The peace coalition No Tech for Apartheid accused Google of a “flagrant act of retaliation” late Wednesday night as the Silicon Valley giant announced it had fired 28 workers over protests against its cloud services contract with the Israeli government. The firings came after Google organizers held two 10-hour sit-ins at the company’s offices in Sunnyvale, California and New York City…
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The Victorian government has inked a three-year state purchasing contract with Google to give public servants easier access to the tech giant’s cloud services and workflow tools. The annual estimated contract value is $1.8 million, but gives Google its first key head agreement for cloud with the Victorian government, which already holds similar deals with…
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A claim has been shared in Chinese-language social media posts that Google “abandoned” the Chinese market due to the domestic requirements asking foreign firms to store data in China.
But the claim is misleading. Google had its servers in China before exiting the country in 2010. The primary reason for the American tech giant’s departure from the Chinese market was its refusal to comply with the Chinese government’s content censorship.
The claim was shared on Douyin, a Chinese version of TikTok, on March 10, by a user “Li Sanjin Alex Sees the World” with more than 3 million followers.
Commenting on the U.S.’s latest decision to ban Tiktok, the user claimed the U.S. specifically “targeted” the Chinese app by creating a new law to push it out although it complied with all American domestic laws.
“Someone might say China [also] banned it [foreign social media platforms] anyway. Facebook, Twitter, Google, it’s all equal [banned in China]. You are dead wrong,” said the user.
“As long as they keep their data at home [in China] … you can develop in the Chinese market at will. Google, they disagreed. [to follow the domestic regulations] So they gave up the Chinese market.”
“Li Sanjin Alex Sees the World” was among many Chinese online users who criticized the U.S.’s move to ban TikTok, while citing Google’s decision to exit China as an example to “compare” how both the American and Chinese government “treat” foreign companies differently.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill last Wednesday calling for the app’s Chinese developer ByteDance to divest from the company or be booted out of U.S. app stores.
The bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, receiving 352 votes in favor, and only 65 against.
Many House legislators have argued that the app could allow Beijing to access user data and influence Americans through the wildly popular social media platform’s addictive algorithm. The White House has backed the bill, with President Joe Biden saying he would sign it if it passes Congress.
But the claim is misleading.
Google’s China exit
A review of archived documents reveals that before Google announced its exit from the Chinese market in 2010, its servers were located within China.
The American tech giant even had joint ventures or collaborations with various Chinese companies in different businesses.
Google also cooperated with the Chinese government’s request for self-censorship of content.
In fact, Google stated that due to sophisticated cyber attacks originating from China and requests from the Chinese government for censorship, the company decided to redirect its “services designed for mainland China users” to servers in Hong Kong.
China has numerous laws regarding content censorship.
The “Administrative Measures for the Security Protection of International Networking of Computer Information Networks” is one example.
Under the measure, China’s Ministry of Public Security is responsible for protecting the connection between the computer network in China and the international Internet.
“No unit or individual shall use the international networking to endanger state security, divulge state secrets, nor shall it/he/she infringe on national, social and collective interests and the legitimate rights and interests of citizens, nor shall it/he/she engage in illegal criminal activities,” the Article 4 of the measure reads.
AFCL has previously reported on China’s increasing control over the Internet industry.
TikTok ban?
TikTok, a highly popular app owned by a Chinese firm, faces scrutiny due to the significant control the Chinese government has over its national companies. Critics fear that this influence might allow the Chinese government to collect personal data from American users or manipulate American politics through TikTok.
The U.S.’s latest move is aimed at the ownership structure of the app, while establishing clear legal compliance norms.
With the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, has 180 days after the law takes effect to sell the app business and hold no more than 20% of the shares to continue operating in the U.S. market.
The new bill wouldn’t remove TikTok from people’s phones. But it would prevent Apple and Google from distributing the app from their app stores, and maintaining the app via updates, which would eventually make the app unusable.
The bill would also ban U.S. websites from hosting TikTok.
