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Former officials say big tech monopoly power is vital to national security

greenwald.substack.com

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Re: Former officials say big tech monopoly power is vital to national security

#91

Post by euroderf »

aaronsimpson wrote: post #71
cryptica wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one reporting that apparently. Just some things that the mainstream media lied about: - The NIH having funded gain of function research in Wuhan Labs. - The mortality rate of COVID19 (they ignored obvious issues with data collection and flawed incentives which over-counted deaths and under-counted cases). - The effectiveness of COVID19 vaccines (several outlets initially said that 1 dose would be enough to get 9…

What sort of complete moron would consider the 2008 bank bailout (what I assume you're referring to) as a crime? How is TARP and the repurchasing of toxic bank assets for the stabilization of the US/global financial system, which was fully paid back to the taxpayer with interest, a crime? Unless you think we should've just let the financial system melt into oblivion? It's this populist rhetoric of people being mad at…

It is more important to feel good than to think good !

Re: Former officials say big tech monopoly power is vital to national security

#92

Post by cryptica »

Aunche wrote: post #75
cryptica wrote: post #15

It's such a financially convenient line of thinking. It's absolute nonsense. Both at face value and once you dig into it. Mainstream media is feeding us constant lies which work against our interests, destroy our ability to trust institutions and the government. Big Tech is clearly the biggest threat to our democracy. Before Big Tech, we did not have such problems. This new narrative is pure self-serving propaganda,…

>The problem with the US and the west is not freedom of speech or the free market, it's our debt-based monetary system which is now based on soft money. The decline started in 1971 when USD became detached from the gold standard. You have it backwards. We didn't end Bretton Woods because the government wanted to print money. The government was printing money, so they had to end Bretton Woods or else hyperinflation wo…

The Bretton Woods system never fully ended in reality. Bretton Woods just ensured that all foreign fiat currencies would be pegged to the US dollar which at the time was pegged to gold. It was intended as a mechanism to allow all global currencies to be indirectly pegged to gold via the USD.

When Nixon abandoned the gold standard in 1971, the fiat currencies of all countries around the world were still pegged to the USD. This aspect of the Bretton Woods agreement remained in place... The USD started losing value but this did not cause the USD to hyperinflate relative to other currencies because all countries were still trying to maintain a stable exchange rate relative to the USD. It became currency manipulation on a global scale. Economies became increasingly detached from real value.

You should watch 'Hidden Secrets of Money' - One of the episodes does a really good job at explaining how this occurred.

Re: Former officials say big tech monopoly power is vital to national security

#93

Post by kornhole »

pfraze wrote: post #84
kornhole wrote: post #63

Frances Haugen, the supposed Facebook whistleblower, slipped up in her 60 minutes interview and revealed that she works for US intelligence. The effort she was employed to advance is acceptance of more censorship of Meta and the like. Conspicuously absent from the publicly promoted discussion was any mention of the free alternatives such as the fediverse. 'The Social Dilemma' movie had similar objectives and narrativ…

Source?

It was somewhere in the interview where she mentioned about how careful she was at copying FB files because of her previous experience working in intelligence. I am sorry I don't feel like listening to the whole thing again to give you the specific time marker. https://youtu.be/_Lx5VmAdZSI

Re: Former officials say big tech monopoly power is vital to national security

#94

Post by lambdasquirrel »

Barrin92 wrote: post #69

The hilarious thing about this is that China is at the same time cracking down hard on its own tech sector for reasons of domestic competition and concentration of power. So on the one hand you have the country of freedom that must preserve its monopolistic structures and accept the lesser evil to fight the enemies abroad but the communist security state is busy... reigning their giants in? Probably a good time to qu…

I don't think China's doing it out of the good of their heart, or because they're less monopolistic. They strike me as being 1. smarter about it and 2. already having whatever control they want, through implicit means.

Somehow, I think that the CPC knows that the Chinese internet companies won't run without Alibaba, but I also think they know a lot of the Chinese engineers who work for Alibaba don't really have too many other places to go. So important players like Alibaba will probably stand regardless of the level of crackdowns they have taken. For the sake of competitiveness – and to keep Jack Ma erstwhiles in line – some random flogging may be in order. I think China is also concerned about the brain drain caused by having a tech sector that's too economically prosperous compared to the rest of the economy. (How they acted on that is another thing).

The U.S., meanwhile, evidently doesn't care very much about the long-term health of its tech economy.

I'm really uncomfortable about the situation that this presents. In the U.S., Apple has usually pushed against the establishment making it easier to crack their phones. And there are worse social networks than FB and Twitter. There are better ones too, but if I find myself wanting to defend Apple against the government (even though I'm sure they're taking their stance out of selfish reasons), then the overall situation seems like it is inherently balanced against U.S. competitiveness in tech.

