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That’s the way it is. The world is in the middle of World War III.
Of course, this is NOT public knowledge. This is something that only the American “leadership”, and international leaders have any idea about.
Not the rabble.
Not people like you.
And let me be blunt. The United States owns the media, and all communication traffic over the internet. They don’t want any one getting near the truth. So if you all want to know what the truth is, look at what they are hiding. Look at what they are omitting. Look at what they are “glossing over”. Look at what they are ignoring.
What won’t they dare talk about?
What is right there, in your face, and yet it is omitted from all public discourse?
Yes. John Bolton -rabid anti-China neocon was put in charge of the Bio-Weapons office in Washington DC and launched a long and concentrated series of bio-weapons attacks against China. Mike Pompeo referred to it as a “live exercise”, and it was coordinated with other efforts in Hong Kong, Taiwan, XinJiang, and throughout the South East Asian environs.
But, the USA was unprepared for the blow-back.
Coronavirus is a bio-weapon that was patented nearly twenty years ago by the State Department, and they “threw caution to the wind” when they carpet bombed China with eight bio-weapons targeting food and livestock, and three new and “novel” never-before-seen viruses against the Chinese people.
Not expecting that China knew what was going on all the time.
Ah. That’s a total of eleven (x11) new and “novel” viruses that hit China “out of the blue” at the same precise moment when Trump decided to conduct a “hybrid war” against China.
But I covered all this elsewhere.
In fact, I even draped the overview on the main index for a spell…
All three bio-Weapons (used against China) are in America now
So America got everything all “fired up” and started the same old playbook. But once they realized that a traditional war was not in the “cards”, they decided to “soften up” China with some bio-weapons. But it didn’t work out as planned. Never the less, the plan is still a “go go go”, and everyone is following the timetable, no matter how insane it appears.
Well,,, let’s review for a second.
I have long argued that the USA under the Trump administration used three bio-weapons targeting Chinese civilians in 2020. The first, the COVID-19B hit on CNY, and supposedly the American population was inoculated from it by the COVID-19A strain.
I have further argued that all the bio-weapons would boomerang back to the United States either intentionally or inadvertently. You simply cannot isolate an infected area well.
And that is what we are seeing today.
Attack One.Brain Seizure Virus. While Americans were (supposedly) inoculated from the lethal “B 1.1.7 strain” of COVID-19 by the flu-like “A strain”, apparently the lethal strain has NOW hit America. I’ve tons and tons of movies knowing what it was like when it hit China.
Of course they were all banned by Trump by Executive Order, so Americans and their allies never saw any of them. Thus the sheeple bought into the lies that the COVID was just a slight cold.
This realization, that the lethal “B strain” is now all over America, is forcing the authorities to scramble for the mRNA vaccine. Which is designed as a multi-purpose solution that can be expanded with other “boosters” when new Bio-weapons events unfold. Read about it HERE.
Attack Two.Death by Vomiting Virus. The second bio-weapon to hit China occurred in July 2020 in Beijing. It was a tick borne virus, (Dabieshantick virus and SFTSV) and should alert anyone because not only does Beijing not have ticks, but the nearest tick infested region is half a nation away. Roughly the distance between Florida and Maine.
As soon as the CIA assets turned over the vials to the PLA, Donald Trump was whisked off to a secure military base, and America went to Defcon One.
The virus causes a disease called “Severe Fever with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome” (SFTS). Essentially your internal organs start to hemorrhage you vomit them out violently until you die. The STFS virus is transmitted to humans, and is thought to be fatal in 1 to 3 out of every 10 infections. The people die a long, drawn out and painful death.
Trump launched this virus against China when it was obvious that [1] China controlled COVID-19B, and that [2] Hong Kong was secure, and [3] the NGO (CIA agents) were escorted out of China.
Well it seems that the American “news media” is readying the American population for some blow back.
One year later, it appears that Los Angeles is expecting the second bio-weapon that hit China; the Death by violent-vomiting bio-weapon. Hitting Los Angles this Summer. Just peachy. And you know, this is a “new virus” of a completely different bio-weapon family. The COVID vaccine won’t protect anyone. Read about it HERE. So local California authorities are taking the necessary precautions for this event.
Attack Three.Death by Diarrhea Virus. The third bio-weapon, the Swine G4 virus is now hitting America. It’s the “spiteful” virus that causes death by diarrhea unless immediate treatment is provided.
Yeah, the infected shit themselves to death and shit out their entire organs though internal hemorrhaging. Just peachy. And you know, this is a “new virus” of a completely different bio-weapon family. The COVID vaccine won’t protect anyone. Trump launched it against China after his eight battle carrier flotilla sailed home in defeat in 2020.
But all that is just an appetizer for what’s to come…
So that’s it, you might think.
The uninformed are waiting until “herd immunity” is attained against the “global pandemic” and then everything will return back to normal. Right? Isn’t that the impression that everyone has, eh?
Well it isn’t.
America is so thick-headed and run by idiots that they are just following the “marching orders” laid down years ago. And given the absolutely unexpected (by American elites) turn of events, that the actions being taken by America (by following out of date and obsolete orders) just makes America look like it’s being run by idiots.
I think that the United States is so stuffed up with imbeciles inside Washington, the military, the government, and the media that both Russia and China are toying with them like a cat toys with a mouse…
America, as it is being run today, is helpless. And it shows.
Yeah.
It’s like this.
And I am not the only person to think so.
Consider this… fine article by Mr. E. A. ( I will provide a link to his site once I get it, and place it here.)
New article–NBC Reporter Give Putin the Third Degree.
I read both the transcript from the Kremlin as well as watched the whole spectacle on RT, it’s also on the Russian Insider YT channel, if you want to subject yourself to it.
NBC Reporter Gives Putin the Third Degree. (He left out the most important question—Mr. Putin, do you still beat your wife?)
On June 11th, President Putin met with NBC journalist, Keir Simmons.
Simmons started off expressing his appreciation for the first meeting after almost three years, and without pausing for Putin to acknowledge the greeting, immediately launched into this litany of accusations posing as questions.
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What was so striking—if you’ll pardon the pun—was the accusatory assumption of guilt, implicit in the questions. It’s as if some presumed guilty serial killer (whoops, sorry, President Putin) was finally brought to the police station to be confronted with numerous allegations…….but no evidence.
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Putin’s ability to keep his composure was pretty remarkable. It seemed as if he was in a ring, and letting his opponent throw multiple punches which he parried. Simmons assumed that he was in charge of the interview:
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“Keir Simmons: It’s just that there’s a limited amount of time, Mr President. Unless we can have more time, I’d be very happy to have to keep going for another 30 minutes.
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Vladimir Putin: I determine the time here, so don’t worry about time.”
The upstart Pulitzer Prize aspirant needed to be reminded who’s boss.
It seems that since the 1958 release of this novel, the USA has still not learned its lesson:
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What is the theme of the Ugly American?
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Racism and Cultural Insensitivity. Despite living and working in another country, most members of the American Foreign Service hold racist views and lack awareness of the cultures they live amongst.
After patiently listening to a series of accusatory, “Guilty until proven innocent” questions, the topic turned to interference in Russia’s affairs, and accusations of Russia interfering in US affairs.
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Simmons objected to Russia’s laws restricting the ability of foreigners’ activity in Russia. Putin noted that it is the USA itself that wrote such a law decades ago.
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Putin summed it up by saying:
We have a saying: ”Don’t be mad at the mirror if you are ugly.“ It has nothing to do with you personally. But if somebody blames us for something, what I say is, ”Why don’t you look at yourselves?“ You will see yourselves in the mirror, not us.
Yet Another Instance of US Cognitive Dissonance and Psychological Projection.
President Putin gave a speech at the UN a few years back pointing out US destructive policies, and asked, “Can’t you see what you have done?” The tone of the interview was yet another example of the inability of the US media and presumably Washington Consensus complex, to see its own crimes, while assuming its own innocence—Cognitive Dissonance, while blaming others for what it does and has been doing—Psychological Projection.
This begs the question, what is going on here? Is this merely a psychological lapse?
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Or is it something more contrived and cynical?
Accuse the victim of that for which you are guilty
Why Did Putin Agree to this Interview?
We of course can’t know, however, to this observer, it looks like he just gave NBC more editable fodder to feed the Western audiences.
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The best example is this edited snippet.
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Keir Simmons: … Mr President. Do you worry that your opposition to NATO has actually strengthened it? For six years, NATO has spent more on defense.
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Vladimir Putin: Some defense. During the USSR era, Gorbachev, who is still, thank God, with us, got a promise, a verbal promise that there would be no NATO expansion to the east. Where is that…
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Keir Simmons: Where is that…
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Vladimir Putin: …promise? Two ways of expansion.
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Keir Simmons: Where is that written down? Where is that promise written down?
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Vladimir Putin: Right, right. Well done. Correct. You’ve got a point. Got you good.
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Well, congratulations. Of course, everything should be sealed and written on paper. But what was the point of expanding NATO to the east and bringing this infrastructure to our borders, and all of this before saying that we are the ones who have been acting aggressively?
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Why? On what basis? Did Russia after the USSR collapsed present any threat to the US or European countries? We voluntarily withdrew our troops from Eastern Europe. Leaving them just on empty land. Our people there, military personnel for decades lived there in what was not normal conditions, including their children.
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We went to tremendous expenses. And what did we get in response? We got in response infrastructure next to our borders. And now, you are saying that we are threatening somebody. We’re conducting war games on a regular basis, including sometimes surprise military exercises. Why should it worry the NATO partners? I just don’t understand that.
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Keir Simmons: Will you commit now not to send any further Russian troops into Ukrainian sovereign territory?
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Vladimir Putin: Look, did we say that we were planning to send our armed formations anywhere? We were conducting war games in our territory. How can this not be clear? I’m saying it again because I want your audience to hear it, your listeners to hear it both on the screens of their televisions and on the internet.
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We conducted military exercises in our territory. Imagine if we sent our troops into direct proximity to your borders. What would have been your response? We didn’t do that. We did it in our territory. You conducted war games in Alaska. God bless you. But you had crossed an ocean, brought thousands of personnel, thousands of units of military equipment close to our borders, and yet you believe that we are acting aggressively and somehow you’re not acting aggressively. Just look at that. The pot calling the kettle black.
So how was it edited?
Putin: Gorbachev, who is still, thank God, with us, got a promise, a verbal promise that there would be no NATO expansion to the east. Where is that…
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Keir Simmons: Where is that…
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Vladimir Putin: …promise? Two ways of expansion.
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Keir Simmons: Where is that written down? Where is that promise written down?
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Vladimir Putin: Right, right. Well done. Correct. You’ve got a point. Got you good. Well, congratulations.
In other words, it was perfectly fine to renege on repeated verbal promises.
So why did Putin accede to this interview? Good question.
Here is the list of questions, taken from the Kremlin transcript.
Russia is preparing, perhaps within months, to supply Iran with an advanced satellite system, enabling Tehran to track military targets. Is that true?
President Biden has defined his first trip to Europe as quote, ”about rallying the world’s democracies.“ He views you as a leader of autocrats, who is determined to undermine the liberal democratic order. Is that true?
President Biden asked you to meet with him. He didn’t make any preconditions. Were you surprised?
Will you go into the summit agreeing to begin more arms control talks immediately after the summit?
President Biden wants predictability and stability. Is that what you want?But he would say that you have caused a lot of instability and unpredictability.
You once described President Trump as a bright person, talented. How would you describe President Biden?
President Biden said one time when you met, you were inches away from each other, close to each other. And he said to you, ”I’m looking into your eyes, and I can’t see a soul.“ And you said, ”We understand each other.“ Do you remember that exchange?
President Biden is saying he told you to your face, ”You don’t have a soul.“ (Laughter.)
Would you have felt that was an inappropriate thing to say?
What do you think of the Black Lives Matter movement?
there is now a weight of evidence, a long list of alleged state-sponsored cyberattacks. Let me give you five.
The US intelligence community says Russia
interfered with the 2016 election.
Election security officials said Russia tried to interfere with the 2020 election.
Cybersecurity researchers said government hackers targeted COVID vaccine researchers, hacking for COVID vaccines.
In April, the Treasury Department said the SolarWinds attack was the world’s worst, including nine federal agencies.
And just before your summit, Microsoft says it has discovered another attack with targets including organizations that have criticised you, Mr Putin. Mr President, are you waging a cyber war against America?
Russian-speaking criminals is the allegation, are targeting the American way of life: food, gas, water, hospitals, transport. Why would you let Russian-speaking criminals disrupt your diplomacy? Wouldn’t you want to know who’s responsible?
You don’t ask for a truce unless you’re fighting in a [cyberspace] war.
Russia is fighting on that[cyberspace] battlefield. Correct? That if you can come to an agreement over hacking and election interference, then you’ll call off the hacking and the election interference if America agrees not to comment on your elections and your political opponents?
What should Americans worry about? What might happen next if there’s no agreement on cyber? Do you fear that American intelligence is deep inside Russian systems and has the ability to do you a lot of damage in cyber?
he’ll [Biden]raise the issue of Alexei Navalny, targeted for assassination, now in a Russian jail. Mr President, why are you so threatened by opposition?
In America, we call what you’re doing now ”whataboutism.“ ”What about this? What about that?“ It’s a way of not answering the question. Let me ask you a direct question.
Can I just ask you a direct question? Did you order Alexei Navalny’s assassination?
Mr President, are you a killer?
Anna Politkovskaya, shot dead. Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned by polonium. Sergei Magnitsky, allegedly beaten and died in prison. Boris Nemtsov, shot moments from the Kremlin, moments from here. Mikhail Lesin died of blunt trauma in Washington, DC. Are all of these a coincidence, Mr President?
Did you have prior knowledge that a commercial airliner would be forced to land in Belarus and that a journalist would be arrested?
You appear to have approved of it judging by your meeting with President Lukashenko soon afterwards. In the case of neighbouring Ukraine earlier this year, the European Union said you had more than 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border. Was that an attempt to get Washington’s attention?
Mr President. Do you worry that your opposition to NATO has actually strengthened it? For six years, NATO has spent more on defence.
Where is that written down? Where is that promise [that Nato would not expand outside of Germany written down?]
Will you commit now not to send any further Russian troops into Ukrainian sovereign territory?
The Biden administration has said that at your summit they will bring up the case of two US prisoners in Russia, Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed. They are two former Marines. Trevor Reed is suffering from COVID in prison. Why don’t you release them ahead of the summit? Wouldn’t that show goodwill?
And on the prisoner swap question, is that something that you would consider? Are you looking to negotiate? You’re meeting with the President.
Just to be clear so we hear it from you, which Russian prisoners in the US would you be hoping to bring back to Russia by name?
ust quickly before I move on, on the subject of prisons, again with Alexei Navalny, will you commit that you will personally ensure that Alexei Navalny will leave prison alive?
You complain so much about NATO to your west. Why do you never complain about China’s militarisation to your east?
What do you think of China’s treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang?
There is the accusation of a million Uyghurs in so-called concentration camps. Is that your message to the Muslim communities in the former Soviet Union? You don’t think anything wrong is happening there?
It’s just a question of whether you are prepared to criticise China. China, for example, abstained on Crimea at the Security Council. China’s biggest banks have not contravened American sanctions against Russia. Do you think you get 100% support from China?
Why are you splitting off from the US space programme and moving forward with China?
If the People’s Liberation Army made a move on Taiwan how would Russia respond to that?
You’re threatening to close that crossing in July at the Security Council. Why would you do that, knowing that it will cause the death of refugees?
Mr President, you extended the Constitution so that you could be President of Russia until 2036. Do you worry that the longer you are in power and without any sign of someone to replace you, the more instability there may be when you finally do choose to leave office?
Meanwhile, while Russia is telling the USA to fuck off, so is China.
Why can America send troops and bombers to the border of Russia, and the border of China and expect that no one will shoot them down? Why does the Pentagon believe that they are somehow immune from a military combat event? Why does the USA assume that Russia and China won’t start behaving the same way that America has been behaving all these decades?
Maybe we are starting to see efforts that are telling the neocon “war hawks” in Washington DC, to SHUT THE FUCK UP, or go ahead and start a war. They are not going to play your fucking games any longer. And the morons in Washington DC are taking the bait. They are like moronic children playing with dynamite.
Of course, the American alt-Right, and mainstream media won’t dare mention this. Probably right now there are meetings with professional diversity officers and LGBT advisors discussing how to manipulate the news feeds to calm the situation down. After they take internal polls, and get direction, will they come up with a new narrative that will support an aggressive China and Russia.
But that’s not all.
China just been flying 28 fighter planes in loops and circles all around Taiwan. You won’t find this news in America. I know, I looked.
Maybe tomorrow.
But right now it’s been all over the Chinese media for the last three days. America only displays news to box Americans into believing an approved narrative.
These actions and activities are all so new, and so unexpected, that the Pentagon and the CIA / NSA really hasn’t a clue as to how to spin them.
It seems like they want to provoke America to come out to play. So yeah, what else the fuck does it look like. Will America take the bait?
Curious Bullshit
But America is still playing the same old games. It is still pushing the same tired narratives.
What constitutes “news” from the United States is just getting crazier and crazier. Check out these two outlandish stores about China that I found on Drudge today;
It's from the fierce neocon publication the National Review. But these people are so deluded. I don't even know where to begin.
[1] There is no water scarcity problem in China in any form, shape or configuration anywhere. And secondly, [2] China IS the Chinese people. There just isn't a "ruling class" like you have in the West.
The point is that those who are in this "echo chamber" believe this nonsense. No wonder they seem to be like a moronic idiot monster thrashing about to us "normal's".
I mentioned this article to my Chinese friends inside of China and they actually laughed. Laughed! That is just how deluded, out of touch with reality, and insane these people are.
It's all a pile of bull manure. Not true in the least. But what do you expect from the neocon publication Wall street Journal. Again. Those in the echo chambers believe this nonsense.
Not even remotely true.
That is the essence of propaganda: pick some big lies, repeat them endlessly, and accuse anybody who is willing to contradict them with consorting with the enemy.
Anybody who dares to challenge the propaganda narrative is automatically either a “Kremlin bot”, a “fifty center” or “Xi Peng stooge.”
This is, of course, a convenient dodge. When all sorts of things are going wrong, from lost wars to stolen elections to stolen retirements to stolen futures of one’s children to weapons systems that don’t work, it is easiest to find a single scapegoat.
For such a huge set of problems, the scapegoat has to be a very large one, and Russia and China just both happens to be the right size.
Jim Kunstler:
I think what is really going on, what's sort of behind the insanity of this, is the very strange and mysterious collapse of the intellectual class in America.
Now, you’ve got a class of people in the media and academia, highly educated people, the permanent bureaucracy in the government who now believe in crazy things and are proposing dangerous things and seem to have just completely lost it.
It does demonstrate something about the madness of crowds.
Some things, in a way, are beyond the rational reach of analysis. You know, you're just in kind of unchartered territory of group herd emotion whether it's wildebeests or lemmings or people on the upper east side of Manhattan setting their hair on fire.
I think the real question you have to ask is what happens to a society when the thinking class can't think anymore? To me, that's the most dangerous thing. And the mendacity they are showing is amazing.
Preparation for war
The United States made it perfectly clear what excuses that it would use for Congress to authorize a formal war declaration against China. These were all laid out in the March 2021 Anchorage, Alaska meeting.
And since that date, the world pretty much understands that when the “negotiation party” told China “We don’t want a war.” that it is now official. The USA will conduct a war against China.
And the “negotiations” are only a mere formality.
Both Russia and China are aware of what is going on.
And America is playing and following a script that was established years ago, based on [1] faulty data, [2] incorrect and false Intel, [3] corrupted perceptions and [4] moronic leadership. And they STILL haven’t deviated from that script.
As time moves forward, both China and Russia tick off the predictable check list of American actions, and one after the other each box is checked off, and the predictable actions take place.
Meanwhile, China and Russia maneuvers forces, political assets, Geo-political situations to their advantage. Always guarded to see if the American leadership will deviate form the old stale plan. But it doesn’t. Which might be a really pleasant surprise.
I would well imagine that maybe the USA is much smarter than this, and allowing Russia and China to be lulled into a state of comfortable deception. But I am not so sure that this is actually the case. Noting the neocon war hawks in Washington DC, they are very two-dimensional actors with little hard practical experience and shows linear thinking clouded by emotional distortion.
We, you and I, sit on the sidelines and watch all this take place.
It truly seems like the United States is being run by morons that are just following instructions from other morons who all don’t have a clue as to what the issues are, the stakes actually are, and are absolutely deluded by some kind of mental illness of their superiority when there is no actual advantage in any way, shape or form.
It’s pretty messed up.
To me, it seems that America is sleepwalking toward what it thinks will be a nice standard “boilerplate” “distant” war. From with [1] the military-industrial complex can profit from, [2] the government can use as an excuse to suppress American revolting elements, and [3] from which it can buy some time to rebuild key technologies, infrastructure and economic advantage.