Edited by Taejun Kang and Malcolm Foster.
Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Rita Cheng for Asia Fact Check Lab.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
How delicious is political hypocrisy. Abundant and rich, it manifests in the corridors of power with regularity. Of late, there is much of it in the US Congress, evident over debates on whether the platform TikTok should be banned in the United States. Much of this seems based on an assumption that foreign companies are not entitled to hoover up, commodify and use the personal data of users, mocking, if not obliterating privacy altogether. US companies, however, are. While it is true that aspects of Silicon Valley have drawn the ire of those on The Hill in spouts of select rage, giants such as Meta and Google continue to use the business model of surveillance capitalism with reassurance and impunity.
In May 2023, the disparity of treatment between the companies was laid bare in a Congressional hearing that smacked the hands of Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pinchai with little result, while lacerating TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. “Your platform should be banned,” blustered Chair Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA) of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The ongoing concern, and one with some basis, is TikTok’s link with parent company ByteDance. Being based in China, the nexus with the authoritarian state that wields influence on its operations is a legitimate concern, given national security laws requiring the company to share data with officials. But the line of questioning proved obtuse and confused, revealing an obsession with themes resonant with McCarthyite hysteria. On several occasions, the word “communists” issued from the lips of the irate politicians, including regular references to the Chinese Community Party.
Alex Cranz, writing for The Verge, summarised the hectoring session well: “Between their obsession with communism, their often obnoxious and condescending tone, and the occasional assumption that Chew was Chinese, despite his repeated reminders that he is Singaporean, the hearing was a weird, brutal, xenophobic mess.”
TikTok, for its part, continues to tell regulators that it has taken adequate steps to wall off the data of its 150 million users in the US from ByteDance’s operations, expending US$1.5 billion in its efforts to do so. A January investigation by the Wall Street Journal, however, found that “managers sometimes instruct workers to share data with colleagues in other parts of the company and with ByteDance workers without going through official channels”. How shocking.
Cranz might have also mentioned something else: that the entire show was vaudevillian in its ignorance of US government practices that involved doing exactly what ByteDance and TikTok are accused of: demanding that companies share user data with officials. If he is to be forgotten for everything else, Edward Snowden’s 2013 disclosures on the National Security Agency’s collaboration with US telecom and internet companies on that point should be enshrined in posterity’s halls.
The PRISM program, as it was called, involved the participation of such Big Tech firms as Google, Facebook, YouTube and Apple in sharing the personal data of users with the NSA. Largely because of Snowden’s revelations, end-to-end encryption became both urgent and modish. “An enormous fraction of global internet traffic travelled electronically naked,” Snowden remarked in an interview with The Atlantic last year. “Now it is a rare sight.”
The US House of Representatives has now made good its threats against TikTok in passing a bill that paves the way for the possible imposition of a ban of the app. It gives ByteDance a six-month period of grace to sell its stake in the company, lest it face a nationwide block. Whether it passes the Senate is an open question, given opposition to it by certain Republicans, including presidential hopeful Donald Trump. Other politicians fear losing an invaluable bridge in communicating with youthful voters.
On March 13, however, the righteous were shining in confidence. The House’s top Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, claimed that the bill would lessen “the likelihood that TikTok user data is exploited and privacy undermined by a hostile foreign adversary” while Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher declared that the US could no longer “take the risk of having a dominant news platform in America controlled by a company that is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party.” The subtext: best leave the despoiling and abuse to US companies.
