Julian Assange: Google is not what it seems
Translation of an excerpt from Julian Assange’s “When Google Met WikiLeaks”: coups, surveillance, collusion with the government, and other weekdays for a good corporation.
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt shares a joke with Hillary Clinton during a “casual conversation” - a special meeting with company employees at the main office in Mountain View, California, July 21, 2014
***
Eric Schmidt is quite an influential figure, even among those powerful personalities with whom I had to cross my path since I created WikiLeaks. In mid-May 2011, I was under house arrest in Norfolk County, about three hours northwest of London. Punitive measures against our activity were then unfolded at all and in every moment, it seemed to last forever. At that time it was difficult to get my attention. But when my colleague, Joseph Farrell, said that the executive director of Google wanted to arrange a meeting with me, I was all in a rumor.
')
In some sense, the top echelon of Google was for me more distant and incomprehensible than the government offices of Washington. By that time, we had been clinging to the horns with many high-ranking US officials for many years. All their mystery has evaporated. However, the power centers growing in Silicon Valley were unfamiliar to me and I suddenly realized the opportunity to feel what was happening with the company, which is becoming one of the most influential on the planet. And it was Schmidt who took the position of CEO in 2001 and turned Google into an empire.
I was intrigued by the fact that the mountain is going to Mohammed. But only after Schmidt and his companions visited me, did I understand who they really were.
***
The stated reason for the meeting was the book. Schmidt wrote a treatise with Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas. The book was supposed to be a guide to brainstorming techniques used by Google. At that time I still knew little about Cohen. In fact, Cohen went to work at Google from the US State Department in 2010. He was the man of the Y generation [ approx. 1981-1990 ], a generator of ideas in the government between two state administrations, a court from the world of political think tanks and institutions, who got there in some twenty years. He grew up as a senior adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. In the government, working in the service of Planning Policy [ app. Policy Planning Staff, a US State Department service that acts as an internal think tank. ] Cohen soon earned the nickname “Condi's party-starter”, passing buzzwords from Silicon Valley to political circles and producing amazing rhetorical nonsense like “State Diplomacy 2.0” ( "Public Diplomacy 2.0"). On his personal page on the website of the Council on International Relations in his qualifications it is indicated “Terrorism; radicalization; the impact of 21st century communications technology on statehood; Iran".
Google Ideas Director Jared Cohen shares his geopolitical vision with US Army recruits in the West Point Military Academy lecture hall, February 26, 2014
It was Cohen, who, working at the State Department, wrote Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey by email with a request to postpone the planned technical work in order to promote the uprising in Iran , which did not take place in 2009. His documented affair with Google began the same year that he became friends with Eric Schmidt, being in the ruins of Baghdad after the occupation. Just a month later, Schmidt recreated the habitual Cohen habitat inside Google by developing an internal “think tank”, placing it in New York and putting Cohen at the head. This is how Google Ideas came about.
Later, this year, the couple wrote for Foreign Affairs Council magazine “Foreign Affairs” material, extolling the reform potential of Silicon Valley technologies as a tool for US foreign policy. Describing what they called the "coalition of connections" ("coalitions of the connected"), Schmidt and Cohen argue:
In the same text, they mention that these technologies are provided primarily by the private sector ("this technology is overwhelmingly provided by the private sector"). Shortly after publication, events take place in Tunisia. Then Egypt , and after and throughout the rest of the Middle East, revolutions broke out [ the events mentioned refer to the period 2010-2012 ]. The echo of these events presented a real performance in the online media for Western Internet users. Professional political observers who had a hand in smoothing over the events when describing uprisings in support of pro-Western dictators called what happened “Twitter revolutions”. Suddenly, everyone wanted to be at the intersection of global US influence points and social media, and Schmidt and Cohen have already established a place for themselves in this field. Taking the working title “The Empire of the Mind”, they began to stretch their article to the size of a book, simultaneously searching for big and significant names in the world of technology and global influence, to make them part of their research.
And they wanted to meet me. I agreed. Agreed on June.
More information:
Original excerpt on WikiLeaks
"When Google Met WikiLeaks" in its entirety ($ 10)
Be sure to look at the footnotes in the original article - there is more material on the book
The second part of the translation
Third part of the translation
Fourth part translation
Fifth part of the translation
Sixth part of the translation
upd A bit of geography
Delving into the translation, I noticed that Assange described in detail the end point of the route of representatives of Google from the airport in London to its location - East Anglia, Norfolk, Beccles ("... into East Anglia to Norfolk and Beccles"). After a brief googling, it turned out that in vain at first I had called Norfolk a village, as it turned out to be a county. But Beccles is the city in which Assange stayed during his house arrest. Moreover, this city is located in the county of Suffolk (Suffolk), which borders the Norfolk. So, it turns out, Julian is a little confused here in the English provinces (or maybe he intentionally confused the tracks, who knows).
