The U.S. federal agency in charge of detaining and deporting immigrants is poised to expand to unprecedented levels the sprawling surveillance apparatus left by the Biden administration.
Within days of President Donald Trump’s victory in November, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) posted several notices on the federal procurement website seeking contractors to provide technological tools to enlarge, transform, and modernize the agency’s capabilities to track, monitor, and surveil noncitizens.
The year 2008 signaled to many the weak foundations of modern capitalism in the hands of the greedy, untethered financial sector—the “vampire squid” investment banks as journalist Matt Taibbi called them. Rising from the ashes of the crash, these banks used government money—”socialism for the bankers”—to enrich themselves and Big Business. This money never got to the masses. Instead shares were bought back in traditional capitalist industries and an emerging powerful bloc—the Jeff Bezos’s, the Microsoft’s, the Google’s of the world—invested in what guest Yanis Varoufakis calls, “cloud capital.”
China is making enormous progress in the development of artificial intelligence technology, and it has set off a political and economic earthquake in the West.
The stocks of US Big Tech corporations crashed on January 27, losing hundreds of billions of dollars in market capitalization over the span of just a few hours, on the news that a small Chinese company called DeepSeek had created a new cutting-edge AI model, which was released for free to the public.
The UK’s leading newspaper The Guardian described DeepSeek as “the biggest threat to Silicon Valley’s hegemony”.
The unglamorous but key federal office that sent out a mass “deferred resignation” offer to federal employees on Tuesday has reportedly been taken over by people with ties to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a close confidant of U.S. President Donald Trump. Citing unnamed sources, Wired reported Tuesday that “the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) — essentially…
The hype around Artificial Intelligence, the now failed U.S. attempt to monopolize it, and the recent counter from China are a lesson in how to innovate. They also show that the U.S. is losing the capability to do so.
In mid 2023, when the Artificial Intelligence hype gained headlines, I wrote:
‘Artificial Intelligence’ Is (Mostly) Glorified Pattern Recognition
Currently there is some hype about a family of large language models like ChatGPT. The program reads natural language input and processes it into some related natural language content output. That is not new. The first Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (Alice) was developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the early 1960s. I had funny chats with ELIZA in the 1980s on a mainframe terminal. ChatGPT is a bit niftier and its iterative results, i.e. the ‘conversations’ it creates, may well astonish some people. But the hype around it is unwarranted.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has misled the Australian Parliament and is liable to prosecution — not that government will lift a finger to enforce the law, reports Michael West Media.
SPECIAL REPORT:By Michael West
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has misled the Australian Parliament. In a submission to the Senate, the company claimed, “Foxtel also pays millions of dollars in income tax, GST and payroll tax, unlike many of our large international digital competitors”.
However, an MWM investigation into the financial affairs of Foxtel has shown Foxtel was paying zero income tax when it told the Senate it was paying “millions”. The penalty for lying to the Senate is potential imprisonment, although “contempt of Parliament” laws are never enforced.
The investigation found that NXE, the entity that controls Foxtel, paid no income tax in any of the five years from 2019 to 2023. During this time it generated $14 billion of total income.
The total tax payable across this period is $0. The average total income is $2.8 billion per year.
Foxtel Submission to the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee Inquiry into The Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (2021 Measures No.1) Bill. Image: MWM screenshot
Why did News Corporation mislead the Parliament? The plausible answers are in its Foxtel Submission to the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee Inquiry into The Broadcasting Legislation Amendment.
In May 2021 — which is also where the transgression occurred — the media executives for the American tycoon were lobbying a Parliamentary committee to change the laws in their favour.
By this time, Netflix had leap-frogged Foxtel Pay TV subscriptions in Australia and Foxtel was complaining it had to spend too much money on producing local Australian content under the laws of the time. Also that Netflix paid almost no tax.
Big-league tax dodger
They were correct in this. Netflix, which is a big-league tax dodger itself, was by then making bucketloads of money in Australia but with zero local content requirements.