The blotted copybooks of such giants as Meta and Google have tended to only feature in morally circumscribed ways, sparing the model of their business operations from severe scrutiny. On January 31, the Senate Judiciary Committee gave a farcical display of rant and displeasure over the issue of what it called “the Online Child Exploitation Crisis.” Pet terrors long nursed were on show: the mania about paedophiles using social media platforms to stalk their quarry; financial extortion of youth; sexploitation; drug dealing.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) made much of Zuckerberg on that occasion, but only as a prop to apologise to victims of Meta’s approach to child users. The Meta CEO has long known that such palliative displays only serve as false catharsis; the substance and rationale of how his company operations gather data never changes. And the show was also all the more sinister in providing a backdrop for Congressional paranoia, exemplified in such proposed measures as the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has rightly called KOSA a censorship bill which smuggles in such concepts as “duty of care” as a pretext to monitor information and conduct on the Internet. The attack on TikTok is ostensibly similar in protecting users in the US from the prying eyes of Beijing’s officials while waving through the egregious assaults on privacy by the Silicon Valley behemoths. How wonderfully patriotic.
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Search engines like Google and Bing will face penalties or injunctions for failing to take action against access to illegal and harmful content from Tuesday with the arrival of the sixth online safety industry code. The search engine service code is the last of six industry-developed codes outlining appropriate steps that technology providers should undertake…
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RNZ MEDIAWATCH: By Colin Peacock, RNZ
Television New Zealand’s proposals to balance its worsening books by killing news and current affairs programmes mean New Zealanders could end up with almost no national current affairs on TV within weeks.
It is a response to digital era changes in technology, viewing and advertising — but also the consequence of political choices.
“I can see that I’ve chosen a good night to come on,” TVNZ presenter Jack Tame said mournfully on his stint as a Newstalk ZB panelist last Wednesday.
The news that TVNZ news staff had been told to “watch their inboxes” the next morning had just broken.
It was less than a week since Newshub’s owners had announced a plan to close it completely in mid-year and TVNZ had reported bad financial figures for the last half of 2023.
The following day — last Thursday — TVNZ’s Midday News told viewers 9 percent of TVNZ staff — 68 people in total — would go in a plan to balance the books.
“The broadcaster has told staff that its headcount is high and so are costs,” said reporter Kim Baker-Wilson starkly on TVNZ’s Midday.
On chopping block
Twenty-four hours later, it was one of the shows on the chopping block — along with late news show Tonight and TVNZ’s flagship weekly current affairs show Sunday.
“As the last of its kind — is that what we want in our media landscape . . . to have no in-depth current affairs show?” said Sunday presenter Miriama Kamo (also the host of the weekend show Marae).
Consumers investigator Fair Go — with a 47-year track record as one of TVNZ’s most popular local shows — will also be gone by the end of May under this plan.
If Newshub vanishes from rival channel Three by mid year, there will be just one national daily TV news bulletin left — TVNZ’s 1News — and no long form current affairs at all, except TVNZ’s Q+A and others funded from the public purse by NZ on Air and Te Mangai Paho.
Tellingly, weekday TVNZ shows which will carry on — Breakfast and Seven Sharp — are ones which generate income from “partner content” deals and “integrated advertising” — effectively paid-for slots within the programmes.
TVNZ had made it known cuts were coming months ago because costs were outstripping fast-falling revenue as advertisers tightened their belts or spent elsewhere.
TVNZ executives had also made it clear that reinforcing TVNZ’s digital-first strategy would be a key goal as well as just cutting costs.
Other notable cut
So the other notable service to be cut was a surprise — the youth-focused digital-native outlet Re: News.
After its launch in 2017, its young staff revived a mothballed studio and gained a reputation for hard work — and then for the quality of its work.
It won national journalism awards in the past two years and reached younger people who rarely if ever turn on a television set.
Reportedly, the staff of Re: News staff is to be halved and lose some of its leaders.
The main media workers’ union E tū said it will fight to save jobs and extend the short consultation period.
Some staff made it plain that they weren’t giving up just yet either and would present counter-proposals to save shows and jobs.
In a statement, TVNZ said the proposals “in no way relate to the immense contribution of the teams that work on those shows and the significant journalistic value they’ve provided over the years”.
Money-spinners
But some were money-spinners too.
Fair Go and Sunday still pull in big six-figure live primetime TV audiences and more views now on TVNZ+. Its marketers frequently tell the advertisers that.
