Get informed How the political and media élite stitched up Julian Assange—a succinct piece that should open one’s eyes on the seven-plus-year campaign against him.
Google’s foreign policy positioning is encapsulated in Eric Schmidt and Google Ideas. Google Ideas is Google’s in-house think tank that specializes on Google’s geopolitical interactions with the world. Eric Schmidt has become Google’s secretary of state, a Henry Kissinger-like figure whose job it is to go out and meet with foreign leaders and their opponents and position Google in the world. The question becomes: what is the positioning?
We can see that positioning, for example, in relation to the proposed bombing of Syria, when Google took an interventionist stance and used its extremely powerful advertising network to push John Kerry’s call to bomb Syria. This is not the State Department buying some Google ads. This is Google using its front page, of its own volition, to promote John Kerry’s attempts to bomb Syria.
They put a link in bright red just before the proposed vote in Congress—the day of John Kerry’s public call for intervention in Syria. They put a bright red link on the Google home page advertising the talk.
Julian Assange on Google’s promotion of US foreign policy. Google claims the link was a promotion of a Google Hangout featuring Sec. Kerry, and disputes Assange’s allegation that this was unique.
They are formally listed as part of the defence industrial base since 2009. They have been engaged with the Prism system, where nearly all information collected by Google is available to the NSA. At the institutional level, Google is deeply involved in US foreign policy.
Julian Assange, to RT
http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447
Julian Assange: how Eric Schmidt and others at Google are really just part of the Washington élite, with the imperialist tendencies you might expect from that lot (e.g. US multinational corporations are good for your health).
NSA calls Google ‘a key member of the Defense Industrial Base’.
What did you expect? That Google were all about not being evil, on the side of everyday netizens? Yeah, right.
Julian Assange’s full statement from the Ecuadorian embassy I missed this on the day (catching up on work after being out) but who would have thought we would be in a situation where Ecuador and various South American nations would be upholding press freedoms and the Vienna Convention, and Britain and the US would not?
If Mr. Assange is extradited to the United States, the consequences will reverberate for years around the world. Mr. Assange is not an American citizen, and none of his actions have taken place on American soil. If the United States can prosecute a journalist in these circumstances, the governments of Russia or China could, by the same logic, demand that foreign reporters anywhere on earth be extradited for violating their laws. The setting of such a precedent should deeply concern everyone, admirers of WikiLeaks or not.
Michael Moore and Oliver Stone: ‘WikiLeaks and Free Speech’, The New York Times, August 20, 2012
Are you free, Mr Assange? I never noticed the similarity till Simon Prast pointed it out to me.