But it is delusional.
Fundamentally it has no advantage. And digging a deep hole in beach sand will only result in more digging. Nothing will actually be accomplished.
And Russia and China consider this activity dangerous, and are positioning themselves to provide a “killing blow” if need be to “an insane and rabid dog”. And to me it seems like Russia and China are quite aware of this and are like a cat toying with a mouse that it caught.
Us outsiders who see the whole picture outside of the American propaganda machine can see this most clearly and we are both bemused and horrified at the same time.
It’s good that Americans are kept in the dark.
Can you just imagine the horror and internal strife if Americans found out the true extent of the American government’s actions, plans and desires.
Conclusions
Just because the world is fucked, doesn’t mean that you need be too.
No one really even understands who is coming up with all of these lunatic ideas, such as ...
“we have to stop the Chinese by doing an earth-shattering world war because we disagree with the way they are managing their Islamic terror threat and also we have a map that indicates they are violating Vietnamese fishing rights.”
My cats have taught me a lot over the years. One of the most valuable lessons that I have learned has become a major platform of my life. I cannot tell you how many times I have had to relearn this most fundamental lesson.
“Life is hard. Then you nap.”
Do you want more?
If you liked this article, you can read similar articles by viewing the New Beginnings index for this class here;
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Google has taken on the role of the former East German Secret police, known as the Stasi . They have been implementing these cold war policies with the full blessings of the United States government, and it’s going to get far, far worse.
Head's up! I am using a ton load of dated references in this post. I do so out of necessity.
It's this Republican said this, and that Democrat did that.
It's all bullshit.
Both political parties are playing a game. Don't fall for the details of the game. Pay attention to the tools that they are using to manipulate you.
Google.
Do not get upset by the dated references to Obama, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and all the rest. I used what was available to me. Keep in mind that the political figures are PUPPETS. When reading this article pay attention to how Google is used as a tool to manipulate you.
Google is no longer “just” a simple indexing medium for the Internet. It has grown in popularity, and has leveraged its finances to the extent of hiring brilliant people. As such, the United States, under President Obama has collaborated with it to greatly expand the NSA and surveillance capabilities of the government.
Google controls what you read and view on the Internet.
That is fine, if you have a very simplistic view of the world. As most humans do. It is our nature as herd animals.
“An under-the-radar startup funded by billionaire Eric Schmidt has become a major technology vendor for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, underscoring the bonds between Silicon Valley and Democratic politics.
The Groundwork, according to Democratic campaign operatives and technologists, is part of efforts by Schmidt—the executive chairman of Google parent-company Alphabet—to ensure that Clinton has the engineering talent needed to win the election. And it is one of a series of quiet investments by Schmidt that recognize how modern political campaigns are run, with data analytics and digital outreach as vital ingredients that allow candidates to find, court, and turn out critical voter blocs.
There is also another gap in play: The shrinking distance between Google and the Democratic Party. Former Google executive Stephanie Hannon is the Clinton campaign’s chief technology officer, and a host of ex-Googlers are currently employed as high-ranking technical staff at the Obama White House. Schmidt, for his part, is one of the most powerful donors in the Democratic Party—and his influence does not stem only from his wealth, estimated by Forbes at more than $10 billion.
According to campaign finance disclosures, Clinton’s campaign is the Groundwork’s only political client. Its employees are mostly back-end software developers with experience at blue-chip tech firms like Netflix, Dreamhost, and Google.”
– From the article; Meet “Groundwork” – Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Stealth Startup Working to Make Hillary Clinton President
Google is not an investigative website like others. It is the most popular search tool used in the United States. The reader must recognize that, as such, it is absolutely controlled by the political machinery originating out of Washington, DC.
Thus, using Google to search to non-biased information is impossible. (A commentator suggested you do a google image search on “white couple” – he said the results would make your blood boil. He was right.)
All the searches are explicitly tailored towards a progressive-narrative that originates out of the United States government. (Just like Facebook.) This is fine for those whom only want a censored dialog presented to them.
However, that bodes poorly for the more open-minded and adventuresome in this world.
Google Integrated with the United States Government
There is a very good reason why China refuses to permit Google to operate inside China. They simply do not want the Internet habits of their citizens to be monitored and tracked. And who can blame them?
“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 U.S. power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation.”
-Julian Assange wrote in his book.
Assange became concerned about former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s ties with the State Department in 2009 when Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary of state. He has claimed that Schmidt, who is a chairman at the company, has worked with the Clintons for years, as Donald Trump accused Google of political bias saying that it suppresses negative news about Clinton.
Speaking by video link to an anniversary news conference in Berlin earlier this week, he said the leaks include ‘significant material’ on war, arms, oil, internet giant Google, the U.S. election and mass surveillance. (2016) WikiLeaks hoped ‘to be publishing every week for the next 10 weeks,’ Assange said.
Google tracks your location always
Google is facing new scrutiny in the wake of revelations that it stores users’ location data even when “Location History” is turned off.
Once caught, Google used to quietly change it’s illegal activities. Now it simply doesn’t give a damn.
Google quietly edited its description of the practice on its own website—while continuing said practice—to clarify that “some location data may be saved as part of your activity on other services, like Search and Maps.”
As a result of the previously unknown practice, which was first exposed by the Associated Press, Google has now been sued by a man in San Diego. Simultaneously, activists in Washington, DC are urging the Federal Trade Commission to examine whether the company is in breach of its 2011 consent decree with the agency.
In the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court last Friday in San Francisco, attorneys representing a man named Napoleon Patacsil argued that Google is violating the California Invasion of Privacy Act and the state’s constitutional right to privacy.
The lawsuit seeks class-action status, and it would include both an “Android Class” and “iPhone Class” for the potential millions of people in the United States with such phones who turned off their Location History and nonetheless had it recorded by Google. It will likely take months or longer for the judge to determine whether there is a sufficient class.
Perhaps one of the reasons why Huawei was banned in the United States was because they did not preload Google spyware.
Also on August 17, attorneys from the Electronic Privacy Information Center wrote in a sternly worded three-page letter to the FTC that Google’s practices are in clear violation of the 2011 settlement with the agency.
In that settlement, Google agreed that it would not misrepresent anything related to
"(1) the purposes for which it collects and uses covered information, and (2) the extent to which consumers may exercise control over the collection, use, or disclosure of covered information."
Until the Associated Press story on August 13, Google’s policy simply stated:
"You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored."
This turns out to not be true.
Google did not respond to Ars’ request for comment.
Alphabet Inc.’s cloud-based Google Photos service
Every time you use Google or a Google-related product, such as their browser, etc., to upload a photo or use your camera to take a photo, or your computer to take a photo, Google keeps the image. Not only that, but they have created a database of images where facial recognition is used to link photos with geolocation data (as well as device data) and provide a photographic record of a given person.
So, if your friend uses Google Chrome to upload a harmless dessert picture up to (say for example) Tumblr, and a blurry image of you in the background is in the picture…congratulations! You are now part of the United States government data base, and they know where you were, and what you looked like at that time.
This software is functionally similar to the Facebook software known as Deepface.
Beware
In an interview, Google whistleblower Zach Vorhies, advises against having any association with Google. He warns of their dangerous practices and comments that they have declared war on anyone who is not a progressive socialist. They expect everyone to cower away in silence. Their expectations are that their consumers be placid and as non-threatening as possible.
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. How is this legal? . How is this not a monopoly? . Why it is permitted to exist int his form? . The Google World infographic created by Overdrive Interactive is a visual representation of Google’s projects, services, technologies, and companies acquired by Google. View the Google World or download it as a PDF with live links to over 200 assets. .
Zach worked as a senior software engineer at both Google and YouTube for over eight years.
He has, and shares, his inside knowledge of his experiences and knowledge. He is convinced that Google and other software giants in silicon-valley possess a global monopoly. A monopoly that is both dangerous and evil. He also states that Google is not a reliable source of information any longer.
We should all heed his advice.
Google’s monopoly over search is mandated simply because of a continued reassurance that it is an unbiased search platform. Yet that is absolutely not true. Google is actively suppressing and censoring information. It is impossible to censor something and be unbiased at the same time.
Manipulation for political objectives
“…If you retained direct links, it was still there depending on the source, but Google wouldn't find it all of a sudden. I started choosing what to read by searching with three or four engines and picking what Google seemed to be not finding but everyone else did. Now, however that doesn't work, a lot of non-Google engines use Google, and the ones that don't have been biased corrupted also.”
The absolute partisan support for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 general election should be enough to satisfy even the most ignorant reader of this manuscript. Google censored, lied, rewrote articles, modified search results, altered hash tags, and blanked out everything deemed a threat to their preferred nominee.
I get it. Not everyone reads the same kind of news, or is exposed to the same kinds of things as other people are. It is ok.
If the reader wants to think that Google is an unbiased tool, believe it. I don’t really care.
There was a time in my life when I actually believed that Santa Claus really existed. There also was a time when I believed that I needed to pay taxes to repair the roads. It’s crazy! As I lived in Pennsylvania at the time.
It was (maybe is) one of the most corrupt states where the DOT funds are routinely stolen from. OK.
Here’s some links for some of the more interested parties;
The entire company, all their money, all their employees and all their efforts were single focused on one objective; the [1] control of the election process (for the election of a puppet figurehead), and [2] a continuance of control over people that represents the desires of the oligarchy inside the United States
Well, the company is getting some negative repercussions from their activity. Go here.
Zach Vorheis has some things to say.
For the video, as well as links to the transcripts, visit Mercola.com here.
It’s pretty much well known, but the Untied States is owned by a handful of oligarchs. They utilize companies and manipulate the people in order to have them do their bidding. Thus, the point of sharing this information is that the largest mechanism for obtaining information in the world is terribly compromised.
Google is manipulating search results to influence our behavior. At the same time, denying this is happening.
The Wall Street Journal.
The Wall Street Journal published a a very thorough investigation covering these same points. As well as explaining the consequences of this behavior.
Disclosure of evil intent on Project Veritas
Zach Vorhies released about 950 pages of internal Google documents. These documents provide a comprehensive picture of what’s going on at the upper management within Google.
They illustrate that Google has become corrupt, evil, political in nature and aligned with wealthy oligarchs who intend to use the platform to manipulate great masses of people. In order words, to use Google much the same way that “Over-seers” used to control plantation slaves.
What Happened to ‘Don’t Be Evil’?
Zach comments…
“Everything started out with Google really great,” Vorhies says.
“They had this mission statement of organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful. They also had this idea of ‘Don’t be evil.’ It was built right into their initial public offering (IPO) statements.
I thought at the time, ‘This is great. This is exactly the kind of company that the world needs. We need to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible. We need to let the algorithms decide what goes to the top and let the users decide what’s most useful for them and then make sure that other people are able to find that information.’
Google stayed true to those principles all the way up until 2016, until Donald Trump won the election.
For some reason, they decided they were going to throw all these mission statements away and go after the president of the United States, censor the internet and distort the news so that people’s searches could be redirected towards anti-presidential sentiment.
This eventually morphed into not just censorship of the president, but censorship of information related to health …
I realized [that] if this was allowed to continue, then this agenda of Big Pharma would be able to become … ‘the truth’ …
Once I found out that Google was censoring a lot of information, I started looking at the information it was censoring with a new degree of ‘They wouldn’t be censoring it unless it was true,’ sort of thing.
It’s a strange heuristic to use to figure out what’s true in the world, but you’ve just got to figure out what they’re censoring. You kind of understand that they’re censoring it because it’s not Big Tech-friendly. It’s not friendly to the established players.
Some ‘Fake News’ Isn’t so Fake After All
Shortly after Trump won the presidential election, you started hearing more and more about the scourge of “fake news.” Google, like Facebook and others, decided they had to protect users from fake news. The problem is, who determines what’s fake and what’s not?
Exactly.
As Jordan Peterson said in regards to hate speech: "Who is going to regulate it? Who is going to define it?
I know the answer to that - the last people in the world you would want to."
Using Google’s internal search engine, Vorhies set out to determine what Google’s definition of fake news was.
He found several examples in a presentation.
However, in it were actual, verifiable real news events.
“I went, ‘Wait a minute. Is this about fake news or is this about controlling the narrative for like political purposes?'” Vorhies says.
He began collecting these documents because he knew they were explosive enough that Google would remove them if word ever got out about them.
In his continued search for real news presented as fake, he started unearthing other disturbing projects.
The main project responsible for Google censorship is a thing called ‘Machine Learning Fairness’ (ML Fairness).
As you imagine, they’re not going to call their censorship regime something bad. They’re going to call it something like ‘fairness.’
So, if you’re against that, you’re against fairness.
It’s a euphemism. I discovered there was this umbrella project, ‘ML Fairness,’ and there were these sub-components like ‘Project Purple Rain,’ which is a 24-hour response team that is monitoring the internet.
How Machine Learning Fairness Twists Perception of Reality
Just what is ML Fairness and how does it work? Vorhies explains:
Let’s say that this circle right here represents the entire spectrum of all possible artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. ML Fairness is a small part of that type of AI. It’s a relatively new type of AI. What machine learning does is it simulates brain neurons and how they fire.
If you remember how a brain neuron fires, it takes in as input signals from other neurons and then mixes those signals together and decides whether it wants to fire or not, based on the signals that it receives.
Well, these artificial neurons do something similar. They have a collection of inputs, depending on the internal rule set. It will fire depending on the inputs it gets … And then that output is used as input for further downstream processing.
If you have this collection of millions of simulated neurons … you can start to create very complex behavior that’s able to solve problems, like chess or the game Go …
It can classify hate speech. That’s the part that’s interesting to me — how this thing could be used to classify information across the internet.
ML Fairness is a type of AI that takes information on the internet, classifies it and then ranks it. And then the Google engine will figure out whether the information is fair or not. And if it is ‘fair,’ it goes to the top. If it’s not fair, then it gets pushed to the bottom. That’s what ML Fairness is in a nutshell.
What this manipulation ultimately ends up doing is presenting a twisted and false view of the world. What you’re seeing in your search results is what the AI algorithm decided is most fair — not what’s actually happening in the real world.
This is how you now end up getting automated search suggestions such as “men can have periods” and “men can have babies,” even though these are biological impossibilities. However, the algorithm deems the idea that only women can menstruate and bear children as “unfair” and basically “sexist,” and thus it’s pushing these ridiculous search suggestions to the top.
This obnoxious discrepancy is clear when using search terms like “men can …” The manipulation of reality will not be as transparent when using health or political search words, when you cannot be absolutely sure, ahead of time, about what the absolute truth is.
Did Google Conspire to Commit Treason?
Vorhies saw these changes starting to take place in early 2017.
Shortly afterwards, Google announced it was going to start assigning an “authoritativeness score” to all news content.
“I was able to see this ranking on internal documents. High rankings were given to outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.
“These outlets, in my opinion, have been producing propaganda,” Vorhies says. “They led to us into war with Iraq with the weapons of mass destruction hoax. They’ve lied to us [about] Vietnam. They have a history of supporting every war and military encouragement around the world that has [led to] the destruction of millions of lives.”
In June 2017, chief executive officer of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, announced that this was how they were going to filter news content across the YouTube platforms.
As Vorhies expected, this led to a clamp down on anything that goes against the mainstream narrative.
“Around that time, I had the fortune of catching [another] seditious activity by Google. What I caught them doing was deleting words out of the translation dictionary from Arabic to English, in order to make a Trump tweet sound crazy.2,3”
President Trump had recently come back from a visit to Saudi Arabia when, on May 31, 2017, he tweeted: “Despite the negative constant press, covfefe.” Originally, people were able to translate “covfefe” to “We will stand up.” Taken together, you could see President Trump’s tweet basically said, “Despite the negative constant press, we will stand up.”
“People got really excited about that,” Vorhies says. “Well, The New York Times decided that they were going to write an entire article saying, ‘Actually, this word is nonsense. And everyone who thinks there’s a decode is just wrong.’
The same day that this article came out, I believe it was June 1, 2017, a senior executive person at Google … of one of the AI divisions, wrote up a design document saying, ‘We translated this world from Arabic to English.
But according to The New York Times, that’s not right. That’s actually nonsense, so let’s get rid of the word.’
And so, they got rid of the word.
The team that was responsible for getting rid of this word called themselves the ‘Derrida Team.’ Why is that significant? Because there was a French philosopher by the name of Jacques Derrida, who advocated for the destruction of Western culture through the manipulation and censorship of language.
What a coincidence that this team responsible for censoring words would have the same name as this very significant philosopher who is considered the father of post-modernism.
About six days later, I saw the newspapers were making a push for invoking the 25th Amendment to remove a sitting president from office due to mental incapacitation. One of the reasons that they cited was how Trump was tweeting nonsense.
Now, wait a minute, that was made nonsense by this manipulation of the dictionary! I realized these people have gone too far. There’s obviously a collusion here. I have to bring this to attention no matter what.
This isn’t because I’m necessarily a Trump supporter — I didn’t vote for him — this is simply because they can’t be doing this to a sitting president of the United States. That just can’t happen. It’s treason.
If this is going to happen, then I’ve got to let the public [and] law enforcement know about it. Because if I don’t, then I’m part of a conspiracy of silence … It was at that point that I decided I could no longer sit in silence. I took my cache of documents and I started to prepare for a disclosure event.”
Comment: Finally, an explanation for the infamous covfefe tweet'! It's insane that this word was actually a translation, yet it was used to paint Trump as insane. And the fact that, up until this insider document dump,
NO ONE KNEW THIS.
YouTube Censorship Has Had Lethal Consequences
In 2018, the real-world ramifications of censorship hit home when an Iranian YouTube creator who had recently been demonetized marched into YouTube headquarters and opened fire on employees and then shot herself.
"Her name was Nasim [Najafi Aghdam]. She had a video that went viral in Iran ... She was creating really bizarre videos that were just — I don't know — I watched them and I actually strangely loved them. I couldn't stop watching them. They were so weird.
She decided that she was going to quit her job and become a full-time content creator, like millions of others ... YouTube was the platform to do that. Everyone was getting a lot of subscribers and were trying to generate money, get monetized on the platform ...
They would get a cut of the ads that were running when people interact with the ads or view them ... What YouTube did is they made a blanket ban. Anyone under 10,000 subscribers got censored. By censorship, I mean demonetized. They lost all of the funding that they could get for their videos. They can still post videos, they just couldn't get any money [from Google Ads] for it.
And so, this person had just lost her job. She felt she was being oppressed by YouTube. She drove all the way from San Diego, came to the YouTube headquarters on 901 Cherry Avenue ... came into the lunch area patio, took out a handgun and started firing ...
She shot a couple of people. Ran out of ammo, reloaded and shot some more and then [shot] herself in the chest and [bled] to death ... Obviously, this person was mentally deranged but, also, she was triggered by Google's censorship. Now I've got this very personal story about how censorship has affected my safety.
You would think that maybe YouTube would [rethink] its censorship, but no. They didn't ... Every day I would come into work and I would think, 'You know, with this increase in censorship, is someone going to come in with a gun?'"
Google Attempts to Destroy Vorhies by ‘Lawfare’
Vorhies resigned from Google June 28, 2019, and was immediately put under investigation, as the company had logs showing the many documents he’d been searching for and reading through.
Vorhies tells the story of what happened next:
"When I went to Project Veritas, I went under anonymity. We only released two pages of the 950 that they had [been given]. My hope was that Google would leave me alone ... But they decided they weren't going to do that.
They decided they were going to attempt to financially destroy me by engaging in lawfare, which is warfare via the legal system.
Within a few weeks of me disclosing ML Fairness to Project Veritas, they sent me threatening letters, demanding access to all my data outside of work ...
I wrote them back a letter admitting I had retained files, telling them I had given them to law enforcement ... The NDA, the nondisclosure agreement I signed is nonenforceable in cases where the company is committing criminal activity. Sedition is criminal activity, which means that the NDA is null and void.
I can submit evidence of Google's criminal activity to the government and to the media when the company is engaging in unlawful activity. That's what I did. Also, I signed the NDA in good faith, believing that Google's word of organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful and 'Don't be evil,' were truthful statements ...
I met an attorney who was representing Kevin Cernekee, another Google engineer who attempted to blow the whistle in the most legitimate way possible, which was to notify the Federal Labor Relations Authority in California. Kevin gave these papers to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Google responded by ambushing him with HR, seizing his laptop, seeing all the documents that he had downloaded, and then firing him and creating a legal theory that he had hacked into Google to get documents so that he could reconstruct Google's legal strategy and maybe even sell it.
They applied criminal charges against him. They made him defend himself in court for his collection of evidence that he had sent to the NLRB. He's [spent] $100,000 dollars of his own money defending himself from Google, so I knew what was in store for me.
[Cernekee's] lawyer was like, 'Yeah. This is the first step in a very painful process that's going to drive on for years. They're going to make it very expensive. Their goal is to destroy you.' Well, in that case, I'm not going to fight in the legal law. I'm going to fight in the court of public opinion.