TVNZ chief executive Jodi O’Donnell knows all about that. She was previously TVNZ’s commercial director.
So why kill off these programmes now?
Mediawatch’s requests to talk to O’Donnell and TVNZ’s executive editor of news Phil O’Sullivan were unsuccessful.
But O’Donnell did talk to Newstalk ZB on Friday night.
“I’ve been quite open with the fact that there are no sacred cows. And we need to find some ways to stop doing some things for us to reduce our costs,” O’Donnell told Newstalk ZB.
“TVNZ’s still investing over $40 million in news and current affairs — so we absolutely believe in the future of news and current affairs. But we have a situation right now that our operating model is more expensive than the revenue that we’re making. And we have to make some really tough, tough decisions,” she said.
“We’ll constantly be looking at things to keep the operating model in line with what our revenue is. Within the TVNZ Act it’s clear that we need to be a commercial broadcaster, We are a commercial business, so that’s the remit that we need to work on.
“Our competitors these days are not (Newstalk ZB) or Sky or Warner Brothers (Discovery) but Google and Meta. These are multi-trillion dollar organisations. Ninety cents of every dollar spent in digital news advertising is going offshore. That’s 10 cents left for the likes of NZME, TVNZ, Stuff and any of the other local broadcasters.”
Jack Tame also pointed the finger at the titans of tech on his Newstalk ZB Saturday show.
Force of digital giants ‘irrepressible’
“Ultimately the force of those digital giants is irrepressible. Trying to save free-to-air commercial TV, with quality news, current affairs and local programming in a country with five million people . . . is like trying to bail out the Titanic with an empty ice cream container. I’m not aware of any comparable broadcast markets where they’ve managed to pull it off,” he told listeners.
But few countries have a state-owned yet fully-commercial broadcaster trying to do news on TV and online, disconnected from publicly-funded ones also doing news on TV and radio and online.
That makes TVNZ a state-owned broadcaster that serves advertisers as much as New Zealanders.
But if things had panned out differently a year ago, that wouldn’t be the case now either.
What if the public media merger had gone ahead?
A new not-for-profit public media entity incorporating RNZ and TVNZ — Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media (ANZPM) — was supposed to start one year ago this week.
It would have been the biggest media reform since the early 1990s.
The previous government was prepared to spend more than $400 million over four years to get it going.
Almost $20 million was spent on a programme called Strong Public Media, put in place because New Zealand’s media sector was weak.
“Ailing” was the word that the business case used, noting “increased competition from overseas players slashed the share of revenue from advertising.”
But the Labour government killed the plan before the last election, citing the cost of living crisis.
The new entity would still have needed TVNZ’s commercial revenue, but if it had gone ahead, would that mean TVNZ wouldn’t now be sacrificing news shows and journalists?
“Nobody’s surprised. Surely nobody is surprised that this ecosystem is not sustainable any longer. Something radical had to change,” Tracey Martin — the chair of the board charged with getting ANZPM up and running — told Mediawatch.
“I don’t have any problem believing that (TVNZ) would have had to change what they were delivering. But would it have been cuts to news and current affairs that we would have been seeing? There would have been other decisions made because commerciality . . . was not the major driver (of ANZPM),” Martin said.
“That was where we started from. If Armageddon happens — and all other New Zealand media can no longer exist — you have to be there as the Fourth Estate — to make sure that New Zealanders have a place to go to for truth and trust.”
What were the assumptions about the advertising revenue TVNZ would have been able to pull in?
“[TVNZ] was telling us that it wouldn’t be as bad as we believed it would be. TVNZ modeling was not as dramatic as our modeling. We were happy to accept that [because] our modeling gave us a particular window by which to change the ecosystem in which New Zealand media could survive to try and stabilise,” Martin told Mediawatch.
The business case document tracked TVNZ revenue and expenses from 2012 until 2020 — the start of the planning process for the new entity.
By 2020, a sharp rise in costs already exceeded revenue which was above $300 million.
