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"More details emerged from a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014, which revealed that Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt were not only on a first name basis wi

"More details emerged from a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014, which revealed that Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt were not only on a first name basis with then-NSA chief General Keith Alexander, but that Google was part of a “secretive government initiative known as the Enduring Security Framework,” and that this initiative involved Silicon Valley partnering with the Pentagon and the US intelligence community to share information “at network speed.” The Enduring Security Freedom initiative is just one window into how Big Tech can reap big dollars from their relationship with the NSA. In 2013, it emerged that the participants in the PRISM program—the illegal surveillance program which allowed the NSA backdoor access to all information and user data of all of the Big Tech companies—were reimbursed for the program’s expenses by a shadowy arm of the agency known as “Special Source Operations.”" https://www.corbettreport.com/siliconvalley/ https://www.corbettreport.com/siliconvalley/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqvRzRj9tHE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqvRzRj9tHE Silicon Valley is a story of government funded tech development where taxpayers foot the R&D bill while VCs and white Executives reap the profits of taxpayer funded inventions.

dcl 6y ago
Not an accountant or financial analyst, but how does the money these giant public tech companies make from the NSA/other appear in the mandatory financial reports? I'm guessing it must be easily hidden.
- dboreham 6y ago
  NSA is a customer. I'm not sure if financial filings need to identify individual customers. The business might be categorized as "government "? Certainly I worked at a well known Internet company in the 90s and NSA was one of our larger customers (larger for the division I worked in, perhaps not for the entire company).
Craighead 6y ago
What is illegal about Prism?
dredmorbius 6y ago
Corbett Report is an extraordinarily low-quality information source: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Corbett_Report https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Corbett_Report
- nibepins 6y ago
  One of the great things about the Corbett Report is that you don't have to believe it, you can just look at the sources because every source is referenced. The case in point over Google's Sergey Brin and the NSA comes from a Freedom of Information Act request fulfilled by the NSA: https://archive.fo/V0fdG https://archive.fo/V0fdG. The second point about backdoor data collection through PRISM comes from the Snowden leaks and the reporting from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants.... In the video lecture of this post, Steve explains that military funded research from WWI all the way through the Cold War led to the birth of Silicon Valley as we know it today. After making Stanford the "MIT of the West" by bringing hundreds of million dollars of taxpayer money to Stanford for MIL research, in the mid 1950's Fred Terman "encourages his students to leave and start companies" and "professors to leave and consult for companies", and makes his position clear that "I don't want to build production systems for the military, I want to do research. I want other people to start companies and have the military fund them." https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo https://steveblank.com/2009/10/26/the-secret-history-of-silicon-valley-11-the-rise-of-%E2%80%9Crisk-capital%E2%80%9D-part-1/ https://steveblank.com/2009/10/26/the-secret-history-of-sili... Some of Silicon Valley's biggest companies today are the product of tax payer money through the same mechanism which privatizes profits from taxpayer funded MIL research. A prime example is Google. Sergey Brinn and Larry Page had been doing research and building Google at Stanford with taxpayer MIL research money since at least 1995: "In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?" https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/ https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci... As the Corbett Report explains, that relationship ensured Google's growth long after the company was founded: "In 2003, Google signed a $2.1 million contract with the National Security Agency, the US intelligence community’s shadowy surveillance arm that is responsible for collecting, storing and analyzing signals intelligence in foreign intelligence and counterintelligence operations. Google built the agency a customized search tool “capable of searching 15 million documents in twenty-four languages.” So important was this relationship to Google that when the contract expired in April 2004, they extended it for another year at no cost to the government." https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/sites/default/files/2017-09/GOOGGovfinal012411.pdf https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/sites/default/files/2017-09... And as Corbett explains with cited sources available for reference, taxpayer money funded early R&D or provided direct investment in Facebook and Palantir as well. These are but a few examples. Silicon Valley is product of taxpayer money, where the gov. has been picking white men, usually of privileged birth and position, to be winners by funding their research and their companies with taxpayer money. So instead of attacking the messenger and committing a fallacy, are you willing to debate the message?
azujus 6y ago
Admins, is this a troll account? Made 10h ago, no submissions etc.

dcl 6y ago

Not an accountant or financial analyst, but how does the money these giant public tech companies make from the NSA/other appear in the mandatory financial reports? I'm guessing it must be easily hidden.

dboreham 6y ago
NSA is a customer. I'm not sure if financial filings need to identify individual customers. The business might be categorized as "government "? Certainly I worked at a well known Internet company in the 90s and NSA was one of our larger customers (larger for the division I worked in, perhaps not for the entire company).

Craighead 6y ago

What is illegal about Prism?

dredmorbius 6y ago

Corbett Report is an extraordinarily low-quality information source: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Corbett_Report https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Corbett_Report

nibepins 6y ago
One of the great things about the Corbett Report is that you don't have to believe it, you can just look at the sources because every source is referenced. The case in point over Google's Sergey Brin and the NSA comes from a Freedom of Information Act request fulfilled by the NSA: https://archive.fo/V0fdG https://archive.fo/V0fdG. The second point about backdoor data collection through PRISM comes from the Snowden leaks and the reporting from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants.... In the video lecture of this post, Steve explains that military funded research from WWI all the way through the Cold War led to the birth of Silicon Valley as we know it today. After making Stanford the "MIT of the West" by bringing hundreds of million dollars of taxpayer money to Stanford for MIL research, in the mid 1950's Fred Terman "encourages his students to leave and start companies" and "professors to leave and consult for companies", and makes his position clear that "I don't want to build production systems for the military, I want to do research. I want other people to start companies and have the military fund them." https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo https://steveblank.com/2009/10/26/the-secret-history-of-silicon-valley-11-the-rise-of-%E2%80%9Crisk-capital%E2%80%9D-part-1/ https://steveblank.com/2009/10/26/the-secret-history-of-sili... Some of Silicon Valley's biggest companies today are the product of tax payer money through the same mechanism which privatizes profits from taxpayer funded MIL research. A prime example is Google. Sergey Brinn and Larry Page had been doing research and building Google at Stanford with taxpayer MIL research money since at least 1995: "In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?" https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/ https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci... As the Corbett Report explains, that relationship ensured Google's growth long after the company was founded: "In 2003, Google signed a $2.1 million contract with the National Security Agency, the US intelligence community’s shadowy surveillance arm that is responsible for collecting, storing and analyzing signals intelligence in foreign intelligence and counterintelligence operations. Google built the agency a customized search tool “capable of searching 15 million documents in twenty-four languages.” So important was this relationship to Google that when the contract expired in April 2004, they extended it for another year at no cost to the government." https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/sites/default/files/2017-09/GOOGGovfinal012411.pdf https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/sites/default/files/2017-09... And as Corbett explains with cited sources available for reference, taxpayer money funded early R&D or provided direct investment in Facebook and Palantir as well. These are but a few examples. Silicon Valley is product of taxpayer money, where the gov. has been picking white men, usually of privileged birth and position, to be winners by funding their research and their companies with taxpayer money. So instead of attacking the messenger and committing a fallacy, are you willing to debate the message?

azujus 6y ago

Admins, is this a troll account? Made 10h ago, no submissions etc.