Can someone please summarize what the hell this is supposed to be? Sure, DDOS attacks, hacking, etc are bad. What else, exactly, am I supposed to pull away from this horribly designed site?
> Google Ideas builds products to support free expression and access to information for people who need it most — those facing violence and harassment.
> Google Ideas is a team of engineers, researchers and geopolitical experts who build products to support free expression and access to information, especially in repressive societies. We focus on the problems faced by people who live in unstable, isolated, or oppressive environments, including the billions of people who are coming online for the first time.
> With the right tools, we can make the internet more free and open. Many of us take the internet for granted, but for human rights activists, journalists, and artists living under censorship, a free and open internet can be a matter of life and death.
1. Google builds stuff that lets lots of people have access to information. Already knew that.
2. Google has a team of engineers that build stuff to let lots of people have access to information, including people in developing countries or countries that have restricted internet access. Yep, knew that, too.
3. An open internet is good. Check.
....So what? At the risk of sounding like a marketing douchebag, where's the call to action here? Is this supposed to be some kind of new Google product? Or is it just a bunch of PR?
The United States Department of Defense is doubling down on investment in the tech sector for national security and strategic purposes.
One of these investments is into something called "Civil Society Apps" - applications that support exporting American culture and values to certain areas of the world.
The United States benefits by being the center of entertainment (Hollywood), for example, and by having US Social Networking sites filter the content according to American values and ideals across the world.
This is a form of 'soft power'.
The DoD's investment in the tech sector, while also focusing on defensive and offensive cyber capabilities, is putting money into culture export apps.
While some of this work is already done, the governments and civil societies and organizations of other countries do not always like this export, and the US has been known to 'weaponize' some of the networks to stir revolution, dissent, etc (e.g. ZunZuneo).
Google Shield is a project whereby these cultural export apps can be given additional protection.
i can't thank you enough for making this comment and the above one ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9681482 ). people, especially tech/culturally/bullshit literate americans need to focus and _see_ what is happening. international citizens, especially from certain parts of the world, eat whatever the US feeds them, but i've noticed that americans tend to be _very_ good at spotting bs when they are paying attention. the only thing needed is for their hearts to be in the right place. that will determine whether they decide to play along or help.
now, i beg the above user, or someone with an equally clear and analytical mind, to take a long and hard look at india, and what's happening with the urbanised (aka westernized) and so called sophisticated society of india, especially the youth. key words : whatsapp, instagram, mass message forwarding, hollywood, atheism, gender equality, sexual liberation, 'jesus christ', delhi rape, us kashmir india map vs indian govt india map; eventually you'll spot the pattern. we need help from the outside, urgently.
read on the internet.org initiative. google is not alone. they are out to get everyone.
also, (imo) anyone upvoting, commenting, and (probably) even viewing this page is on a list, and their preferences and moral leanings are being analysed. i can't be sure if that is individually, or in a grouping of data. so comment and upvote with care, and try to ensure anonymity.
- an international student with lots of american friends, who loves weed, flirts with other drugs, and tries to keep an open mind
ps - best of luck to us all and thank you if you sincerely read the whole message
Perhaps you could speak some more about what's happening in India?
Here's what I understand: the United States and the West are partnering very heavily with India to get it to rise in tandem with China. India doesn't have a goal to be a global power, and its economy is much more closely integrated with the West, so it's a very kind strategic ally in the changing global economic situation. Its growth and its rise is an area of balance for the West in a world where trade and economy are shifting away from the old world and into the Asia Pacific.
India, with regard to geostrategy, is uniquely placed for growth. Of course it has a large population, which is a huge help, but it also likely to benefit from the trillions of dollars of investment being made by China's investment in Eurasian oil pipelines and trade routes (and Russia's attempt to galvinize a Eurasian Union).
That is to say India will benefit both by West and by East investment.
Now, in support of this Modi (which is in large part the 'West's man') has agreed to Westernize a very great deal and to grow India in very specific and strategic ways.
An example of this is China's investment and experimentation with "Smart Cities" - cities that are designed so that every piece of socioeconomic data can be recorded and adjusted. The idea with a smart city is that this level of insight allows huge boons in the study of, governing of, and changes to the municipality.
With the West's encouragement and investment (through multilateral investment groups) India has not only performed huge amounts of financial reorganization but also promises to build 100 smart cities of its own.