I decided at that point to come out to Project Veritas and disclose who I was so that I could get eyes [on me], and I said, 'If Google's going to take me down, then I'm going to leverage that so that everyone else can see what they do and what they're really about. And then we can make Google's censorship program part of the national discussion.'
I disclosed everything. I released it to the public, all 950 pages ... August 17, 2019 ... [I've] tried to become a cultural force so that we can hold Google to account of what they're doing, because their censorship is wrong.
It's wrong for America. It's anti-American. Their election meddling is something that needs to be looked at, needs to be watched, because they've meddled with the elections in the past. They're meddling in the elections now.
They were able to deactivate Tulsi Gabbard's ad account directly following the Democratic debates.
They've meddled in the Ireland elections.
They've meddled in the Brazil elections.
We know this because there was a Supreme Court ruling that released the evidence showing they had a secret agreement with one of the politicians to generate dirt and boost it up on the current president of Brazil."
How Autofill Can Shift Political Opinion
Vorhies goes on to explain and describe how Google tools such as autofill search recommendations can be used to sway public opinion on political (and other topics), which can have significant political consequences.
Autofill is what happens when you start typing a search query into a search engine and algorithms kick in to offer suggestions to complete your search. We’ve been led to believe that whatever the autofill recommendations are is what most people are in fact searching for — Google has stated that the suggestions given are generated by a collection of user data — but that’s not true, at least not anymore.
“This story about the autofill first got disclosed by Dr. Robert Epstein, who is a Harvard-trained psychologist and former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today,” Vorhies explains.
“What he said was that Google had flipped a bunch of votes for Hillary using this autosuggest feature. I’ve investigated this claim.
I’ve verified it to be true …
It turns out that a lot of the popular searches were being suppressed.
For example, you typed in ‘Clinton body count.’ It’s a popular search term. This brings up all the people who have died in the decades that were associated with Hillary Clinton.
Well, this search result has been deleted off the search suggestion. What’s happened instead is that a bunch of negative search terms have been inserted that went against the current president of the United States, Donald Trump.
So, when you’re typing in search queries for Trump, it’s autocompleting and suggesting, ‘Do you mean that he’s a liar? That he’s a crook?’ … And then you do the same for Hillary Clinton and it has all these positive terms … They were doing this on the political stuff.
The most significant thing about this feature is the fact that you don’t expect to have this part of your online experience to be hatched for political reasons. You think that this is legitimately what other people are searching for.
As a result, you don’t have your filters on. Your brain puts on these filters when it starts to evaluate politically charged information. When you read a newspaper article, you may be thinking to yourself, ‘This may be true, this may not.’ You’re skeptical.
But when you’re typing into a search, you don’t think that because you don’t think that’s rigged, so whatever bias is inherent in that search result slips through and goes directly into your subconscious. This is what Epstein was explaining.”
The Search Engine Manipulation Effect
Epstein developed a “black box test” (a method of software testing) to measure just how influential a tool like autofill can be. Remarkably, his test demonstrated that “Google’s ‘autocomplete’ search suggestions can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split”5,6 — all without anyone being aware of the manipulation.
Similarly, when Epstein looked at the power of search engine manipulation to shift preferences and perceptions, he found that:7
"(1) biased search rankings can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more, (2) the shift can be much higher in some demographic groups, and (3) such rankings can be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation."
The good news is, there are ways to lower this manipulation effect, but to do so, people have to be aware that biased ranking is taking place. In his 2017 paper, “Suppressing the Search Engine Manipulation Effect,” Epstein writes:8
“A recent series of experiments demonstrated that introducing ranking bias to election-related search engine results can have a strong and undetectable influence on the preferences of undecided voters.
This phenomenon, called the search engine manipulation effect (SEME), exerts influence largely through order effects that are enhanced in a digital context.
We present data from three new experiments involving 3,600 subjects in 39 countries in which we replicate SEME and test design interventions for suppressing the effect. In the replication, voting preferences shifted by 39.0%, a number almost identical to the shift found in a previously published experiment (37.1%).
Alerting users to the ranking bias reduced the shift to 22.1%, and more detailed alerts reduced it to 13.8%. Users’ browsing behaviors were also significantly altered by the alerts, with more clicks and time going to lower-ranked search results.
Although bias alerts were effective in suppressing SEME, we found that SEME could be completely eliminated only by alternating search results — in effect, with an equal-time rule.
We propose a browser extension capable of deploying bias alerts in real-time and speculate that SEME might be impacting a wide range of decision-making, not just voting, in which case search engines might need to be strictly regulated.”
As pointed out by Vorhies,
"We've got to watch out for Google, because ... they're going to try to rig the 2020 elections."
Based on Epstein’s results, Google certainly appears to have the power to do so. The only way to prevent it may be an information campaign that exposes this hidden agenda, thereby helping to suppress this search engine manipulation effect.
“Autocomplete predictions are produced based on a number of factors including the popularity of search terms,” spokeswoman Kara Berman said in a statement sent to The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Our systems are periodically updated to improve Search, and our users’ search activity varies, so the terms that appear in Autocomplete may change over time. Additionally, our systems automatically filter a small set of offensive or inappropriate content from autocomplete predictions.”
-Google formal statement
This all should be quite understandable because, after all, there have been more than 250 people who have transitioned from Google to government or vice versa during the Obama administration.
At least two dozen among the group have taken jobs in key posts in government or Google in that span. These individuals include Mikey Dickerson, Robert Manhini, Nicole Wong, Jannine Versi, Michele Weslander, Sameer Bhalotra, Julie Brill, Will Hudson, Michelle Lee, Matthew Bye, Joshua Wright and Renata Hesse.
Former Google employees occupy several key slots in the federal government. These include:
Alexander Macgillivray, deputy general counsel at Google 2003-09, general counsel at Twitter 2009-13, deputy chief technology officer at OSTP 2014-present.
Nicole Wong, vice president and deputy general counsel at Google from 2004-11 and deputy chief technology officer at OSTP 2013-14.
Jannine Versi, product marketing manager in Middle East and North Africa for Google 2010-2012, White House National Economic Council 2013-14, chief of staff International Trade Administration at U.S. Department of Commerce 2014-present.
Michelle Lee, deputy general counsel at Google 2003-12, under secretary of commerce for intellectual property and director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office 2012-present.
Mikey Dickerson, site reliability manager at Google 2006-13, administrator U.S. Digital Service 2014-present. Dickerson also assisted with election day monitoring and modeling with Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign and helped repair the broken HealthCare.gov website.
At least 18 former Google employees work or have worked for the U.S. Digital Service and its General Services Administration sidekick, 18F. USDS operates under the Executive Office of the President, consulting on big federal information technology projects.
Search Results for Roger Ailes
The former Chairman and CEO of Fox News, Roger Ailes, died in May 2017. He was arguably one of the most consequential individuals in media and politics in the last century, and he leaves behind a loving wife and son. He also leaves behind a cadre of loyal former employees who love and respect him.
However if you run a Google search on him, you’ll find that the top results consist almost entirely of articles from several liberal publications savaging his reputation as a person. The search results, both on mobile and desktop platforms, begin with entries that are strikingly cruel and meanspirited. This behavior raise new questions about Google’s objectivity. (As if there WERE questions to be raised.)
The top results on “Roger Ailes” include [1] a piece by leftist activist Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone declaring Ailes “one of the worst Americans ever,” [2] an article by NBC’s Joy Reid on Time stating that Ailes “built a kingdom on exploited bias,” and [3] a Bret Stephens op-ed in the New York Times, that calls him “the man who wrecked conservatism.” [4] An op-ed on The Guardian by Arwa Mahdawi condemning Ailes for helping to “create this nightmare world” shows up alongside the other articles savaging him, way above obituaries or any neutral pieces about the man.
Regardless the opinion anyone might hold about Roger Ailes, the only thing certain is that Google’s search algorithm is deeply biased. In fact, it is biased in favor of publications who oppose his role as a leader in the conservative movement.
Control of Search Results
Google, Inc., isn’t just the world’s biggest purveyor of information; it is also the world’s biggest censor.
The company maintains at least nine different blacklists that impact our lives. It does so without input or authority from any outside advisory group, industry association or government agency. Google is not the only company suppressing content on the internet. Indeed, Reddit has frequently been accused of banning postings on specific topics, and a recent report suggests that Facebook has been deleting conservative news stories from its newsfeed. (A practice that might have a significant effect on public opinion – even on voting. ) Google, though, is currently the biggest bully on the block.
When Google’s employees or algorithms decide to block our access to information about a news item, political candidate or business, things can happen. Control information, and you control thoughts. Opinions and votes can shift, reputations can be ruined and businesses can crash and burn. (Because online censorship is entirely unregulated at the moment, victims have little or no recourse when they have been harmed.) Eventually, authorities will almost certainly have to step in, just as they did when credit bureaus were regulated in 1970. The alternative would be to allow a large corporation to wield an especially destructive kind of power that should be exercised with great restraint and should belong only to the public: the power to shame or exclude.
If Google were just another mom-and-pop shop with a sign saying “we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone,” that would be one thing. But as the golden gateway to all knowledge, Google has rapidly become an essential in people’s lives – nearly as essential as air or water. We don’t let public utilities make arbitrary and secretive decisions about denying people services; we shouldn’t let Google do so either.
The autocomplete blacklist.
This is a list of words and phrases that are excluded from the autocomplete feature in Google’s search bar. The search bar instantly suggests multiple search options when you type words such as “democracy” or “watermelon,” but it freezes when you type profanities, and, at times, it has frozen when people typed words like “torrent,” “bisexual” and “penis.” At this writing, it’s freezing when I type “clitoris.” The autocomplete blacklist can also be used to protect or discredit political candidates. As recently reported, at the moment autocomplete shows you “Ted” (for former GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz) when you type “lying,” but it will not show you “Hillary” when you type “crooked” – not even, on my computer, anyway, when you type “crooked hill.” (The nicknames for Clinton and Cruz coined by Donald Trump, of course.) If you add the “a,” so you’ve got “crooked hilla,” you get the very odd suggestion “crooked Hillary Bernie.” When you type “crooked” on Bing, “crooked Hillary” pops up instantly. Google’s list of forbidden terms varies by region and individual.
The Google Maps blacklist.
This list is a little more creepy, and if you are concerned about your privacy, it might be a good list to be on. The cameras of Google Earth and Google Maps have photographed your home for all to see. If you don’t like that, “just move,” Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt said. Google also maintains a list of properties it either blacks out or blurs out in its images. Some are probably military installations, some the residences of wealthy people, and some – well, who knows? See elsewhere in this manuscript for more details on this subject.
The Google account blacklist.
A couple of years ago, Google consolidated a number of its products – Gmail, Google Docs, Google+, YouTube, Google Wallet and others – so you can access all of them through your one Google account.
If you somehow violate Google’s vague and intimidating terms of service agreement, you will join the ever-growing list of people who are shut out of their accounts.
Which means you’ll lose access to all of these interconnected products. Because virtually no one has ever read this lengthy, legalistic agreement, however, people are shocked when they’re shut out, in part because Google reserves the right to “stop providing Services to you … at any time.”
And because Google, one of the largest and richest companies in the world, has no customer service department, getting reinstated can be difficult. (Given, however, that all of these services gather personal information about you to sell to advertisers, losing one’s Google account has been judged by some to be a blessing in disguise.)
The Google News blacklist.
If a librarian were caught trashing all the liberal newspapers before people could read them, he or she might get in a heap o’ trouble.
What happens when most of the librarians in the world have been replaced by a single company?
Google is now the largest news aggregator in the world, tracking tens of thousands of news sources in more than thirty languages and recently adding thousands of small, local news sources to its inventory. It also selectively bans news sources as it pleases.
In 2006, Google was accused of excluding conservative news sources that generated stories critical of Islam, and the company has also been accused of banning individual columnists and competing companies from its news feed. In December 2014, facing a new law in Spain that would have charged Google for scraping content from Spanish news sources (which, after all, have to pay to prepare their news), Google suddenly withdrew its news service from Spain, which led to an immediate drop in traffic to Spanish new stories. That drop in traffic is the problem: When a large aggregator bans you from its service, fewer people find your news stories, which means opinions will shift away from those you support. Selective blacklisting of news sources is a powerful way of promoting a political, religious or moral agenda, with no one the wiser.
The Google AdWords blacklist.
Now things get creepier. More than 70 percent of Google’s $80 billion in annual revenue comes from its AdWords advertising service, which it implemented in 2000 by infringing on a similar system already patented by Overture Services. The way it works is simple:
Businesses worldwide bid on the right to use certain keywords in short text ads that link to their websites (those text ads are the AdWords); when people click on the links, those businesses pay Google.
These ads appear on Google.com and other Google websites and are also interwoven into the content of more than a million non-Google websites – Google’s “Display Network.”
The problem here is that if a Google executive decides your business or industry doesn’t meet its moral standards, it bans you from AdWords; these days, with Google’s reach so large, that can quickly put you out of business. In 2011, Google blacklisted an Irish political group that defended sex workers but which did not provide them; after a protest, the company eventually backed down.
In May 2016, Google blacklisted an entire industry – companies providing high-interest “payday” loans. As always, the company billed this dramatic move as an exercise in social responsibility, failing to note that it is a major investor in LendUp.com, which is in the same industry; if Google fails to blacklist LendUp (it’s too early to tell), the industry ban might turn out to have been more of an anticompetitive move than one of conscience. That kind of hypocrisy has turned up before in AdWords activities.
Whereas Google takes a moral stand, for example, in banning ads from companies promising quick weight loss, in 2011, Google forfeited a whopping $500 million to the U.S. Justice Department for having knowingly allowed Canadian drug companies to sell drugs illegally in the U.S. for years through the AdWords system, and several state attorneys general believe that Google has continued to engage in similar practices since 2011; investigations are ongoing.
Privacy
Privacy is a pretty big issue with me. The entire concept of monitoring former W(U)-SAP members of MAJestic and other “black operations projects” requires that the agents no longer have any kind of privacy.
Well, I suppose that I could write reams of pages on this subject, but I won’t. If the reader is not aware of how important privacy is, then let it lie at that. I for one, tend to leave my cell phone at home hen I go out so that I know that if someone wants to talk to me or reach me, they will do so when I want them to, not when they want to. It’s my little wall of privacy that I have since erected.
Sigh. Another day, another reminder that companies don’t really have to abide by promises to not share your personal information. They have a big “but” in their contracts.
In 2016, millions of Sports Authority customers began receiving notices that their e-mail addresses and other data were about to be transferred to competitor Dick’s Sporting Goods. The transfer is legal because Sports Authority declared bankruptcy and sold off its spare parts this summer. Dick’s, smartly and legally, bought the customer information.
According to the L.A. Times, a treasure trove of 25 million e-mails and some other data cost Dick’s $15 million. So you might not think your data is valuable, but someone sure does.
But you probably didn’t know that. In fact, when Sports Authority asked for your email, you may have been told, “We won’t share it” by an employee or a web page. Consumers are often told that. It’s a lie, unless it includes the “but,” which is often casually omitted or otherwise missed by consumers.
The Google AdSense blacklist.
If your website has been approved by AdWords, you are eligible to sign up for Google AdSense, a system in which Google places ads for various products and services on your website. When people click on those ads, Google pays you. If you are good at driving traffic to your website, you can make millions of dollars a year running AdSense ads – all without having any products or services of your own. Meanwhile, Google makes a net profit by charging the companies behind the ads for bringing them customers; this accounts for about 18 percent of Google’s income.
Here, too, there is scandal:
In April 2014, in two posts on PasteBin.com, someone claiming to be a former Google employee working in their AdSense department alleged the department engaged in a regular practice of dumping AdSense customers just before Google was scheduled to pay them. To this day, no one knows whether the person behind the posts was legit, but one thing is clear: Since that time, real lawsuits filed by real companies have, according to WebProNews, been “piling up” against Google, alleging the companies were unaccountably dumped at the last minute by AdSense just before large payments were due, in some cases payments as high as $500,000.
The search engine blacklist.
Google’s ubiquitous search engine has indeed become the gateway to virtually all information, handling 90 percent of search in most countries. It dominates search because its index is so large: Google indexes more than 45 billion web pages; its next-biggest competitor, Microsoft’s Bing, indexes a mere 14 billion, which helps to explain the poor quality of Bing’s search results.
Google’s dominance in search is why businesses large and small live in constant “fear of Google,” as Mathias Dopfner, CEO of Axel Springer, the largest publishing conglomerate in Europe, put it in an open letter to Eric Schmidt in 2014.
According to Dopfner, when Google made one of its frequent adjustments to its search algorithm, one of his company’s subsidiaries dropped dramatically in the search rankings and lost 70 percent of its traffic within a few days.
Even worse than the vagaries of the adjustments, however, are the dire consequences that follow when Google employees somehow conclude you have violated their “guidelines”:
You either get banished to the rarely visited Netherlands of search pages beyond the first page (90 percent of all clicks go to links on that first page) or completely removed from the index.
In 2011, Google took a “manual action” of a “corrective” nature against retailer J.C. Penney – punishment for Penney’s alleged use of a legal SEO technique called “link building” that many companies employ to try to boost their rankings in Google’s search results. Penney was demoted 60 positions or more in the rankings.
Search ranking manipulations of this sort don’t just ruin businesses; they also affect people’s opinions, attitudes, beliefs and behavior, as my research on the Search Engine Manipulation Effect has demonstrated.
Fortunately, definitive information about Google’s punishment programs is likely to turn up over the next year or two thanks to legal challenges the company is facing. In 2014, a Florida company called e-Ventures Worldwide filed a lawsuit against Google for “completely removing almost every website” associated with the company from its search rankings.
When the company’s lawyers tried to get internal documents relevant to Google’s actions though typical litigation discovery procedures, Google refused to comply.
In July 2015, a judge ruled that Google had to honor e-Ventures’ discovery requests, and that case is now moving forward. More significantly, in April 2016, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the attorney general of Mississippi – supported in his efforts by the attorneys general of 40 other states – has the right to proceed with broad discovery requests in his own investigations into Google’s secretive and often arbitrary practices.
This brings me, at last, to the biggest and potentially most dangerous of Google’s blacklists – which Google’s calls its “quarantine” list.
The American quarantine list.
Google maintains a quarantine list for every nation that it services. The entities that go on that list are determined by the government of the host nation, and Google itself.
To get a sense of the scale of this list, I find it helpful to think about an old movie – the classic 1951 film “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” which starred a huge metal robot named Gort. He had laser-weapon eyes, zapped terrified humans into oblivion and had the power to destroy the world.
Klaatu, Gort’s alien master, was trying to deliver an important message to earthlings, but they kept shooting him before he could. Finally, to get the world’s attention, Klaatu demonstrated the enormous power of the alien races he represented by shutting down – at noon New York time – all of the electricity on earth for exactly 30 minutes.
The earth stood still.
Substitute “ogle” for “rt,” and you get “Google,” which is every bit as powerful as Gort but with a much better public relations department – so good, in fact, that you are probably unaware that on Jan. 31, 2009, Google blocked access to virtually the entire internet. And, as if not to be outdone by a 1951 science fiction move, it did so for 40 minutes.
Impossible, you say. Why would do-no-evil Google do such an apocalyptic thing, and, for that matter, how, technically, could a single company block access to more than 100 million websites?
The answer has to do with the dark and murky world of website blacklists – ever-changing lists of websites that contain malicious software that might infect or damage people’s computers.
There are many such lists – even tools, such as blacklistalert.org, that scan multiple blacklists to see if your IP address is on any of them.
Some lists are kind of mickey-mouse – repositories where people submit the names or IP addresses of suspect sites.
Others, usually maintained by security companies that help protect other companies, are more high-tech, relying on “crawlers” – computer programs that continuously comb the internet.
But the best and longest list of suspect websites is Google’s, launched in May 2007.
Because Google is crawling the web more extensively than anyone else, it is also in the best position to find malicious websites.
In 2012, Google acknowledged that each and every day it adds about 9,500 new websites to its American quarantine list and displays malware warnings on the answers it gives to between 12 and 14 million search queries. It won’t reveal the exact number of websites on the list, but it is certainly in the millions on any given day.
In 2011, Google blocked an entire subdomain, co.cc, which alone contained 11 million websites, justifying its action by claiming that most of the websites in that domain appeared to be “spammy.”
According to Matt Cutts, still the leader of Google’s web spam team, the company “reserves the right” to take such action when it deems it necessary. (The right? Who gave Google that right?)
And that’s nothing: According to The Guardian, on Saturday, Jan. 31, 2009, at 2:40 pm GMT, Google blocked the entire internet for those impressive 40 minutes, supposedly, said the company, because of “human error” by its employees. It would have been 6:40 am in Mountain View, California, where Google is headquartered.
