Posted on 03/20/2016 7:32:41 PM PDT by MarvinStinson
Google in 2012 sought to help insurgents overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to State Department emails receiving fresh scrutiny this week.
Messages between former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's team and one of the company's executives detailed the plan for Google to get involved in the region.
"Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool ... that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from,"
Jared Cohen, the head of what was then the company's "Google Ideas" division, wrote in a July 2012 email to several top Clinton officials.
"Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition," Cohen said, adding that the plan was for Google to surreptitiously give the tool to Middle Eastern media.
"Given how hard it is to get information into Syria right now, we are partnering with Al-Jazeera who will take primary ownership over the tool we have built, track the data, verify it, and broadcast it back into Syria," he said.
"Please keep this very close hold and let me know if there is anything [else] you think we need to account for or think about before we launch. We believe this can have an important impact," Cohen concluded.
The message was addressed to deputy secretary of state Bill Burns; Alec Ross, a senior Clinton advisor; and Clinton's deputy chief of staff, Jake Sullivan. Sullivan subsequently forwarded Cohen's proposal to Clinton, describing it as "a pretty cool idea."
Cohen worked as a low-level staffer at the State Department until 2010, when he was hired to lead Google Ideas, but was tied to the use of social media to incite social uprisings even before he left the department. He once reportedly asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to hold off of conducting system maintenance that officials believed could have impeded a brief 2009 uprising in Iran.
The exchange on Syria was highlighted by Wikileaks on Saturday.
“Don’t be evil”
WHAT A FREAKING JOKE.
As I have always said, Google is a part of the US government.
Did you post that in disappearing ink?
I HATE google.
slap us in the face every Easter with NOTHING on their home site.
They were active in Egypt too.
During Obama’s attempt to hand Egypt over to the muslim brotherhood.
“Please keep close hold”
On an unsecured network involving the 3rd most powerful US admin figure.
Google manipulated the U.S. election as well in favor of Obama. You do a search for anything negative on Obama and the first couple of pages were all ‘slopes’ style misleading / disinformation sites.
Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
PLEASE..someone give an alternative half decent search engine to turn to
WOW. This might be worth a double WOW.
DuckDuckGo.com
Good one, doesn’t track you
No why? “:^)
thanks. I had forgotten it. it was mentioned here before.
I will make it default now.
Google’s motto was “Don’t be evil.”
That should have been a pretty good clue.
Good Lord!! that took about 10 seconds.
for a 47 year old, i’m really behind the times.
God help us.
They were also heavily involved in the ‘Arab Spring’. Don’t ever forget that.
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