In 2010, then-CEO Eric Schmidt gave an interview to the Atlantic
where he stated, "Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line
and not cross it." Exactly what that creepy line is was never
precisely defined, but he did indicate that implanting people with
Google microchips was probably across it. Tellingly, though, Schmidt
also pointed out that given the amount of information people
willingly give to the information trafficker each day, without even
typing a word Google can "more or less know what you're thinking
about." These words coming from a frequent attendee of the annual
Bilderberg conference should at the very least give one pause for thought.
International Forecaster April 2012 (#6) - Gold, Silver, Economy + More
By: Bob Chapman, The International Forecaster
http://news.goldseek.com/InternationalForecaster/1335111352.php
-- Posted Sunday, 22 April 2012 | | Source: GoldSeek.com
The following are some snippets from the most recent issue of the
International Forecaster. For the full 23 page issue, please see
subscription information below.
US MARKETS
For a company whose corporate motto is "Don't Be Evil," Google Inc.
certainly has found itself at the receiving end of its share of
lawsuits, claims and controversies. Still, even by Google's standards
this past week has been a difficult one.
A strange press release touting a company calling itself
"Planetary Resources"--which promises to combine the "space
exploration and natural resource" sectors and is being backed by a
who's who of technorati and big-name investors including Google
co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin--is providing plenty of fodder
for speculation in the press ("Is asteroid mining in our near
future?"). But not even an announcement that Google itself was about
to go interplanetary would be enough to keep the company's legal woes
off the business pages of the newspapers (let alone its own online
news service).
Dominating the attention of the tech world at the moment
is Oracle's lawsuit against Google over an alleged misuse of Oracle's
programming platform, Java. The claim: Google used some Java in
Android, their mobile offering, without licensing. The stakes: Oracle
is seeking $1 billion and an injunction from further Android sales
until the issue is settled. The hype: Testimony by both Larry Page
and Larry Ellison, the CEOs of Google and Oracle respectively,
earlier this week generated plenty of buzz and press attention. The
bottom line: Oracle's original $6.1 billion claim was thrown out of
court because the judge determined that they were essentially making
up their calculations, and no one really expects that they will
receive the $1 billion they are now asking. In fact, it's far from
clear they will be awarded damages at all, although an injunction
against the use of Java in Android could be an important and
precedent-setting outcome.
But this was not Google's biggest headache of the week.
Corporate governance specialists are accusing co-founders
Page and Brin of making the company a dictatorship with a recent
proposal to effect a 2:1 stock split that will create a new class of
non-voting shares. The deal will create a third tier of Google
shares, Class C, that will trade under a different ticker and hold no
voting rights. Investors will end up with double the number of shares
but their vote will be diluted, effectively consolidating the power
of the holders of Class B shares, primarily Page and Brin. Now
investors are complaining that this is all just a power grab designed
to entrench the co-founders' control over the company at the expense
of everyone else.
But this was not Google's biggest headache of the week, either.
Google also finds itself in the crosshairs of an antitrust
lawsuit alleging that the company colluded with Apple, Adobe, Intel
and three other tech giants to suppress salaries and mobility
opportunities for top employees by agreeing not to poach from each
other. The suit was brought by five software engineers who are
alleging that the accused companies entered into identical bilateral
agreements to not recruit each other's employees. They allege that
the fact that all seven companies entered into nearly identical
reciprocal agreements in secret within a 2-year time span represents
a case of illegal collusion. The case cleared its first hurdle this
week when U.S. District Court judge Lucy Koh ruled that the charges
cannot be dismissed as implausible and the companies will have to
face the suit. The case is expected to go to trial in June 2013.
Neither was this Google's major headache, however.