Re: Former officials say big tech monopoly power is vital to national security

#95

Post by archontes »

refurb wrote: post #81
archontes wrote: post #57

I think Greenwald's characterization of the letter's contents is a bit disingenuous. The letter makes the claim that recently proposed legislation that would enforce non-discriminatory access would do so in a way that would include foreign adversaries. Greenwald takes that and elevates the claim to, "Any attempts to restrict Big Tech's monopolistic power would therefore undermine the U.S. fight against Moscow." The l…

”that letter was still well-founded at the time” They had zero proof it was Russian disinformation. They just made that up despite indications the laptop was in fact authentic. And they did that right before a Presidential election. That doesn’t concern you? You feel that the letter was “well founded”? Founded on what? A politically convenient guess?

Without knowing what information they had at the time, I will say we now know that there was plenty of disinformation about it being manufactured and spread.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/04/hunter-biden-la...

Perhaps the most concerning thing is that a group of such blatantly unscrupulous people has actual political support in the US.

I feel the need to draw a parallel to Trump's refusal of military aid to Ukraine contingent upon them manufacturing an investigation of Hunter Biden, over which he was impeached.

Re: Former officials say big tech monopoly power is vital to national security

#96

Post by jjulius »

kornhole wrote: post #93
pfraze wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source?

It was somewhere in the interview where she mentioned about how careful she was at copying FB files because of her previous experience working in intelligence. I am sorry I don't feel like listening to the whole thing again to give you the specific time marker. https://youtu.be/_Lx5VmAdZSI

>... previous experience working in intelligence

Previous? But just moments ago you said...

>... she works for US intelligence.

And even still, the comment you reference is pretty innocuous if you have actual context. She has publicly stated that she worked alongside intelligence assets at a "threat intelligence unit" at Facebook[1].

[1]https://twitter.com/Rasha_Abdul/status/1496788958084280320

Re: Former officials say big tech monopoly power is vital to national security

#97

Post by arrosenberg »

cryptica wrote: post #15

It's such a financially convenient line of thinking. It's absolute nonsense. Both at face value and once you dig into it. Mainstream media is feeding us constant lies which work against our interests, destroy our ability to trust institutions and the government. Big Tech is clearly the biggest threat to our democracy. Before Big Tech, we did not have such problems. This new narrative is pure self-serving propaganda,…

> Free-market capitalism with freedom of speech is the recipe for economic prosperity. Has been for hundreds of years.

Economic prosperity for a handful of wealthy Brits you mean? Regulated capitalism created the middle class, free market capitalism is doing its damnedest to undo that outcome.

Re: Former officials say big tech monopoly power is vital to national security

#98

Post by incomingpain »

spamizbad wrote: post #62
incomingpain wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Former intelligence people churn out all sorts of goofy takes in an attempt to build their brand. They’re also all over the spectrum depending on what audience they’re chasing. You're right but is this one a goofy take? Or is there a real something here?

I don't think so, but to indulge my own cranky theories: Perhaps Elon Musk's takeover attempt was done at the behest of the US government to take control of the platform under the cover of "censorship". Musk himself indicated he wanted to make the platform more miserable for the "extremes" on both the left and right (both perceived as being anti-government) - leaving you with the establishment consensus unharmed in t…

That's a cool idea. Largely speaking you can see Elon's point of view.

He was on Babylon Bee's show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvGnw1sHh9M 2.4 million views in last 3 months. In this video they in detail discuss the problem with political banning.

2 months later, Babylon Bee got banned off twitter for a joke. Clear political banning and violation of section 230.

Re: Former officials say big tech monopoly power is vital to national security

#99

Post by bavell »

aaronsimpson wrote: post #71
cryptica wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one reporting that apparently. Just some things that the mainstream media lied about: - The NIH having funded gain of function research in Wuhan Labs. - The mortality rate of COVID19 (they ignored obvious issues with data collection and flawed incentives which over-counted deaths and under-counted cases). - The effectiveness of COVID19 vaccines (several outlets initially said that 1 dose would be enough to get 9…

What sort of complete moron would consider the 2008 bank bailout (what I assume you're referring to) as a crime? How is TARP and the repurchasing of toxic bank assets for the stabilization of the US/global financial system, which was fully paid back to the taxpayer with interest, a crime? Unless you think we should've just let the financial system melt into oblivion? It's this populist rhetoric of people being mad at…

I don't consider the 2008 bailout a "crime" per se but it was definitely a govt handout and did not punish the bad actors who caused the issues in the first place.

It's interesting to me that you ignored the rest of the lies that were pointed out and focused only on one bullet to make your point. You seem to think people are mad when they shouldn't be? Is constantly being gaslit by cable news (just to give one example) acceptable to you?

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