Big Tech Companies are NOT Truly Private – Here’s How/Why

A couple of important facts need to be understood. First of all, a lot of these Big Tech companies, especially Oracle and Google, started out receiving funding by various government agencies, either directly or indirectly. James Corbett does an excellent documentary explaining this history – watch it here. To be clear, Big Tech means the largest and wealthiest technology companies, both today and in recent history, such as Oracle, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Most worrying is that most of these companies spy on users, violating privacy and basic human manners.

Additionally, in recent history, as of the time of this writing, and continuing to this day, Big Tech companies continue receiving taxpayer money in the form of lucrative and exclusive contracts, such as Amazon’s $600 million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) for an Amazon Web Services(AWS) server. Wired did an excellent explanation and commentary about this – watch it here.

In Corbett’s documentary, he states the following key points on how the government, and its various funding and other influences, was who truly created modern-day Silicon Valley, rather than organic entrepreneurial development.

Corbett starts with World War II, explaining how Frederic Terman was instrumental, by helping to transform Stanford into the MIT of the west. Founding the Stanford Research Institute(SRI), Stanford University was able to contract with the Department of Defense(DoD), which actually violated SRI’s original directive to avoid doing so. Terman and his associates essentially created Silicon Valley into the connection between technology companies and the government

Funding for the various companies was placed under the cover of “national security” and classified, but such classification is illegitimate because clear and present danger, for national security protection, was never proven, nor was any clear and present danger from doing so not disproven. After all, if something is illegitimately categorized as a national security issue, doesn’t that illegitimate categorization in and of itself pose a national security, risk, of competence, to say the least?

The company Oracle derives its name from its first customer, the CIA. Project Oracle, the name of the initial, and ongoing, association with the CIA, was how it started. To this day, Oracle still gets 25% of its business from government contracts.

Another example is Sun MicroSystems. All the technology foundations for Sun MicroSystems were funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency(ARPA), an agency of the government.

Google, perhaps the biggest of all Big Tech companies, started out as a research project of Sergey Brin and Larry Page in Silicon Valley. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA), what ARPA eventually became, was one of the seven military, civilian and law enforcement agencies that sponsored the Stanford Digital Libraries Project, which funded Brin and Page’s research.

Google has maintained relationships with intelligence agencies ever since – how (un)surprising!

In 2003, Google signed a $2.1M contract with the NSA. Google built a customized search engine for them. No wonder Google never bothered to tell its users that it was spying on them and collecting all sorts of personal data without consent.

In 2005, InQTel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, has sold over 5,000 shares of Google stock. Interestingly, records of when InQTel bought those 5,000 shares, and thus an ownership stake in Google, are absent. Additionally, Google Earth is CIA-assisted technology.

Let’s now turn to Facebook, and its connection to DARPA. As Corbett explains, Facebook received venture capital funds from intelligence-connected insiders to Zuckerberg when he was still at Harvard

One of Facebook’s original funders is Excel Partners, which provided $12.7M of capital in 2005. Excel Partners manager James Breyer used to be the former chair with NVCA, along with InQTel former member Gilman Louie. Breyer was also previously with BBN, an arm of ARPA-net.

DARPA has also been working to weaponize Facebook’s Occulus, as Corbett explains.

Then there is also the Revolving Door Effect; Big Tech companies hire people who previously held high positions in government bureaucracies like the DoD and intelligence/spying agencies. Conversely, Big Tech executives later go into government, like former Google CEO Eric Schimdt did, serving on an advisory board for the DoD after his time with Google.

On a related but somewhat tangential note, Corbett also talks about Yasha Lavine, the author of The Secret Military History of the Internet. Yasha tells the audience how the internet, contrary to popular belief, was never intended to be a tool of liberation. On the contrary, it was meant for controlling human groups, such as through ARPANet’s research.

Now that older history about Big Tech’s partnership with government, thereby proving that Big Tech companies are not actually public, let’s now turn to recent history of this ongoing, non-public, nature of Big Tech companies.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is one of the leading corporate spenders on lobbying, as explained in The Wired article posted in the earlier part of this post. These lobbying efforts help Alphabet win contracts and prevent regulation against their power.

Then there is then-CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos, who bought up the Washington Post, which has a taxpayer-funded CIA contract. Additionally, AWS signed a 10-year, $600M contract with CIA.

The NSA also awarded Amazon with a contract; Amazon’s IC GovCloud surveillance machine is the manifestation of that contract.

Amazon and Microsoft, another one of the Big Tech companies, are both bidding for the (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure)JEDI contract.

Additionally, Yahoo designed custom software to filter its users’ emails and deliver messages that triggered a set of search terms to the NSA. At the same time as Yahoo was feeding user data to the NSA, Google was developing a search engine called Dragonfly in collaboration with the Communist Party of China(CCP). One of the lesser-known, but primary and more nefarious, purposes of Dragonly was to enable the CCP to track and eventually round-up dissidents, much like Hitler and the Nazis did. This means that Google has blood on its hands, contrary to it’s former motto “Don’t Be Evil”. In a letter obtained by The Intercept, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told a group of six US senators that Dragonfly could have “broad benefits inside and outside of China” but refused to release other details of the program, which the company’s search engine chief, Ben Gomes, informed Google staff would be released in early 2019. Benefits, such as rounding up dissidents of the CCP?

For even more instances of Big Tech signing defense contracts, go here: https://www.axios.com/ai-companies-defense-contractors-government-6305c209-1d5a-45eb-ac85-9042fa9e13f6.html

Don’t ever forget, these contracts that Big Tech companies sign with all these government departments and agencies are taxpayer-funded. This means that Big Tech has been receiving taxpayer money, while continuing to creepily spy on users, and even non-users, violating privacy and basic human manners. No truly private company should ever receive taxpayer money, especially in the form of lucrative contracts as described above, that most of the time serve to further surveil and violate the precious privacy of both the U.S. citizenry and the rest of the world.

Therefore, those who argue that Big Tech companies can censor content and remove content that they don’t like because these Big Tech companies are “private”, are making an invalid argument.