Making television drama and so forth is expensive. It is far cheaper to pipe foreign content through your channels online. As Netflix does.
The misleading of Parliament by corporations is rife, and contempt laws need to be enforced, as demonstrated routinely by the PwC inquiry last year. Corporations and their representatives routinely lie in their pursuit of corporate objectives.
If democracy is to function better, the information provided to Parliament needs to be clarified, beyond doubt, as reliable. Former senator Rex Patrick has made the point in these pages.
Even in this short statement to the committee of inquiry (published above), there are other misleading statements. Like many companies defending their failure to pay adequate income tax, Foxtel claims that it “paid millions” in GST and payroll tax.
Companies don’t “pay” GST or payroll tax. They collect these taxes on behalf of governments.
Little regard for laws
Further to the contempt of Parliament, so little regard for the laws of Australia is shown by corporations that the local American boss of a small gas fracking company, Tamboran Resources, controlled by a US oil billionaire, didn’t even bother turning up to give evidence when asked.
This despite being rewarded with millions in public grant money.
Politicians need to muscle up, as Greens Senator Nick McKim did when grilling former Woolies boss Brad Banducci for prevaricating over providing evidence to the supermarket inquiry.
Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker. This article was first published by Michael West Media and is reopublished with permission.
US President Donald Trump has abandoned an executive order placing safety obligations on the developers of artificial intelligence systems, cutting red tape for his Big Tech backers on his first day in office. An executive order revoking the 2023 order by former President Joe Biden was one of almost 100 signed on Tuesday by President…
As numerous U.S. corporations bend to the right with the political winds swirling around Republican President-elect Donald Trump’s imminent return to power, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is following up on his company’s termination of its fact-checking program by ending its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and praising “masculine energy” in corporate America. “I think a lot of the…
The latest “free speech” proclamation from a Big Tech billionaire has caused both alarm and a collective eyeroll. Digital rights activists say the debate over freedom of speech and content moderation has devolved into a partisan food fight without challenging the virtual monopolies that a few wealthy companies hold over our data and online experience. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announced on…
The vast censorship and suppression campaign launched by American tech companies since October 7, 2023 has been both systemic and deliberate. Instagram, Facebook, X as well as other tech platforms and companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple have actively worked to stifle information regarding the genocide in Gaza. Dissent against policies or individuals who enable these decisions is often met with swift reprimand in the form of job loss.
Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report are three courageous individuals who chose to put their careers on the line to fight against Big Tech suppression of voices fighting for Palestinian lives.
Silicon Valley and tech billionaires are lining up to support the incoming Trump administration. With the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, as one of Trump’s closest advisers, Trump has hosted Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for dinners at Mar-a-Lago. Amazon, Meta and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have all announced donations of $1 million each to Trump’s inaugural committee.
The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Microsoft in a wide-ranging probe that will examine whether the company’s business practices have run afoul of antitrust laws, according to people familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, FTC attorneys have been conducting interviews and setting up meetings with Microsoft competitors. One key area of interest is how the world’s largest software…
Australia will set broad limits on anticompetitive behaviour by big tech companies under a proposed framework that could impose penalties of up to $50 million, more than two years after the competition watchdog first called for the regime . Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones outlined the framework in a speech on Monday, which would include service-specific…
Social media companies failing to fight scams on their platforms will be subject to fines of up to $50 million under a new framework brought before Parliament on Thursday. Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones has put social media companies “on notice”, with the proposed legislation to enable sector-specific mandatory scam codes and require consumers to have…
If reelected U.S. president, Donald Trump, echoing other Republicans, has said he would shut down the Department of Education. All signs point toward a second Trump term expanding school privatization efforts and discriminatory policies carried out during the first Trump term under hard right billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. But even if Trump loses, the longtime wealthy backers of…
