How Rogue CIA Agents At Google Are Set To

Take Out Trump and Alt-Right Media

The Mainstream Media Is Using "Trolling" As An Excuse To Censor The Right

by Tyler Durden

Authored by Duane Norman via Free Market Shooter blog,

Free Market Shooter was recently presented with an article from Vogue detailing the steps Google’s Yasmin Green is taking to become a “slayer” of internet trolls.  A few notable excerpts are below:

“We have that geopolitical lens,” Green tells me. “We have the mandate to think ahead, rather than respond to what’s happening at the moment. To think prophetically.”

 “Our job is to get more and better information in the hands of vulnerable people,” she says.

“How can we illustrate this?” asks Green. How, in other words, can the threat be explained so that you don’t have to be a Silicon Valley programmer to understand it?

Does this sound at all to you like a simple reprogramming of search algorithms?  Because it sure reads a lot more like McCarthy-ist censorship.  And a closer look at Google’s strategy reveals that is exactly what Google intends to do, with right-wing news as the target.

First, you have to take a look at what Yasmin Green and Jigsaw have been up to, and what its original purpose was.  Jigsaw was originally put in place to counter ISIS, which was an idea everyone could get behind.  Wired posted an article detailing exactly what it was that she did:

“This came out of an observation that there’s a lot of online demand for ISIS material, but there are also a lot of credible organic voices online debunking their narratives,” says Yasmin Green, Jigsaw’s head of research and development.

 “The Redirect Method is at its heart a targeted advertising campaign: Let’s take these individuals who are vulnerable to ISIS’ recruitment messaging and instead show them information that refutes it.”

 The Redirect Method is a new way to confront online radicalization with targeted advertising https://t.co/ySc8XK6MU6 pic.twitter.com/rZwUiZsFOK

— Jigsaw (@JigsawTeam) September 7, 2016

It all seemed innocuous enough – filtering search results, using national security as the guise for doing so.  But later that day, The Intercept detailed exactly where the “program” was heading next: censorship.

Ross Frenett, co-founder of Moonshot, said his company and Jigsaw are now working with funding from private groups, including the Gen Next Foundation, to target other violent extremists, including on the hard right.

“We are very conscious — as our own organization and I know Jigsaw are — that this [violent extremism] is not solely the problem of one particular group,” Frenett said.

Of course, the mainstream media made sure to help boost the claims.  The Guardian posted an analysis a few months later, detailing the “tricks” that “right-wing” groups have implemented for the goal of “widespread dissemination of misinformation”, which appears to be much more like a baseless continuation of the Zimdars “fake news” list that made headlines shortly beforehand.

In the past, when a journalist or academic exposes one of these algorithmic hiccups, humans at Google quietly make manual adjustments in a process that’s neither transparent nor accountable.

At the same time, politically motivated third parties including the “alt-right”, a far-right movement in the US, use a variety of techniques to trick the algorithm and push propaganda and misinformation higher up Google’s search rankings.

And just recently, the gut punch came – Google announced it was implementing review teams with outside contractors known as “quality raters” to flag terms that could be deemed to be “upsetting-offensive” to viewers.  In other words, it is relying on bots to flag content as right-biased, so it can be moved down in its search rankings:

Google is trying to improve the quality of its search results by directing review teams to flag content that might come across as upsetting or offensive.

With the change, content with racial slurs could now get flagged under a new category called “upsetting-offensive.” So could content that promotes hate or violence against a specific group of people based on gender, race or other criteria.

 While flagging something doesn’t directly affect the search results themselves, it’s used to tweak the company’s software so that better content ranks higher. This approach might, for instance, push down content that is inaccurate or has other questionable attributes, thereby giving prominence to trustworthy sources.

 The review teams - comprised of contractors known as “quality raters” - already comb through websites and other content to flag questionable items such as pornography. Google added “upsetting-offensive” in its latest guidelines for quality raters. Google declined to comment on the changes, which were reported in the blog Search Engine Land and elsewhere.

You got that right – a “review team” is subjectively deciding which content it will censor.  What happened to the programmers and objectively censoring “trolls” and abuse?  The whole thing is much more similar to McCarthyism, except instead of targeting “communists” during the Cold War, they are targeting “right-wing” websites and individuals.  Truly a threat to “national security” in the same vein as ISIS, isn’t it?

If you take a closer look at Vogue’s article on Yasmin Green, which reads much more like a self-promoting puff piece detailing her style choices and educational background far more than it details anything substantive on how Google will become a “slayer” of trolls,  you’ll see where her ideas on censorship likely came from.