Co-founder Sergey Brin has had to backpedal on comments
made in an interview with the Guardian earlier this week in which he
effectively said that the biggest threat to freedom and openness on
the internet are companies and applications that don't allow Google's
bots into their data. Meanwhile, Russian search engine Yandex accused
Google of shutting out rivals, raising the specter of the ongoing
European Commission antitrust investigation into the company's
alleged practice of favoring its own services in its search rankings
and locking advertisers in to their services. That investigation is
expected to wrap up within days. The search giant is also having to
cozy up to the Chinese government, which it made such a point of
falling out with in 2010, to win approval for its $12.5 billion
purchase of Motorola Mobility.
But these are not Google's biggest headaches this week, either.
What must really be causing sleepless nights in Mountain
View this week is the possibility that the Street View fiasco may
still not be over. Last Sunday's news that the tech giant had gotten
away from the scandal with a $25,000 hangnail ("rap on the knuckles"
seems too painful to analogize to such a puny fine) was immediately
met with renewed outcry over the affair. The Electronic Privacy
Information Center is calling for a full copy of the FCC's report on
their investigation, which they insisted on releasing in heavily
redacted format. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) is insisting that the
FCC decision leaves many questions unanswered and is calling for a
Congressional investigation.
For those unfamiliar with the Street View brouhaha, the
scandal erupted in May 2010 when Google was forced to admit that
their fleet of Street View camera cars was doing more than taking the
occasionally uncomfortable photo of random passers-by while prowling
the streets, snapping pictures for their street map database. They
were also sniffing wi-fi networks and, supposedly by accident,
private information, including emails, passwords, and any other data
flowing through unencrypted networks whenever the cars were rolling
by. For this heinous breach of personal privacy the company has so
far received a lot of stern finger-waggings from various governments'
privacy commissioners and now the insignificant FCC fine and threats
of (likely ineffectual) investigations by Congress.
Given its track record so far, none of these threatened
actions or investigations are particularly frightening to the company
behind the most-visited website on the Internet. What is potentially
frightening is the thought that the public might actually become
interested in the issue of privacy as it relates to Google, because
once that can of worms is opened their might be no way to put the lid
back on.
In 2010, then-CEO Eric Schmidt gave an interview to the
Atlantic where he stated, "Google policy is to get right up to the
creepy line and not cross it." Exactly what that creepy line is was
never precisely defined, but he did indicate that implanting people
with Google microchips was probably across it. Tellingly, though,
Schmidt also pointed out that given the amount of information people
willingly give to the information trafficker each day, without even
typing a word Google can "more or less know what you're thinking
about." These words coming from a frequent attendee of the annual
Bilderberg conference should at the very least give one pause for thought.
In fact, Google is just one player among many in Silicon
Valley who are engaged in a race to rewrite the social norms adhering
to the concept of privacy. The FTC and its French counterpart are
investigating charges that Google is bypassing Apple's web browser's
privacy settings to serve advertising cookies to customers against
their will. An investigation earlier this year showed how Facebook
was spying on smartphone users' text messages. A report last year
that iPhones keep logs of users' personal location data that stays
with the user across backups and even device migrations caused
shockwaves, especially since recently released internal police
documents have demonstrated that Apple and Google are required to
help law enforcement break into iPhones and Androids when issued a
court order.
This is nothing compared to the technologies that are
being prepared for the very near future. Google has admitted since
2006 that it is developing "audio fingerprint" technology that would
make use of the user's computer's built-in microphone to "listen in"
on the user's environment and deliver relevant advertisements. A dog
barking in the background, for example, might elicit advertisements
for dog food. Even if these technologies were only and forever
assumed to be in benevolent hands, the implications are clear: a home
is no longer a castle in the Internet age and old notions of privacy
don't exist.
Of course, these spying tools are not in the disinterested
hands of advertising executives, a point that has been demonstrated
forcefully a number of times over the years. In 2006 a retired AT&T
technician blew the whistle on Room 641A, an intercept facility that
the NSA set up in an AT&T (later SBC) communication building.