Raphael was described by his family as a “bright and cheerful child” who, at the age of 12, wanted nothing more than to get an education. However, his family in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was unable to afford the monthly tuition fees required to send him to school. Like many children living in poverty in the DRC, Raphael began working in an industrial cobalt mine near Kolwezi…
A Labor-led parliamentary committee has urged the federal government to appoint a Digital Affairs minister to coordinate the regulation of social media and other digital platforms, including across privacy, competition and online safety. The call to adopt a similar approach to that of Taiwan comes as the remit of existing existing regulatory agencies like the…
Students in the United States are being watched. With dubious promises of greater security and enhanced learning, tech companies have outfitted classrooms across the U.S. with devices and technologies that allow for constant surveillance and data gathering. Firms such as Gaggle, Securly and Bark (to name a few) now collect data from tens of thousands of K-12 students. Despite their reach…
The Israeli government has funded multiple ad campaigns to attack and delegitimize Gaza’s main humanitarian aid agency under Google searches for the agency, new reporting finds — the latest instance of how the Israeli government spreads its propaganda online within the U.S. According to an investigation by Wired, since January at least, Israel has bought ads attacking the UN Relief and Works…
Australia’s competition watchdog has uncovered another secret deal for Google search engine exclusivity on Android devices, this time with the country’s third biggest telco TPG. TPG has agreed to scrap the agreement for a share of advertising revenue, signing a court-enforceable undertaking with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) late last week. It is…
The Israeli military is using cloud storage and artificial intelligence services provided by U.S. tech titans for “direct participation and collaboration” in what many critics around the world call Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, according to an investigation published this week. Two Israeli publications — +972 Magazine and Local Call — on Sunday published a joint investigation revealing…
Social media giants are “dragging their heels” on scams, Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones said on Wednesday while outlining new obligations to prevent scams and compensate victims. Mr Jones told the National Press Club that “digital platforms have a moral obligation to join the fight as part of their social licence”, given they are used heavily…
OpenAI founder Sam Altman has been embroiled in a series of controversies about the company’s decision-making. Most recently, he incorporated actress Scarlett Johansson’s voice without her permission into ChatGPT. Yet before that, Altman helped launch a cryptocurrency project in 2021 called Worldcoin that scanned people’s eyeballs and collected biometric data in exchange for digital money.
The Luddites, who smashed machines in the 19th century, in an organized effort to resist automation, are often portrayed as uneducated opponents of technology. But according to Blood in the Machine author Brian Merchant, “The Luddites were incredibly educated as to the harms of technology. They were very skilled technologists. So they understood exactly how new developments in machinery would…
In comedy and politics, just as in business and innovation, timing is everything. This week, Australians were reminded of the truth of this enduring axiom. News Corporation Australasia executive chairman Michael Miller fronted the National Press Club in Canberra calling for the Australian government to reign-in the monopoly power of the Big Tech giants in…
The Israeli government spent millions of dollars to fund a covert, ongoing social media campaign to create an illusion of stronger pro-Israel sentiment in order to push U.S. politicians to send more military funding to bankroll the Gaza genocide and other Israeli atrocities, a new bombshell report finds. Reports published Wednesday by Haaretz and The New York Times detail how, in October…
In recent months, a number of novelists, artists and newspapers have sued generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies for taking a “free ride” on their content. These suits allege that the companies, which use that content to train their machine learning models, may be breaking copyright laws. From the tech industry’s perspective, this content mining is necessary in order to build the AI…
The European Commission signaled Monday that it has no intention of waiting for powerful tech companies to change their practices in order to comply with a landmark anti-monopoly law passed by the European Union earlier this month, as officials informed Apple, Facebook parent company Meta, and Google parent company Alphabet that they were being investigated for potential violations.
Investigating MH17 unlocked the role of big data in assembling a criminal brief, pioneering the use of open-source intelligence. “I became interested in how big data was being used to automate and amplify disinformation efforts,” Dr Miah Hammond-Errey, a former director at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre, tells InnovationAus.com editorial director James…
A review of Australia’s online safety laws will consider greater enforcement powers for the eSafety Commissioner and new penalties for social media giants to address the growing number harms, such as deepfakes, internet pile-on attacks and doxxing. The review will also explore whether a cost recovery model could be used to fund regulatory activities, much…
