Via Big Government.
This is one of the reasons I stopped using Google.
A major Internet company is under investigation by more than 30 state attorneys-general for alleged wiretapping violations. In Europe and now Texas that same company faces anti-trust inquiries on whether it unfairly penalizes its competitors, and its operations face criminal wiretapping inquiries throughout Europe, as well as in Australia and South Korea.
Yet, inside the Beltway, it’s business as usual. The Obama Administration plans to award the company a sweetheart, no-bid contract for satellite imagery and access to classified data. After protests, the Administration backtracks, allowing other companies to bid, but still intends to award the contract to the company. According to industry sources the total spending in that segment on intelligence outsourcing in 2009 was $161 billion. This is no small contract.
Surprising? Then how about this: This same company’s executives were among the Obama campaign’s largest contributors. Its CEO stumped for candidate Obama, while he and other senior executives ponied up $150,000 to help pay for the inaugural celebration.
But, it gets even better: The CEO and another senior company official serve as technology advisors to the Administration on issues that directly impact their company. The company’s senior lobbyist has had multiple secret meetings with senior officials at the National Security Council. Meanwhile, the company’s former top Washington lobbyist now works in the White House overseeing national policy over issues on which he used to lobby.
Is it Halliburton? Exxon? Boeing? Nope. The company is Google, the CEO is Eric Schmidt and the joke is on us.
……this is a company that made $24 billion last year by effectively snooping and analyzing the online habits of billions of consumers worldwide, and is now aggressively getting into the federal contracting business with some of our nation’s most secretive government agencies. So much for openness and transparency.
At its core, Google’s business model is, and always has been, to amass, analyze, and sell as much information about you as it can. It tracks you across the Internet. It watches your house. It records your Internet searches. It keeps this information on massive computer server farms across the U.S. and uses it to predict your likelihood to buy things or go places.
In fairness, most people are unaware of the price they must pay for free services such as a Gmail account or software for a smart phone. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with a person voluntarily trading some privacy for personalized ads to get a free or discounted service.
But in Google’s case, it has gone well beyond serving personalized ads. In a very short time, the company has developed a reputation for practices that violate even the most casual customers’ expectation of privacy. Back in 2007, this cavalier attitude was revealed in an independent survey of the privacy policies of major online companies. According to a Privacy International survey that probed more than 20 global companies (AOL, Yahoo, MySpace, LinkedIn, Skype, etc.) on their protection of customers’ sensitive personal information — Google was the only company to receive the group’s lowest rating. The survey found that Google was involved in “comprehensive consumer surveillance” and had an “entrenched hostility to privacy.”
……Then, last December, Schmidt showed his true colors, giving this creepy assessment of his customers’ privacy: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
In May of this year, Google revealed that its Street View cars had been collecting sensitive personal information from unencrypted wireless networks all over the world – a privacy violation of Orwellian proportion.
And then this month, the creepiness factor went stratospheric when Schmidt quipped to a British newspaper, “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”
Here’s what I want Schmidt to do next: Go fuck himself.
Google got my attention a while back by virtue of the fact that the owners are leftwing hacks with a malicious political agenda. Between its stupid, snarky attacks on George W. Bush and it’s left-leaning practices, I could no longer tolerate using their site. They also have a penchant for acquiescing to authoritarian communist regimes.
In 2005, Google kowtowed when China cracked down on political dissidents using the site as an outlet. Davis Drummond’s company made a deal with Chinese government censors to prevent its search engine from being used by dissidents, and even handed over the names of dissidents who posted on Google. Those poor people are either languishing in prison or dead.
The alliance between someone like Obama and the odious executives at Google makes for a sinister threat to privacy and yet another Big Brother power grab. He’s already seized banks, private sector businesses, two thirds of the auto industy, and your health care. Now he wants to control the internet and free speech. Don’t think so? Read on:
Dems want to circumvent free speech with the DISCLOSE Act (HR 5175):
http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2010/06/03/dems-concoct-another-censorship-bill/
Mark Lloyd, chief diversity officer of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), called for a “confrontational movement” to combat what he claimed was control of the media by international corporations and to re-establish the regulatory power of government through robust public broadcasting and a more powerful FCC.
http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/obamas-communications-diversity-czar/
The Senate proposed a bill to control your internet access:
Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.
They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10320096-38.html
And Obama appointed another Czar:
If you thought Washington—which already took over banking and autos, and is fast-tracking attempts to take over health care and energy—would leave the Internet alone, you were dead wrong. The Internet (perhaps our greatest free market success story in recent years) is squarely in the cross-hairs of the administration and it’s not waiting for Congress to act. The charge is being led by an eager, ideologically committed White House staffer named Susan Crawford. Officially, she is the Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy. Wired Magazine calls her, “the most powerful geek close to the president.” In recent weeks, bloggers and online activists have begun calling Crawford the “Internet Czar.” The shoe fits.
As Bill Collier of Freedomist has reported, Crawford has known ties to ACORN, which is one of the participating organizations of her “OneWebDay” project. Crawford self-consciously modeled OneWebDay on Earth Day and the radical environmental agenda that it propelled forward. As Crawford explained her mission to The Wall Street Journal in April: “We should do a better job as a nation of making sure fast, affordable broadband is as ubiquitous as electricity, water, snail mail, or any other public utility.”
In other words, the agenda of her organization is to transform access to the Internet into a government entitlement project, with all the necessary government intrusion and control in order guarantee it to everyone—in the world.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2009/10/05/phil-kerpen-obama-internet-czar-acorn/
The House, Senate, White House, and all of the accompanying socialist baggage, need to be ‘repealed and replaced’.
November cannot come soon enough.