And as we now know, TVNZ revenue has fallen further and more quickly since then.
“We were predicting linear TV revenue was going to continue to drop substantially and relatively quickly — and they were not going to be able to switch their advertising revenue at the same capacity to digital,” Martin said.
“They had more confidence than we did,” she said.
The ANZPM legislation estimated it as a $400 million a year operation, with roughly half the funding from public sources and half from commercial revenue.
TVNZ’s submission said that was “unambitious”.
“If the commercial arm of the new entity can aid in gaining more revenue to reinvest into local content and to reinvest into public media outcomes, all the better,” the chief executive at the time Simon Power told Mediawatch in 2023.
“It was a very rosy picture they painted. They had a mandate to be a commercial business that had to give confidence to the advertisers and the rest of New Zealand but they were very confident two years ago that this wouldn’t happen,” she said.
In opposition, National Party leader Christopher Luxon described the merger as “ideological and insane” and “a solution looking for a problem”.
But if that was based on TVNZ’s bullish assessments of its own revenue-raising capacity — or a disregard of a probable downturn ahead, was that a big mistake?
“I won’t comment for today’s government, but statements being made in the last couple of days about people getting their news from somewhere else; truth and trust has dropped off; linear has got to be transferred into the digital environment . . . none of those things are new comments,” Martin told Mediawatch.
“They’re all in the documentation that we placed into the public domain — and I asked the special permission, as the chair of the ANZPM group, to brief spokespersons for broadcasting of the Greens, Act and National to try and make sure that everybody has as much and as much information as we could give them,” she said.
Media and Communications Minister Melissa Lee said this week she was working on proposals to help the media to take to cabinet.
“I don’t give advice to the minister, but I would advise officials to go back and pull out the business case and paperwork for ANZPM — and to look at the submissions and the number of people who supported the concept, but had concerns about particular areas,” Tracey Martin told Mediawatch.
“Don’t let perfection get in the way of action.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Tech giants and privacy groups have rallied against a proposal to force companies to scan cloud and messaging services for illegal and harmful content in Australia, arguing for changes to protect encryption. The calls are contained in some of the 50 submissions received by the Office of the eSafety Commissioner during its consultation on the…
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Chromebook laptops will be assembled in Australia for the first time under a new deal between Google and Adelaide-based gaming PC manufacturer Allied Corporation to supply the computers to school students. The partnership – Google’s first with an Australian manufacturer – opens the door to state and territory governments to buy locally-made laptops for schools,…
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When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart.
— Howard Thurman, theologian and civil rights activist
The Christmas story of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.
The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable (a barn), where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus. Warned that the government planned to kill the baby, Jesus’ family fled with him to Egypt until it was safe to return to their native land.
Yet what if Jesus had been born 2,000 years later?
What if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, Jesus had been born at this moment in time? What kind of reception would Jesus and his family be given? Would we recognize the Christ child’s humanity, let alone his divinity? Would we treat him any differently than he was treated by the Roman Empire? If his family were forced to flee violence in their native country and sought refuge and asylum within our borders, what sanctuary would we offer them?
A singular number of churches across the country have asked those very questions in recent years, and their conclusions were depicted with unnerving accuracy by nativity scenes in which Jesus and his family are separated, segregated and caged in individual chain-link pens, topped by barbed wire fencing.
Those nativity scenes were a pointed attempt to remind the modern world that the narrative about the birth of Jesus is one that speaks on multiple fronts to a world that has allowed the life, teachings and crucifixion of Jesus to be drowned out by partisan politics, secularism, materialism and war, all driven by a manipulative shadow government called the Deep State.
The modern-day church has largely shied away from applying Jesus’ teachings to modern problems such as war, poverty, immigration, etc., but thankfully there have been individuals throughout history who ask themselves and the world: what would Jesus do?
