Google: "big tech" monopolistic corp. ABSOLUTELY INFESTED w. CIA and MOSSAD agents, suckers--get a clue, morons

[Apollonian]

National Security search engine: Google’s ranks are filled with CIA agents​

By Alan MacLeod (Posted Jul 27, 2022)
Originally published: MintPress News on July 25, 2022 (more by MintPress News) |

Link: https://mronline.org/2022/07/27/national-security-search-engine/

Google–one of the largest and most influential organizations in the modern world–is filled with ex-CIA agents. Studying employment websites and databases, MintPress has ascertained that the Silicon Valley giant has recently hired dozens of professionals from the Central Intelligence Agency in recent years. Moreover, an inordinate number of these recruits work in highly politically sensitive fields, wielding considerable control over how its products work and what the world sees on its screens and in its search results.
Chief amongst these is the trust and safety department, whose staff, in the words of then Google trust and safety vice president Kristie Canegallo, “[d]ecide what content is allowed on our platform”–in other words, setting the rules of the internet, determining what billions see and what they do not see. Before Google, Canegallo had been President Obama’s Deputy White House Chief of Staff for Implementation and is currently Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security.

“WE LIED, WE CHEATED, WE STOLE”​

Many of the team helping Canegallo make calls on what content should be allowed in Google searches and on platforms like YouTube were former CIA employees. For example:

• Jacqueline Lopour spent more than ten years at the CIA, where she served as “a leading U.S. Government expert on security challenges in South Asia and the Middle East and the go-to writer of quickly needed papers for the U.S. President.” She joined Google in 2017 and is currently a senior intelligence collection and trust and safety manager.

• Between 2010 and 2015, Jeff Lazarus was an economic and political analyst for the CIA. In 2017, he was hired as a policy advisor for trust and safety at Google, where he worked on suppressing “extremist content.” He moved to Apple in 2021.

• Ryan Fugit spent eight years as a CIA officer. Then, in 2019, Google convinced him to leave and become a senior manager of trust and safety.
• As a director of trust and safety, Bryan Weisbard led teams that adjudicated “the most sensitive YouTube trust and safety escalations globally” and “enforced” the most “urgent and highest priority” misinformation and sensitive content decisions. Between 2006 and 2010, he was an intelligence officer with the CIA. He is now a director at Facebook.
• Like Lopour and Lazarus, Nick Rossman concentrated on Iraq while he was a CIA analyst (2009-2014). Since January, he has been a senior manager in Google’s trust and safety division.
• Jacob Barrett, Google’s global lead for safe browsing operations, was an analytic lead and open source officer at the CIA between 2007 and 2013.
• A 12-year CIA political and leadership analyst, Michelle Toborowski, left the agency in 2019 to take a job as the intelligence analyst lead in trust and safety at YouTube.

The problem with former CIA agents becoming the arbiters of what is true and what is false and what should be promoted and what should be deleted is that they cut their teeth at a notorious organization whose job it was to inject lies and false information into the public discourse to further the goals of the national security state. John Stockwell, former head of a CIA task force, explained on camera how his organization infiltrated media departments the world over, created fake newspapers and news agencies, and planted fake news about Washington’s enemies. “I had propagandists all over the world,” he said, adding,

We pumped dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists [to the media]… We ran [faked] photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country… We didn’t know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists eating babies for breakfast.

This continues to this day, with the CIA promoting dubious stories about the so-called “Havana Syndrome” and how the Russian government was supposedly offering money to the Taliban to kill U.S. soldiers.
Mike Pompeo, former director of the CIA, admitted as much in a talk he gave in 2019. As he said to the audience at Texas A&M University,

When I was a cadet, what’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses [on] it!