“I actually told my family and friends in London that I’m not going to settle in New York,” she recalls. “Obviously! It’s a very aggressive city. It’ll rub off on me. And then you know what? I met a New Yorker and married and had a New York baby.”

 She went to University College London, then the London School of Economics, then worked at a consulting firm, where she specialized in oil and gas and traveled throughout Africa and the Middle East, comparing cultures in a way that, when she looks back now, destined her to work at a place like Jigsaw. When a job at Google came up, Green saw a chance to be on the corporation’s intellectual front guard.

It’s quite amusing that someone who has traveled Africa and the Middle East, areas of the world where repression and censorship are so commonplace that they are readily accepted as “part of” the culture, is claiming to working to fight against repression and to stand up for free speech by censoring “hurtful” opinions they oh-so conveniently happen to disagree with.  But what else would you expect, from someone who lives in a place as “accepting” and “diverse” as New York City?

If Jigsaw really wanted to combat “trolling” and “fake news”, perhaps they would start by flagging CNN as “upsetting-offensive” before anything else? Meet Google’s Intelligence Officer and Mata Hari of the web:

Yasmin Green (née Dolatabadi) was born in Tehran in 1981 and raised in London, where, aged 16 she played on the England Junior Women’s National Basketball team. She later received her B.Sc. in Economics from University College London and her M.Sc. in Management from the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

Today, Yasmin is the Head of Research and Development for Jigsaw (previously Google Ideas), a technology incubator within Alphabet Inc. focused on solving global security challenges through technology. She oversees the team’s research as well as its work on counter-radicalization and online hate, harassment, and intimidation.

At Google Ideas, Yasmin was Head of Sales Strategy and Operations for Southern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, and prior to joining Google, consulted for Booz Allen Hamilton across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Yasmin has extensive experience leading and project managing in some of the world’s toughest environments and has spent time in Syria, UAE and Nigeria, where she has worked cross-functionally in sectors ranging from oil and gas to the internet. She recently led a multi-partner coalition to launch Against Violent Extremism, the world’s first online network of former violent extremists and survivors of terrorism.

Yasmin is a Senior Advisor on Innovation to Oxford Analytica and Co-Chair of the European Commission’s Working Group on Online Radicalization. In 2016, she was named a Women inPower Fellow. She also serves on the Board of the Tory Burch Foundation. She lives in New York City with her musician/artist/filmmaker husband Adam Green and their two-year-old daughter Zeba. Yasmin and Adam recently joined forces to produce Adam Green’s Aladdin, a psychedelic papier-mâché re-make of the Arabic Nights folk tale, starring Macaulay Culkin. #inspiringwomen #womenintech #iranianwomen #heforshe #proudpersian #yasmingreen #google #yasmindolatabadi #googleideas #womeninpower

Google Raises Army of 10,000 to Fight for the Jews

While we’ve previously reported that Google was recently pressured to change their algorithms to bury holohoax-denial sites, the malevolent tech giant has manifestly decided to go full out and declare war on the enemies of the Jews.

They have raised a mighty army to swarm us, presumably with the goal of destroying the world of men.

Google will now flag or suppress search results that the (((DEEP STATE))) doesn't want you to know about.

GOOGLE's Schmidt wants algorithms to censor Internet for 'hate speech'

Google's Sergey Brin got into America under the special privilege for Soviet Jews immigration law. Which was introduced into the US Senate by Jewish Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ)

It should be noted that a representative from Google’s new 1984-style internet political dissent suppression program, Jigsaw, will be at the ADL conference as well. Expect nasty things to happen to our 1st Amendment right to criticize Jews following this gathering of high power Jews and NGO collaborators.

The Great Shutdown: Google's Jigzaw

GOOGLE Launches News 'Fact Check'

Russia Insider

Ironically enough, in Wikileaks’ publishing three years later of the Global Intelligence Files — internal emails from the private security firm, Stratfor — Cohen’s and Google’s true depth of influence became strikingly apparent. Assange wrote:

Cohen’s directorate appeared to cross over from public relations and ‘corporate responsibility’ work into active corporate intervention in foreign affairs at a level that is normally reserved for states. Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google’s ‘director of regime change.’ According to the emails, he was trying to plant his fingerprints on some of the major historical events in the contemporary Middle East. He could be placed in Egypt during the revolution, meeting with Wael Ghonim, the Google employee whose arrest and imprisonment hours later would make him a PR-friendly symbol of the uprising in the Western press. Meetings had been planned in Palestine and Turkey, both of which—claimed Stratfor emails—were killed by the senior Google leadership as too risky. Only a few months before he met with me, Cohen was planning a trip to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan to ‘engage the Iranian communities closer to the border,’ as part of Google Ideas’ project on repressive societies.