What would Jesus—the baby born in Bethlehem who grew into an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day (namely, the Roman Empire) but spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire—do about the injustices of our modern age?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked himself what Jesus would have done about the horrors perpetrated by Hitler and his assassins. The answer: Bonhoeffer was executed by Hitler for attempting to undermine the tyranny at the heart of Nazi Germany.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asked himself what Jesus would have done about the soul-destroying gulags and labor camps of the Soviet Union. The answer: Solzhenitsyn found his voice and used it to speak out about government oppression and brutality.
Martin Luther King Jr. asked himself what Jesus would have done about America’s warmongering. The answer: declaring “my conscience leaves me no other choice,” King risked widespread condemnation as well as his life when he publicly opposed the Vietnam War on moral and economic grounds.
Even now, despite the popularity of the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD) in Christian circles, there remains a disconnect in the modern church between the teachings of Christ and the suffering of what Jesus in Matthew 25 refers to as the “least of these.”
Yet this is not a theological gray area: Jesus was unequivocal about his views on many things, not the least of which was charity, compassion, war, tyranny and love.
After all, Jesus—the revered preacher, teacher, radical and prophet—was born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of the American police state. When he grew up, he had powerful, profound things to say, things that would change how we view people, alter government policies and change the world. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Love your enemies” are just a few examples of his most profound and revolutionary teachings.
When confronted by those in authority, Jesus did not shy away from speaking truth to power. Indeed, his teachings undermined the political and religious establishment of his day. It cost him his life. He was eventually crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be.
Can you imagine what Jesus’ life would have been like if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, he had been born and raised in the American police state?
Consider the following if you will.
Had Jesus been born in the era of the America police state, rather than traveling to Bethlehem for a census, Jesus’ parents would have been mailed a 28-page American Community Survey, a mandatory government questionnaire documenting their habits, household inhabitants, work schedule, how many toilets are in your home, etc. The penalty for not responding to this invasive survey can go as high as $5,000.
Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. Rather than wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, however, the baby’s parents might have been forced to ward off visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth. One couple in Washington had all three of their children removed after social services objected to the two youngest being birthed in an unassisted home delivery.
Had Jesus been born in a hospital, his blood and DNA would have been taken without his parents’ knowledge or consent and entered into a government biobank. While most states require newborn screening, a growing number are holding onto that genetic material long-term for research, analysis and purposes yet to be disclosed.
Then again, had Jesus’ parents been undocumented immigrants, they and the newborn baby might have been shuffled to a profit-driven, private prison for illegals where they first would have been separated from each other, the children detained in make-shift cages, and the parents eventually turned into cheap, forced laborers for corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret. There’s quite a lot of money to be made from imprisoning immigrants, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.
From the time he was old enough to attend school, Jesus would have been drilled in lessons of compliance and obedience to government authorities, while learning little about his own rights. Had he been daring enough to speak out against injustice while still in school, he might have found himself tasered or beaten by a school resource officer, or at the very least suspended under a school zero tolerance policy that punishes minor infractions as harshly as more serious offenses.
Had Jesus disappeared for a few hours let alone days as a 12-year-old, his parents would have been handcuffed, arrested and jailed for parental negligence. Parents across the country have been arrested for far less “offenses” such as allowing their children to walk to the park unaccompanied and play in their front yard alone.
Rather than disappearing from the history books from his early teenaged years to adulthood, Jesus’ movements and personal data—including his biometrics—would have been documented, tracked, monitored and filed by governmental agencies and corporations such as Google and Microsoft. Incredibly, 95 percent of school districts share their student records with outside companies that are contracted to manage data, which they then use to market products to us.
From the moment Jesus made contact with an “extremist” such as John the Baptist, he would have been flagged for surveillance because of his association with a prominent activist, peaceful or otherwise. Since 9/11, the FBI has actively carried out surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations on a broad range of activist groups, from animal rights groups to poverty relief, anti-war groups and other such “extremist” organizations.