Was this time chosen because it is one of the few hours of the week when all of the world’s stock markets are closed? Could this have been another of the many pranks for which Google employees are so famous? In 2008, Google invited the public to submit applications to join the “first permanent human colony on Mars.” Sorry, Marsophiles; it was just a prank.
When Google’s search engine shows you a search result for a site it has quarantined, you see warnings such as, “The site ahead contains malware” or “This site may harm your computer” on the search result.
That’s useful information if that website actually contains malware, either because the website was set up by bad guys or because a legitimate site was infected with malware by hackers.
But Google’s crawlers often make mistakes, blacklisting websites that have merely been “hijacked,” which means the website itself isn’t dangerous but merely that accessing it through the search engine will forward you to a malicious site.
For instance, the website, http://drrobertepstein.com, was hijacked in this way in early 2012. Accessing the website directly wasn’t dangerous, but trying to access it through the Google search engine forwarded users to a malicious website in Nigeria.
When this happens, Google not only warns you about the infected website on its search engine (which makes sense), it also blocks you from accessing the website directly through multiple browsers – even non-Google browsers. (Hmm. Now that’s odd. I’ll get back to that point shortly.)
The mistakes are just one problem.
The bigger problem is that even though it takes only a fraction of a second for a crawler to list you, after your site has been cleaned up Google’s crawlers sometimes take days or even weeks to delist you – long enough to threaten the existence of some businesses.
This is quite bizarre considering how rapidly automated online systems operate these days. Within seconds after you pay for a plane ticket online, your seat is booked, your credit card is charged, your receipt is displayed and a confirmation email shows up in your inbox – a complex series of events involving multiple computers controlled by at least three or four separate companies.
However, when you inform Google’s automated blacklist system that your website is now clean, you are simply advised to check back occasionally to see if any action has been taken.
To get delisted after your website has been repaired, you either have to struggle with the company’s online Webmaster tools, which are far from friendly, or you have to hire a security expert to do so – typically for a fee ranging between $1,000 and $10,000.
No expert, however, can speed up the mysterious delisting process; the best he or she can do is set it in motion.
So far, all I’ve told you is that Google’s crawlers scan the internet, sometimes find what appear to be suspect websites and put those websites on a quarantine list.
That information is then conveyed to users through the search engine. So far so good, except of course for the mistakes and the delisting problem; one might even say that Google is performing a public service, which is how some people who are familiar with the quarantine list defend it.
But I also mentioned that Google somehow blocks people from accessing websites directly through multiple browsers.
How on earth could it do that? How could Google block you when you are trying to access a website using Safari, an Apple product, or Firefox, a browser maintained by Mozilla, the self-proclaimed “nonprofit defender of the free and open internet”?
The key here is browsers. No browser maker wants to send you to a malicious website, and because Google has the best blacklist, major browsers such as Safari and Firefox – and Chrome, of course, Google’s own browser, as well as browsers that load through Android, Google’s mobile operating system – check Google’s quarantine list before they send you to a website. (In November 2014, Mozilla announced it will no longer list Google as its default search engine, but it also disclosed that it will continue to rely on Google’s quarantine list to screen users’ search requests.)
If the site has been quarantined by Google, you see one of those big, scary images that say things like “Get me out of here!” or “Reported attack site!”
At this point, given the default security settings on most browsers, most people will find it impossible to visit the site – but who would want to? If the site is not on Google’s quarantine list, you are sent on your way.
OK, that explains how Google blocks you even when you’re using a non-Google browser, but why do they block you? In other words, how does blocking you feed the ravenous advertising machine – the sine qua non of Google’s existence?
Have you figured it out yet? The scam is as simple as it is brilliant: When a browser queries Google’s quarantine list, it has just shared information with Google.
With Chrome and Android, you are always giving up information to Google, but you are also doing so even if you are using non-Google browsers.
That is where the money is – more information about search activity kindly provided by competing browser companies. How much information is shared will depend on the particular deal the browser company has with Google. In a maximum information deal, Google will learn the identity of the user; in a minimum information deal, Google will still learn which websites people want to visit – valuable data when one is in the business of ranking websites. Google can also charge fees for access to its quarantine list, of course, but that’s not where the real gold is.
Chrome, Android, Firefox and Safari currently carry about 92 percent of all browser traffic in the U.S. – 74 percent worldwide – and these numbers are increasing. As of this writing, that means Google is regularly collecting information through its quarantine list from more than 2.5 billion people. Given the recent pact between Microsoft and Google, in coming months we might learn that Microsoft – both to save money and to improve its services – has also started using Google’s quarantine list in place of its own much smaller list; this would further increase the volume of information Google is receiving.
To put this another way, Google has grown, and is still growing, on the backs of some of its competitors, with end users oblivious to Google’s antics – as usual.
It is yet another example of what I have called “Google’s Dance” – the remarkable way in which Google puts a false and friendly public face on activities that serve only one purpose for the company: increasing profit.
On the surface, Google’s quarantine list is yet another way Google helps us, free of charge, breeze through our day safe and well-informed.
Beneath the surface, that list is yet another way Google accumulates more information about us to sell to advertisers.
You may disagree, but in my view Google’s blacklisting practices put the company into the role of thuggish internet cop – a role that was never authorized by any government, nonprofit organization or industry association.
It is as if the biggest bully in town suddenly put on a badge and started patrolling, shuttering businesses as it pleased, while also secretly peeping into windows, taking photos and selling them to the highest bidder.
Consider: Heading into the holiday season in late 2013, an online handbag business suffered a 50 percent drop in business because of blacklisting.
In 2009, it took an eco-friendly pest control company 60 days to leap the hurdles required to remove Google’s warnings, long enough to nearly go broke. And sometimes the blacklisting process appears to be personal: In May 2013, the highly opinionated PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak wondered “When Did Google Become the Internet Police?” after both his website and podcast site were blacklisted. He also ran into the delisting problem:
"It's funny, how the site can be blacklisted in a millisecond by an analysis but I have to wait forever to get cleared by the same analysis doing the same scan. Why is that?"
- John Dvorak
Could Google really be arrogant enough to mess with a prominent journalist? According to CNN, in 2005 Google “blacklisted all CNET reporters for a year after the popular technology news website published personal information about one of Google’s founders” – Eric Schmidt – “in a story about growing privacy concerns.” The company declined to comment on CNN’s story.
Google’s mysterious and self-serving practice of blacklisting is one of many reasons Google should be regulated, just as phone companies and credit bureaus are. The E.U.’s recent antitrust actions against Google, the leaked FTC staff report about Google’s biased search rankings, President Obama’s call for regulating internet service providers – all have merit, but they overlook another danger.
No one company, which is accountable to its shareholders but not to the general public, should have the power to instantly put another company out of business or block access to any website in the world.
How frequently Google acts irresponsibly is beside the point; it has the ability to do so, which means that in a matter of seconds any of Google’s 37,000 employees with the right passwords or skills could laser a business or political candidate into oblivion or even freeze much of the world’s economy.
Some degree of censorship and blacklisting is probably necessary; I am not disputing that. But the suppression of information on the internet needs to be managed by, or at least subject to the regulations of, responsible public officials, with every aspect of their operations transparent to all.
Other related issues
No one actually likes this kind of censorship. However, countries will permit it to occur as long as it furthers their political agenda and aims. Yet, the moment that a company self-censors in defiance of a given governmental requirement, expect great and rapid retribution.
Google suffered a major regulatory blow on Tuesday 27JUN17, when the EU’s antitrust regulator fined Alphabet’s Google a record €2.42 billion ($2.71 billion) fine for “abusing its dominance in search” and favoring its own comparison-shopping service in search results: a decision with far-reaching implications for both the tech sector and already strained transatlantic relations. The EU further ordered the search giant to apply the same methods to rivals as its own when displaying their services in search results.
Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner, said Google “denied other companies the chance to compete” and left consumers without “genuine choice.”
“Google’s strategy for its comparison shopping service wasn’t just about attracting customers by making its product better than those of its rivals. Instead, Google abused its market dominance as a search engine by promoting its own comparison shopping service in its search results, and demoting those of competitors. What Google has done is illegal under EU antitrust rules.”
Is any reader surprised?
Recording all Sounds around a Google Product
Google maintains a record of everything you have said around it (and products aligned with the Google enterprises) for years, and you can listen to the huge archives that if recorded of you yourself. The company quietly records many of the conversations that people have around its products.
The feature works as a way of letting people search with their voice, and storing those recordings presumably lets Google improve its language recognition tools as well as the results that it gives to people. It is considered a “value added” feature, but I for one consider it highly annoying and problematic.
The new portal was introduced in June 2015 and so has been active ever since that date. Therefore, Google now has a very full record of (assumingly non-catagorized) things you have said, which you assumed have been in private.
Google justifies this collection as a kind of audio diary.
The easiest way to stop Google recording everything is to turn off the virtual assistant and never to use voice search. But that solution also gets at the central problem of much privacy and data use today – doing so cuts off one of the most useful things about having an Android phone.
Google is tracking billions of credit card transaction records to prove that its online ads are prompting people to make purchases – even when they happen offline in brick-and-mortar stores, the company said Tuesday, 23MAY17. The advance allows Google to determine how many sales have been generated by digital ad campaigns, a goal that industry insiders have long described as “the holy grail” of online advertising.
To power its multi-billion dollar advertising juggernaut, Google already analyzes users’ web browsing, search history and geographic locations, using data from popular Google-owned apps like YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps and the Google Play store. All that information is tied to the real identities of users when they log into Google’s services.
The credit card data enables the tech giant to connect these digital trails to real-world purchase records in a far more extensive way than was possible before. Privacy advocates said few people understand that their purchases are being analyzed in this way and could feel uneasy, despite assurances from Google that it has taken steps to protect the personal information of its users.
Of course the company said it took pains to protect user privacy, it declined to detail how the system works or what companies are analyzing credit and debit card records on Google’s behalf. Google, which saw $79 billion in revenues in 2016, said it would not handle the records directly but that its undisclosed partner companies had access to 70 percent of credit and debit card transactions in the United States.
“What’s really fascinating to me is that as the companies become increasingly intrusive in terms of their data collection, they also become more secretive,”
-Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Google for years has been mining location data from Google Maps in an effort to prove that knowledge of people’s physical locations could “close the loop” between physical and digital worlds. Users can block this by adjusting the settings on smartphones, but few do so, say privacy experts.
This location tracking ability has allowed Google to send reports to retailers telling them, for example, whether people who saw an ad for a lawn mower later visited or passed by a Home Depot. The location-tracking program has grown since it was first launched with only a handful of retailers: Home Depot, Express, Nissan, and Sephora have participated.
“Google — and also Facebook — believe that in order to get digital dollars from advertisers who are still primarily spending on TV, they need to prove that digital works, these companies have to invest in finding the identity of the consumer at the moment when that shopper is at the cash register”
- Amit Jain, chief executive of Bridg, a digital advertising startup that matches online to offline behavior.
Google executives say they are using complex, patent-pending mathematical formulas to protect the privacy of consumers when they match a Google user with a shopper who makes a purchase in a brick-and-mortar store.
The mathematical formulas convert people’s names and other purchase information, including the time stamp, location, and the amount of the purchase, into anonymous strings of numbers.
The formulas make it impossible for Google to know the identity of the real-world shoppers, and for the retailers to know the identities of Google’s users, said company executives, who called the process “double-blind” encryption.
Consider “double-blind” encryption
The tech giant declined to describe its mathematical formulas in anything more than broad terms, citing a pending patent.
Dischler said the work was based on a 2011 research paper by three MIT scientists, which was funded by Google and Citigroup. The company would not say how merchants had obtained consent from consumers to pass along their credit card information.
Google said it requires its partners to use only personal data that they have the “rights” to use, but it would not say whether that meant the consumers had consented.
Paul Stephens from Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a consumer advocacy group based in San Diego, said only a few pieces of data can allow a marketer to identify an individual, and he expressed skepticism that Google’s system for guarding the identities of users will stand up to the efforts of hackers, who in the past have successfully stripped away privacy protections created by other companies after data breaches.
“What we have learned is that it’s extremely difficult to anonymize data, if you care about your privacy, you definitely need to be concerned.”
Such data providers have been the targets of cybercriminals in the past. In 2015, a hack of data broker Experian exposed the personal information of 15 million people.
Google Tracks you even when off
Those of you that are not using Chinese Huawei or ShaoMi phones had best pay attention to any phones pre-loaded with Google Apps.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Google is actually tracking you even when you switch your device settings to Location History “off”.
As journalist Mark Ames comments in response to a new Associated Press story exposing Google’s ability to track people at all times even when they explicitly tell Google not to via iPhone and Android settings, “The Pentagon invented the internet to be the perfect global surveillance/counterinsurgency machine. Surveillance is baked into the internet’s DNA.”
In but the latest in a continuing saga of big tech tracking and surveillance stories which should serve to convince us all we are living in the beginning phases of a Minority Report style tracking and pansophical “pre-crime” system, it’s now confirmed that the world’s most powerful tech company and search tool will always find a way to keep your location data.
The Associated Press sought the help of Princeton researchers to prove that while Google is clear and upfront about giving App users the ability to turn off or “pause” Location History on their devices, there are other hidden means through which it retains the data.
Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you’ve been. Google’s support page on the subject states: “You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.”
That isn’t true. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking.
For example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely open its Maps app. Automatic daily weather updates on Android phones pinpoint roughly where you are. And some searches that have nothing to do with location, like “chocolate chip cookies,” or “kids science kits,” pinpoint your precise latitude and longitude — accurate to the square foot — and save it to your Google account.
The issue directly affects around two billion people using Google’s Android operating software and iPhone users relying on Google maps or a simple search.
Among the computer science researchers at Princeton conducting the tests is Jonathan Mayer, who told the AP, “If you’re going to allow users to turn off something called ‘Location History,’ then all the places where you maintain location history should be turned off,” and added, “That seems like a pretty straightforward position to have.”
Google, for its part, is defending the software and privacy tracking settings, saying the company has been perfectly clear and has not violated privacy ethics.
“There are a number of different ways that Google may use location to improve people’s experience, including: Location History, Web and App Activity, and through device-level Location Services,” a Google statement to the AP reads. “We provide clear descriptions of these tools, and robust controls so people can turn them on or off, and delete their histories at any time.”
According to the AP, there is a way to prevent Google from storing the various location marker and metadata collection possibilities, but it’s somewhat hidden and painstaking.
Google’s own description on how to do this as a result of the AP inquiry is as follows:
To stop Google from saving these location markers, the company says, users can turn off another setting, one that does not specifically reference location information. Called “Web and App Activity” and enabled by default, that setting stores a variety of information from Google apps and websites to your Google account.
When paused, it will prevent activity on any device from being saved to your account. But leaving “Web & App Activity” on and turning “Location History” off only prevents Google from adding your movements to the “timeline,” its visualization of your daily travels. It does not stop Google’s collection of other location markers.
You can delete these location markers by hand, but it’s a painstaking process since you have to select them individually, unless you want to delete all of your stored activity.
Of course, the more constant location data obviously means more advertising profits and further revenue possibilities for Google and its clients, so we fully expect future hidden tracking loopholes to possibly come to light.
This story about Google surveillance only surprising if you haven't read @yashalevine's Surveillance Valley. The Pentagon invented the internet to be the perfect global surveillance/counterinsurgency machine. Surveillance is baked into the internet's DNA https://t.co/31QcyeYVM5 — Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) August 13, 2018
Beginning in 2014, Google has utilized user location histories to allow advertisers to track the effectiveness of online ads at driving foot traffic. With the continued possibility of real-time tracking to generate billions of dollars, it should come as no surprise that Google would seek to make it as difficult (or perhaps impossible?) as it can for users to ensure they aren’t tracked.
Some of the revelations the former CIA anti-terrorism counter intelligence officer revealed CIA whistleblower, Kevin Shipp.included that
“Google Earth was set up through the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and InQtel.”
Indeed he is correct, the CIA and NGA owned the company Google acquired, Keyhole Inc., paying an undisclosed sum for the company to turn its tech into what we now know as Google Earth. Another curious investor in Keyhole Inc. was none other than the venture capital firm In-Q-Tel run by the CIA according to a press release at the time.
Google is the CIA.
Shipp also disclosed that the agency known as the Joint Special Ops Command (JSOC) is the “president’s secret army” which he can use for secret assassinations, overturning governments and things the American people don’t know about.
FBI warrantless searches violate the Fourth Amendment with national security letters, which Shipp noted enables them to walk into your employer’s office and demand all your financial records and if he or she says anything about them being there they can put your supervisor in jail or drop a case against themselves using the “State’s Secret Privilege law.”
What this means is that Google is connected to and linked into the United States covert investigative agencies.
In the shocking, explosive presentation, Shipp went on to express that there are “over 10,000 secret sites in the U.S.” that formed after 9/11. There are “1,291 secret government agencies, 1,931 large private corporations and over 4,800,000 Americans that he knows of who have a secrecy clearance, and 854,000 who have Top Secret clearance, explaining they signed their lives away bound by an agreement.
He also detailed how Congress is owned by the Military Industrial Complex through the Congressional Armed Services Committee (48 senior members of Congress) giving those members money in return for a vote on the spending bill for the military and intelligence budget.
He even touched on what he called the “secret intelligence industrial complex,” which he called the center of the shadow government including the CIA, NSA, NRO, and NGA.
Shipp further stated that around the “secret intelligence industrial complex” you have the big five conglomerate of intelligence contractors, [1] Leidos Holdings, [2] CSRA, [3] CACI, [4] SAIC, and [5] Booz Allen Hamilton. He noted that the work they do is “top secret and unreported.”
Censoring gmail
Gmail users are claiming that Google is filtering emails from Donald Trump’s campaign into their spam boxes.
There have been previous reports, denied by Google, that the search engine was manipulating search autocomplete results in favor of Hillary Clinton. Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, has previously said, “Google is directly engaged with Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
In 2015, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt reportedly funded a startup, “The Groundwork,” with the objective of helping Hillary Clinton get elected.
Fact Checking
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Google is a latecomer to the plethora of Internet “fact check” sites. The announcement that Google would integrate a “fact check” system into their search engine occurred in 2016. I am sad to say that its creation was not the result of a “need” or the creation of a “value added” attribute to the search engine. No. It was the result of the political climate during the contentious election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
At that time, American disgust with the American media was at an all-time high. They had lost all credibility with the media, as the overwhelming support of the Democrat candidate by the media was absolute and unabashed. As such, the media through polling had discovered a number of disturbing trends, one of which was that they had lost their edge in credibility. People were turning to “fringe” and “alternative media”, as well as social media for their news (and here). This included not only the media but every established internet organization, including fact check websites. And HERE.
Google Was "Working To Get Hillary Clinton Elected" With "Silent Donation" According To Leaked Internal Email
Tucker Carlson just blew the cover off the 2016 election influence charade, after he read an internal email on Monday night’s show from a senior Google employee who admitted to using company resources to make a “silent donation” to a liberal group that was creating ads and donating funds to bus Latinos to voting stations during the 2016 election in key swing states, in an effort to help Hillary Clinton win.
The email was sent by the former head of Google’s multicultural marketing department, Eliana Mario, on November 9, 2016.
“That email was subsequently forwarded by two Google VP’s to more staff members throughout the company,” says Carlson, adding “In her email, Mario touts Google’s multi-faceted efforts to boost Hispanic turnout in the election. She noticed that Latino voters did record-breaking numbers, especially in states like Florida, Nevada and Arizona – the last of which she describes as “a key state for us.” She brags that the company used its power to ensure that millions of people saw certain hashtags and social media impressions, with the goal of influencing their behavior during the election.”
Elsewhere in the email Mario says “Google supported partners like Voto Latino to pay for rides to the polls in key states.”
She describes this assistance as a “silent donation”
Mario then says that Google helped Voto Latino create ad campaigns to promote those rides. Now officially Voto Latino is a non-partisan entity, but that is a sham. Voto Latino is vocally partisan. Recently the group declared that Hispanics – ALL Hispanics are in President Trump’s “crosshairs.” They said they plan to respond to this by registering another million additional Hispanic voters in the next Presidential cycle.
It was, in effect, an in-kind contribution to the Hillary Clinton for President campaign.
In the end, Google was disappointed. As Mario herself conceded “ultimately after all was said and done, the Latino community did come out to vote, and completely surprised us. We never anticipated that 29% of Latinos would vote for Trump. No one did. -Tucker Carlson
So it looks like @Google executives have been caught red-handed trying to throw the election to Hillary Clinton in 2016. Maybe that's why they refused to appear before Congress last week?https://t.co/1YELagt8hH
This, of course, isn’t the first evidence of Google doing all they could to help Hillary win the election. In an April 15, 2014 email from Google’s then-Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt found in the WikiLeaked Podesta emails, titled “Notes for a 2016 Democratic Campaign,” Schmidt tells Cheryl Mills that
"I have put together my thoughts on the campaign ideas and I have scheduled some meetings in the next few weeks for veterans of the campaign to tell me how to make these ideas better. This is simply a draft but do let me know if this is a helpful process for you all."