Of course, the massive company — its various facets now under the umbrella of Alphabet, Inc. — has never been fully absent government involvement. Research for what would become ultimately become Google had been undertaken by company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in cooperation with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — the strictly secretive technological testing and planning arm for the Department of Defense.

Indeed Google’s continued coziness with the diplomacy, military, and intelligence wings of the United States government should not be, though perpetually are, ignored.

Political establishment bulldogs on both sides of the aisle and their cheerleader corporate media presstitutes will continue for months or years to debate the failed presidential bid of Hillary Clinton and the apparently shocking rise and election of Donald Trump, but technology played a starring role in those events. Several reports last year cautioned Google’s algorithms could swing the election — and not only the American election but national elections around the globe.

We estimate, based on win margins in national elections around the world,” said Robert Epstein, a psychologist with the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and author of one of the studies, “that Google could determine the outcome of upwards of 25 percent of all national elections.

Considering lines between the tech giant and the government have essentially been abandoned, this revelation puts power and influence into acute, if not terrifying, perspective.
Google’s ties with the Pentagon and intelligence communities never ceased. Revealed by a Freedom of Information Act request cited by Assange, Google founder Brin, together with Schmidt, corresponded casually by email with National Security Agency chief Gen. Keith Alexander in 2012, discussing a program called the “Enduring Society Framework.”

Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and the Silicon Cartel

Eric Schmidt’s Rogue CIA Outfit Wants To Rape Your Mind

THE CIA IS INVESTING IN FIRMS THAT MINE YOUR TWEETS AND INSTAGRAM PHOTOS

Posted by  Olivia Russell

SOFT ROBOTS THAT can grasp delicate objects, computer algorithms designed to spot an “insider threat,” and artificial intelligence that will sift through large data sets — these are just a few of the technologies being pursued by companies with investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm, according to a document obtained by The Intercept.

Yet among the 38 previously undisclosed companies receiving In-Q-Tel funding, the research focus that stands out is social media mining and surveillance; the portfolio document lists several tech companies pursuing work in this area, including Dataminr, Geofeedia, PATHAR, and TransVoyant.

In-Q-Tel’s investment process.

Screen grab from In-Q-Tel’s website.

Those four firms, which provide unique tools to mine data from platforms such as Twitter, presented at a February “CEO Summit” in San Jose sponsored by the fund, along with other In-Q-Tel portfolio companies.

The investments appear to reflect the CIA’s increasing focus on monitoring social media. Last September, David Cohen, the CIA’s second-highest ranking official, spoke at length at Cornell University about a litany of challenges stemming from the new media landscape. The Islamic State’s “sophisticated use of Twitter and other social media platforms is a perfect example of the malign use of these technologies,” he said.

Social media also offers a wealth of potential intelligence; Cohen noted that Twitter messages from the Islamic State, sometimes called ISIL, have provided useful information. “ISIL’s tweets and other social media messages publicizing their activities often produce information that, especially in the aggregate, provides real intelligence value,” he said.

The latest round of In-Q-Tel investments comes as the CIA has revamped its outreach to Silicon Valley, establishing a new wing, the Directorate of Digital Innovation, which is tasked with developing and deploying cutting-edge solutions by directly engaging the private sector. The directorate is working closely with In-Q-Tel to integrate the latest technology into agency-wide intelligence capabilities.

Dataminr directly licenses a stream of data from Twitter to spot trends and detect emerging threats.

Screen grab from Dataminr’s website.

Dataminr directly licenses a stream of data from Twitter to visualize and quickly spot trends on behalf of law enforcement agencies and hedge funds, among other clients.

Geofeedia collects geotagged social media messages to monitor breaking news events in real time.

Screen grab from Geofeedia’s website.

Geofeedia specializes in collecting geotagged social media messages, from platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, to monitor breaking news events in real time. The company, which counts dozens of local law enforcement agencies as clients, markets its ability to track activist protests on behalf of both corporate interests and police departments.

PATHAR mines social media to determine networks of association.

Screen grab from PATHAR’s website.

PATHAR’s product, Dunami, is used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to “mine Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media to determine networks of association, centers of influence and potential signs of radicalization,” according to an investigation by Reveal.

TransVoyant analyzes data points to deliver insights and predictions about global events.

Screen grab from TransVoyant’s website.