And all this is to say nothing about the coup attempts on foreign governments, the drug and weapons smuggling and the worldwide network of “black sites” where thousands are tortured. Furthermore, many of the ex-CIA employees listed participated in some of the worst crimes against humanity of the 21st century, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq–and are clearly proud of it. So while there is admittedly a limited pool of qualified people for roles in cybersecurity, it is wholly inappropriate that Google is employing so many spooks to run their most sensitive, influential operations. And it is especially troubling that so many of the individuals mentioned throughout were plucked directly from the CIA to work at Google–a fact that suggests that either Google is actively recruiting from the intelligence services or that there is some sort of backroom deal between Silicon Valley and the national security state.
Elizabeth Murray, a retired intelligence agent who spent 27 years at the CIA and other intelligence organizations, explained how Google might benefit from hiring former spies. “By snagging a CIA employee, a company can save a considerable sum,” she told MintPress, noting that these individuals have been highly trained and likely have a security clearance–something that is exceptionally difficult to attain in civilian organizations.
“In terms of benefit to the CIA, a CIA officer could spend several years acquiring a unique set of skills at a social media conglomerate and then return to the agency, parlaying their newly acquired expertise to the benefit of the agency,” Murray added.
Even if there is nothing explicitly nefarious about this relationship, it still means that Google will start to think like and see problems the same way as the CIA does. Google has become immensely powerful, transforming itself into a behemoth that dominates online communication, commerce, information gathering, entertainment and more. In previous articles in this series, I have detailed how Twitter has hired dozens of individuals from the FBI, how Facebook is awash with CIA agents, how NATO has gained a huge presence in TikTok’s upper ranks and how a hawkish war planner from the Atlantic Council was mysteriously appointed to become Reddit’s director of policy. But Google is different; you can ignore or choose not to use those other platforms. Google, on the other hand, is far too big to escape from.
An inordinate amount of Google’s intelligence and security teams appear to come from the intelligence and security services. These include the following individuals:

• Deborah Wituski, who between 1999 and 2018, rose up the CIA’s ranks, becoming chief of staff to the director. She left the agency for Google, where she is now vice president of global intelligence.
• Chelsea Magnant also left the CIA for Google in 2018, leaving an 8-year career as a political analyst for a job as a global threat analyst for the tech giant.
• Yong Suk Lee spent 22 years at the CIA, leaving to take a position in global risk analysis and global security at Google. In May, he was promoted to become a director.

• Beth Schmierer worked as a strategic analyst for the CIA between 2006 and 2011. She then became a political officer at the State Department. She joined Google in January as a global threat analyst and is now an Americas intelligence manager for the company.
• Toni Hipp joined Google as a global threat team manager (intelligence) in 2017 and is now a global affairs and public policy manager in strategy and operations. Before joining Google, she spent nearly six years at the CIA as a foreign policy analyst.
• Jamie W. is the director of threat assessment for Google and the company’s former global intelligence manager. Before Google, she held a number of senior positions in the CIA, including chief of targeting for the near east region. Before her 13-year stint in the CIA, she also worked as an analyst for the FBI.
• Meaghan Gruppo worked as an intelligence analyst and public affairs officer at the CIA from 2008 until 2014. Since 2018, she has worked in security risk analysis and threat management for Google.
• Clinton Dallas’ LinkedIn profile notes that, until December, he was a CIA officer. In January of this year, he became a risk programs specialist at Google.

The professional background of so many of its security and risk management staff may go a long way to explaining why Google seems focused on countering threats from official enemy states of the United States. The company’s Threat Analysis blog is full of published reports about state-backed efforts from Iran, North Korea, Russia and China to influence its platform. But it never seems to detect any nefarious activities from the U.S. government.
This is despite the fact that the United States is carrying out the largest and most extensive attempt in history to manipulate the internet. A long exposé in Newsweek last year detailed how the Pentagon alone fields a clandestine army of at least 60,000 individuals whose job it is to ruthlessly run national security state propaganda campaigns online. Calling it “the largest undercover force the world has ever known.” The exposé explained that,

These are the cutting-edge cyber fighters and intelligence collectors who assume false personas online, employing ‘nonattribution’ and ‘misattribution’ techniques to hide the who and the where of their online presence while they search for high-value targets and collect what is called ‘publicly accessible information’—or even engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media.

A SPOOK IN EVERY DEPARTMENT​

Google employs ex-CIA agents in a myriad of different departments, a selection of which includes:

• Michael Barlett. Between 2007 and 2017, Barlett was chief of operations at the CIA. Since 2019, he has worked as a risk lead in workforce solutions for Google.
• Nicole Menkhoff. Menkhoff spent more than ten years as a weapons analyst at the CIA. In February 2015, she left the CIA for Google, where she was a senior human resources business partner and later became engineering chief of staff.
• Candice Bryant. Bryant spent nearly 17 years at the CIA, where she rose to become its chief of public communications. In September, she was headhunted from the CIA by Google to become its executive communications manager.