Documents revealed by the whistleblower showed that the room was
being fed data via beam splitters installed on the fibre optics
carrying Internet backbone traffic, and the data was being fed into a
Narus STA 6400, designed to analyze Internet communications. The
story leads into the NSA warrantless wiretapping scandal and seems to
imply that the NSA at the very least had the capability to spy on any
and all Internet traffic flowing through that hub.
Also in 2006 an ex-CIA agent went public claiming that CIA
seed money had helped to get Google off the ground and that the two
had maintained a "small but significant relationship." The story was
officially denied by Google, with the whistleblower claiming that the
company was lying in an effort to keep the lid on the story. Alarm
bells were raised in 2010, however, when it was announced that Google
was collaborating with the NSA on cybersecurity operations. For
nearly two years, EPIC has been fighting a FOIA battle to get
documents about the relationship disclosed to the public, but so far
all of those efforts have been stonewalled.
In a groundbreaking story last month James Bamford
revealed the nature of a new data center the NSA is building in Utah.
According to the insiders sourced in the report, the center will not
only be a repository of internet traffic and information, it will
also be equipped with state-of-the-art code-breaking technologies
that will allow the NSA to open and analyze all of the data they
intercept, from financial information to legal documents to military
and diplomatic communiques. According to one official: "Everybody's a
target; everybody with communication is a target."
The public tends to concentrate on isolated stories about
privacy issues, but the full picture of government and corporate
surveillance is hardly ever put together. When it is it reveals the
mind-boggling amounts of data that these entities have already
collected on almost anyone with access to electronic communication.
This is only a problem for companies like Google if the
public cares. As long as they stay on this side of Eric Schmidt's
"creepy line" (however one defines that) and be careful not to upset
people too much, they can get away with just about anything. So far,
there has not been significant outcry about the Street View fiasco or
similar revelations except in isolated tech journals. Most people
seem content to sign up for services that track and trace their
users' every movement, activity and social relation. Perhaps Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg was correct after all when he said the social
norm of privacy was "evolving over time."
In any event, Google is a business and just like any other
business it will only be forced to change tack when significant
numbers of users become aware of and concerned about the issue of
online privacy. There are a number of alternative search engines
promising privacy and claiming not to record IP addresses, although
the majority of the online public doesn't consider this a priority
right now. Incidents like the Street View scandal, however, offer the
chance to air this dirty laundry and give the public a chance to
reflect on just how much our society has altered its views about
privacy in such a short time. However ineffectual another government
investigation into the process might be in terms of securing stiffer
fines or penalties, the real reward of such efforts is the attention
it draws to the issue.
--
+44 (0)7786 952037
http://groups.google.com/group/uk-911-truth
http://www.youtube.com/user/PublicEnquiry
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Diggers350/
http://www.reinvestigate911.org/
http://www.thisweek.org.uk/
http://www.911forum.org.uk/
"Capitalism is institutionalised bribery."
_________________
www.abolishwar.org.uk
<http://www.elementary.org.uk>www.elementary.org.uk
www.public-interest.co.uk
www.radio4all.net/index.php/series/Bristol+Broadband+Co-operative
www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1407615751783.2051663.1274106225&l=90330c0ba5&type=1
<http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf>http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which
alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
<https://217.72.179.7/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/>https://217.72.179.7/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
Fear not therefore: for there is nothing covered that shall not be
revealed; and nothing hid that shall not be made known. What I tell
you in darkness, that speak ye in the light and what ye hear in the
ear, that preach ye upon the housetops. Matthew 10:26-27
Die Pride and Envie; Flesh, take the poor's advice.
Covetousnesse be gon: Come, Truth and Love arise.
Patience take the Crown; throw Anger out of dores:
Cast out Hypocrisie and Lust, which follows whores:
Then England sit in rest; Thy sorrows will have end;
Thy Sons will live in peace, and each will be a friend.
http://tinyurl.com/6ct7zh6
--
Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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