While there are numerous curious nuances in the plan, presented below in its entirety, the one section that caught our – and Wikileaks’ attention – is the following which implicitly suggests Google planned the creation of a voter tracking database, using smart phones:
Key is the development of a single record for a voter that aggregates all that is known about them. In 2016 smart phones will be used to identify, meet, and update profiles on the voter. A dynamic volunteer can easily speak with a voter and, with their email or other digital handle, get the voter videos and other answers to areas they care about (“the benefits of ACA to you” etc.)
I met with Eric Schmidt tonight. As David reported, he's ready to fund, advise recruit talent, etc. He was more deferential on structure than I expected. Wasn't pushing to run through one of his existing firms. Clearly wants to be head outside advisor, but didn't seem like he wanted to push others out. Clearly wants to get going. He's still in DC tomorrow and would like to meet with you if you are in DC in the afternoon. I think it's worth doing. You around? If you are, and want to meet with him, maybe the four of us can get on to the project.
Another email from February 2015 suggested that the Google Chairman remained active in its collaboration with the Clinton campaign: John Podesta wrote that Eric Schmidt met with HR “about the business he proposes to do with the campaign. He says he’s met with HRC” and adds that “FYI. They are donating the Google plane for the Africa trip”
Meanwhile, according to a Breitbart report by Allum Bokhari, “By inserting negative search suggestions under the name of a candidate, search engines like Google can shift the opinions of undecided voters by up to 43.4 percent, according to new research by a team at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and reported exclusively by Breitbart News.”
The lead author of the study, Dr. Robert Epstein, has previously conducted research into what he calls the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME). This research showed that the manipulation of results pages in search engines can shift the voting preferences of undecideds by anywhere between 20 and 80 percent, depending on the demographic.
His latest research looks at how search engines can affect voters by suggesting negative or positive search terms when a political candidate’s name is entered into the search bar. Dr. Epstein’s research found that when negative search terms are suggested for a candidate, it can have a dramatic effect on voter opinion.
So, despite Google’s best efforts to help Clinton win the election, it simply wasn’t enough.
Meanwhile, Google has yet to answer why their search results for the word “Idiot” are vastly different from DuckDuckGo.
Google as a Workplace Nightmare
Apparently, Google has a reputation as a fantastic place to work. They offer many “perks”, which in everyway seems to make the rest of corporate America look like evil slave plantations. It’s pretty “in your face” regarding this. Why “everyone knows” that Google is a great place to work. Why, there is even a Hollywood movie about this…
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of articles on this. Here are just afew of the top hits;
Ah, the usual suspects. Huffington Post, Slate, Inc., Forbes, Business Insider… With a pedigree like that, you must either conclude that one of two things is going on. Either [1] they truly are a fantastic company to work for, or [2] they have invested heavily on a major propaganda campaign.
Oh and having all that money (where do they get all their billions of dollars? They do not host advertisements, so SOMEONE must be paying them) they have made propaganda films about how great Google is…
“The Internship” 2013 by Director Shawn Levy. Two salesmen whose careers have been torpedoed by the digital age find their way into a coveted internship at Google, where they must compete with a group of young, tech-savvy geniuses for a shot at employment.
Google might be a tool of the corporate elite, but they provide a great working environment for their employees. At least that is the impression that everyone seems to have.
Is this an accurate impression?
Well, in industy, companies always want to put on a “good face”. They want to have a good, clean and positive image. They invest money into their logo, and website. They produce marketing campaigns, and present television commercials to put everything in a favorable light (Remember the Sunbeam-Oster commercials in the 1990’s during the Al Dunlop years while he was gutting the workforce?).
Albert John Dunlap (born July 26, 1937) is a disgraced former corporate executive. He was best known as a turnaround specialist and professional downsizer, although it was later discovered that his reputed turnarounds were elaborate frauds.
The ruthless methods he employed to streamline failing companies, most notably Scott Paper, won him the nicknames "Chainsaw Al" and "Rambo in Pinstripes".
However, his career was effectively ended after he engineered a massive accounting scandal at Sunbeam Products, now Sunbeam-Oster, that ultimately cost that company its independence.
He is barred from serving as an officer of a publicly traded corporation.
His widespread layoffs and accounting frauds have put him on several lists of worst CEOs. I should know, I had the unfortunate experience to work under him.
They do everything in their power to produce a positive image. For image is everything.
It’s often very difficult to determine when a company is actually telling the truth or is trying to hide a harsh reality. I actually do not know what the story is with Google. However, what I do know is that there is one metric that guarantees whether or not a company has a positive work environment for their employees. That metric is “workforce retention”. Happy employees stay at a company. Unhappy employees leave.
So how does Google stack up?
Company
Work length at software companies (Years)
Facebook
2.02 years
Google
1.90 years
Oracle
1.89 years
Apple
1.85 years
Amazon
1.84 years
Twitter
1.83 years
Microsoft
1.81 years
Airbnb
1.64 years
Snap Inc.
1.62 years
Uber
1.23 years
This is how long (on average) employees stay in those companies. Note, that NONE of the values for the work lengths are in 6 month increments. Typically, in the rest of the world, if not in the industry, people work contracts for durations of 6 months, one or upto two years. This table does not show that at all. It shows that people are leaving in an unstructured, and unplanned manner.
This is suggestive of rapid terminations, or individual departures. Since the data was compiled during the “recession” of the Obama Administration, it is rather unlikely that the workers would voluntarily leave during an economic downturn. You simply don’t leave a job unless you have another one lined up, or you physically cannot stand working at that position any longer.
With a turnover like this, I’m impressed that they still manage to deliver a high-quality product. Here’s a telling quote from LinkedIN;
“It's understandable that most people use those companies as a springboard to get higher salaries and less stressful environment elsewhere, but as a hiring manager, I would cry if on my team the retention was like this.”
Indeed.
So WHY the investment that “Google is a great company to work for?”
I argue that if they are so very good at manipulating public opinion for to ohers (the NSA, the CIA, the political machinery) then why not do some things for themselves. And that is exactly what they did.
Conclusions
Yeah, I’m using a shit-load of ancient references that have fallen into the political dust. You, the reader should not be concerned. I used what I could find. And unfortunately most seems to be political in nature. Republicans said this, democrats said that. Blah, blah, blah.
The truth is that both political parties are playing a back and forth game against you. They keep the American people divided up and in constant fight against each other. Don’t fall for that game. Both are tools of the oligarchy.
Never forget that. They are puppets. They are actors. They are lies. They are entertainment.
Pay attention to how they use the systems currently in place. Google.
If you haven’t divorced Google, and blocked it completely from your browser, then DO IT NOW. This is only the “tip of the iceberg” and it’s a lot worse than anyone knows.
If you liked this article, you can read similar articles by viewing the master index for this class here;
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Have you noticed how the internet is a “white board”? All articles either get scrubbed or drop down in search engine listings to a point where they are impossible to access. If not outright blocked, and then newer articles take their pace with revised narratives.
This is true throughout all electronic media. Everything changes, and the old is erased, and the new takes it’s place.
In the old days, empires used to chisel off the faces of previous rulers statues, and chisel away their names. These actions would leave long lasting scars that remained for all to see. Maybe people couldn’t remember what the old ruler looked like or their names, but at least they knew that there was a time when the nations was ruled by someone else.
Now, we don’t even have that luxury.
Here's a great article. Reprinted as found. All credit to the author. Edited to fit this venue.
Paper Books Can’t Be Shut Off from Afar
“The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine,” Doctorow said.
Private ownership—in particular the private ownership of books, software, music and other cultural information—is the linchpin of a free society.
Having many copies of works of art, music and literature distributed widely (e.g., many copies of the same book among many private owners, or many copies of the same audio files, torrents or blockchain ledger entries on many private computers) protects a culture against corruption and censorship.
Decentralization strategies like these help to preserve press freedom, and individual freedom.
The widespread private ownership of cultural artifacts guarantees civil liberties, and draws people into their culture immanently, persistently, giving it life and power.
Cory Doctorow’s comment on Friday at BoingBoing regarding private ownership of books is well worth reading; he wrote it because Microsoft is shutting down its e-books service, and all the DRM books people bought from them will thus vanish into thin air.
Microsoft will provide refunds to those affected, but that isn’t remotely the point.
The point is that all their users’ books are to be shut off with a single poof! on Microsoft’s say-so.
That is a button that nobody, no corporation and no government agency, should be ever permitted to have.
“The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine,” Doctorow said.
At this very moment, governments are forbidding millions of people, Chinese people, Cubans, Belarusians and Egyptians and Hungarians and many, many others all over this world, from reading whatever they want.
So if there is to be a fear of the increasing adoption of e-books such as those offered by Microsoft, and to a far greater degree, Amazon, that’s by far the scariest thing about it.
Because if you were to keep all your books in a remotely controlled place, some villain really could come along one day and pretty much flip the switch and take them all away — and not just yours but everyone’s, all at once.
What if we had some species of Trump deciding to take action against the despicable, dangerous pointy-heads he is forever railing against?
Boom!
Nothing left to read but The Art of the Deal.
I don’t intend on shutting up about this ever, and I’m sure Doctorow won’t either, bless him.
His reasoning seems to have had something to do with the fact that books are hard to send to Africa.
Anyway my husband gave me a Kindle for my birthday that year, and I loved it a lot.
Thousands and thousands of books fit on this pretty, if potentially sinister, little machine.
I’d just go over to Project Gutenberg and vacuum stuff up every which way, because I have no literary discernment whatsoever and will gladly spend the afternoon reading Agatha Christie or really, literally almost anything.
Project Gutenberg is now up to more than 59,500 free e-books, all out of copyright and so classics, mostly.
And no need to feel the least bit guilty as you might even at a thrift shop, where whatever you buy, it’s going to take up room on bookshelves that you know you don’t have; these books took up no extra room at all.
I bet you will be surprised to hear when Project Gutenberg first started. 1971 (!) is the true answer, and could they ever destroy every Final Jeopardy contestant with that one, I bet.
Its founder, Michael Hart, was a most unusual and interesting man. The ultimate anti-corporatist. Like Yoda, Mr. Hart doesn’t appear to have possessed much glamour or power on the outside, but he was brimming with these and other virtues on the inside.
He didn’t care two pins about money, wouldn’t take a salary for years and years, and acquired the few bits of stuff he seemed to need at garage sales.
In the 1970s, nobody knew that computers would eventually be used for the mass storage of culture.
It hadn’t occurred to anyone yet that the computer would be useful for anything aside from just computation. It was so shockingly, incredibly good at that! There was such a lot of computation that needed doing, so computation was first in line.
Now it is clear as day that whoever controls computer storage will effectively control the media commons.
There are a lot of champions in this fight, but Michael Hart saw it all coming about half a century ago and started typing his fool head off, dozens and dozens of whole books, long before OCR was a gleam in a programmer’s eye.
Hart did more to secure the future of the public domain than anyone else in the world, I believe.
Project Gutenberg’s widely distributed books cannot be taken away—and when they’re downloaded and stored on private devices and media, it’s like insurance for Western Civ.
My first few times on Project Gutenberg I downloaded a lot of rare early Wodehouse (highly recommended: The Swoop! or, How Clarence Saved England) and also a lot of Thackeray, Gibbon, pretty much all of Mrs. Gaskell and, just by accident, Émile Gaboriau’s La Vie Infernale — the fruitiest, most marvelous 19th-c. French melodrama (in two parts: The Count’s Millions and Baron Trigault’s Vengeance. I just love those.) Plus Shakespeare and the King James Bible and that sort of stuff.
I am no fan of Amazon, and even back then I resisted spending money there, but I did buy an e-book copy of Infinite Jest, which is far and away my favorite modern novel.
A few days later, I was having a little dispute with my husband over whether or not Wallace misuses the word “ilk” in that book, which with the Kindle’s search feature took about twenty seconds to settle (A: not really; the solecism appears just once, in the quoted speech of Madame Psychosis.)
It’s all thrillingly searchable, and browsable, plus once you get a book on your Kindle (or Nook, or equiv.) you can highlight things and also make your own notes.
By now scholars, researchers, historians and journalists will want both a searchable ebook copy and a paper copy, I would think, of anything they’re really interested in.
I also learned that having an e-reader meant that one might quite easily wind up buying more books than before, if anything, because the getting of books was on one’s mind more.
So all that is the upside of owning e-books.
But my Fahrenheit-451-paranoia was fanned into a giant flaming ball of fear-napalm when I looked into the personal ownership of the files and books on my own Kindle.
And things have only gotten a lot worse since then.
Almost exactly ten years ago, you may remember, Amazon came stealthily along and deleted e-copies of 1984 (no seriously, they did) and Animal Farm from people’s Kindles — copies they’d already paid for and downloaded — because it turned out that there was a rights problem with the e-publisher.
Jeff Bezos wound up apologizing all over himself and taking it all back and promising never to do that ever again, but the fact remains that Amazon has some kind of access to your Kindle files and can literally remove them, if they feel like it, which is downright creepy, and if it were your computer you would not like it one little bit.
Having learned this, I went along and had a closer look at the then-current Kindle License Agreement.
There was some simply petrifying stuff on there.
For starters, then as now, you don’t “own” Kindle books, you’re basically renting them. (“Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.”)
Amazon’s current terms of use now specify explicitly that they can look over your shoulder while you read. Check this out!
Information Provided to Amazon. The Kindle Application will provide Amazon with information about use of your Kindle Application and its interaction with Kindle Content and the Service (such as last page read, content archiving, available memory, up-time, log files, and signal strength).
They can change the software on you whenever they like, or just shut it down completely, without so much as a by your leave:
Changes to Service; Amendments. We may change, suspend, or discontinue the Service, in whole or in part, including adding or removing Subscription Content from a Service, at any time without notice.
That is how a totalitarian state might go about confiscating books, if they wanted to. There is nothing in this agreement to stop Amazon from modifying the Kindle software to make it impossible for you to read any of your own files on the device.
Such a step is not forbidden to Amazon by this agreement; they are under no apparent obligation to protect any data you might be storing. That’s not to say that there aren’t laws, at least in some states, that might allow you to sue for damages; I don’t know. I’m just saying, this agreement doesn’t require Amazon to protect your data.
A bad government could just grab the controls from them and have at it.
Changes to Service; Amendments.We may change, suspend, or discontinue the Service, in whole or in part, including adding or removing Subscription Content from a Service, at any time without notice. We may amend any of this Agreement’s terms at our sole discretion by posting the revised terms on the Amazon.com website.
Or they might decide to shut just your account down:
Termination. Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Service, and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service without refund of any fees.
Keep in mind these are your books that you bought or collected.
Can you imagine a bookseller or publisher asserting rights over the contents of your bookshelves in your house? That’s basically what we’re talking about, here.
After reading all this back in 2010, I rang the (excellent, and very polite) Kindle customer service up to learn more, especially about privacy issues.
One thing I wanted to know was exactly how much access Amazon had to my private, personal Kindle files (such as .txt and .pdf files that I’d made myself.) But after being bumped up through a couple of layers of supervisors, I didn’t get very clear answers.
For instance, on the question of Amazon’s remote access to my personal stuff. “We don’t have access to your files,” I was first told. But can you see my personal files? And if you wanted to delete my personal files, as was done with the Orwell books, could you do it?
“We don’t do that.”
Eight or nine years down the road, we can be pretty sure that if a tech behemoth suddenly feels like doing something horrible, they just will do it.
And to rub this fact in your faces, let me reproduce this article from BoingBoing. All credit to the author, reproduced as found.
Microsoft is about to shut off its ebook DRM servers: “The books will stop working”
“The books will stop working”: That’s the substance of the reminder that Microsoft sent to customers for their ebook store, reminding them that, as announced in April, the company is getting out of the ebook business because it wasn’t profitable enough for them, and when they do, they’re going to shut off their DRM servers, which will make the books stop working.
Almost exactly fifteen years ago, I gave an influential, widely cited talk at Microsoft Research where I predicted this exact outcome. I don’t feel good about the fact that I got it right. This is a fucking travesty.
As Rob Donoghue tweeted, “I keep saying it and it sounds worse each time…There will be refunds, and reasonable voice says to me it’s just business, but the book voice wants to burn it all down. I’m kind of with the book voice on this one.”
Me too. Here’s what I wrote back in April, when Microsoft announced the shutdown.
Microsoft has a DRM-locked ebook store that isn’t making enough money, so they’re shutting it down and taking away every book that every one of its customers acquired effective July 1.
Customers will receive refunds.
This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media into sharp contrast. I have bought a lot of MP3s over the years, thousands of them, and many of the retailers I purchased from are long gone, but I still have the MP3s. Likewise, I have bought many books from long-defunct booksellers and even defunct publishers, but I still own those books.
When I was a bookseller, nothing I could do would result in your losing the book that I sold you. If I regretted selling you a book, I didn’t get to break into your house and steal it, even if I left you a cash refund for the price you paid.
People sometimes treat me like my decision not to sell my books through Amazon’s Audible is irrational (Audible will not let writers or publisher opt to sell their books without DRM), but if you think Amazon is immune to this kind of shenanigans, you are sadly mistaken. My books matter a lot to me. I just paid $8,000 to have a container full of books shipped from a storage locker in the UK to our home in LA so I can be closer to them.
The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine: if the publishing industry deliberately set out to destroy any sense of intrinsic, civilization-supporting value in literary works, they could not have done a better job.
Reminded that the Microsoft ebook store closes next week. The DRM'd books will stop working.
If you want to make sure that your literature, books and documents won’t be edited remotely, or erased without your permission, then please use paper books. If you have a lot of files on your electronics and you want to keep them, you can disable your Wifi.
If you want to guarantee that they will not be tampered with, then you can do this through a hardware change (not rely on the software itself).
Anything that is electronic, that can connect to the internet, can be changed by others. This is most especially true in the United States. You might find that HermanMelville‘s book MobyDick might be changed from…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
One of the “givens” that I pretty much have come to accept as normal is the belief that if you bought something, you owned it. If you bought a pair of shoes, it was yours and you could do what ever you wanted with it. If you bought a pack of cigarettes, you could smoke them or throw them away. It was your possession and you could do what you wanted with it. Unfortunately, this is no longer true in the United States.
It all began with housing. The days of full-ownership of a house in America are long, long over. And I am not talking about a mortgage either. I am talking about taxes, and regulations, and fees and requirements. If you have to ask permission, then you don’t own it. If you have to pay more money on it, you don’t own it. If someone can change it or alter it without your permission you don’t own it.
Ownership is the bedrock of freedom.
Unfortunately it no longer exists in the United States.
And what is much sadder is that all Americans don’t realize this loss; this loss in the ability to own things, and to use them as you feel fit. They see it as normal. “Of course, you need to ask the local Home Owners Association permission to remodel your house.” “Of course, you cannot smoke cigarettes in a restaurant, or on the street or in a park…” “Of course, you need to pay the upgrade fee on your software program. You don’t really own it, don’t you know.”
This encroachment is sickening to me.
People! If you cannot own things, you are not free. Do you know who else cannot own things?
Slaves.
That’s who.
Back in the day, I had a library of books. No, I am not exaggerating. I had my walls plastered floor to ceiling with books, and my entire house was cluttered with my tomes and books. I loved those things, and I lost them. This story of how they came to disappear is noteworthy in-itself, but, let’s not get sidetracked. With the advent of computerized software, you can have entire libraries that can fit inside an object no bigger than the palm of your hand. Great huh?
Maybe not so.
I once had a iPod with perhaps 10,000 songs on it. I had collected music from all over the internet, mostly “Limewire”, but I also used other services. Then one day, the system reset for a software update. It erased my entire collection! Why? Why in God’s name did this happen?
I will tell you why.
I did not buy the songs from iTunes. (Which is the monopoly that Apple has constructed around it’s iPod platform.)
Was the iPod my property?
Apparently not.
Now the purist might say that I needed to read the fine print in my purchaser’s agreement. And to that I must counter… with this…
You do not own anything that requires that you read “fine print” that defines how you must use that object.
Ah. Let that sink in.
Remember that personal ownership is a fundamental pillar of freedom. If you cannot own things, free and clear, you are just renting them on loan.
And it’s not just me speaking. The United States government and the courts have reinforced this belief. You don’t own much of anything. In fact, it is even against the law to collect rainwater! I mean there is something seriously wrong if you cannot own the rain that falls on you from the skies above.
Let’s talk about books.
Paper Books Can’t Be Shut Off from Afar
“The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine,” Doctorow said.
This is a reprint of the great article titled “Paper Books Can’t Be Shut Off from Afar”. Published on Jun 30, 2019 12:00PM EDT Maria Bustillos. All credit to the author.
Private ownership—in particular the private ownership of books, software, music and other cultural information—is the linchpin of a free society. Having many copies of works of art, music and literature distributed widely (e.g., many copies of the same book among many private owners, or many copies of the same audio files, torrents or blockchain ledger entries on many private computers) protects a culture against corruption and censorship. Decentralization strategies like these help to preserve press freedom, and individual freedom. The widespread private ownership of cultural artifacts guarantees civil liberties, and draws people into their culture immanently, persistently, giving it life and power.