TransVoyant, founded by former Lockheed Martin Vice President Dennis Groseclose, provides a similar service by analyzing multiple data points for so-called decision-makers. The firm touts its ability to monitor Twitter to spot “gang incidents” and threats to journalists. A team from TransVoyant has worked with the U.S. military in Afghanistan to integrate data from satellites, radar, reconnaissance aircraft, and drones.

Dataminr, Geofeedia, and PATHAR did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Heather Crotty, the director of marketing at TransVoyant, acknowledged an investment from In-Q-Tel, but could not discuss the scope of the relationship. In-Q-Tel “does not disclose the financial terms of its investments,” Crotty said.

Carrie A. Sessine, the vice president for external affairs at In-Q-Tel, also declined an interview because the fund “does not participate in media interviews or opportunities.”

Over the last decade, In-Q-Tel has made a number of public investments in companies that specialize in scanning large sets of online data. In 2009, the fund partnered with Visible Technologies, which specializes in reputation management over the internet by identifying the influence of “positive” and “negative” authors on a range of platforms for a given subject. And six years ago, In-Q-Tel formed partnerships with NetBase, another social media analysis firm that touts its ability to scan “billions of sources in public and private online information,” and Recorded Future, a firm that monitors the web to predict events in the future.

Unpublicized In-Q-Tel Portfolio Companies

Bruce Lund, a senior member of In-Q-Tel’s technical staff, noted in a 2012 paper that “monitoring social media” is increasingly essential for government agencies seeking to keep track of “erupting political movements, crises, epidemics, and disasters, not to mention general global trends.”

The recent wave of investments in social media-related companies suggests the CIA has accelerated the drive to make collection of user-generated online data a priority. Alongside its investments in start-ups, In-Q-Tel has also developed a special technology laboratory in Silicon Valley, called Lab41, to provide tools for the intelligence community to connect the dots in large sets of data.

In February, Lab41 published an article exploring the ways in which a Twitter user’s location could be predicted with a degree of certainty through the location of the user’s friends. On Github, an open source website for developers, Lab41 currently has a project to ascertain the “feasibility of using architectures such as Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks to classify the positive, negative, or neutral sentiment of Twitter messages towards a specific topic.”

Collecting intelligence on foreign adversaries has potential benefits for counterterrorism, but such CIA-supported surveillance technology is also used for domestic law enforcement and by the private sector to spy on activist groups.

Palantir, one of In-Q-Tel’s earliest investments in the social media analytics realm, was exposed in 2011 by the hacker group LulzSec to be in negotiation for a proposal to track labor union activists and other critics of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobbying group in Washington. The company, now celebrated as a “tech unicorn” — a term for start-ups that reach over $1 billion in valuation — distanced itself from the plan after it was exposed in a cache of leaked emails from the now-defunct firm HBGary Federal.

Cover of the document obtained by The Intercept.

Yet other In-Q-Tel-backed companies are now openly embracing the practice. Geofeedia, for instance, promotes its research into Greenpeace activists, student demonstrations, minimum wage advocates, and other political movements. Police departments in Oakland, Chicago, Detroit, and other major municipalities have contracted with Geofeedia, as well as private firms such as the Mall of America and McDonald’s.

Lee Guthman, an executive at Geofeedia, told reporter John Knefel that his company could predict the potential for violence at Black Lives Matter protests just by using the location and sentiment of tweets. Guthman said the technology could gauge sentiment by attaching “positive and negative points” to certain phrases, while measuring “proximity of words to certain words.”

Privacy advocates, however, have expressed concern about these sorts of automated judgments.

“When you have private companies deciding which algorithms get you a so-called threat score, or make you a person of interest, there’s obviously room for targeting people based on viewpoints or even unlawfully targeting people based on race or religion,” said Lee Rowland, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

She added that there is a dangerous trend toward government relying on tech companies to “build massive dossiers on people” using “nothing but constitutionally protected speech.”

Author : Lee Fang

Source : https://theintercept.com/2016/04/14/in-undisclosed-cia-investments-social-media-mining-looms-large/

GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK UNDER INVESTIGATION

FOR MANIPULATING ELECTIONS FOR OBAMA

AND HILLARY

With Data From Peter Stone and Greg Gordon and modifications and updates by WikiPedia writers

Investigators are examining whether Google’s far-left news site manipulation played any role in the 2008 cyber operation that dramatically widened the reach of news stories — some fictional — that favored Obama’s and, later, Clinton’s presidential bid, people familiar with the inquiry say. Eric Schmidt, Google’s boss, has confessed to being in the basement of Obama’s headquarters, on Obama’s election, rigging the internet to steer perceptions towards Obama.