Google to close engineering office in Russia

Re:Google to close engineering office in Russia by debacle on Friday December 12, 2014 @10:10AM (#8740375)

"Freedom zones," trying to get MLK to commit suicide, the Red Scare, subversion of activist groups during the Nixon years, Kent State, manipulation of social networks and Wikipedia, controlling the media to the point that it might as well be called the state media unless you're watching BBC or Comedy Central.

I could go on and on. The Russians are not worse than the US, they're just not as good at hiding it.

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Re:Google to close engineering office in Russia by muglug on Friday December 12, 2014 @12:13PM (#8741284)

The US government does not "control" the media, and allows private news organisations (Fox News, The Wall St Journal) that effectively act as a mouthpiece for the opposition party to flourish. Not so in Russia, where independent news organisations are under constant attack.

You're absolutely right that the US has done some deplorable things in its past (including, as we now know, the recent state-sanctioned torture of probably innocent foreigners). That doesn't make what Russia's doing today, in fairly plain sight, any less repugnant.

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Re:Google to close engineering office in Russia by debacle on Friday December 12, 2014 @12:52PM (#8741579)

Your problem is comparing Russia's censorship to the US's spying. Russia has its own intelligence gathering programs that we know little about, but we know a lot about the US's censorship (and how they manipulate the media) and it would make more sense to compare those two.

For the same reason that it makes no sense to compare the US GDP to the size of Poland's navy, there's no value in comparing Russian censorship to US intelligence.

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