Cory Doctorow’s comment on Friday at BoingBoing regarding private ownership of books is well worth reading; he wrote it because Microsoft is shutting down its e-books service, and all the DRM books people bought from them will thus vanish into thin air. Microsoft will provide refunds to those affected, but that isn’t remotely the point. The point is that all their users’ books are to be shut off with a single poof! on Microsoft’s say-so. That is a button that nobody, no corporation and no government agency, should be ever permitted to have.
“The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine,” Doctorow said.
At this very moment, governments are forbidding millions of people, Chinese people, Cubans, Belarusians and Egyptians and Hungarians and many, many others all over this world, from reading whatever they want.
So if there is to be a fear of the increasing adoption of e-books such as those offered by Microsoft, and to a far greater degree, Amazon, that’s by far the scariest thing about it. Because if you were to keep all your books in a remotely controlled place, some villain really could come along one day and pretty much flip the switch and take them all away — and not just yours but everyone’s, all at once. What if we had some species of Trump deciding to take action against the despicable, dangerous pointy-heads he is forever railing against?
Boom! Nothing left to read but The Art of the Deal.
I don’t intend on shutting up about this ever, and I’m sure Doctorow won’t either, bless him.
In 2010, techno-utopianism was in full swing, with e.g. Nick Negroponte going around saying that physical books would be mass-produced for only maybe another five years (yeah, sorry guy). His reasoning seems to have had something to do with the fact that books are hard to send to Africa.
Anyway my husband gave me a Kindle for my birthday that year, and I loved it a lot. Thousands and thousands of books fit on this pretty, if potentially sinister, little machine. I’d just go over to Project Gutenberg and vacuum stuff up every which way, because I have no literary discernment whatsoever and will gladly spend the afternoon reading Agatha Christie or really, literally almost anything.
Project Gutenberg is now up to more than 59,500 free e-books, all out of copyright and so classics, mostly. And no need to feel the least bit guilty as you might even at a thrift shop, where whatever you buy, it’s going to take up room on bookshelves that you know you don’t have; these books took up no extra room at all.
I bet you will be surprised to hear when Project Gutenberg first started. 1971 (!) is the true answer, and could they ever destroy every Final Jeopardy contestant with that one, I bet.
Its founder, Michael Hart, was a most unusual and interesting man. The ultimate anti-corporatist. Like Yoda, Mr. Hart doesn’t appear to have possessed much glamour or power on the outside, but he was brimming with these and other virtues on the inside.
He didn’t care two pins about money, wouldn’t take a salary for years and years, and acquired the few bits of stuff he seemed to need at garage sales.
In the 1970s, nobody knew that computers would eventually be used for the mass storage of culture. It hadn’t occurred to anyone yet that the computer would be useful for anything aside from just computation. It was so shockingly, incredibly good at that! There was such a lot of computation that needed doing, so computation was first in line.
Now it is clear as day that whoever controls computer storage will effectively control the media commons.
There are a lot of champions in this fight, but Michael Hart saw it all coming about half a century ago and started typing his fool head off, dozens and dozens of whole books, long before OCR was a gleam in a programmer’s eye.
Hart did more to secure the future of the public domain than anyone else in the world, I believe. Project Gutenberg’s widely distributed books cannot be taken away—and when they’re downloaded and stored on private devices and media, it’s like insurance for Western Civ.
My first few times on Project Gutenberg I downloaded a lot of rare early Wodehouse (highly recommended: The Swoop! or, How Clarence Saved England) and also a lot of Thackeray, Gibbon, pretty much all of Mrs. Gaskell and, just by accident, Émile Gaboriau’s La Vie Infernale — the fruitiest, most marvelous 19th-c. French melodrama (in two parts: The Count’s Millions and Baron Trigault’s Vengeance. I just love those.) Plus Shakespeare and the King James Bible and that sort of stuff.
I am no fan of Amazon, and even back then I resisted spending money there, but I did buy an e-book copy of Infinite Jest, which is far and away my favorite modern novel.
A few days later, I was having a little dispute with my husband over whether or not Wallace misuses the word “ilk” in that book, which with the Kindle’s search feature took about twenty seconds to settle (A: not really; the solecism appears just once, in the quoted speech of Madame Psychosis.)
It’s all thrillingly searchable, and browsable, plus once you get a book on your Kindle (or Nook, or equiv.) you can highlight things and also make your own notes. By now scholars, researchers, historians and journalists will want both a searchable ebook copy and a paper copy, I would think, of anything they’re really interested in.
I also learned that having an e-reader meant that one might quite easily wind up buying more books than before, if anything, because the getting of books was on one’s mind more.
So all that is the upside of owning e-books.
But my Fahrenheit-451-paranoia was fanned into a giant flaming ball of fear-napalm when I looked into the personal ownership of the files and books on my own Kindle. And things have only gotten a lot worse since then.
Almost exactly ten years ago, you may remember, Amazon came stealthily along and deleted e-copies of 1984 (no seriously, they did) and Animal Farm from people’s Kindles — copies they’d already paid for and downloaded — because it turned out that there was a rights problem with the e-publisher.
Jeff Bezos wound up apologizing all over himself and taking it all back and promising never to do that ever again, but the fact remains that Amazon has some kind of access to your Kindle files and can literally remove them, if they feel like it, which is downright creepy, and if it were your computer you would not like it one little bit.
Having learned this, I went along and had a closer look at the then-current Kindle License Agreement.
There was some simply petrifying stuff on there. For starters, then as now, you don’t “own” Kindle books, you’re basically renting them. (“Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.”)
Amazon’s current terms of use now specify explicitly that they can look over your shoulder while you read. Check this out!
Information Provided to Amazon. The Kindle Application will provide Amazon with information about use of your Kindle Application and its interaction with Kindle Content and the Service (such as last page read, content archiving, available memory, up-time, log files, and signal strength).
They can change the software on you whenever they like, or just shut it down completely, without so much as a by your leave:
Changes to Service; Amendments. We may change, suspend, or discontinue the Service, in whole or in part, including adding or removing Subscription Content from a Service, at any time without notice.
That is how a totalitarian state might go about confiscating books, if they wanted to. There is nothing in this agreement to stop Amazon from modifying the Kindle software to make it impossible for you to read any of your own files on the device.
Such a step is not forbidden to Amazon by this agreement; they are under no apparent obligation to protect any data you might be storing. That’s not to say that there aren’t laws, at least in some states, that might allow you to sue for damages; I don’t know. I’m just saying, this agreement doesn’t require Amazon to protect your data.
A bad government could just grab the controls from them and have at it.
Changes to Service; Amendments.We may change, suspend, or discontinue the Service, in whole or in part, including adding or removing Subscription Content from a Service, at any time without notice. We may amend any of this Agreement’s terms at our sole discretion by posting the revised terms on the Amazon.com website.
Or they might decide to shut just your account down:
Termination. Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Service, and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service without refund of any fees.
Keep in mind these are your books that you bought or collected. Can you imagine a bookseller or publisher asserting rights over the contents of your bookshelves in your house? That’s basically what we’re talking about, here.
After reading all this back in 2010, I rang the (excellent, and very polite) Kindle customer service up to learn more, especially about privacy issues. One thing I wanted to know was exactly how much access Amazon had to my private, personal Kindle files (such as .txt and .pdf files that I’d made myself.) But after being bumped up through a couple of layers of supervisors, I didn’t get very clear answers. For instance, on the question of Amazon’s remote access to my personal stuff. “We don’t have access to your files,” I was first told. But can you see my personal files? And if you wanted to delete my personal files, as was done with the Orwell books, could you do it?
“We don’t do that.”
Eight or nine years down the road, we can be pretty sure that if a tech behemoth suddenly feels like doing something horrible, they just will do it. Please buy paper books.
A portion of this piece appeared in somewhat different form in 2010 at The Awl.
Conclusion
I used to have an account on Tumblr. I enjoyed it for the strange and beautiful pictures that I would collect there, and when people started to use it to distribute some high quality porn, I collected those images as well. I really liked that webpage and social network.
Then it was bought up or sold to Yahoo!. Every assurance was made that promised that nothing would ever change and that the private collections of pictures would remain intact.
Then came the war on porn. Yahoo! suddenly, yes after saying that they wouldn’t, decided to wholesale delete images, accounts, data and histories. And all my lovely photos about America in the 1930’s, pictures of military conflicts, fantastic and unusual works of art, and yes my on-line porn collection was vaporized in a nanosecond.
Foolish me.
I believed that when a company promised to do something that they would at least try to keep their word.
Three years ago, was my twenty year anniversary of my membership on the Free Republic website. Over the twenty years that I was a member I was one of the most prolific posters with over 10,000 articles that I had posted (and which readied me for the role that this Metallicman venue provides). And then, one of my articles did not meet the desires of one of their censors, and without notice, and any kind of appreciation they deleted my entire account. Jim Robinson probably didn’t have any idea that they did it. But there it was. All my FR contacts, my notes, my articles (no backups either) and my opinions and comments, all deleted.
Poof.
Gone.
Look. I get it. I’m a “big boy”. I should have known better than to put my trust and faith in others. I should have made complete hard-paper backups, and had electronic versions in portable storage media. I was naive.
And when I was “retired” and saw what happened to my life, my possessions and my histories, I saw that I was a “big nothing”. I only existed at the pleasure of others. I only lived in whatever lifestyle that I could scrounge up at the pleasure of others, and what I owned, down to my underwear was all at the mercy of what others might decide to do.
The only way to change this course that the United States is on is to terminate it’s existence catastrophically. It needs to be sudden, and abrupt and a replacement government needs to take it’s place. This sounds so awful, but it need not be.
I advocate that the Federal government be abolished. And the individual states regain their original roles, and maintain their original existence as it was initially intended prior to 1776.
We can let the individual citizens of any given state decide what limits that they want to place on the ownership of property. Not those in California, or Washington DC. And people would no longer be citizens of the United States of America, but would be the sovereign citizen of Pennsylvania, or of Maryland, or of Colorado, or of Wyoming.
But, you know, it’s so easy to be misunderstood. And for me, it’s better not to “fight city hall”, or “beat a dead horse”. You live life to the best of your ability, and if you find that you are not able to live life to your satisfaction then you “move to greener pastures”.
Which is what I did.
I live in China, and I do own my houses. I don’t rent them. I don’t have mortgages on them. I never pay taxes on them, and I am not subject to any rules or regulations regarding them. Nor do I need to ask permission to renovate them.
That is what freedom is.
Stop.
Take a realistic appraisal of what you really own. Do not include anything that requires payments, fees, regulations that you must abide by, or that is subject to inspections, or random investigations. If you are an American you will discover that you actually own very little.
You own, functionally, just about the same as what a Roman slave would own.
Do you want to see similar posts?
I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
Yeah. Trump is really pushing this. But we all know what is going on. If it is Chinese, it is bad. It’s a all-hands-on-deck assault on China, short of nuclear war. And the ONLY reason why America is not invading China, and blasting the living fuck out of it’s cities is because Trump knows that America will become completely destroyed and radioactive in the process. China does not play.
So he’s going all-out against everything Chinese. And part of that is the software applications that are Chinese, and being used all over the world. We have read about Huawei, and wechat, which most Americans know nothing about. So they just go with the flow and say Yah! China Bad!
China Bad!
Well, there’s a lot of articles on this. Most are propaganda justifying banning software and technology.
Little thought is whether the President of the United States actually has the power to ban anything. After all, it took a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol back in 1913. Since when did the President become a King?
But I digress.
The excuse is “National Security”. It’s a catch-all phrase which means “I can do what I want and not give any reasons or justification for it”.
Anyways, this article is a pretty decent overview on this subject and is well worth a look. It is titled “Huawei, Tik-Tok and WeChat” written by Larry Romanoff on August 8, 2020 it has 201 Comments . It was found on the UNZ website and all credit to the author. It was edited to fit this venue.
Huawei, Tik-Tok and WeChat
First, let’s dispel the combined notion that China spies on everyone and the US spies on no one. There is so much public evidence to destroy both these assertions that I won’t bother repeating them here. I will however remind readers that a few years ago China more or less banned Windows 8 from the country because it was discovered that the O/S had a built-in NSA back door.[1]
It seems that Germany reported on this first, but the devastating proof was at an IT conference where a Microsoft executive was interrupted during a speech with precisely this accusation.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]
He did not deny it because the person making the accusation was the person who discovered it and had with him the proof, but refused to discuss it and changed the subject.
But this is hardly news. Forty years ago it was proven that all Xerox copy machines delivered to foreign embassies and consulates in the US were “espionage-ready”.[10][11]
Also, for at least 20 years, and perhaps much more, it was common knowledge that when any foreign embassies, consulates, banks and other corporations ordered computers and similar hardware from US suppliers, those shipments were intercepted by UPS, delivered to the CIA and/or NSA for installation of “extra” hardware and software before delivery to their destinations. This was one of the confirmations by Edward Snowden.[12][13][14][15]
Any search on this will give you millions of hits unless Google chooses that moment to lose its memory.
Huawei
Trump’s problems with Huawei are twofold.
The most obvious is that China is eating America’s lunch when it comes to innovation and invention and Trump would like to slow this down by destroying Huawei and is clearly making every possible effort in this regard, including bullying and threatening half the known world against using Huawei’s products. But this is the small part of the problem; the real issue is espionage.
There is no practical value in disputing the assertion that Cisco and other American hardware and software firms install back doors to all their equipment for the convenience of CIA and NSA access. But suddenly Huawei is replacing Cisco and those other American firms with its better and less expensive equipment.
That part is okay, but how can the CIA and NSA approach Huawei and ask the company to build back doors into its equipment so the US can spy on China – among all other countries?
There is no solution to this problem other than to trash Huawei’s reputation by accusing it of being an espionage threat and having the company’s equipment banned. And this applies not only to the US, but to the entire Five Eyes Espionage Network, involving the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.[16]
Briefly, this was set up to break laws while pretending no laws were being broken.
It is generally against the law for a government to spy on its own citizens, but that law doesn’t apply to a foreign government. So Canada spies on Australian citizens and sends the information to the Australian spooks who can claim they did nothing wrong.
Rinse and repeat.
The sad part is that the “intelligence” received is usually of little interest to the four minor participants but all of it is shared with the US who are frothing to spy on the entire world and to take possession of “every communication” of every kind in the entire world. Thus, it isn’t sufficient to ban Huawei only from the US because this company’s equipment would castrate the NSA’s effort in the other four nations. Thus, US bullying to ensure each of its five eyes is Huawei-free.
And that’s the entire story, like it or not.
Tik-Tok
Tik-Tok is nothing of consequence, except that it is in direct competition with similar American platforms and has proven too popular and too competitive to be permitted to survive.
This is just a cheap, below-the-belt and illegal-as-hell shot at China.
No threat, no nothing.
However, as with all similar IT products and platforms it contains much personal information especially useful for marketing, which has so far been the private property of people like Google, Facebook and Twitter.
Thus, Trump kills two birds with one stone: either simply kill Tik-Tok on some trumped-up accusation (if you’ll excuse the expression) of espionage, or force a sale to an American company.
Either way, China loses massively while the political oppression and marketing value of that personal information remains safely in trusted American hands.
WeChat
Since few Americans are familiar with WeChat, let me give you a description. Many of these functions are available in the West through various platforms, but not always to the same extent nor with the same convenience.
With WeChat we can transmit text and voice messages, photos and videos, and other files of any description even of many Mb in size.
FOR FREE.
We can send and receive both text and voice messages in any language because WeChat has an excellent translation function in combination with one of its partners which translates not only text and voice, but will extract and translate all text contained in photos, handy for restaurant menus if you can’t read Chinese.
FOR FREE
We can place not only voice calls but video calls to anyone anywhere that transmit over the internet.
FOR FREE
It is so convenient that WeChat is the default communication choice for a great many people for most purposes. WeChat also has a Moments platform where we can post text, photos, videos, that are visible to those on our contact lists while selecting those who can view and who cannot, reserving some posts for close friends and others more generally public.
In China we have two primary online payment systems, one operated by Alibaba (called Alipay) and the other by WeChat. Its use is nearly universal in China and both are free to the user. Unlike PayPal…
ITS FREE
During the past several years I cannot recall a single instance where I had cash in my pocket (even small change) when I went anywhere or was shopping for anything. Even to purchase a small bunch of green onions at a street market, the vendor has a QR code which my phone scans and the payment into their bank account is automatic.
With WeChat, we can send money to each other.
FOR FREE
If we want to share the cost of lunch, you can pay the entire bill and I transfer my share to you through WeChat. If I ever need cash, I could go to any shop or even approach a complete stranger and ask for 1,000 RMB and instantly repay him into his WeChat account.
It is frequently used to transfer money internationally this way, sending dollars to a friend in one country and receiving RMB into a WeChat account in China.
Instant, secure, and free of all fees.
FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE
It all happens within a second, with a concurrent text message confirmation from the bank of both sides of the transaction. WeChat is the main reason people can travel anywhere in China with only a mobile phone and passport (and a change of clothing). Through WeChat, people can purchase plane or train tickets, pay taxi fares and hotel bills, restaurant tabs, in the same way.
FOR FREE
Another useful WeChat function is real-time GPS location sharing. If a group is traveling to a destination in several cars, WeChat displays an active GPS map showing all locations in real space and time. If I am meeting a friend at a shopping mall or park or other large location, with this GPS function we can see each other’s location in real time and I know which way to walk to encounter my friend.
We have WeChat groups which we can create with any number of participants for any convenient purpose. During the COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai we had a temporary WeChat group for the purchase of meat and vegetables that functioned better than any supermarket and with much less trouble. If I want to have a Christmas party I form a group of those I plan to invite, and all our discussions and planning take place within that platform. Most communities (small portions of residential districts) have a WeChat group for notification of community events and sharing important information.
The point with Trump’s “sanction” of WeChat is first that it will terminally disrupt international communications between China and the US for students, scientists, diplomats, media reporters, for all those in the US who have frequent communications with China, effects felt more seriously by those in China, which is a plus for Trump.
Second, Trump’s administration is uncomfortable with the extent to which WeChat is encroaching on the American turf of Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and more, with already around 100 million downloads in the US, and his actions are partially to reclaim that turf by simply banning a competing medium that is threatening to take over and seriously downgrade the popularity of similar American platforms.
But most important is the espionage and censorship role of Trump’s initiative.
As the censorship noose tightens around Facebook and Twitter, Americans are naturally moving to WeChat. The real issue is not that WeChat poses any danger to the US in any sense but, as with Huawei, the CIA and NSA cannot very well approach WeChat and ask for automatic sharing of all that personal relationship data.
Therefore, under the guise of China being untrustworthy, the US government simply bans WeChat and thus no one in the US can send or receive any message without the NSA having a copy.
A huge plus is that any news not fitting the official narrative will then be strangled at birth, as Google, Facebook and Twitter are now doing.
If Microsoft or another American firm were to buy WeChat, then of course all is well since it is US firms, not Chinese, who automatically share all personal contact data with their government.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
This stuff was all over the news a few months ago. Then, guess what? Life moved on. And people, being who they are, forgot the message.
People, please listen up.
A private company has taken on the role of the former East German Secret police, known as the Stasi . They have been implementing these cold war policies with the full blessings of the United States government, and it’s going to get far, far worse.
This private company is Google.
In an interview, Google whistleblower Zach Vorhies, advises against having any association with Google. He warns of their dangerous practices and comments that they have declared war on anyone who is not a progressive socialist. They expect everyone to cower away in silence. Their expectations are that their consumers be placid and as non-threatening as possible.
The Google World infographic created by Overdrive Interactive is a visual representation of Google’s projects, services, technologies, and companies acquired by Google. View the Google World or download it as a PDF with live links to over 200 assets.
Zach worked as a senior software engineer at both Google and YouTube for over eight years.
He has, and shares, his inside knowledge of his experiences and knowledge. He is convinced that Google and other software giants in silicon-valley possess a global monopoly. A monopoly that is both dangerous and evil. He also states that Google is not a reliable source of information any longer.
We should all heed his advice.
Google’s monopoly over search is mandated simply because of a continued reassurance that it is an unbiased search platform. Yet that is absolutely not true. Google is actively suppressing and censoring information. It is impossible to censor something and be unbiased at the same time.
Zach Vorheis has some things to say.
For the video, as well as links to the transcripts, visit Mercola.com here.
It’s pretty much well known, but the Untied States is owned by a handful of oligarchs. They utilize companies and manipulate the people in order to have them do their bidding. Thus, the point of sharing this information is that the largest mechanism for obtaining information in the world is terribly compromised.
Google is manipulating search results to influence our behavior. At the same time, denying this is happening.
The Wall Street Journal.
