease division within the US and against friendly countries.

Again, you assume their goal is the continuation of the republic as it exists and to make that more likely. This is probably not the case, first of all these agencies are compartmentalized, different projects can and often do have competing goals, and second, their ultimate goal is the continuation of state power, as is the goal of every state, and if that goal conflicts with what Americans view as being in their interest, then any expected loyalty to their countrymen cannot be relied upon.

But why would they not want “the continuation of the republic?” You don’t offer any plausible motive for why they wouldn’t. The power of the state — eg the ability to get folks to row in the same direction towards a common goal — is contingent upon the social contract, which at the present moment most seem to experience as perilously broken.

I don't need to offer you a motive. I can't read peoples minds. I'm just pointing out that your assumption that they view our social goals as valuable is unfounded. Emperors have killed their own people before. The power of a state rests upon social contract until the state has real power, and then it rests on the maintenance of that power. You cannot foresee what the maintenance of that power entails, and neither can I, which is why I can do no more than speculate on motive. Again, I'm not saying they don't value the same things we value, I believe that but that's not a claim I'm making here. I'm just pointing out that that doesn't have to be the case. You're ascribing a motive you cannot possibly know to the actions of other individuals, I won't do that. Remember, the state is comprised of people, with goals and ends and desires and beliefs, it's not a perfect alamgamation of the desires of those governed.

Let me ask you, why might a state view a foreign population, not a foreign state but a foreign population, as an enemy or a threat? What is it specific to that population that poses a threat to said state? Is it something that precludes the domestic population from being a similar threat? Why must the state view us as anything more than another colony?

>why might a state view a foreign population, not a foreign state but a foreign population, as an enemy or a threat? What is it specific to that population that poses a threat to said state? Is it something that precludes the domestic population from being a similar threat? Why must the state view us as anything more than another colony?

The state might view a foreign population as an enemy because they support their government which is an enemy. If we support a foreign government, the state might also view us as an enemy. My original point was that the CIA wants us to support the US government.

Part of the danger is that the CIA does not represent the people. The leadership is unelected, and they basically have influence over policy within government, and increasingly the ability to shape the speech of citizens through private corporations. Who decides what the "bad stuff" is?

There was a time on Twitter when sharing actual links to US documents on Covid would result in a ban for misinformation, or scientific opinions of actual doctors would result in suspension, if it was not in line with media talking points. The whitehouse itself would on occasion tell Twitter what it didn't like. Do you mean like that?

I feel like things are painful now partly because we live in the time of the first generation of humans to be born with this type of telecommunication, apps all day everyday, nobody knowing how to act. I feel like, maybe just let it play out? You could force it one way or another but like so many things intuitively it feels like people prefer to be happy and generations will rotate through ways of processing info until an equilibrium is reached. And natural equilibrium feels like it would be more stable than trying to control how people behave.

>"it's quite likely that much of what we're seeing is the work of foreign and domestic* adversaries"

I think it's naive to assume the same weapons and tools used abroad won't be used at home. We've already found American police forces using IMSI catchers to surveil protestors in their own country.

Would you feel even safer if they were monitoring phone calls, or any conversation that happened near a phone, for the communication of sentiments that might benefit our foreign adversaries?

There is and will be constant flow of people and information between corporations, and governments.

This is also true when it comes to mainstream media.

Same for big pharma and government health institutions.

The situation is not shocking, it is normal. Although it is also part of 'manufacturing consent'.

There is censorship laundering, where governments dictate narrative through corporations, and privacy laundering when governments buy citizen data from corporations.

It just works like this. We should be aware about this, but it is certainly not shocking.

Duh, they're incorporated in the US. Are there any domestic businesses that size that can truly say they refuse to cooperate with the intelligence community? Because that would be newsworthy.

You shouldn’t approach it from such a detached, cynical angle. The import is as if the OSI embedded senior agents in the postal system during the labor unrest in the US during the 1910s-20s, and the FBI in Ma Bell during the second red scare in the 40s-50s.

The possibility for gatekeeping primary modes of information exchange is quite real, and quite worrying.

Neither of those hypotheticals seem that far-fetched. Maybe that's just the cynical side of me talking,

> The possibility for gatekeeping primary modes of information exchange is quite real, and quite worrying.

It's distressing today. The US intercepts an insane amount of communiqué - we knew about India's involvement in the Canadian Sikhist assassination before it happened. American-made electronics leak insurgent battle plans, tattle on domestic terrorists, enable modem-level attacks and who knows what else. The only reason you and I aren't threatened by it is the decorum required to operate an above-ground surveillance network.

No US company, especially at scale, can promise protection against the state for it's users. There's precious little anyone can do about it, nobody is selling an "alternative product" without state oversight.

I do wonder on that basis what ground we could ever have to stand on when we criticize China's surveillance regime. That would be like the US accusing Russia of meddling in elections.

For me at least, China's big issue is the Great Firewall. It's easy to make big claims when your citizens are self-contained in an information vacuum. The US has a similar autocracy issue, but whistleblowers are generally lauded unless they expose state secrets. The US political landscape is grim, but the grass is most certainly not greener in the single-party states.

It's curious that in as comprehensive an analysis as this, OP does not even mention Pepe Silvia.

Domestic terrorists hate it that corporations have sophisticated anti-terror operations.

It sucks that corporations have to take this on themselves, but that's just the world we live in. It's no mystery why these people fled the CIA for private industry during the Trump era.

Strange comment. I don't see anything about domestic terrorism in the linked thread.

That's because the author of the linked thread is being intentionally misleading about the careers and expertise of these individuals, and what they do as corporate executives.

I wonder what domestic terror operations these brave content moderators have thwarted.

Feel free to look through here: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21083819/facebook-dan...

Keyword is "armed militia". You can look a few of them up on Google to see what they get up to.

People yell at Meta when they don't moderate content and when they do moderate content, so I don't envy them.

The CIA was unable to stop an armed militia storming the Capitol, the insurgents failed due to their own incompetence.

Or do they turn a blind eye when the former CIA director has a cabinet position?

What are they misleading us about?

Color me the brightest shade of surprise

This is laying the groundwork for the conspiracy theory that Google and other tech companies rigged the 2024 election, in case Biden wins. Tim pool has been posting about it recently. What most likely actually happened is these people got sick of working in the govt around 2018 (gee I wonder why) and fled to the high paying tech industry, and when a resume lands on your desk with 5+ years experience in the CIA, it's hard to ignore.

Bold title with and bold claims, but really little to get from the write-up itself than LinkedIn bios. However, I could add a question to the following quote:

> Is it merely a coincidence that censorship has increased aggressively since then?

Well, if you really have a foreign actor waging digital war at you, then what are your short-term options really?

I mean honestly, seeing what's happening around Europe and especially ex socialist countries, I can only confirm that the Putin regime wages a full-scale digital war towards European population. Why would that be different in the USA and why would it be bad to allow measures to be taken against it by working with Internet giants like Google and Meta?

> Bold title with and bold claims

It's a cut-and-paste job of articles that have been circulating among political magazines and blogs for years.

It should be different in the US because augmenting the flow of information to manipulate behavior goes against the foundational principles that the US holds and represents. We expect Russia to manipulate and lie to the populations and control what they say to each other. We tell ourselves that our success comes from our integrity, our unwillingness to do this, that we outperform and defeat them precisely because they do this and we do not. I personally do believe this as well. And besides that, we should be condemning anyone that engages in this sort of thing, not whatabouting it. My mind is mine, it's not your battlefield. All that a state gets from me when attempting to do this is withdrawal of my loyalty to it and my faith in it.

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