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Re:Project Shield by rudolf0 on Monday September 26, 2016 @02:20PM (#12584258)
I haven't read the book and was not aware of some of Google Ideas' more shady activities. Thank you, because otherwise I wouldn't have heard of any of this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Cohen#Involvement_on_Syr...

>In an email addressed to the deputy Secretary of State under Hillary Clinton dated on July 25, 2012, Cohen revealed that Google Ideas was working on a project, together with Al Jazeera, to track defectors of the Syrian Army with the explicit goal of "encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition."

That is pretty frightening.

Re:Project Shield by Bartweiss on Monday September 26, 2016 @03:49PM (#12584969)
I'm glad you found it interesting.

I started from Assange's scathing review and decided I had to read the thing for myself. From an inside view, it's just terrible futurism (who wants to read the news on a transparent screen facing a window?), but from an outside view it's a fascinating position paper from Schmidt/Cohen.

I'm usually unimpressed with the "tech companies are all government conspirators!" paranoia, but I do have the sense that Google has chosen a way more active role in international politics than others.