"Julian Assange cautioned all of us a while back, in the vein of revelations similar to those provided by Edward Snowden, that Google — the insidious search engine with a reputation for powering humanity’s research — plays the dark hand role in furthering U.S. imperialism and foreign policy agendas.
...This cult of government and non-government insiders have a firm belief their goals should be the unassailable, unquestionable motivator for American imperialism — whatever the U.S. thinks best as a “benevolent superpower,” so should the rest of the ‘non-evil’ world.
“They will tell you that open-mindedness is a virtue, but all perspectives that challenge the exceptionalist drive at the heart of American foreign policy will remain invisible to them,” Assange wrote in When Google Met Wikileaks.
“This is the impenetrable banality of ‘don’t be evil.’
They believe that they are doing good.
And that is a problem.”
...Fortune, calling Cohen a “fascinating fellow,” noted that, in his book Children of Jihad, the young diplomat and technology enthusiast “advocates for the use of technology for social upheaval in the Middle East and elsewhere.”
...It wasn’t until weeks and months after this gathering Assange fully realized how closely Google operates in tandem with the government of the United States — and how perilous the innocent mask of its public intentions truly is in light of such cooperation.
“They will tell you that open-mindedness is a virtue, but all perspectives that challenge the exceptionalist drive at the heart of American foreign policy will remain invisible to them,” Assange wrote in When Google Met Wikileaks.
They believe that they are doing good.
And that is a problem.”
...Fortune, calling Cohen a “fascinating fellow,” noted that, in his book Children of Jihad, the young diplomat and technology enthusiast “advocates for the use of technology for social upheaval in the Middle East and elsewhere.”
...It wasn’t until weeks and months after this gathering Assange fully realized how closely Google operates in tandem with the government of the United States — and how perilous the innocent mask of its public intentions truly is in light of such cooperation.
Ironically enough, in Wikileaks’ publishing three years later of the Global Intelligence Files — internal emails from private security firm, Stratfor — Cohen’s and Google’s true depth of influence became strikingly apparent. Assange wrote:
“Cohen’s directorate appeared to cross over from public relations and ‘corporate responsibility’ work into active corporate intervention in foreign affairs at a level that is normally reserved for states. Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google’s ‘director of regime change.’ According to the emails, he was trying to plant his fingerprints on some of the major historical events in the contemporary Middle East. He could be placed in Egypt during the revolution, meeting with Wael Ghonim, the Google employee whose arrest and imprisonment hours later would make him a PR-friendly symbol of the uprising in the Western press. Meetings had been planned in Palestine and Turkey, both of which—claimed Stratfor emails—were killed by the senior Google leadership as too risky. Only a few months before he met with me, Cohen was planning a trip to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan to ‘engage the Iranian communities closer to the border,’ as part of Google Ideas’ project on repressive societies.”
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