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#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?”

FBI/SIS -> CIA

The Special Intelligence Service was a covert counterintelligence branch of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) located in South America during World War II. It was established during the term of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to monitor Axis activities in Central and South America.
In 1934, President Roosevelt began to grow concerned about activities of Nazi groups within the United States. The FBI was ordered to begin investigating these groups operating within the country. The goal of this work was to determine if foreign agents were working within these American Nazi groups.
In 1940, the government decided to expand the scope of this mission. There were more than 1.5 million expatriate Germans living in South America, including Argentina and Brazil. As a result, this area had become an active area of Axis espionage, propaganda and sabotage. In June 1940, President Roosevelt ordered the formation of the Special Intelligence Service to monitor these activities.
The SIS allied with the BIS (Basque Intelligence Service) in Latin America.^[2]
It is presumptive that Assistant Director Percy E. "Sam" Foxworth was the first chief of the SIS. He died in a plane crash on 15 January 1943 with agent Harold Dennis Haberfeld. The second chief appears to have been Jerome Doyle.^[3]
The front for the organization was actually an operating law firm, called the "Importers and Exporters Service Company." It operated out of room 4332 of the International Building at 30 Rockefeller Center--the RCA Building--beginning in August 1940.^[4] The organization took some time to become fully operational, due to language and cultural differences, but within a year the SIS had a number of agents in place under various covers.
This organization placed more than 340 undercover agents in regions of Latin America. They operated for seven years, and by 1946 a total of 887 Axis spies had been discovered. Also found were 281 agents of Axis propaganda, 222 smugglers shipping important war materials, and more than 100 saboteurs and other operatives. It located 24 secret Axis radio stations and confiscated 40 radio transmitters and 18 receiving sets.^[5]
Following the war the SIS was disbanded, having been in operation in 1940-1946. After it was disbanded, its region of operation was incorporated in those of the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency.

Ties in with the "oops, went too far" series of Q drops a few months ago.