The deep state's stake in your brain

[Joseph Tracy]

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e.

1)The first keypoint  here is the Pentagon’s increasing outsourcing of actual decision making influence to a secretive collection of paranoid( my word, but clearly aligned with neocon thought) private security firms with no public input brought together as the ‘Highlands Forum’ .  They are particularly concerned with cyber warfare in the info age including the management of public perception of wars. The writer documents this thoroughly. 

Participants in  Highlands Forum:  Delegates have included senior personnel from SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton, RAND Corp., Cisco, Human Genome Sciences, eBay, PayPal, IBM, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, the BBC, Disney, General Electric, Enron, among innumerable others; Democrat and Republican members of Congress and the Senate; senior executives from the US energy industry such as Daniel Yergin of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates; and key people involved in both sides of presidential campaigns.
Other participants have included senior media professionals: David Ignatius, associate editor of the Washington Post and at the time the executive editor of the International Herald Tribune; Thomas Friedman, long-time New York Times columnist; Arnaud de Borchgrave, an editor at Washington Times and United Press International; Steven Levy, a former Newsweek editor, senior writer for Wired and now chief tech editor at Medium; Lawrence Wright, staff writer at the New Yorker; Noah Shachtmann, executive editor at the Daily Beast; Rebecca McKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices Online; Nik Gowing of the BBC; and John Markoff of the New York Times.
  
The next section of the article is about the founding, funding and government connections of Google from the original software development at Stanford until now. It tracks the numerous google leaders with ties to DARPA, CIA, NSA, and Highlands forum including the large inflow of contracts thaat came with the push for the Total Information Awareness program which morphed into current global surveillance arrangements, support for drone war etc. The scope and number of DOD Intel connections  with and money support to key Silicon Valley leaders is pretty staggering.

Below is another quote which begins to bring the article to its conclusion.

"...Facebook’s 2008 round of funding was led by Greylock Venture Capital, which invested $27.5 million. The firm’s senior partners include Howard Cox, another former NVCA chair who also sits on the board of In-Q-Tel. Apart from Breyer and Zuckerberg, Facebook’s only other board member is Peter Thiel, co-founder of defense contractor Palantir which provides all sorts of data-mining and visualization technologies to US government, military and intelligence agencies, including the NSA and FBI, and which itself was nurtured to financial viability by Highlands Forum members.
Palantir co-founders Thiel and Alex Karp met with John Poindexter in 2004, according to Wired, the same year Poindexter had attended the Highlands Island Forum in Singapore. They met at the home of Richard Perle, another Andrew Marshall acolyte. Poindexter helped Palantir open doors, and to assemble “a legion of advocates from the most influential strata of government.” Thiel had also met with Gilman Louie of In-Q-Tel, securing the backing of the CIA in this early phase.
And so we come full circle. Data-mining programs like ExecuteLocus and projects linked to it, which were developed throughout this period, apparently laid the groundwork for the new NSA programmes eventually disclosed by Edward Snowden. …..”

All of this is about how citizen’s taxes pay for billionaires to undermine the US constitution and create a police surveillance state. It is obvious that Zuckerburg, Thiel, Google and far right neo-cons like Richard Perle had far more to do with the election of know-nothing war and surveillance hawks like Trump, Bush and Obama than the Russians.
	


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Nafeez Ahmed
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