The government created Silicon Valley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

I have no evidence other than the sheer obviousness of it, but the ties still continue to this day. I have no doubt it is kept hidden from most employees due to the general political leanings of most Valley engineers. For instance, my work does a ton of work for the DoE and you hear them mentioned all the time. The DoD is also a customer and you never hear their name.

Google bought Keyhole (now Google Maps) from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's VC firm [1] -- this was when Eric Schmidt was CEO.

Maps was caught wardriving [2] with Google Streetview, linking Wifi access point names to physical locations early on. After getting caught, they settled for $13 Million last year.

Now Google Maps and even location services on all Android devices uses wifi scanning and bluetooth scanning as part of location triangulation. This is a constantly updating map of every SSID in existance, including unique radio devices in a given location.

Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, now heads up the DoD's advisory board on new technology [3]

[1] https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/22/tech/google-street-view-priva...

[3] https://www.defensenews.com/industry/techwatch/2016/03/02/go... ||| https://innovation.defense.gov/Media/Biographies/Bio-Display...

Allegedly, Schmidt also games politics, albeit unsuccessfully, he spent millions on The Groundwork trying to prop up Hillary's 2016 campaign only charging them ~$700k (at one point they had 70 SWE/SRE on staff with most focusing on her campaign's needs for an entire year, they were only a couple blocks away in NYC from Hillary HQ). The company he invested in, Timshel, folded the same year as Hillary lost the election. I'd bet anyone money he wrote off his illegal in-kind contributions as 1099 losses. Check out his emails with Robby Mook.

Coincidentally, it was his daughter who pushed for Cambridge Analytica's parent company to connect with Palantir while she was an intern.

Correction: Keyhole became Google Earth. (Fun fact: the K in KML is Keyhole.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History

Google Maps stems from an Australian company called Where2, which AFAIK was not funded by spooks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#Acquisitions

More history about Google's mapping products is available in Bill Kilday's book "Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality". Kilday was a founder at Keyhole, the startup acquired by Google to become Google Earth.

Remember the Google I/O when the presentation included a mom waiting in a queue inside a park ride and maps calculated that it's enough time to have another ride and then go somewhere else?

This was the moment I got afraid of every single Android device that's already on the market, sniffing around for everything they can find.

If private people do this, they get jailed. If google does it, nobody gives a damn about it.

There is no privacy, as everybody around you is compromising it without themselves knowing.

Schmidt also _visited_ Assange, https://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-27...

> Maps was caught wardriving [2] with Google Streetview, linking Wifi access point names to physical locations early on. After getting caught, they settled for $13 Million last year.

The issue was that they captured data from open APs, and that collection of data was deemed illegal wiretapping.

The mapping of WiFi networks to physical locations was not.

Regarding [2], the sensationalized, alarmist way the media reported this was not remotely accurate, nor would the conspiracy theory angle on this story make any practical sense.

Sorry, what's not practical about Google increasing their location accuracy for the benefit of both the consumer and the government?

The second link isn't about that, it's about Google stealing information from insecure WiFi using Street View vehicles.

Is there a solid source on what was actually collected?

Google’s official statement admitted to collecting payload data from unsecured WiFi networks but said it was a mistake from including a library with extraneous code. [1]

The statement also linked to a third-party analysis of the relevant code which concluded: [2]

“Gslite is an executable program that captures, parses, and writes to disk 802.11 wireless frame data. In particular, it parses all frame header data and associates it with its GPS coordinates for easy storage and use in mapping network locations. The program does not analyze or parse the body of Data frames, which contain user content. The data in the Data frame body passes through memory and is written to disk in unparsed format if the frame is sent over an unencrypted wireless network, and is discarded if the frame is sent over an encrypted network.”

[1]: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection...

[2]: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...

> I have no evidence

I mean, there are several books about it such as Surveillance Valley, or these two sister pieces

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/why-google-made-the-...

JEDI has been headline news on CNBC for the last year. DARPA has numerous highly public initiatives and partnerships with SV darlings. Working with the DoD is almost never a secret, it just isn't sexy.

The government didn't create Silicon Valley, Robert Noyce and the rest of the Traitorous 8 did. They did however bankroll semiconductor fabs here and in Texas for a few years but the world is better for it.

I have evidence: I used to date a couple of CEO secretaries, and they always told me when the spooks came to town. Often. And a lot of companies where you think to yourself "gee, that's pretty weird, why would they be interested there."

well why wouldn't they? Every government would love to have silicon valley. The question is why the rest of the world blindly trusts the narrative about data security

All these 3-letter acronyms exists to further American interests - for a long time that was primarily the military/industrial complex followed by oil/gas. We're now just seeing the focus switch to supporting big tech as a priority.

It's still distressing to see those intelligence agencies further entrench themselves into fields perfectly suited for a surveillance state. Their reputation makes trusting that they won't abuse it difficult.