And interesting twist on this is that the smart cities invented by the West have an investment clause: the West wants to 'own' the city - to have equity in it - so that the cities are privately owned and that when people pay to live in the cities and as the cities produce surplus this money goes back into the pockets of private investors.
This is a kind of scary prospect for those who have traditional Western grounding as it makes these cities seem more like giant corporations (or maybe 'fiefs'?) than democracies.
But this probably isn't what the poster above is talking about?
Could you speak more about what trends you see in India?
this and more. i actually had no idea that something like the smart cities you mentioned was planned. and neither does any of the general public here. the idea is terrifying. i wonder where and how will they build these entire new cities and how will they cajole working ckass people into moving there, since villagers are definitely not part of their hifi money techno compounds.
it is very interesting to see your perspective on the global economic position that india occupies. think about how one country can actually 'own' shares of the very cities of another free democracy.
please do not take offence when i say that i can't tell you anything concrete at this stage, except harp about the evils of culture domination, about history repeating itself, and about researching more on my previous comment (if you are so inclined). this is in part because i haven't grasped the pattern fully myself, and for the safety of my dear ones. i just believe as much as a mind can, that there is evil afoot (apologies for being dramatic but i fully believe that a lot of countries including india face grave, long term threats).
"Neo-colonialism" may be the term you are looking for, along with "soft power".
Russia and China in particular are upset with this form of cultural domination and export by the West. Both have stated quite frankly in real terms that they seek to maintain and spread their own culture instead and in fact both Russia and China have begun programs for culture export based on the US model.
China is heavily invested in working in Eurasia, Africa and South America at the moment. They are a bit careful about the Middle East.
A more productive and charitable way to enter this conversation would be to engage it with fact-based and evidence-laden argumentation, and citation where necessary.
On that end if you have any fact-based questions I'm willing to unpack various claims and to discuss issues and ideas on their own merits.
I'm sorry that you are so dismissive, especially post Snowden, of the idea that the US has strategic partnerships with US companies.
This is not new, shocking or crazy information. It is not an unreasonable or alien claim.
If you do start reading serious journalism, paying attention to cyberwarfare, read up on current US propaganda efforts, or pay attention to US legislation or anything else that may turn your interest you've discovered that I'm willing to blather quite verbosely and would love to chat more.
From the company formerly known for requiring 'real names'™ for its shove-it-down-your-throat social network product.
I'd be wary. I'm sure there's lots of technical talent at Google, I'm sure they do interesting things. But they are not white knights, protecting the internet. And if I either would be afraid of harassment (see previous policy above) or a journalist with sources to protect, I'd look for more .. independent support, I guess.
Google is such a strange company. Don't they participate in the suppression of free expression in places like China, justifying it as a cost of doing business?
edit: in an effort to not spread bad information, I'd like to retract my statement. It was based on outdated information.
This reality of the censorship appears to be well documented[1], and I don't think it's quite as simple as that. Here's the TL;DR
Google filtered terms the Chinese government required (by law), but did so by returning results saying that some items were filtered out specifically so users would know their results were filtered. Google never gave any information on who searched specific terms, but after some attacks on their servers in an apparent attempt to get this information, Google announced they would no longer filter searches for China. Talks on how to accomplish this broke down, and Google redirected their China site to Hong Kong, which has no censorship restrictions, but the Great Firewall seems to be filtering results.
They stopped the redirect[1] and now just show a link to Google Hong Kong.
They also removed the warning that the user's search results were being filtered [2].
To the best of my knowledge, the current status:
User visits Google China - http://google.cn
- This is a hyperlink to Google Hong Kong on the front page
- IF user searches via Google.cn, the search results will be filtered by China not self-censored by Google. They will NOT be presented with a warning anymore.
- IF user searches via Google.hk, from mainland china, the same thing will happen and the results will still be filtered. [3]
At this point, I don't believe the link to .hk Google serves as much use as it does a political statement.
I agree, I think their original stance, showing results and noting where they had to filter, was much better. But if that makes them a target, and can reverse and good they think they are doing if they are hacked by China and any identifying information (correlation with the Great Firewall seems likely) is found, I can see their reasoning. If you truly want to do the right thing, is making yourself a target that makes the situation worse the right way to go about it? It's a complex situation, and there's probably lots of information that we aren't privy to. At least it got press and there was some awareness.
So Google has tried almost everything and has broken into China's Great Firewall. They even were warning users if the content was politically controversial.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China
It seems to be a collection of things to help fight against evil. I couldn't navigate the site (firefox), so I just looked at the source. What I see is:
-a reverse proxy
-service to scrape various business records, helping journalists analyzing records
-anti-phishing tool (browser plugin?) that verifies you're not putting your (Google) password into a wrong site.
