#1024
Apr 4 2018
Jared Cohen.
Coming soon to a theater near you.
Q
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3643266/posts?page=141#141
3/28/2018, 11:35:55 PM · 141 of 1,882
edzo4 to bagster; Duchess47
you just reminded me of something from earlier: Jared Cohen from google who is also on council of foreign relations went to alphabet and works with the state dept twitter and facebook during arab spring
https://www.fastcompany.com/40474738/can-alphabets-jigsaw-solve-the-internets-most-dangerous-puzzles
Can Alphabet’s Jigsaw Solve Google’s Most Vexing Problems?
Jared Cohen, CEO of Google offshoot Jigsaw, is taking on ISIS, fake news, and toxic trolls
-—excerpt-—
A Rhodes Scholar and former State Department policy wonk who worked under Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton, Cohen is fluent in Swahili and has journeyed to 103 countries, often amid turmoil. Once, according to Cohen, he snuck into eastern Congo by hiding in a truck under a pile of bananas during the Great War of Africa. He tells me he’s been kicked out of Syria twice, and mentions he can’t go back to Cairo after conspiracy theories arose suggesting that he had a hand in the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
A self-described “investigative anthropological researcher,” Cohen was in Pakistan acting as an attaché for Jigsaw, the Alphabet subsidiary that defines itself as an incubator building “tools to make the world safer.” It evolved out of Google Ideas, an internal think tank Cohen cofounded in 2010 with Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO and current Alphabet executive chairman, to address geopolitical challenges with technology. Facebook and Twitter helped spread free expression during the Arab Spring, and yet social media is also being used to disseminate messages of hate, with terrorist attacks coordinated on WhatsApp and beheadings aired on YouTube.
If there’s one core tenet of Cohen’s philosophy, it’s that you can’t solve these problems from behind a MacBook. Google prides itself on data and AI—and Jigsaw does as well—but Cohen’s company also leverages anecdotes and human intelligence to inform its products. Cohen and team have ventured to Iraq to interview ISIS defectors to learn about the group’s online messaging tactics, and to Macedonia to meet with trolls who traffic in social media disinformation.
Staying on through the transition to the Obama administration, Cohen continued his work under Secretary Hillary Clinton—until he almost lost his job. In June 2009, as street demonstrations were heating up in reaction to the Iranian presidential election, Cohen caught wind that Twitter would be pausing its service for maintenance. Concerned that the move might quash the viral spread of protests in Tehran, Cohen reached out to Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey and urged him to postpone the shutdown. Obama administration officials were livid—Cohen’s action appeared to violate the administration’s policy of non-interference—and, after the story landed in The New York Times, recalls Ross, then a senior adviser to Clinton, President Obama is said to have fumed aloud, “Who is Jared Cohen, and why haven’t we fired him yet?”
Clinton protected Cohen, and the incident eventually became a shining example of what her team was beginning to refer to as “21st-century statecraft,” a paradigm shift in diplomacy that encouraged taking advantage of growing digital influences to shape modern geopolitics. By that point, Cohen and Ross had started organizing what they called tech delegations to see what Silicon Valley and Washington could accomplish together overseas. They corralled technology leaders like Dorsey, prominent VC Shervin Pishevar, and Mitchell Baker of Mozilla to visit places ranging from Syria and Mexico to Pakistan and Congo.
What Cohen reveled in most was the business world’s lack of government constraints, as he witnessed on a 2010 trip to Russia with then–eBay CEO John Donahoe. “We were there to discuss corruption and free speech—you can imagine how far that gets diplomat to diplomat,” Cohen says, recalling that Donahoe announced that Russia was too corrupt for eBay to conduct business there. “Suddenly the Russian deputy prime minister wants to follow [Donahoe] all the way to the airport to have another conversation.”
On the very first “techdel,” Cohen brought Eric Schmidt to Iraq, where the two bonded while wearing flak jackets. Cohen was mesmerized by Schmidt’s intellect and ability to suggest ideas unlikely to have occurred to anyone from the State Department. “Eric was asking things like, ‘Why aren’t you laying fiber-optic cables underneath roads when you’re paving them? “Why are you investing in low-orbit satellite when everyone is going to be using mobile phones soon?”
new for reddit maybe OLD news on FR
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3636549/posts?page=680#680
Google ideas became Jigsaw https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/google-ideas-jared-cohen-diplomacy-digital-age/
The discussion, titled “Breaking Borders in the Digital Age,” explored Cohen’s observations about how technology plays a role in international diplomacy and geopolitics. He spoke of his on-the-ground experiences traveling in Iran.
Cohen, a Rhodes Scholar who names Condoleezza Rice as one of his mentors, managed to get a visa to travel to Iran while he was in graduate school. While there, he researched the impact of technology on politics, interviewing Hezbollah fighters and traveling to Syria and other parts of the Middle East. Following his stint abroad, he took his skills set to the US State Department.
Below, Cohen speaks about the “huge blind spot” the US government faced in the mid-to-late 2000s, back when words such as “Google” and “Facebook” were not taken seriously in diplomatic settings: (Videos At link)
https://www.fastcompany.com/40474738/can-alphabets-jigsaw-solve-the-internets-most-dangerous-puzzles
Can Alphabet’s Jigsaw Solve Google’s Most Vexing Problems?
Jared Cohen, CEO of Google offshoot Jigsaw, is taking on ISIS, fake news, and toxic trolls
http://bigthink.com/collective-intelligence/google-ideas-the-future-according-to-eric-schmidt-and-jared-cohen
“If I were an evil person,” Schmidt argued, “I would be terrified of this new world because of the information that is being assembled.” It will be very difficult for an evil-doer to go about their dirty work “without being found, prosecuted and put in jail for their evil activities,” said Schmidt.
In other words, if evil-doers want to achieve their goals, they will have to do it in a way that will ultimately leave some sort of digital trail. This creates more room for error. So consider the example of a naive 25 year-old terrorist who throws caution to the wind and calls his friend in Pakistan. He gets caught. But capturing this one individual also “makes it easier to unravel an entire network.”
Not a new find; we’ve been on top of it. He’s been in the LexiQon since his mention on April 4th.