It may suit national interest, but it bodes poorly for the public interest.

They help the companies, who help the Government in return. And the whole conspiracy is carried on via the revolving doors of influence and networks of who knows who.

Where the public suffers is that it's their tax money that funds this rather than going towards education, health, essential services, better wages, social and economic mobility - the list goes on.

>They help the companies, who help the Government in return. And the whole conspiracy is carried on via the revolving doors of influence and networks of who knows who.

Except now one of the ways the companies can help the government is with readymade worldwide surveillance. That is much scarier than anything Dole could offer.

>All these 3-letter acronyms exists to further American interests

That's a strangely Aristotelian view of organizations. It is as if you are suggesting that the 3-letter agencies have a fundamental essence outside of the intentions of the people who work there.

I think their point was that these organizations are supposed to be filled with public servants, civil servants, and military/former military whose aims are the furthering of American interests. That's why they were started, and for at least some period of time (not necessarily through recent history, but maybe?) that's what they were. Honestly that's part of the argument for public servants making less money than their private sector counter-parts, that a big part of their "compensation" is being part of these huge organizations "saving America" or whatever patriotic spin you want to put on it.

Compartmentalization allows for that. You operate with orders to accomplish X, and it is more than possible to hide why you are accomplishing X.

Typically it goes like this: lobbyist meets with policy maker, policy maker decides objectives for [a-z]{3}, [a-z]{3} undertakes missions in support of lobbyist's objectives.

United Fruit.

East India Company - been the case for a long time.

"The sinister Huawei has close ties with the Chinese government. Our companies can't compete on a level playing field!"

Tech is in bed with the government everywhere on the planet, and has been for a long time. The question has never been about fairness, it is: who has your interests in mind?

None of them particularly care about the average citizens interests, so treating the two similarly seems fair.

Who would you rather have logs of all your Internet activity: your own government, or another government thousands of miles away that is increasingly at odds with country's?

I could argue that I'm much more worried about the set of events my own government can set in action against me if they so choose.

The other government has less power over me because they are thousands of miles away and don't control the institutions that I need to function as a citizen.

That being said, the foreign government might be less afraid of using my information against me, since they would be less afraid of blowback.

I guess I'm not sure. Both suck.

Better use TAILS.

This is never an either/or situation, it is neither/both.

It is increasingly "both, and do nothing about it" or "both, and be vocally opposed to it, and potentially cause issues for yourself x years from now."

The answer highly depends on who you are, what you do, and who is interested in your information.

Over ehre in Small Belgium it doesn't feel like it. In bed with big internationals for other reasons some of which local like de beers sure tho but that just smells more of corruption than anything protectionist or intelligence based

Because EU countries don't have mammoth sized, trillion dollar SW companies with a global monopoly.

If your country's software industry is comprised mostly of 10-200 person web shops and consultancies there's no real gain for the Goverment agencies to be in bed with them.

If you follow that thought through to other industries, what do you think Denmark learns of US military movement and equipment from the armies biggest heavy lifter, Danish Maersk shipping? It can't be much since outside the software world companies don't sift through every single piece of "cargo" and goes to show why you shouldn't trust foreign software companies at all, allies or not.

Err... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP

Billion, trillion, shmillion, lose some, win some, it's all virtual. Not backed by anything real. I mean, you can see the house of cards falling down because of a sneeze right now :-)

Weird Ron Paul fiat currently pseudo-rant notwithstanding, SAP is a good example but an outlier. Pick a random multinational [b|tr]illion-dollar software company and it's going to be American most of the time, and from San Francisco most of the time that it's American.

In this case the US really doesn’t have my interests in mind.

As hard as it may be to accept, this is the reality we live in.

The government has used Big Tech forever. Oracle, Microsoft, Apple products have been used by NSA+CIA for about as long as those companies have had products. Yes, those companies sell to the government. They want to make money and the government has money.

Obligatory link to Steve Blank's recounting of SV's early days (1950-1980).

https://steveblank.com/2009/04/20/the-secret-history-of-sili...

https://steveblank.com/2009/04/06/story-behind-%E2%80%9Cthe-...

https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

Yep, and IBM helped nazis to run their concentration camps.

Technology is power.

There is a difference between selling your product to government and working with government.

I am pretty sure USA government buy's plenty of stuff from Chinese companies like everbody else does. Doesn't mean Chinese companies are working with it.

Even if they weren't explicit partners it seems highly likely that intelligence agencies would get covert access to the resources of the main web companies - they are just too tempting a target not to.

Well on our way? lol... I wish we were only still in that stage...

Do you have any evidence for that or just speculating because some business/government people move around in the same business arena?

It sounds tinfoils hat crazy because it is.

No we do need to say that because is patently untrue.