• Kyle Foster. Foster spent six years at the agency, then four more at the CIA’s venture capitalist wing, In-Q-Tel. He left In-Q-Tel in 2016 for a job as a software engineer at Google.
• Joanna Gillia. Gillia was a leadership analyst at the CIA until 2014, the same year she took a job with Google. She worked in staffing until 2020.
• Katherine Tobin. Tobin was a CIA branch chief between 2014 and 2018. She is now head of workspace innovation for Google.
• Christine Lei. Lei left her job as an economic intelligence analyst for the CIA in 2015 for the post of executive compensation manager at Google, where she continues to work to this day.
• Justin Schuh. Schuh retired last year after 11 years as engineering director for Google Chrome. Before Google, however, he had a long career in national security, working as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Marine Corps, a global network exploitation analyst for the NSA, and a technical operations officer for the CIA.
• Tom Franklin. Franklin worked as a program manager at the CIA between 2011 and 2013. Between 2015 and 2021, he was a product manager for Google.
• Katherine Pham. According to her LinkedIn profile, Pham did “some cool stuff” at the CIA in 2016. Since October, she has been a software engineer for Google.

• Corey Ponder. Ponder was a policy advisor for Google between 2019 and 2021. Before that, he spent six years with the CIA.

Thus, it is clear that former CIA personnel are deeply embedded within the Silicon Valley giant. Of course, Google is a huge company with thousands of employees. It could therefore be argued that it is unsurprising that some number of former national security state agents work for it, especially those who have the rare and highly developed skills necessary to preside over user privacy and safety. But this tolerance of spooks in the ranks is not applied evenly. This study could find no examples of former agents of the SVR, the SEBIN or the Ministry of Intelligence–the CIA’s Russian, Venezuelan or Iranian equivalents–working at Google. Indeed, the very idea seems absurd. Yet dozens of Google employees casually note on public websites that they worked for the CIA and appear to see that as entirely unproblematic.Therefore, this relationship is, at best inappropriate and, at worst, a U.S. government power play to control cyberspace. Google users frequently say they want more agency over their data. But the only agency they get is the Central Intelligence kind.

GOOGLE: NURTURED BY THE CIA​

In their 2013 book, “The New Digital Age,” then Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Director of Google Ideas Jared Cohen wrote about how companies like theirs were fast becoming the U.S. empire’s most potent weapon in retaining Washington’s control over the modern world. As they said,

Part of defending freedom of information and expression in the future will entail a new element of military aid. Training will include technical assistance and infrastructural support in lieu of tanks and tear gas—though the latter will probably remain part of the arrangement. What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.

Their prediction has turned out to be accurate. But few people know that Google, from its very inception, was fundamentally intertwined with the CIA. As journalist Nafeez Ahmed’s investigation found, the CIA and the NSA were bankrolling Stanford Ph.D. student Sergey Brin’s research–work that would later produce Google.
Not only that, but, in Ahmed’s words, “senior U.S. intelligence representatives including a CIA official oversaw the evolution of Google in this pre-launch phase, all the way until the company was ready to be officially founded.” He concluded that,

The United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by U.S. intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’

As late as 2005, In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capitalist arm, was a major shareholder in Google. These shares were a result of Google’s acquisition of Keyhole, Inc., a CIA-backed surveillance firm whose software eventually became Google Earth. By 2007, Google was selling the government-enhanced versions of Google Earth that it was using for targeting in Iraq, as well as secret search engines that spy agencies were using for surveillance, according to The Washington Post. By this time, the Post also notes, Google was partnering with Lockheed Martin to produce futuristic technology for the military.
In the 21st century, warfare is far more than just bullets and tanks. But Google’s attempts to feed from the trough of the military-industrial complex have proven controversial. In 2018, it faced an employee rebellion after securing Pentagon funding for a project designing lethal weaponry systems. That same year, the company dropped its longstanding motto, “don’t be evil.” Since then, it has also become a huge CIA contractor. In 2020, it secured part of a CIA cloud services contract reportedly worth “tens of billions of dollars.”
Therefore, while the company, for the longest time, presented itself as a group of outsiders attempting to make the world a better place, from the very start, it has been closely connected with the halls of power. Indeed, in 2016, The Google Transparency Project identified at least 258 examples of a “revolving door” between Google and various branches of the federal government as individuals moved from one to the other.
Schmidt and Cohen are two of those individuals. Schmidt was chairman of both the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and the Defense Innovation Advisory Board, bodies created to help Silicon Valley assist the U.S. military with cyberweapons. Meanwhile, Cohen left his high-powered job at the State Department to work for Google. Schmidt had served as an advisor (particularly on the Middle East) to both Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. He even participated in an unsuccessful 2009 regime change attempt in Iran, successfully pressuring Twitter to maintain services to the country during a U.S.-backed uprising aimed at toppling the government.
While this article is not trying to claim any of the individuals named are nefarious CIA plants, the way in which Google and the CIA have worked so closely together raises national security questions for all other nations, especially those attempting to pursue foreign policies independent of the United States. Ultimately, the line between big tech and big brother has been blurred beyond recognition.
Murray also warned that this hand-in-hand relationship also endangers individual freedoms, meaning that the Google/CIA connection should worry everybody. “All of this threatens individual rights to privacy, free speech, freedom of expression. Once they have your data, the U.S. government can use it against you at any time,” she told MintPress, “It’s really quite frightening.”