The Wall Street Journal published a a very thorough investigation covering these same points. As well as explaining the consequences of this behavior.
Disclosure of evil intent on Project Veritas
Zach Vorhies released about 950 pages of internal Google documents. These documents provide a comprehensive picture of what’s going on at the upper management within Google.
They illustrate that Google has become corrupt, evil, political in nature and aligned with wealthy oligarchs who intend to use the platform to manipulate great masses of people. In order words, to use Google much the same way that “Over-seers” used to control plantation slaves.
What Happened to ‘Don’t Be Evil’?
Zach comments…
“Everything started out with Google really great,” Vorhies says.
“They had this mission statement of organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful. They also had this idea of ‘Don’t be evil.’ It was built right into their initial public offering (IPO) statements.
I thought at the time, ‘This is great. This is exactly the kind of company that the world needs. We need to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible. We need to let the algorithms decide what goes to the top and let the users decide what’s most useful for them and then make sure that other people are able to find that information.’
Google stayed true to those principles all the way up until 2016, until Donald Trump won the election.
For some reason, they decided they were going to throw all these mission statements away and go after the president of the United States, censor the internet and distort the news so that people’s searches could be redirected towards anti-presidential sentiment.
This eventually morphed into not just censorship of the president, but censorship of information related to health …
I realized [that] if this was allowed to continue, then this agenda of Big Pharma would be able to become … ‘the truth’ …
Once I found out that Google was censoring a lot of information, I started looking at the information it was censoring with a new degree of ‘They wouldn’t be censoring it unless it was true,’ sort of thing.
It’s a strange heuristic to use to figure out what’s true in the world, but you’ve just got to figure out what they’re censoring. You kind of understand that they’re censoring it because it’s not Big Tech-friendly. It’s not friendly to the established players.
Some ‘Fake News’ Isn’t so Fake After All
Shortly after Trump won the presidential election, you started hearing more and more about the scourge of “fake news.” Google, like Facebook and others, decided they had to protect users from fake news. The problem is, who determines what’s fake and what’s not?
Exactly.
As Jordan Peterson said in regards to hate speech: "Who is going to regulate it? Who is going to define it?
I know the answer to that - the last people in the world you would want to."
Using Google’s internal search engine, Vorhies set out to determine what Google’s definition of fake news was.
He found several examples in a presentation.
However, in it were actual, verifiable real news events.
“I went, ‘Wait a minute. Is this about fake news or is this about controlling the narrative for like political purposes?'” Vorhies says.
He began collecting these documents because he knew they were explosive enough that Google would remove them if word ever got out about them.
In his continued search for real news presented as fake, he started unearthing other disturbing projects.
The main project responsible for Google censorship is a thing called ‘Machine Learning Fairness’ (ML Fairness).
As you imagine, they’re not going to call their censorship regime something bad. They’re going to call it something like ‘fairness.’
So, if you’re against that, you’re against fairness.
It’s a euphemism. I discovered there was this umbrella project, ‘ML Fairness,’ and there were these sub-components like ‘Project Purple Rain,’ which is a 24-hour response team that is monitoring the internet.
How Machine Learning Fairness Twists Perception of Reality
Just what is ML Fairness and how does it work? Vorhies explains:
Let’s say that this circle right here represents the entire spectrum of all possible artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. ML Fairness is a small part of that type of AI. It’s a relatively new type of AI. What machine learning does is it simulates brain neurons and how they fire.
If you remember how a brain neuron fires, it takes in as input signals from other neurons and then mixes those signals together and decides whether it wants to fire or not, based on the signals that it receives.
Well, these artificial neurons do something similar. They have a collection of inputs, depending on the internal rule set. It will fire depending on the inputs it gets … And then that output is used as input for further downstream processing.
If you have this collection of millions of simulated neurons … you can start to create very complex behavior that’s able to solve problems, like chess or the game Go …
It can classify hate speech. That’s the part that’s interesting to me — how this thing could be used to classify information across the internet.
ML Fairness is a type of AI that takes information on the internet, classifies it and then ranks it. And then the Google engine will figure out whether the information is fair or not. And if it is ‘fair,’ it goes to the top. If it’s not fair, then it gets pushed to the bottom. That’s what ML Fairness is in a nutshell.
What this manipulation ultimately ends up doing is presenting a twisted and false view of the world. What you’re seeing in your search results is what the AI algorithm decided is most fair — not what’s actually happening in the real world.
This is how you now end up getting automated search suggestions such as “men can have periods” and “men can have babies,” even though these are biological impossibilities. However, the algorithm deems the idea that only women can menstruate and bear children as “unfair” and basically “sexist,” and thus it’s pushing these ridiculous search suggestions to the top.
This obnoxious discrepancy is clear when using search terms like “men can …” The manipulation of reality will not be as transparent when using health or political search words, when you cannot be absolutely sure, ahead of time, about what the absolute truth is.
Did Google Conspire to Commit Treason?
Vorhies saw these changes starting to take place in early 2017.
Shortly afterwards, Google announced it was going to start assigning an “authoritativeness score” to all news content.
“I was able to see this ranking on internal documents. High rankings were given to outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.
“These outlets, in my opinion, have been producing propaganda,” Vorhies says. “They led to us into war with Iraq with the weapons of mass destruction hoax. They’ve lied to us [about] Vietnam. They have a history of supporting every war and military encouragement around the world that has [led to] the destruction of millions of lives.”
In June 2017, chief executive officer of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, announced that this was how they were going to filter news content across the YouTube platforms.
As Vorhies expected, this led to a clamp down on anything that goes against the mainstream narrative.
“Around that time, I had the fortune of catching [another] seditious activity by Google. What I caught them doing was deleting words out of the translation dictionary from Arabic to English, in order to make a Trump tweet sound crazy.2,3”
President Trump had recently come back from a visit to Saudi Arabia when, on May 31, 2017, he tweeted: “Despite the negative constant press, covfefe.” Originally, people were able to translate “covfefe” to “We will stand up.” Taken together, you could see President Trump’s tweet basically said, “Despite the negative constant press, we will stand up.”
“People got really excited about that,” Vorhies says. “Well, The New York Times decided that they were going to write an entire article saying, ‘Actually, this word is nonsense. And everyone who thinks there’s a decode is just wrong.’
The same day that this article came out, I believe it was June 1, 2017, a senior executive person at Google … of one of the AI divisions, wrote up a design document saying, ‘We translated this world from Arabic to English.
But according to The New York Times, that’s not right. That’s actually nonsense, so let’s get rid of the word.’
And so, they got rid of the word.
The team that was responsible for getting rid of this word called themselves the ‘Derrida Team.’ Why is that significant? Because there was a French philosopher by the name of Jacques Derrida, who advocated for the destruction of Western culture through the manipulation and censorship of language.
What a coincidence that this team responsible for censoring words would have the same name as this very significant philosopher who is considered the father of post-modernism.
About six days later, I saw the newspapers were making a push for invoking the 25th Amendment to remove a sitting president from office due to mental incapacitation. One of the reasons that they cited was how Trump was tweeting nonsense.
Now, wait a minute, that was made nonsense by this manipulation of the dictionary! I realized these people have gone too far. There’s obviously a collusion here. I have to bring this to attention no matter what.
This isn’t because I’m necessarily a Trump supporter — I didn’t vote for him — this is simply because they can’t be doing this to a sitting president of the United States. That just can’t happen. It’s treason.
If this is going to happen, then I’ve got to let the public [and] law enforcement know about it. Because if I don’t, then I’m part of a conspiracy of silence … It was at that point that I decided I could no longer sit in silence. I took my cache of documents and I started to prepare for a disclosure event.”
Comment: Finally, an explanation for the infamous covfefe tweet'! It's insane that this word was actually a translation, yet it was used to paint Trump as insane. And the fact that, up until this insider document dump,
NO ONE KNEW THIS.
YouTube Censorship Has Had Lethal Consequences
In 2018, the real-world ramifications of censorship hit home when an Iranian YouTube creator who had recently been demonetized marched into YouTube headquarters and opened fire on employees and then shot herself.4
“Her name was Nasim [Najafi Aghdam]. She had a video that went viral in Iran … She was creating really bizarre videos that were just — I don’t know — I watched them and I actually strangely loved them. I couldn’t stop watching them. They were so weird.
She decided that she was going to quit her job and become a full-time content creator, like millions of others … YouTube was the platform to do that. Everyone was getting a lot of subscribers and were trying to generate money, get monetized on the platform …
They would get a cut of the ads that were running when people interact with the ads or view them … What YouTube did is they made a blanket ban. Anyone under 10,000 subscribers got censored. By censorship, I mean demonetized. They lost all of the funding that they could get for their videos. They can still post videos, they just couldn’t get any money [from Google Ads] for it.
And so, this person had just lost her job. She felt she was being oppressed by YouTube. She drove all the way from San Diego, came to the YouTube headquarters on 901 Cherry Avenue … came into the lunch area patio, took out a handgun and started firing …
She shot a couple of people. Ran out of ammo, reloaded and shot some more and then [shot] herself in the chest and [bled] to death … Obviously, this person was mentally deranged but, also, she was triggered by Google’s censorship. Now I’ve got this very personal story about how censorship has affected my safety.
You would think that maybe YouTube would [rethink] its censorship, but no. They didn’t … Every day I would come into work and I would think, ‘You know, with this increase in censorship, is someone going to come in with a gun?'”
Google Attempts to Destroy Vorhies by ‘Lawfare’
Vorhies resigned from Google June 28, 2019, and was immediately put under investigation, as the company had logs showing the many documents he’d been searching for and reading through.
Vorhies tells the story of what happened next:
“When I went to Project Veritas, I went under anonymity. We only released two pages of the 950 that they had [been given]. My hope was that Google would leave me alone … But they decided they weren’t going to do that.
They decided they were going to attempt to financially destroy me by engaging in lawfare, which is warfare via the legal system.
Within a few weeks of me disclosing ML Fairness to Project Veritas, they sent me threatening letters, demanding access to all my data outside of work …
I wrote them back a letter admitting I had retained files, telling them I had given them to law enforcement … The NDA, the nondisclosure agreement I signed is nonenforceable in cases where the company is committing criminal activity. Sedition is criminal activity, which means that the NDA is null and void.
I can submit evidence of Google’s criminal activity to the government and to the media when the company is engaging in unlawful activity. That’s what I did. Also, I signed the NDA in good faith, believing that Google’s word of organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful and ‘Don’t be evil,’ were truthful statements …
I met an attorney who was representing Kevin Cernekee, another Google engineer who attempted to blow the whistle in the most legitimate way possible, which was to notify the Federal Labor Relations Authority in California. Kevin gave these papers to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Google responded by ambushing him with HR, seizing his laptop, seeing all the documents that he had downloaded, and then firing him and creating a legal theory that he had hacked into Google to get documents so that he could reconstruct Google’s legal strategy and maybe even sell it.
They applied criminal charges against him. They made him defend himself in court for his collection of evidence that he had sent to the NLRB. He’s [spent] $100,000 dollars of his own money defending himself from Google, so I knew what was in store for me.
[Cernekee’s] lawyer was like, ‘Yeah. This is the first step in a very painful process that’s going to drive on for years. They’re going to make it very expensive. Their goal is to destroy you.’ Well, in that case, I’m not going to fight in the legal law. I’m going to fight in the court of public opinion.
I decided at that point to come out to Project Veritas and disclose who I was so that I could get eyes [on me], and I said, ‘If Google’s going to take me down, then I’m going to leverage that so that everyone else can see what they do and what they’re really about. And then we can make Google’s censorship program part of the national discussion.’
I disclosed everything. I released it to the public, all 950 pages … August 17, 2019 … [I’ve] tried to become a cultural force so that we can hold Google to account of what they’re doing, because their censorship is wrong.
It’s wrong for America. It’s anti-American. Their election meddling is something that needs to be looked at, needs to be watched, because they’ve meddled with the elections in the past. They’re meddling in the elections now.
They were able to deactivate Tulsi Gabbard’s ad account directly following the Democratic debates.
They’ve meddled in the Ireland elections.
They’ve meddled in the Brazil elections.
We know this because there was a Supreme Court ruling that released the evidence showing they had a secret agreement with one of the politicians to generate dirt and boost it up on the current president of Brazil.”
How Autofill Can Shift Political Opinion
Vorhies goes on to explain and describe how Google tools such as autofill search recommendations can be used to sway public opinion on political (and other topics), which can have significant political consequences.
Autofill is what happens when you start typing a search query into a search engine and algorithms kick in to offer suggestions to complete your search. We’ve been led to believe that whatever the autofill recommendations are is what most people are in fact searching for — Google has stated that the suggestions given are generated by a collection of user data — but that’s not true, at least not anymore.
“This story about the autofill first got disclosed by Dr. Robert Epstein, who is a Harvard-trained psychologist and former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today,” Vorhies explains.
“What he said was that Google had flipped a bunch of votes for Hillary using this autosuggest feature. I’ve investigated this claim.
I’ve verified it to be true …
It turns out that a lot of the popular searches were being suppressed.
For example, you typed in ‘Clinton body count.’ It’s a popular search term. This brings up all the people who have died in the decades that were associated with Hillary Clinton.
Well, this search result has been deleted off the search suggestion. What’s happened instead is that a bunch of negative search terms have been inserted that went against the current president of the United States, Donald Trump.
So, when you’re typing in search queries for Trump, it’s autocompleting and suggesting, ‘Do you mean that he’s a liar? That he’s a crook?’ … And then you do the same for Hillary Clinton and it has all these positive terms … They were doing this on the political stuff.
The most significant thing about this feature is the fact that you don’t expect to have this part of your online experience to be hatched for political reasons. You think that this is legitimately what other people are searching for.
As a result, you don’t have your filters on. Your brain puts on these filters when it starts to evaluate politically charged information. When you read a newspaper article, you may be thinking to yourself, ‘This may be true, this may not.’ You’re skeptical.
But when you’re typing into a search, you don’t think that because you don’t think that’s rigged, so whatever bias is inherent in that search result slips through and goes directly into your subconscious. This is what Epstein was explaining.”
The Search Engine Manipulation Effect
Epstein developed a “black box test” (a method of software testing) to measure just how influential a tool like autofill can be. Remarkably, his test demonstrated that “Google’s ‘autocomplete’ search suggestions can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split”5,6 — all without anyone being aware of the manipulation.
Similarly, when Epstein looked at the power of search engine manipulation to shift preferences and perceptions, he found that:7
“(1) biased search rankings can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more, (2) the shift can be much higher in some demographic groups, and (3) such rankings can be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation.”
The good news is, there are ways to lower this manipulation effect, but to do so, people have to be aware that biased ranking is taking place. In his 2017 paper, “Suppressing the Search Engine Manipulation Effect,” Epstein writes:8
“A recent series of experiments demonstrated that introducing ranking bias to election-related search engine results can have a strong and undetectable influence on the preferences of undecided voters.
This phenomenon, called the search engine manipulation effect (SEME), exerts influence largely through order effects that are enhanced in a digital context.
We present data from three new experiments involving 3,600 subjects in 39 countries in which we replicate SEME and test design interventions for suppressing the effect. In the replication, voting preferences shifted by 39.0%, a number almost identical to the shift found in a previously published experiment (37.1%).
Alerting users to the ranking bias reduced the shift to 22.1%, and more detailed alerts reduced it to 13.8%. Users’ browsing behaviors were also significantly altered by the alerts, with more clicks and time going to lower-ranked search results.
Although bias alerts were effective in suppressing SEME, we found that SEME could be completely eliminated only by alternating search results — in effect, with an equal-time rule.
We propose a browser extension capable of deploying bias alerts in real-time and speculate that SEME might be impacting a wide range of decision-making, not just voting, in which case search engines might need to be strictly regulated.”
As pointed out by Vorhies,
“We’ve got to watch out for Google, because … they’re going to try to rig the 2020 elections.”
Based on Epstein’s results, Google certainly appears to have the power to do so. The only way to prevent it may be an information campaign that exposes this hidden agenda, thereby helping to suppress this search engine manipulation effect.
Do a Google Detox
How can you prevent getting sucked into the false-reality vortex that is Google? Vorhies offers a number of suggestions for how to minimize Google’s influence over your life:
Stop using Gmail. ProtonMail,11 which provides end-to-end encryption and less spam, is an excellent option, and one which I use here.
Switch from an android phone (powered by Google) to an iPhone. (I use Chinese cell phones. 5G and unhackable by the NSA in America.)
There are alternatives for most if not all Google products, and by using these other companies, we can help them grow so that Google becomes less and less relevant.
“Use iPhone, use DuckDuckGo and use Protonmail. Those three things will get most of Google out of your life,” Vorhies says.
“I’ve been a lot happier because of that. I know [Google is] able to read everything that I write when I’m on Gmail or I’m using one of their services. I’ve had people who want to interview me on YouTube, and then their YouTube pages get destroyed.”
Stop using Google docs (Digital Trends has published an article suggesting a number of alternatives12).
If you’re a high school student, do not convert the Google accounts you created as a student into any type of personal accounts.
Both the Chrome and Firefox browsers have been compromised by Google, so consider switching if you’re on either of those.
Brave is my personal favorite, but the Opera browser is another alternative.13
Vorhies is also a fan of Brave.
He says…
“The guy who created this browser, Brave … added features to eliminate all the ads. Now my MacBook runs like new.
I’ve got a 2012 MacBook. I thought I had to upgrade it in order to make it run fast. [Using] Brave instead, my computer operates five times faster when it opens a lot of browser tabs.
It’s phenomenal.
Not only do I get to Google detox, but I get a better experience by not using Google. It’s a no-brainer.
People should just use it. And all of the plug-ins I use, like LastPass, which contains all of my passwords, they all install.” Support Vorhies’ ‘Disclosure Tour’
In the interview, Vorhies recounts a long harrowing incident in which Google instructed local police to perform a mental wellness check on him. Pretty crazy stuff. Which eventually escalated into a full-blown evacuation of the entire street due to a fake bomb threat. Obviously a ruse, confabulated in an effort to get him out of his apartment.
Crazy stuff during crazy times.
He also discusses how Google’s censorship of things like holistic health and clean energy developments is actually evidence that a better future is ahead. The drug and oil industries are starting to lose their grip as safer, less expensive and more effective alternatives are gaining ground.
He argues that censorship is a last-ditch effort to hold on to a crumbling paradigm.
Raising Awareness of the dangers of Google
As Vorhies mentioned earlier, his primary focus right now is to raise awareness about Google and to create a cultural force for change.
You can follow Vorhies on Twitter. His handle is PerpetualManiac (Twitter.com/PerpetualManiac).
“If you click the follow button, you’ll be part of a collection of patriots who are looking to ensure the survival of the republic, to ensure sovereignty and to bring Google to account for the censorship they’re doing.
People are helping me raise awareness by retweeting the things I’m saying. Because honestly, I’m fighting giants,”
“If [Google is] going to take me down, then I’m just going to go down fighting. I’m going to leverage everything they do to further the great awakening that’s happening right now in the United States and across the world.”
“I’m doing that because, ultimately, I’m in service to a higher power … I believe this magnificent creative force in the universe wants people to be free. It’s up to us to ensure that the freedoms we enjoy are handed down to our children … our grandchildren and our collective future.”
If you haven’t divorced Google, and blocked it completely from your browser, then DO IT NOW. This is only the “tip of the iceberg” and it’s a lot worse than anyone knows.
If you liked this article, you can read similar articles by viewing the master index for this class here;
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Back in the day, I was one of the first people to start using Google as a search engine. I liked it’s clean interface, and simplicity.
Of course, over the years, other people also found this to be the preferential search engine. Unfortunately, Google became big, powerful and yes, evil. They siphon up your personal information with zero regard to fourth amendment protections. They sell the information to the highest bidder, and give it away for free if the person is part of a government agency.
Unfortunately, people like myself VALUE privacy. And that means that I no longer can use Google.
Here is a selection of various search engine alternatives to Google. It is not a complete list. As there are thousands of alternatives. These are some the best ones that I have found.
You might discover, as I have, that they have BETTER and more comprehensive results than Google. You just need to understand that they work differently than Google. So you must query your searches differently…
You see, Google only provides results to you that they feel should be presented to you.
A “googlr”; an employee at Google. They feel that THEY know what is best for you. They will set up the software programs to sort through the reams of information on the internet, so that you only get to view the information that THEY want you to see. See this chick here. She thinks that she is better than you are, in determining what you need to know.
This is problematic. Because they only show you the possible results that you qualify for. The qualification rules are kept secret, and are a closely held secret at that. They, like many of their politically liberal breathren, consider themselves as your parents and have the role of censoring your search results for (what they consider to be) your own good.
With all this being said, let’s look at the top candidate…
Let’s start with the fist step is divorcing yourself from Google. Use Duckduckgo. If you go duck, you will never go back.
It is clean and operates much like Google does. The only difference is that it is private. Yes, you can think of it as the Google that should have been. While Google is “evil Spock” (a fine Star Trek reference), Duckduckgo would be the “good Spock”.
