INSURGE Intelligence is a Medium publication of investigative journalism on intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, and geopolitics.
Commenters cite its pieces on the CIA's role in Google and a Pentagon AI robot army to back claims about tech and intelligence ties.
> Google Photos is NOT Google Drive
> ...
> ... I think that this is a lazy design. ...
No, it's absolutely deliberate.
My take (not sure why nobody else is saying this):
Google is contractually required to not inspect or analyze the _private_ data it stores beyond technical purposes such as deduplication.
- Google Drive is used for corporate environments where privacy is the be-all end-all. Can't really do anything there.
- But by using UX antipatterns to get away with making Photos public by default, Google can say "well the photo was publicly accessible so we've ...".
Hmm. I wonder what the legal ramifications are of making a photo private. Does that constitute a licensing change on the part of the copyright holder (you)? Can Google argue _for_ holding on to "the copy of the photo that was public"? (Yes there's no bit difference but the legal flavor is different.) If that's the case, that could explain why everything's public by default; just grab a copy of the photo before the user makes it private a second later.
Remember how the Pixel has unlimited online Photos storage?
This is clearly a tracking move. I was reading about how YouTube analyzes the content of videos (AI content recognition), etc. If Google has the infra to analyze _video_ they can easily do images.
Related: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e (REALLY long - I started going crosseyed ~60% through - but probably the most relevant thing you'll find all…
Highly recommend the book National Security Cinema by Tom Secker and Matthew Alfred.
They trawled through FOI documents to uncover a lengthy history of US intelligence agencies having holywood scripts changed to suit their needs.
> the US government has worked behind the scenes on over 800 major movies and more than 1,000 TV titles.
> Vietnam is evidently another sore topic for the US military, which also removed a reference to the war from the screenplay for Hulk (2003)
> It seems that any reference to military suicide — even an off-hand remark in a superhero action-comedy adventure — is something the DOD’s Hollywood office will not allow.
> If there are characters, action or dialogue that the DOD don’t approve of then the film-maker has to make changes to accommodate the military’s demands. If they refuse then the Pentagon packs up its toys and goes home. To obtain full cooperation the producers have to sign contracts — Production Assistance Agreements — which lock them into using a military-approved version of the script.
> Strangely, Phil Strub denied that there was any support for Tomorrow Never Dies. But the DOD are credited at the end of the film and we obtained a copy of the Production Assistance Agreement between the producers and the Pentagon.
> changing the code name of the military operation to capture the Hulk from ‘Ranch Hand’ to ‘Angry Man’.
‘Ranch Hand’ is the name of a real military operation that saw the US Air Force dump millions of gallons of…
Commercial banking, together with the Intellectual Property system, is one of the greatest Rentier swindles of all time. We are literally renting the money we use, for extortionate prices [1].
"The dollar as a reserve currency transfers wealth from the rest of world to the USA
One final way in which money works today that has a substantial effect on the workings of the global political economy is the use of the US dollar as the international reserve currency. This follows the decision of the OPEC countries shortly after the end of the Second World War to accept only dollars for their oil. Today, the dollar is used for trade in many other commodities.
This acts as a huge subsidy to the US economy, since countries elsewhere in the world sell goods and services to the US, but instead of buying back from US companies, they keep the dollars so as to be able to trade among themselves — as well as to be able to protect their currencies from speculative attack. This effective transfer of wealth from the rest of the world to the US permits the US to be easily the world’s largest debtor nation, while driving the unprecedented widening of wealth disparity within the global community (Douthwaite, 1999)." [2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzCegQVljdY
[2] https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/impacts-of-our-current-money-system-57c1a3628be6
The terrorist ends wherever a threat to the state's power exists, it's been shown quite well that they don't care if you're domestic or not. This, IMO, is why "self-radicalized" and "domestic terrorist" were injected into our vernacular, to normalize and justify the need to surveil the general public.
The thing is, and like I mentioned in a post awhile back: technically competent actors, the ones bound to cause the most harm, would absolutely be using a bespoke method of covert communication. There's really little value, IMO, to the countrywide dragnet outside of sentiment analysis and control.
The military complex wove itself early into the tech industry in ways that they could intentionally side-step laws meant to keep such public/private collusion from happening[0]. The impetus for the founding of the collaboration was a report on the importance in controlling perception in future wars.
We saw the same strategy deployed directly against the American people during the election "fortification" where DHS and social media colluded to control perception with little regard for truth[1].
[0] https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e
[1] https://homeland.house.gov/2023/11/06/chairmen-green-bishop-uncover-new-evidence-of-dhs-big-tech-collaborating-to-censor-americans/
You're calling out RT for being state-run, but some of ours are almost just as bad. They just convinced you they aren't(1,2).
And what you're suggesting is that Twitter take sides in this, support US propoganda and suppress others... How is this different than RT?
Some are starting to talk about some of our mainstream journalists as belonging in a "special kind of journalistic hell(3)."
1-https://theintercept.com/2016/09/18/washpost-makes-history-first-paper-to-call-for-prosecution-of-its-own-source-after-accepting-pulitzer/
2-https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/exclusive-documents-expose-direct-us-military-intelligence-influence-on-1-800-movies-and-tv-shows-36433107c307
3-https://www.salon.com/2016/09/20/betraying-snowden-theres-a-special-place-in-journalism-hell-for-the-washington-post-editorial-board/
My opinion is that google only ever presented as a new type of company - without ever being that.
It was marketing spin - and I bought into that.
I since found out it was funded from inception by inqtel, the CIA's venture capital arm. There are lots of articles to this effect, eg: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e
So, the hype, the free canteen, etc was all just spin to move people from a more messy handmade internet, into a corporate one. A way to dominate and intercept everyone's actions online when searching. And you have to say, it was a good strategy! Do the younger generation even know that there are pages outside of the corporate held companies?