 

[Apollonian]

Big tech companies swarming with ex-FBI, CIA agents as social media becomes part of ‘national security state’​

STATION GOSSIP 10:16

Link: http://www.stationgossip.com/2023/02/big-tech-companies-swarming-with-ex-fbi.html

According to a journalist who has extensively studied Big Tech giants such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google, these companies are not just ...​

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According to a journalist who has extensively studied Big Tech giants such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google, these companies are not just private entities but essentially “agents of the national security state,” going on to argue that these companies have become far too powerful and are actively exploiting the public.
The journalist, Alan MacLeod noted on a podcast hosted by fellow journalist and researcher Whitney Webb, that Big Tech companies are leveraging their vast resources to influence public opinion and shape the political landscape. They have become an integral part of the national security state apparatus, MacLeod continued, and are now interfering with political discourse, censoring content, and manipulating data to promote their own interests, according to Lifesite News.
MacLeod also believes that the situation is dangerous and should be regulated by the government in order to protect the public from exploitation. Furthermore, he is calling on the public to hold these companies more accountable and to demand greater transparency and accountability in how they use their power.
Lifesite News noted further:
His claim is backed by research by an open-source investigator with the Twitter handle @NameRedacted247, who has found that Google, for example, currently employs “at least 165 people, in high-ranking positions, from the intelligence community,” including 52 people from the FBI, 30 people from the NSA, and 27 people from the CIA, as The Trumpet shared in January.


MacLeod himself has documented employee shifts from the CIA to Google, showing with LinkedIn account screenshots how one CIA employee after another has gone on to work for the world’s most popular search engine, there often clustering in “trust and safety” roles, which are hugely influential in their management of so-called “misinformation” and “hate speech.”
For instance, Jacqueline Lopour, who spent over ten years at the CIA as an expert on “security challenges in South Asia and the Middle East” and as a “go-to writer of quickly needed papers for the U.S. President,” is presently a “trust and safety” senior manager at Google.
Ryan Fugit and Nick Rossman have both spent time working for the CIA before joining Google as senior managers of trust and safety. Michelle Toborowski, who had worked for the CIA for 12 years before joining YouTube – a major Google subsidiary – worked as an intelligence analyst lead in trust and safety. In this role, she was tasked with proactively assessing platform risks, particularly in areas such as violent extremism and hate.

LinkedIn profiles indicate that former U.S. intelligence employees are often “shared” among Big Tech giants. Bryan Weisbard, a former CIA intelligence officer, is a prime example. His roles have included Director of Online Safety Operations for Twitter, Director of Trust and Safety for YouTube, and currently Director of Privacy Planning and Operations for Meta (Facebook).
MacLeod has also discovered that Facebook “has recruited dozens of individuals from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as many more from other agencies like the FBI and Department of Defense (DoD),” who, as in the other big tech platforms, are concentrated in “highly politically sensitive sectors such as trust, security and content moderation.”
He added that it’s now “to the point where some might feel it becomes difficult to see where the U.S. national security state ends and Facebook begins.” He went on to claim that either Big Tech “is actively recruiting from the intelligence services or that there is some sort of backroom deal between Silicon Valley and the national security state.”
Either way, the collusion is there: Big tech companies are being used as platforms to go around the Constitution and ban or censor speech the security state does not approve of or agree with.

