Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems

HP is a prime example of this, as many government computers and services involve HP, hence HP has such a high "investment" rate with lobbying.

DARPA is mentioned exactly once in this article and then mostly as a tangential point. Despite this, it's mentioned several times in multiple critical top-level comments here in the comment section.

Like the media, I think the main role Google will play is by controlling how information is spread through youtube. Google already plays a political role by * promoting certain political agendas directly, * making a big show of not removing "Innocence of Muslims" * while at the same time quietly censoring equivalent "anti-Semitic" videos in Europe (e.g. "Jews and Gun Control").

Apart from that, Google is a big part of the internet infrastructure, and so they naturally work with the government to keep this secure. I think this is the extent of their technical cooperation with the government. The political stuff they mainly do of their own accord because of the political views of their executives.

EDIT: Jared Cohen sounds like a guy they hired to further a fairly mainstream liberal/Jewish agenda (to spread openness and democracy around the world, especially Muslim countries) through very mundane means. However on occasion he decided to do a lot of crazy stuff like "regime change" of his own accord (see wikileaks stratfor emails), much against the desires of Google.

There's always going to be collection of selective disclosure. Some of that could be changed by a culture of secrecy (youtube videos in skimasks ^_^), but in general there will be people who post everything to the friendster du jour. And I don't see how one could ever stop assuming that information will be archived indefinitely. For this, my hope can only be for a symmetric Brinworld transparency where it ultimately doesn't matter (and to the extent some does, people learn to navigate these contours).

But for stuff that doesn't need to be shared, I think you're focused too much on the NSA, when it's really just the most prominent example. Any sufficiently-funded intelligence agency is going to have plants that work at significant corporate information troves. Exfiltration isn't terribly hard when companies setup geographically diverse data centers on purpose.

And as I said, insurance companies are a far more worrying threat to me as far as dictating everyday terms of your life - "we noticed you buy an awful lot of beer. Your auto insurance rates will be doubling unless you let us install a GPS-enabled breathalyzer in your car". I suppose this could be held back with legislation if we had a working political process, but I also recognize that economics tends to win out regardless.

You say 'devolve' when talking about moving to non-centralized services, but this is a loaded term. I view web toys (also a loaded term, heh heh) as a stop off from the Internet becoming mainstream-recognized before its application technologies were really polished to withstand model precession. There's no reason privacy-preserving technology couldn't have a similar interface, yet be easily self-administered with the help of any friend who is just slightly savvy (besides that it's much harder to get such software funded when there's no point for capital to invest because it rightly takes the middlemen out of the picture).

Now you are saying that he should redact certain items. What judgement should he use for that? Since it seemed like you were questioning his ability to make that judgement.

I think Greenwald's slow release of the files from Snowden has done a superb job of making the US wary about what it can do and say, which I think was part of Greenwald's agenda. Compare that to the Wikileaks cable release which, once it went public, had a burst of fingerprint pointing and then became yesterday's news.

I don't understand your statement. The Newsweek describes Assange as beliving "the liberating power of the Internet is based on its freedom and statelessness". How is liberation not part of a humanitarian goal? Based on what he's said, his political agenda is meant to pursue his humanitarian agenda.

So even if I'm wrong, and there are people who have no political agenda, why do you say that Assange has a "political agenda", when it's apparently actually his humanitarian agenda that you see?