Thanks for clarifying and editing xumuku , YevgenG and KirillEltsov
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt shares a joke with Hillary Clinton during a “casual conversation” - a special meeting with company employees at the main office in Mountain View, California, July 21, 2014
***
Eric Schmidt is quite an influential figure, even among those powerful personalities with whom I had to cross my path since I created WikiLeaks. In mid-May 2011, I was under house arrest in Norfolk County, about three hours northwest of London. Punitive measures against our activity were then unfolded at all and in every moment, it seemed to last forever. At that time it was difficult to get my attention. But when my colleague, Joseph Farrell, said that the executive director of Google wanted to arrange a meeting with me, I was all in a rumor.
')
In some sense, the top echelon of Google was for me more distant and incomprehensible than the government offices of Washington. By that time, we had been clinging to the horns with many high-ranking US officials for many years. All their mystery has evaporated. However, the power centers growing in Silicon Valley were unfamiliar to me and I suddenly realized the opportunity to feel what was happening with the company, which is becoming one of the most influential on the planet. And it was Schmidt who took the position of CEO in 2001 and turned Google into an empire.
I was intrigued by the fact that the mountain is going to Mohammed. But only after Schmidt and his companions visited me, did I understand who they really were.
***
The stated reason for the meeting was the book. Schmidt wrote a treatise with Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas. The book was supposed to be a guide to brainstorming techniques used by Google. At that time I still knew little about Cohen. In fact, Cohen went to work at Google from the US State Department in 2010. He was the man of the Y generation [ approx. 1981-1990 ], a generator of ideas in the government between two state administrations, a court from the world of political think tanks and institutions, who got there in some twenty years. He grew up as a senior adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. In the government, working in the service of Planning Policy [ app. Policy Planning Staff, a US State Department service that acts as an internal think tank. ] Cohen soon earned the nickname “Condi's party-starter”, passing buzzwords from Silicon Valley to political circles and producing amazing rhetorical nonsense like “State Diplomacy 2.0” ( "Public Diplomacy 2.0"). On his personal page on the website of the Council on International Relations in his qualifications it is indicated “Terrorism; radicalization; the impact of 21st century communications technology on statehood; Iran".
Google Ideas Director Jared Cohen shares his geopolitical vision with US Army recruits in the West Point Military Academy lecture hall, February 26, 2014
It was Cohen, who, working at the State Department, wrote Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey by email with a request to postpone the planned technical work in order to promote the uprising in Iran , which did not take place in 2009. His documented affair with Google began the same year that he became friends with Eric Schmidt, being in the ruins of Baghdad after the occupation. Just a month later, Schmidt recreated the habitual Cohen habitat inside Google by developing an internal “think tank”, placing it in New York and putting Cohen at the head. This is how Google Ideas came about.
Later, this year, the couple wrote for Foreign Affairs Council magazine “Foreign Affairs” material, extolling the reform potential of Silicon Valley technologies as a tool for US foreign policy. Describing what they called the "coalition of connections" ("coalitions of the connected"), Schmidt and Cohen argue:
Democratic states building military coalitions have the opportunity to build similar relations on the basis of communication technologies. [...] They [technology] offer new ways to fulfill the duty to protect their citizens around the world.
In the same text, they mention that these technologies are provided primarily by the private sector ("this technology is overwhelmingly provided by the private sector"). Shortly after publication, events take place in Tunisia. Then Egypt , and after and throughout the rest of the Middle East, revolutions broke out [ the events mentioned refer to the period 2010-2012 ]. The echo of these events presented a real performance in the online media for Western Internet users. Professional political observers who had a hand in smoothing over the events when describing uprisings in support of pro-Western dictators called what happened “Twitter revolutions”. Suddenly, everyone wanted to be at the intersection of global US influence points and social media, and Schmidt and Cohen have already established a place for themselves in this field. Taking the working title “The Empire of the Mind”, they began to stretch their article to the size of a book, simultaneously searching for big and significant names in the world of technology and global influence, to make them part of their research.
And they wanted to meet me. I agreed. Agreed on June.
More information:
Original excerpt on WikiLeaks
"When Google Met WikiLeaks" in its entirety ($ 10)
Be sure to look at the footnotes in the original article - there is more material on the book
The second part of the translation
Third part of the translation
Fourth part translation
Fifth part of the translation
Sixth part of the translation
upd A bit of geography
Delving into the translation, I noticed that Assange described in detail the end point of the route of representatives of Google from the airport in London to its location - East Anglia, Norfolk, Beccles ("... into East Anglia to Norfolk and Beccles"). After a brief googling, it turned out that in vain at first I had called Norfolk a village, as it turned out to be a county. But Beccles is the city in which Assange stayed during his house arrest. Moreover, this city is located in the county of Suffolk (Suffolk), which borders the Norfolk. So, it turns out, Julian is a little confused here in the English provinces (or maybe he intentionally confused the tracks, who knows).
Thanks for clarifying and editing xumuku , YevgenG and KirillEltsov
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/299326/
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