 

[Apollonian]

Spooks infiltrate Silicon Valley: Facebook is riddled with ex-CIA agents – including President’s briefer who now runs ‘harmful content’ team​

by tts-admin | Mar 1, 2023

Link: https://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=265732

• Mint Press’ Alan MacLeod found that former CIA agents made up some of the top ranks in almost every politically sensitive department at Meta
• He also found that former FBI agents migrated to Twitter in droves
• DailyMail.com has been able to track down many of these former intelligence officials who are now working at top tech companies

Melissa Koenig — Daily Mail Dec 22, 2022​

Former US government intelligence agents are now working across Silicon Valley in senior roles dedicated to censoring ‘misinformation’, DailyMail.com can disclose.
A large number of ex-officers from the FBI, CIA, NSC, and State Department have taken positions at Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
The revelation comes amid fears the FBI operated control over Twitter censorship and the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The Twitter files have revealed the close relationship with the FBI, how the Bureau regularly demanded accounts and tweets be banned and suspicious contact before the Hunter laptop story was censored.
The documents detailed how so many former FBI agents joined Twitter’s ranks over the past few years that they created their own private Slack channel.
A report by Mint Press’ Alan MacLeod identified dozens of Twitter employees, who had previously held positions at the Bureau, by tracking down their LinkedIn profiles
He also found that former CIA agents made up some of the top ranks in almost every politically-sensitive department at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
And in another report, MacLeod detailed the extent to which former CIA agents started working at Google.
It remains unclear whether any of these former agents have worked with their previous employers in a coordinated effort to quash any stories.
But the CIA is prohibited under federal law from ‘engaging in any activities for purposes of affecting or interfering with the domestic political process.’
DailyMail.com has now been able to track down nine former CIA agents who are working, or have worked, at Meta, including Aaron Berman, the senior policy manager for misinformation at the company who had previously written the president’s daily briefings.
Six others have worked for other intelligence agencies before joining the social media giant, many of whom have posted recently about Facebook’s efforts to tamp down on so-called ‘covert influence operations.’
David Agranovich, a former intelligence officer at the National Security Office serving at the White House, even seemed to have dismissed the Twitter Files, which have been released over the past few weeks and show an apparently coordinated effort to quash certain stories.
Meanwhile, at Twitter, DailyMail.com was able to find eight former FBI agents working in divisions of ‘trust’ and ‘security,’ as well as one man who had allegedly worked ‘psychological operations’ at the National Security Council.’
Others, though, like Kristie Canegallo, Google’s former vice president of trust and safety have gone from their jobs at Big Tech companies to serving in intelligence organizations. Canegallo is now the chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security.

Aaron Berman: President’s former briefer at the CIA turned senior policy manager for misinformation at Meta​

 

[Apollonian]

New Report Ties Biden Regime Funding to the International Fund for Public Interest Media to Censor and Silence Alternative Media​

STATION GOSSIP 07:21

Link: http://www.stationgossip.com/2023/03/new-report-ties-biden-regime-funding-to.html

A detailed online report found that the Biden Administration was working through Samantha Power, the administrator of the United States Ag...​

A detailed online report found that the Biden Administration was working through Samantha Power, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, to censor alternative media by utilizing the International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM) through the administration’s Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal.
The “founding partners” of the IFPIM include Luminate, BBC Media Action Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the MacArthur Foundation.
On September 12, 2021, the Biden Administration announced “up to $30 million” in funding to the International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM) in his opening remarks at the virtual Summit for Democracy conference that was hosted by the US government.
IFPIM.org reported:

Twitter user Bad Kitty Unleashed posted the incriminating documents in a thread on the social media platform that tie the Biden administration, USAID and US tax dollars to the IFPIM.
Former Obama UN Ambassador Samantha Power is currently serving under Joe Biden as the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
In a now-deleted USAID memo Samantha Power announced how she was pleased that USAID was partnering with the IFPIM in April 2022 after Joe Biden announced his $30 million infusion into the organization months earlier.

This USAID webpage has since been deleted.
In the above memo USAID administrator Samantha Power admitted that she was partnering with IFPIM co-Administrators Ms. Maria Ressa and Colin Crowell, on effective tools to address “disinformation.”
In other words, the Biden administration admitted in the now-deleted press release that they were partnering with the IFPIM to censor free speech at home and on a global scale. Power also admits she is “holding major social media and technology companies accountable for the spread of falsehoods on their platforms.”
Of course, we know today that by “falsehoods” or “disinformation” as designated by the Biden administration is information that challenged their worldview and COVID statements and policies.

