Growing up in soviet bloc I took that story at face value. After all democracy was still a new thing, and people haven't invented privacy concerns yet.
Since then I always thought that some sort of cooperation between companies like Facebook or Google and CIA/DOD was an obvious thing to everyone.
And if one wants to know why big tech from China isn't welcome, be it phones or social media, it's not because fear of them spying on Americans, but because of the infeasibility of integrating Chinese companies into our own domestic surveillance systems.
> Years ago a friend working in security told me that every telco operator in Elbonia
See info about the fictional country of Elbonia here, from the Dilbert comics:
Allallarmia https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sichere_Inter-Netzwerk_Archite...
(Really süperspeciälly VPN-hardware used to securely suck data out of ISPs with extradeutsche Gründlichkeit,
mandatory to be installed by law,
just in case,
for some random chase.)
Edit: Thinking of it this is bubbling up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_Complex ,
where Magagagia built some little base just 'a stones throw' away from Allallarmias former monopol government Telcos early internet exchange and HQ .
( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldetechnisches_Zentralam... )
What are the odds?
This isn’t new. Facebook, for example, received early funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, and its origins trace back to DARPA’s canceled LifeLog project—a system designed to track and catalog people’s entire lives. Big Tech and government surveillance have been intertwined from the start.
That’s why these companies never face real consequences. They’ve become quasi-government entities, harvesting data on billions under the guise of commerce.