Evil Spock and Good Spock. Image is from the The Enemy Within (Star Trek: The Original Series). For those of you who have never watched Star Trek or who don’t understand the reference; “good Spock” is clean shaven. “evil Spock” has the beard.
Duckduckgo is a search engine that does not track or personalize your searches and results.
For those of you who are unaware, the “personalization” of search results is the permitted censorship of search results. Don’t go down that dark and scary road.
A dark and scary road.
It is my humble opinion that if you like Google, then you will love Duckduckgo. They offer the same kind of service, only faster, better, quicker and with far more privacy.
If you want to make the world a better place, then stop using Google and start using search engines that respect your privacy.
Here is a comparison between Duckduckgo and Google. Obviously DDG takes privacy very seriously. While Google only gives it “lip service”. Well… how do you think Google makes all it’s money? You don’t see any ads on the front page do you? Nope. They are paid by government agencies to give them YOUR search information.
Duckduckgo is a great search engine that values privacy over everything else. They operate much like Google only they respect your fourth amendment rights.
It should be obvious that Google is working closely with the United States government in the collection of your personal data, as well as the manipulation and censorship of data to control your thoughts. After all, look at all the trips Google had with Barrack Obama. They certainly weren’t swapping golf stories.
Like DuckDuckGo, Search Encrypt is a privacy-based search engine. It includes a general search function, as well as image and video search. This is a search engine that was design with privacy in mind. They believe that your likes, thoughts and search history should be just as private as the color of your underwear.
I agree.
They have a very clean interface, much like Google, except that everything is private and kept secret. They can do most of what you need, and all of what I (personally) use the search engine for.
Search Encrypt should be a preferred search engine for anyone wishing to maintain their privacy in a world where everyone lies and makes false promises. I use it in China without a problem.
I can see this search engine growing and becoming more popular over the years. Time will only tell, if they will maintain their role as the guaranteerer of privacy, or if they will sell out to the highest bidder…
Those tech “giants” in California tend to make empty promises and will sell you out in a heartbeat. Let’s not forget the promises that Yahoo! made when it acquired Tumblr, and then what happened when Verizon took over and crapped on the policies that reflected creative expression in 17DEC18. Never forget the broken promises, the lies, and the sell-out for huge monetary gain.
CEO Tumblr David Karp Akhirnya Mengundurkan Diri. When money becomes an issue, all the free thought, artistic creativity, and hope and dreams come crashing down. Who cares about creativity when you could end up with a new Lamborghini, a nice home on the beach, and all the perks of the wealthy.
That’s About It!
Sorry, but that’s about it for privacy based Internet Searches that I (personally) would feel comfortable using. The problem is that most other search engines are either (somehow) tied to Google (and the American NSA spying apparatus), or tied to one or another government. Now, there is good and bad with this revelation.
By splitting up searches between different government agencies and promoted search engines you can effectively DILUTE the content of search history that any one government has on you.
By using different search engines the SEO attributes are different; thus resulting in different search results.
With that being said, let’s look at some more or less QUESTIONABLE search alternatives out there. Some are promoted as “big on privacy”, others are simply large but tied to a non-American government.
Keep in mind, these search engines must be used with caution and consideration…
We will start with a well promoted search alternative. You can find this quite easily on Bing and Google as the “private” alternative to internet searches. Now, back in the day, Startpage was the world’s most private search engine. It was, because no one else gave a rat’s ass about privacy.
Start Page / ixquick
You see, StartPage was the first search engine to allow users to search privately. None of your details are recorded and no cookies are used, unless you allow it to remember your preferences. It also provides a proxy for those who want to not just search, but browse the internet with full privacy.
Instead of being a full alternative to Google, it combines Google Search results with user privacy. So, when you use StartPage, you’ll get the same Google Search Engine results. The only difference is that your privacy/information isn’t submitted. Google only sees StartPage, not the StartPage user. This enhancement is one of the reasons why StartPage results are so useful.
In short, StartPage Search Engine is the most appropriate private search engine for those who love Google results but can’t make a compromise with privacy.
The user should beware. Many companies that suck up your personal information and browsing habits ALSO promote Startpage. You have to wonder why.
I mean, why does Facebook and Google offer links to “their versions” of Startpage? It makes me pause and think.
Do you believe that a Facebook version of Startpage would maintain your privacy? What about a Google version of Startpage? I don’t. In fact, even if they were sincere in wanting to secure your privacy, I can’t help but think of them polluting the entire effort.
Evil Laughter
MetaGer
How about going to a different country? How about Germany? Now, I have to make a full disclosure that I personally love Germany. I think the German people are awesome. I love the food. I also like the “restaurant chain style” bordellos. Not to mention it is a beautiful land with an awesome history.
They also, and most importantly, respect privacy.
Metager
MetaGer is German-based meta-search engine, developed on 24 small scale web crawlers. It focuses on user’s privacy and makes searches untraceable by leaving no footprint behind. Also, it integrates a proxy server so that users can open any link anonymously from the search results while keeping their IP address hidden from the destination server. This eliminates the chances of advertisers to target you for ads.
The results are obtained from 50 different search engines. Before presenting final results of the query, they are filtered, compiled and sorted.
Comparing Metager to Google.
If you have optimized your website for search by Google, and Bing and the other more prominent American websites, you might be disappointed. This search engine utilizes a completely different criteria to search with, and the results reflect it.
However, the really great news is that you will find many websites that Google, and Bing cannot find.
And now the bad news. It might be publicly private, but who actually knows what the German government might have on the browsing habits of those whom use this search engine…Hum?
Yes. Russia, of all places. We need to put on our commie waders and step out of the American deep-state swamp and enter another deep-state swamp. Only this time it is a cold one covered in icy slush; the Mother Russian land of internet.
Yandex is the largest search engine in Russia with nearly 65% Russian market share. According the Comscore, it is the fourth largest search engine in the world with over 150 million searches per day as of 2012.
Yandex Search Market Share.
Yandex features a parallel search that shows results from main web index as well as specialized information resources, including blogs, news, image and video webpages, and eCommerce sites. In addition, the search engine provides supplementary information (like sports results), and contains spell checkers, autocomplete functionality and antivirus that detects malicious content on webpages.
Unlike the other search engines, this one is NOT optimized for privacy. So, that tells me that you can pretty much expect the Russian government knows who you are and are tracking your internet history for their own purposes. What ever they might be.
Hum… is there a cute large-chested blond-haired Russian femme fatal in my future? I wonder?
Now, the beauty in using this search engine is that the organizations that want your personal information don’t really want your data. After all, it’s going to be pretty hard to target you for Russian Viagra in Saint Petersburgh when you are living in Sunnyside, California. And, it will be unlikely for you to read the Cyrillic characters in their advertisements in the first place.
Russian advertisement for ice cream. Heck, it might even be enjoyable to see some targeted Russian advertisements for a change.
Personally, I think that there is far more harm in the NSA having your personal information than any Russian secret police force, even if it’s a modern version of the KGB.
The reasoning is simple. If the United States government; federal, state, local or agency want’s to arrest you, they will need to make a case out of how evil you are. Then they will compile the reasoning into the most damning case, and convince you to agree to lesser charges via plea bargain. Often they will use your computer habits to justify their narrative.
However, in Russia, and China, they won’t do this. If they want to arrest you, they will simply do so. Period. No justification and song and dance of survival is necessary.
OK. Now, back to America. We all know that Google has rivals…Microsoft.
Bing is Microsoft’s attempt at unseating Google, and arguably the second-most-popular search engine today. Bing used to be MSN search until it was updated in summer of 2009. They should NEVER be considered a Search Engine that honors individual privacy. However, they are placed here in this list for those members of the European Union, who get to have privacy in the their searches that Americans are denied.
Privacy with the Microsoft BING Search Engine.
Touted as a decision engine, Bing tries to support your researching by offering suggestions in the leftmost column, while also giving you various search options across the top of the screen. Things like ‘wiki’ suggestions, ‘visual search’, and ‘related searches’ might be very useful to you. Bing is not dethroning Google in the near future, no, but it is definitely worth trying.
Like Google, however, they will most certainly block certain websites, and avoid others at the request of the United States government. From “Uncle Sam’s” point of view, you go after the “low handing fruit” that the vast bulk of Americans use. Then ridicule the outliers as “misfits”, “deplorables”, and “Nazi’s”.
The international website “Kick Ass Torrents” was seized by the Department of Homeland Security. The reason being that they offered royalty free downloads of copyrighted movies and music. Thanks to President Obama, visiting any of these websites is a federal crime that Americans are forbidden to visit. Even for a nano-second.
As far as privacy is concerned, Bing will alter the behavior of the Search Engine if you live in the EU.
All you need to do is [1] Go here and fill out the application form, [2] wait for a response. Then, [3] trusting that they will obey your request, you are free to use Bing.
"Please provide any other relevant information describing your privacy interest in having this information blocked in response to searches on the name specified above and why you believe your privacy interest outweighs the public’s interest in free expression and the free availability of information."
That’s right, boy’s and girl’s, you need to petition Bing and explain why you want to have privacy. That should tell you all you need to know about how these software companies think of you and your families.
If you are European, you must petition to these people and explain why you want privacy. As an American, you will not be granted privacy. It is not granted by Bing. You are forbidden to have it, simply because NO ONE is enforcing the fourth amendment.
Youdao is a search engine in China released by the company NetEase. It allows users to easily search for images, web pages, music, news, blogs, and even Chinese to English entries in the dictionary, and several others. In 2012, Hui-hui shopping assistant was established, serving as a tool that will allow users to compare items and prices online.
I would not say that they would honor a person’s right to privacy. However, like the Russian search engine, the companies that seem to want to collect user information would find most Americans boring and useless.
Some deep searches are worth the risk to privacy. When that comes in play, consider Yippy!
Yippy
Yippy is a Deep Web search engine that searches other search engines for you. Unlike the regular Web, which is indexed by robot spider programs, Deep Web pages are usually harder to locate by conventional search.
That’s where Yippy becomes very useful. If you are searching for
obscure hobby interest blogs, obscure government information,
tough-to-find obscure news, academic research and otherwise-obscure
content, then Yippy is your tool.
There isn’t any guarantee that your privacy would be maintained, however, this search engine will take you places that other Search Engines (think Google and Bing) would hide from you.
Yahoo! is several things: it is a search engine, a news aggregator, a
shopping center, an emailbox, a travel directory, a horoscope and games
center, and more.
This ‘web portal’ breadth of choice makes this a very helpful site for Internet beginners. Searching the Web should also be about discovery and exploration, and Yahoo! delivers that in wholesale quantities.
Yahoo! also won’t protect your privacy like some of the other search engines mentioned herein. However, they won’t pre-censor to “protect” you either.
On Google, for instance, I had to wade through pages and pages of stuff about how the John Titor Time-traveler was a hoax, with no pages on the actual text of his BBS narrative. Yet, Yahoo! took me right there in a nano-second. Straight the “meat”, with no roadblocks of propagandized articles.
The Internet Archive is a favorite destination for longtime Web
lovers. The Archive has been taking snapshots of the entire World Wide
Web for years now, allowing you and me to travel back in time to see
what a web page looked like in 1999, or what the news was like around
Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
You won’t visit the Archive daily, like you would Google or Yahoo or
Bing, but when you do have need to travel back in time, use this search
site.
With DeepWebTech you can choose between five search engines. If one doesn’t work for you, you can always count on the other to help you find what you need. Just like Chrome, DeepWebTech also counts with browser plugins for you to use if you are searching for something in particular.
With this deep web search engine, you can find information on a subject such as medicine, science, and business. If Google is not giving you what you are looking for, you can count on these deep web search engines getting the job done.
While the privacy is suspect with all these search engines, I do not think that occasional use of such Deep Web trawlers are anything to be overly concerned about. Use a VPN and TOR, if you are concerned.
Other Search Engines….
Here are some other search engines that are worthy of a spin. Like before, they won’t really guard your privacy. However, they might scatter all your searches in a series of disjointed data centers.
Ask.com
Launched in 1996, Ask.com is
a question answering-focused web search engine. Despite its age, Ask is
still very active. They have coupled their search-system with a robust
questions and answer system with billions of online content.
As of 2014, the website had 180 million global users per month (with a
larger user base in the US), and to date, its mobile app has been
downloaded over 40 million times. They acquired a social networking
site, Ask.fm, where people can ask questions with the option of
anonymity. ASKfm handles around 20,000 questions every minute.
Baidu is the most popular search engine in China. This is definitely the most useful engine if you want to improve your SEO’s, but it functions very differently from Google.
The main differences compared to Google come down to how the sites operate. While on the surface they may look similar, different focuses and older systems mean that while Baidu’s technology is better at processing Chinese, they still place a high emphasis on Meta tags, meaning users are open to scams.
One
key difference that should be noted is that Baidu is a completely
Chinese website, and there are very few non-Chinese sites that come up.
While this is difficult for those who are trying to break into the
market, it is one of the reasons why it has such a large user base.
QiHoo 360
This is another very important search
engine in the Chinese market. In 2016 they had around 29% (according
to SEOagencychina.com) of the market share, however, in 2017 they seem
to have around 10% of the market. This is a significant drop and can be
accounted for by Baidu’s massive increase.
QiHoo
360’s flagship search engine is actually called Haosou, so it is
important that while the company is called QiHoo 360, the search engine
has a different name.
Haosou
offers a wide range of services including news, websites, images,
Q&A, videos, images and music, as well other services. As you can
tell it runs a very similar service to Baidu.
Other Search Engines
There are other search engines that you can use. However, you do need to be careful. Many (not all, but many, many) work with Google. (Snarl!) They offer (so called) “anonymous searching” but rely on Google as the back-end. I, for one, do not trust them. When I search, I don’t want to have anything to do with Google. No matter what anyone else says.
Gibru claims to provide Uncensored, Anonymous Search Engine experience — both in the web version and with the official Mozilla Firefox toolbar. This search engine is noted for the 128-bit secure encryption, the promise of data safety and optimal privacy.
Lukol is an easy-to-use private search engine. It does neither track your information nor store your IP. It has no tie-up with Governments or security agencies to share your data. In short, you don’t have to worry about your search indexes getting exposed.
Qrobe.it is another alternative private search engine to rely upon. The interface is way too simple, and you’ll be able to search for Images and Web content. You also get some Settings option and Advanced Search
Some Alternative Search Engines…
Ah, it is just impossible to do anything privately today. Everyone wants a piece of your action. Sigh.
Naver
Naver isn’t actually an “alternate” search engine at all. In fact, Naver is number one in South Koreawhere Google has a very small share. It used to be powered by Yahoo’s Overture system, but following the Yahoo-Microsoft alliance, the engine decided to build and launch its own keyword advertising system, so Naver has now become a leading search engine with its own advertising system. If you’re targeting Korea, put this one first.
Seznam
In the Czech Republic, Seznam has been in the lead for a long time and still just about competes with Google there. However, Google is rapidly creeping up and knocking at its door. For now, continue considering Seznam as essential in the Czech Republic. Over the border in the the Czech Republic’s sibling state Slovakia (they were once one nation and known as Czechosolvakia), Google has already taken over as a strong lead in first place.
Eniro
Eniro is an interesting example of a search engine in Sweden and for a variety of reasons. Eniro is the orignial publisher of Sweden’s Yellow Pages and, as a result, Eniro still has significant brand traction in the country. However, more recently, Eniro has partnered with Google for some aspects of search and for advertising.
What’s interesting though is that Eniro has developed its own pay per click advertising system and then backfills with Google ads which is a model I think we can expect to see emerge more widely. You don’t have to take much more share of advertising revenues, to justify building such a system and amortizing its costs over a few years.
Onet.pl
Well, I will say this about the Poles. They are honest about collecting your data and selling it to others for their own purposes…
Before you click "Go to site" or close this window, please read this information.
We ask for your voluntary consent to the processing of your personal data by our business partners and provide information about the so-called cookies and about the processing of your personal data by us. By clicking "Go to site" or closing the window by clicking the X icon, you agree to the following. You can also refuse consent or limit its scope.
A Polish portal with a strong following, Onet.pl has a slightly different version of the Eniro approach. Here, its search coming almost entirely from Google. It relies on on its advertising for revenue generation.
If you want to agree to the processing of your personal data by Trusted Partners of RAS Polska Group, which you share in the history of browsing websites and web applications and location data generated by your device for marketing purposes (including automated analysis of your activity on websites and applications to determine Your potential interests for adapting the advertisement and offer), including placing web tags (cookies, etc.) on your devices and reading such tags, click "Go to website" or close this window.
Orange
The telecoms companies over the years have, in general, gained a larger slice of “eyeballs” and have often overtaken the former search engines for audience. In France, for instance, Orange has a very strong portal which carries a search function. That search function is powered by Voila.fr — probably the number one ,original French search engine. It’s not Google…Hurrah!
However, the pay per click advertising on Orange.fr comes straight from Google, so this is an example of the opposite business model to those above.
Spiegel.de
Another trend of the moment is of newly prominent search sites that are news portals, generally the online mirrors of offline mega-brands. Der Spiegel (The Mirror) has been the leading and best respected German news magazine since its launch in 1947. Its move to online guaranteed a strong audience and an opportunity for both search and news advertisers.
It has a fascinating approach to search. Here, all searches query the Spiegel itself. Other issues are broken down by related organizations. For instance, plus manager-magazin.de for management issues, merian.de for travel and Wikipedia, clearly giving it a focus on responding to informational queries.
Spiegel doesn’t yet have a keyword-specific search facility not yet having discovered the opportunity, but it does enable you to build your own banner ads directly online and is just one step away from a very influential keyword search facility. Watch this space!
It’s very interesting, and might one-day be the future of searching the internet. However, an alternative to Google, it is not.
Alibaba.com
It is a search engine and it’s not. It is a Yellow Pages and it’s not. Strongest in China and India, Alibaba is difficult to describe apart from saying that in size, it dwarfs some of the better known search engines.
Some describe Alibaba.com as a dating site matchmaking manufacturers and their various types of distributors, which is actually pretty fair. And it has its own keyword matching advertising facility as well.
Personally, I use Alibaba quite a bit. If you want something. You buy in Bulk. Why spend $400 for ten Viagra pills, when I can buy the raw material for 100,000 pills for half that amount?
Conclusions
One cannot utilize the Internet without a Search Engine. Today, many programs and most of our communication is through the Internet. Our portal and the ways of accessing this Internet is through Search Engines. A person who controls your access; controls your life.
Don’t allow them this ability.
In America we proudly call ourselves “free”, and that we have “Freedom”. We announce that we have the Bill of Rights that “protects” us. None of this is true. This is simply because, like a garden, the Bill of Rights must be nurtured…respected and tended to from time to time. And when rabbits come and much on the plants in the garden, they need to be shooed away or killed if need be.
Update 27JUL20
Mojeek.com:
One of the last independent search engines. Mojeek is based out of the UK, and indexes websites on its own (just past 3 billion last month). It advertises no bias in its search results and it lives up to this claim. I searched for “vaccine danger” and was impressed with the variety and accuracy of the sites listed—mostly anti-vaccine sites, as expected, as opposed to Google which heavily filters it to only pro-vaccine apologia sites. There isn’t even an option for filtering the content for typical “family safe search.” Other than that it is a bare-bones search engine with a tab for web, news and images. The have a robust privacy policy, but very little independent reviews of this site, and I can’t tell how they get revenue.
Gigablast.com:
An independent search engine using open-sourced code, Gigablast gathers its own results from independent web-crawling (it has indexed over a billion websites). In this it fights an uphill battle against the big players who refuse to give its bots equal treatment to information. So far I have found its search results fair and unbiased, but there is a little more “clutter” in the results than I am used to from the big search engines, but this reflects its honesty: it is a small, organic search engine. The only source of income is a link for donations (unfortunately through Paypal). Their blog reveals many of the underhanded ways that Google manipulates the information marketplace. They don’t have the privacy features touted by other search sites, except to say that they don’t sell any personal information.
Private.sh:
Fortunately another privacy-oriented group built a smooth interface based on the Gigablast independent search results and adds the highest possible privacy. Not only does it strip away any IP information, but it encrypts any search terms you enter within your own browser before it traverses the internet to their website, where it is decrypted, sent to Gigablast, and the results encrypted before sending back to your computer. This effort effectively shields both your query and the results you see from any spying or eavesdropping attempts along the way. Additionally, no personal information is stored and cannot be subpoenaed. All of this is done seamlessly.
Take Aways
Selection of Search Engines are important for free and unlimited access to information.
There are many search engines to select from.
This post includes English search engines that have various degrees of privacy.
The first step in taking control over your fourth amendment protections is to STOP using Google and use a private and secure search engine.
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this
post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss
growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with
the society within communist China. As there are some really stark
differences between the two.
More Posts about Life
I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified
about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that
are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a
personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome
to come and enjoy a read or two as well.