The Biden administration gave tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to a Global Disinformation Index partner and funder.
Millions of US taxpayer dollars went to the IFPIM which was founded by Omidyar Luminate and BBC Media Action.
The BBC founded The Trusted News Initiative.
The Trusted News Initiative is allegedly responsible for much global censorship on COVID per the lawsuit brought forth by Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Jim Hoft from The Gateway Pundit along with several other independent media platforms.
The BBC founded and runs the Trusted News Initiative. The initiative includes organizations from around the globe including; AP, AFP, BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, Information Futures Lab, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter, The Washington Post, Kompas – Indonesia, Dawn – Pakistan, Indian Express, NDTV – India, ABC – Australia, SBS – Australia, NHK – Japan.
The Trusted News Initiative is allegedly responsible for much global censorship including information on Covid as per the lawsuit brought forth by Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Jim Hoft from The Gateway Pundit along with several other independent media platforms.
The January lawsuit is a first-of-its-kind antitrust action was filed Tuesday against the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), The Washington Post, Reuters, and Associated Press for damages totaling millions for the plaintiffs subject to trebling and seeks to address the boycott and censorship of health-freedom advocates, activists, journalists and medical professionals who dared to question the narrative relating to the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine mandates.
The lawsuit reveals that by March 2020, a partnership was created called the Trusted News Initiative (TNI) between Big Tech and legacy media to exclude rival publishers from the dominant internet platforms. The partnership was launched by BBC Director-General Tony Hall, with the agreement that members of the TNI “work together to . . . ensure that disinformation myths are stopped in their tracks.” This coordinated effort is, by definition, a classic form of a “group boycott” to damage the ability of smaller publishers to compete or even survive.
In July 2019, before the pandemic, the UK and Canadian governments hosted the FCO Global Conference on Media Freedom,[v] where then BBC Director-General Tony Hall announced:

“Last month I convened, behind closed doors, a Trusted News Summit at the BBC, which brought together global tech platforms and publishers. The goal was to arrive at a practical set of actions we can take together, right now, to tackle the rise of misinformation and bias….I’m determined that we use that [BBC] unique reach and trusted voice to lead the way – to create a global alliance for integrity in news. We’re ready to do even more to help promote freedom and democracy worldwide.”

TNI members collectively hold 90% of the overall social media market, 90% share of the social networking market, 75% of the video hosting market, and over 90% of the search-engine market.
The original funders of the International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM) include Luminate and BBC Media Action.

 

[Apollonian]

CIA and Mossad-linked Surveillance System Quietly Being Installed Throughout the US​

Whitney Webb
MARCH 10, 2023

Link:

By Whitney Webb
Launched in 2016 in response to a Tel Aviv shooting and the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, Gabriel offers a suite of surveillance products for “security and safety” incidents at “so-called soft targets and communal spaces, including schools, community centers, synagogues and churches.” The company makes the lofty promise that its products “stop mass shootings.” According to a 2018 report on Gabriel published in the Jerusalem Post, there were an estimated 475,000 such “soft targets” across the U.S., meaning that “the potential market for Gabriel is huge.”
Gabriel, since its founding, has been backed by “an impressive group of leaders,” mainly “former leaders of Mossad, Shin Bet [Israel’s domestic intelligence agency], FBI and CIA.” In recent years, even more former leaders of Israeli and American intelligence agencies have found their way onto Gabriel’s advisory board and have promoted the company’s products.

While the adoption of its surveillance technology was slower than expected in the United States, that dramatically changed last year, when an “anonymous philanthropist” gave the company $1 million to begin installing its products throughout schools, houses of worship and community centers throughout the country. That same “philanthropist” has promised to recruit others to match his donation, with the ultimate goal of installing Gabriel’s system in “every single synagogue, school and campus community in the country.”
With this CIA, FBI and Mossad-backed system now being installed throughout the United States for “free,” it is worth taking a critical look at Gabriel and its products, particularly the company’s future vision for its surveillance system. Perhaps unsurprisingly, much of the company’s future vision coincides with the vision of the intelligence agencies backing it – pre-crime, robotic policing and biometric surveillance.