I don't know. Taken from a sort of "Digital Poverty" point of view, these seem like good sane items to try to reduce that, and they aren't all aimed at one area. They are supporting both human rights (from the internet access as a human right perspective, which may be controversial, but is at least arguable), and fighting corruption. Both noble goals IMHO, and areas where Google's possible contributions line up with their core strengths and values.
Google Ideas is a means by which US outreach, propaganda, narrative, voice and news sites and apps can be protected when it broadcasts to populations around the globe.
US investment in organizations and outlets that align with its strategic goals (or when they are fronts for one department or another) are looked very poorly upon by some countries around the world, which will attempt to take them down - either by legal means, cyber attack or network (e.g. DNS) level blocks.
It is a geopolitical project and a very valuable investment for the United States overseas power projection.
It's a shame this has been voted up so far up the page. For a poster engaged in supposedly "fact-based and evidence-laden argumentation", you forgot your facts and evidence. The only bit where you seem to even approach specifics is
> Google will, in all likelihood, very selectively give protection to news outlets.
> For example those from the Board of Broadcasting Governors, or from the BIIP, or from USAID, or from US sponsored NGOs are definitely going to get support.
But that "in all likelihood" is just you making things up and is not, of course, actual evidence. Everything else you've provided in this thread is handwaving.
> But that "in all likelihood" is just you making things up and is not, of course, actual evidence. Everything else you've provided in this thread is handwaving.
Not in the least. Is there anything you'd like corroborated?
Allow me to add some information here, as the commentor hasn't asked for anything specific.
The United States disbanded USIA (the agency in charge of US propaganda) after the end of the Cold War in 1999. USIA was split into a couple components. Overt programs were given to the Department of State, covert ('black') programs to the Department of Defense and the Board of Broadcasting Governors were split off into their own organized body.
During the Bush administration there was a lot of turmoil about how to organize efforts - they found that splitting the efforts caused confusion as various programs weren't coordinated with the same messages. Bush created Policy Coordinating Committees for "Strategic Communication" to help interdepartment and interagency cooperation. Mostly during this time efforts were focused on the Middle East, and indeed today the US heavily blankets the Middle East with propaganda.
Things have evolved since Bush. There has been a growing role of social media analysis and interaction. The Department of State has a Digital Outreach Team where they will engage on forums in the Middle East (it's an overt program, so they will identify themselves) - but the goals as can be seen from FOIA requests and strategic documents are to confuse adversaries, 'get in their heads' and to engage parties whose opinion may be swayed. Covert operations do much of the same, but under false flags and with persona management software (check out Earnest Voice). You can find out more about these efforts by searching for the Department of States "war of ideas" or congresses "Jihad 2.0", or generally doing due diligence and reading legislation and strategy documents.
Another big change in US strategy is that its audience is much wider. Strategy documents toward the end of the Bush Administration and through the Obama Administration focus on the need to counter anti-American ideas abroad.
Now the CIA especially runs NGO and CSO fronts, many times through USAID, and more generally NGOs and CSOs are invested in if they align with US strategic objectives. If you like you can find CIA reports on investment in NGOs inside of Ukraine as part of their long term plan as project UNITER and how this turned out with NGOs leading Euromaiden protests (if you read foreign media - Germany's Der Speigel is a good source you may trust). ZunZuneo is a very transparent example because there's been lots of journalism on it - in this case the CIA set up a fake Twitter network in Cuba where they were monitoring citizens and planning to turn their network (peaking somewhere around 60,000 users) into an outlet to stir dissent and organize protests.
Many countries try to quell this activity. Cuba, for example, banned smart phones at one point. Russia recently, after the Ukraine affair, kicked out all NGOs with funding from or ties to Western governments.
Aaannnyyway. There's tons of more details to be had (US research into manipulating social networks a la DARPA SMISC, Project MINERVA) but in reading through material and reports on the various task forces of Congressional meetings it's quite clear - though really not surprising as these have been longstanding US practices.
If you would like to read more about propaganda and CIA fronts in the Iraq war, searching for Rendon Group, the Iraqi National Council, and the Office of Strategic Influence.
The United States unequivocally funds and supports NGOs and CSOs that align with its strategic interests and invests them as operating fronts for special operations. This isn't really something that's widely contested.
