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Google Is Not What It Seems by Julian Assange

Google Is Not What It Seems by Julian Assange https://archive.ph/UDDBC#selection-693.93-693.365

Since at least the 1970s, authentic actors like unions and churches have folded under a sustained assault by free-market statism, transforming “civil society” into a buyer’s market for political factions and corporate interests looking to exert influence at arm’s length.

The civil society conference circuit—which flies developing-world activists across the globe hundreds of times a year to bless the unholy union between “government and private stakeholders” at geopoliticized events like the “Stockholm Internet Forum”—simply could not exist if it were not blasted with millions of dollars in political funding annually.

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 US power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation. But Google has always been comfortable with this proximity. Long before company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired Schmidt in 2001, their initial research upon which Google was based had been partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).48 And even as Schmidt’s Google developed an image as the overly friendly giant of global tech, it was building a close relationship with the intelligence community.

As the self-described “radical centrist”65 New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote in 1999, sometimes it is not enough to leave the global dominance of American tech corporations to something as mercurial as “the free market”:

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.66

If the future of the internet is to be Google, that should be of serious concern to people all over the world—in Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the former Soviet Union, and even in Europe—for whom the internet embodies the promise of an alternative to US cultural, economic, and strategic hegemony.71

A “don’t be evil” empire is still an empire.

Anonymous Complainant Targeting Zubair Tweet Linked to Tek Fog App, BJYM Leader in Gujarat

Anonymous Complainant Targeting Zubair Tweet Linked to Tek Fog App, BJYM Leader in Gujarat https://thewire.in/tekfog/altnews.html Ayushman Kaul, Naomi Barton and Devesh Kumar / 02 July 2022 The Wire's investigation into a network of 757 Twitter accounts used to mount attacks against AltNews found that the recovery email ID for the anonymous Twitter handle that sparked the original FIR was This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.'.

The prosecution failed to reveal the account holder’s identity in court, but the Indian Express reported that the police later sent Twitter a notice under Section 91 of Criminal Procedure Code on the evening of June 29, asking them to provide details of the account @balajikijaiin that goes by the name ‘Hanuman Bhakt’.

Investigations by The Wire have uncovered a network of 757 accounts linked to Ahir that have attempted – since 2018 – to incriminate the fact-checker alongside Pratik Sinha, co-founder at AltNews, by highlighting and misconstruing old tweets uploaded by the two journalists to portray them as “Hinduphobic” and then tagging the local authorities in order to have the two journalists arrested for supposedly hurting religious sentiments.

In particular, this network also included eight replica accounts of @balajikijaiin – the anonymous account whose complaint formed the basis of Zubair’s arrest by the Delhi police. Each of these eight accounts exhibited similar properties – profile picture, tweets and usernames – and employed the same modus operandi to target the AltNews co-founders on Twitter. While five of these eight replica accounts have been deleted, two other accounts - @balajikijain and @HanumanBhakt101 - remain active at the time of analysis.

Complementing this activity was a larger network of 18,364 accounts which were also used to trend other hashtags – #ArrestZubair, #ArrestMohamedZubair and #ArrestBlasphemerMdZubair – that targeted the journalist.

In June 2021, the Tek Fog network had 77,800 users, many of which became inactive following the publication of our three part investigation. The activation of this cluster to manipulate public perception around the Zubair case is the first time in the last six months that the use of this network has been detected.

The original @balajikijaiin was the complainant cited in the Delhi Police’s case against Mohammed Zubair. The account was temporarily disabled after the public outcry generated by the case; when it returned, it proceeded to make a similar tweet against the co-founder of AltNews, Pratik Sinha, targeting out a tweet of his from seven years ago and asking for police action to be taken against him.

 

Salute Association for Democratic Rights (APDR) on turning 50

Today we commemorate the 50^th birth anniversary of the Association for Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR) of West Bengal which is one of the oldest human rights organisations in India. A truly landmark day in the history of the civil liberties movement in India. Positive that today inspite of all ups and down it is shimmering it’s torch .

https://countercurrents.org/2022/06/salute-association-for-democratic-rights-apdr-on-turning-50/

by  Harsh Thakore

26/06/2022

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