“Safety” Through Invasive Surveillance​

Gabriel Network, LinkedIn
Gabriel’s product suite is built around its “smart shield” panic button. The panic button can be activated both manually and remotely and offers two-way communication, a live video feed, instant altering and gunshot detection by acoustic means. However, the panic button is meant to be used in tandem with company’s “threat detection” suite, which includes “smart cameras” that use AI, facial recognition and related technologies to detect not just weapons, but also “fights” and “abnormal behavior” of people in a particular area. Gabriel’s cameras and panic buttons throughout a facility are meant to act as “activation triggers.” The triggering is largely automated and managed by AI. When an “activation trigger” is set off, the Gabriel system then enters any one of its alert modes, which include emergency, panic, silent panic and yellow (which is the alert mode for minor incidents).
As noted elsewhere on the company’s website, Gabriel is looking to expand far beyond schools and houses of worship to retail stores, warehouses, data centers and banks. At these other facilities, it specifically promotes its “abnormal behavior” detection capabilities. One example, given in reference to how its products might be used in the banking sector, states the following as an “abnormal behavior detection example”:

A group of people are loitering in the ATM lobby. Gabriel is activated in silent panic mode and sends alerts with live video to the security operations center and on-site security team. Audio talk warnings begin to broadcast in the lobby. Security arrives to clear the scene.

Another example, this time for the retail sector, notes how Gabriel surveillance cameras would activate alerts when they detect “unusual movements.” Yet another example for warehouses and distribution centers notes how facial recognition functionality could be used to activate “silent panic mode” when a terminated employee is detected on the premises.

https://www.gabrielprotects.com/solutions
One of the hallmarks of the Gabriel system versus other systems, per the company, is its heavy reliance on AI and machine learning. As noted on their website, “we are disrupting the security industry by replacing legacy security systems dependent on human interaction with automated systems that reduce response time, chaos and cost.” That “disruption” is predicated in part on Gabriel’s commitment to “innovation,” which has prompted them to integrate what they call “preventative capabilities” into its platform. The company also notes that they have “already begun integrating [the Gabriel system] with cutting edge technologies such as weapons detection, security drones, robotics and smart cameras.”
There is little further information available about the company’s efforts to integrate their system with security drones and robotics. Many security drones are currently on the market for use in homes, industrial sites and other types of locations, as are security robots, such as the robot “dogs” created by the Hyundai-owned company Boston Dynamics that are currently used by some U.S. law enforcement agencies. This, of course, means that Gabriel’s ambitions in this regard are likely to become reality sooner rather than later. What is worth noting, however, is that drones and robots alike can easily be “upgraded” to wield deadly weapons. With Gabriel’s technology in mind, the Orwellian possibility of having an entirely automated response to various types of incidents, including those arising from the detection of “abnormal behavior,” that could include the use of deadly force no longer seem as futuristic or far-fetched as they once did.
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Also important to note is the company’s intended goal of offering predictive policing (i.e., pre-crime) functionalities. They state that: “In the future, we see a security platform [i.e., a future iteration of Gabriel’s products] that can anticipate a mass causality [sic] events based on human behavior, identify mass casualty threats prior to the first action taken, and automate alerting to inform potential victims before any harm is done.” Predictive policing has been a major goal of companies deeply tied to the CIA, as well as Israeli intelligence for a number of years, with the most well-known of these being Palantir.
Gabriel’s systems, once installed, offer complete yet invasive surveillance of civilian areas. While the schools and community centers that Gabriel most often courts have been sporadically targeted by shooters over the past few decades, these are often places that are traditionally uninterested in implementing AI-driven surveillance solutions on their premises. Yet, such places must become “connected” if the future paradigm of complete connectivity between all people and places (e.g., the internet of things, the internet of places, the internet of bodies) is to come to pass. Indeed, this paradigm is necessary to further the connections between the digital and physical worlds that are seen as necessary to usher in the so-called 4th industrial revolution, or 4IR (which itself has been described as the “fusion” of the physical and digital realms).
Notably, Gabriel’s products are meant to form a network equivalent to “the internet of places,” which is a “specialization of the internet of things” that allows buildings to be “instrumentally empowered through sensors, data sharing, and computation.” Gabriel openly touts the “network effect” of its products when they are installed in multiple buildings in the same area, creating a “safe and connected community.” While Gabriel casts this “network effect” as helping to keep entire communities safe, it also benefits the implementation of the “smart city” model, which utilizes the internet of things and ubiquitous sensors and cameras to harvest massive troves of data that are then used to “manage service delivery,” with those services including the deployment of law enforcement.