The Department of Defense (just search for this using your favorite client/search engine) is right now investing large amounts of money through partnerships with Venture Capitalists into Silicon Valley and the tech sector. There is a call for both cybersecurity startups and for civil society apps.
Google is offering (and there are plenty of examples of Google's involvement with US national security investments, perhaps you'd like to ask about this) to protect news and human rights agencies. This will of course be providing protection to US and US-aligned news media organizations and NGOs (they can call my bluff by supporting Chinese NGOs - and China is now starting to try to have its own culture export, news organizations, and human rights groups in Africa, South America and Eurasia).
You just wrote an entirely irrelevant wall of text before finally addressing the question in the last paragraph. However your argument still remains that the US government has used NGOs to advance its interests in the past and this service is offering to shield NGOs from DDoS attacks. QED.
That's not an argument or evidence, that's classic handwaving.
What sort of evidence exactly are you looking for?
Understanding how the US operates, how US companies cooperate, and the context, timing, history and actor roles appear not to be enough.
I suppose you're looking for a smoking gun - a document from Google that explicitly states that Google's intention is to support American NGOs for the purposes of US power projection.
No, I don't have a smoking gun. I can not provide that for you.
It is established that America uses NGOs for culture export/soft power projection.
It is established that Google is a geopolitical actor.
It is established that Google provides investment for researchers who are funded by and for DoD programs.
It is established that Google aligns itself with US culture expansion abroad (they wrote a book on this).
It is established that the US partners with private industry to achieve its objectives. It is established that the US has been calling for more partnership on the cyber domain and with strategic communication.
It is established that Google will be protecting American NGOs.
If it is reasonable to conclude that Google's involvement protecting American NGO's is partnership with US foreign policy is bullshit or handwaving, how would you read the situation?
I think it's unreasonable to think that:
A company that is legally obligated to maximize shareholder profit, and which partnered with the US government for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, and whose executives fairly regularly meet in person with the president of the United States and who has a revolving door with the same Department of State for roles in under Public Diplomacy - that this company, completely separate from these details - on its own 'good will' - decided it would be a nice charitable thing to host US NGO sites and US news intended for foreign audiences.
a citizen from india would like to weigh in and say that I believe you and everything you said lines up with how the youth in our country are turning more and more to western ideals and ignoring their culture (facebook posts, game of thrones, popular pages making posts on iraq, posts on north korea, posts on russia, and a host of other things that you can only experience and observe by living in the country and having friends from that country). that's all i will say for now, if the opinion of someone in an (allegedly) affected country counts.
I do not know much about Cloudflare. It was my impression that they were a legitimate business on their own right. They very well may have a partnership to protect CIA operation digital assets, or partner with other departments for other purposes (protecting US assets during the cyberwar). This in itself would not imply that they are a 'front', just a partner. To claim a front you would have to have some reason to believe that CloudFlare was infiltrated by, bought by (like Condolezza Rice at DropBox) or started/managed by a gov't agency.
I would not claim to believe that they are a front or a partner. I'm not a good person to ask though, I don't know very much about CloudFlare.
The danger of making such jokes, even when they are funny like yours, is that it clouds legitimate and reasonable discussion about the ways in which US companies support US national security efforts.
There is no need to ridicule this poster, as parallel questions about national security efforts and how, where and when US tech companies help are topical, factual and technical.
Not sure what it's supposed to be or who it's for, but looks like the typical crap coming from a big corporation. I'm sure they had tons of synergy meetings about it.
Kidding aside, my first impression was wow, what a nice showcase for HTML5/canvas use. Whoever (at Google?) developed the website did an awesome job! Although knowing what's walking around at Google these days, I'm pretty sure it's been outsourced to an agency.
It protects by computing something from the way you type your password as opposed to knowing the actual password.
Edit: This raises an interesting question. Wouldn't it then be possible to use the same algorithms elsewhere on websites to identify who is even anonymously using the site?
I read some research a few years back where they were able to figure out passwords based on the small delays between hitting each key. eg. it takes me 100ms between typing an "s" and an "e", but 150ms between an "s" and an "8". Unfortunately I don't recall any identifying details. But yes, I think it's totally possible to identify people by their typing "gait" just like it is with people's walking gait.
The marketing copy : "Google Ideas builds products to support free expression and access to information for people who need it most — those facing violence and harassment."
The Reality : "WHAT IT DOES : MAKES DATABASES SEARCHABLE"