https://www.gabrielprotects.com/product
The main drivers (and builders) of the “smart city” and “internet of things” paradigms are, of course, Big Tech. It is worth noting that, despite marketing itself as a company aimed at thwarting mass shootings when and before they occur, Gabriel has also been actively courting the “Big 5” tech behemoths of Silicon Valley – Google, Amazon, Meta (formerly Facebook), Apple and Microsoft. Speaking to the Times of Israel last year, Gabriel’s co-founder Yoni Sherizen stated that:

Our product is now being adopted by the banking and financial services sector and we have some pilots with some of the biggest technology companies, the Big 5. So, we’re looking at data centers, corporate offices or campuses, manufacturing facilities for pharmaceuticals and other essential goods… [we’re] protecting a whole variety of different types of spaces.

The Wind Beneath Gabriel’s Wings​

While mass casualty events in the United States are dreadful and could likely be mitigated to some extent by technologies like those offered by Gabriel, the company’s deep connections to Israeli and American intelligence agencies, which have been seeking to utilize such technologies for ulterior ends, are a cause for concern.
When I first wrote about Gabriel in 2019, their board of advisors included four individuals. They included Ram Ben-Barak, former deputy director of Mossad and former director-general of Israel’s intelligence ministry; Yohanan Danino, former chief of police for the state of Israel; Kobi Mor, former director of overseas mission for the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet; and Ryan Petty, the father of a Parkland shooting victim and friend of former Florida governor (and current Florida senator) Rick Scott. At the time, Petty was the only American on the board.
Since then, Gabriel has been courting American schools, business and other institutions much more aggressively and have added more Americans to its advisory board. These include Bob Pocica, former FBI Special Agent, former Senior Director for Global Security at Pfizer and Senior Advisor to the Chertoff Group (as in former head of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff), and Don Hepburn, former CIA executive for 26 years as well as a former FBI Deputy Assistant Director. Also added was Menachem Pakman, who worked as a senior executive for Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office for over 30 years and is an expert in “intelligence, security and counterterrorism.”

https://www.gabrielprotects.com/company
While it is certainly possible that these numerous former officials from American and Israeli intelligence may have no ulterior motive in advising Gabriel, it is important to note that the leaders of Israeli military intelligence and Mossad don’t see it that way. As I’ve detailed in several previous reports, Israel’s Calcalist Tech published a report in 2019 which noted that “since 2012, cyber-related and intelligence projects that were previously carried out in-house in the Israeli military and Israel’s main intelligence arms are transferred to companies that in some cases were built for this exact purpose.” It later states that:

In some cases, managers of development projects in the Israeli military and intelligence arms were encouraged to form their own companies which then took over the [military and/or intelligence] project.

It’s not exactly clear why Israel’s military intelligence and other intelligence agencies decided to begin outsourcing its operations in 2012, though Calcalist Tech suggests the reasoning was related to the difference in wages between the private sector and the public sector, with pay being much higher in the former. However, 2012 was also the year that American hedge fund manager Paul Singer — together with Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-time economic adviser and former chair of the Israeli National Economic Council, Eugene Kandel — decided to create Start-Up Nation Central (SUNC).

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As I previously reported for MintPress News, SUNC was founded as part of a deliberate Israeli government effort to counter the nonviolent Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement and to make Israel the dominant global “cyber power.” This policy is aimed at increasing Israel’s diplomatic power and specifically undermining BDS as well as any national or international efforts to hold Israel’s government accountable for war crimes and violations of international law in relation to the Palestinians. The goal is to have other countries become so dependent on Israeli companies, and more specifically technology companies, that they are unable to effectively challenge Israeli domestic or foreign policy.
In 2018, Netanyahu was asked by Fox News host Mark Levin whether the large growth seen in recent years in Israel’s technology sector, specifically tech start-ups, was part of Netanyahu’s plan. Netanyahu responded, “That’s very much my plan … It’s a very deliberate policy.” He later added that “Israel had technology because the military, especially military intelligence, produced a lot of capabilities. These incredibly gifted young men and women who come out of the military or the Mossad, they want to start their start-ups.”

Netanyahu again outlined this policy a year later at the 2019 Cybertech Conference in Tel Aviv, where he stated that Israel’s emergence as one of the top five “cyber powers” had “required allowing this combination of military intelligence, academia and industry to converge in one place” and that this further required allowing “our graduates of our military and intelligence units to merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners.”