Jesus’ anti-government views would certainly have resulted in him being labeled a domestic extremist. Law enforcement agencies are being trained to recognize signs of anti-government extremism during interactions with potential extremists who share a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”
While traveling from community to community, Jesus might have been reported to government officials as “suspicious” under the Department of Homeland Security’s “See Something, Say Something” programs. Many states, including New York, are providing individuals with phone apps that allow them to take photos of suspicious activity and report them to their state Intelligence Center, where they are reviewed and forwarded to law-enforcement agencies.
Rather than being permitted to live as an itinerant preacher, Jesus might have found himself threatened with arrest for daring to live off the grid or sleeping outside. In fact, the number of cities that have resorted to criminalizing homelessness by enacting bans on camping, sleeping in vehicles, loitering and begging in public has doubled.
Viewed by the government as a dissident and a potential threat to its power, Jesus might have had government spies planted among his followers to monitor his activities, report on his movements, and entrap him into breaking the law. Such Judases today—called informants—often receive hefty paychecks from the government for their treachery.
Had Jesus used the internet to spread his radical message of peace and love, he might have found his blog posts infiltrated by government spies attempting to undermine his integrity, discredit him or plant incriminating information online about him. At the very least, he would have had his website hacked and his email monitored.
Had Jesus attempted to feed large crowds of people, he would have been threatened with arrest for violating various ordinances prohibiting the distribution of food without a permit. Florida officials arrested a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless on a public beach.
Had Jesus spoken publicly about his 40 days in the desert and his conversations with the devil, he might have been labeled mentally ill and detained in a psych ward against his will for a mandatory involuntary psychiatric hold with no access to family or friends. One Virginia man was arrested, strip searched, handcuffed to a table, diagnosed as having “mental health issues,” and locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait.
Without a doubt, had Jesus attempted to overturn tables in a Jewish temple and rage against the materialism of religious institutions, he would have been charged with a hate crime. More than 45 states and the federal government have hate crime laws on the books.
Had anyone reported Jesus to the police as being potentially dangerous, he might have found himself confronted—and killed—by police officers for whom any perceived act of non-compliance (a twitch, a question, a frown) can result in them shooting first and asking questions later.
Rather than having armed guards capture Jesus in a public place, government officials would have ordered that a SWAT team carry out a raid on Jesus and his followers, complete with flash-bang grenades and military equipment. There are upwards of 80,000 such SWAT team raids carried out every year, many on unsuspecting Americans who have no defense against such government invaders, even when such raids are done in error.
Instead of being detained by Roman guards, Jesus might have been made to “disappear” into a secret government detention center where he would have been interrogated, tortured and subjected to all manner of abuses. Chicago police have “disappeared” more than 7,000 people into a secret, off-the-books interrogation warehouse at Homan Square.
Charged with treason and labeled a domestic terrorist, Jesus might have been sentenced to a life-term in a private prison where he would have been forced to provide slave labor for corporations or put to death by way of the electric chair or a lethal mixture of drugs.
Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, given the nature of government then and now, it is painfully evident that whether Jesus had been born in our modern age or his own, he still would have died at the hands of a police state.
Thus, as we draw near to Christmas with its celebration of miracles and promise of salvation, we would do well to remember that what happened in that manger on that starry night in Bethlehem is only the beginning of the story. That baby born in a police state grew up to be a man who did not turn away from the evils of his age but rather spoke out against it.
The post The Deep State’s Persecution of Its Most Vulnerable Citizens first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The federal government will spend almost $80 million connecting smaller Pacific Island nations to a new trans-Pacific subsea cable to be be built by Google between Australia and the United States. At least nine countries, including Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Vanuatu and Nauru, are set to benefit from the financing, which totals…
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Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has fined X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, more than $600,000 for failing to answer questions on the steps it is taking to tackle child sexual exploitation material. The $610,500 fine is the first to be issued under the Online Safety Act, which introduced new requirements in 2022 to…
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Tech giants are unwilling or unable to provide lawmakers with figures on their local market share despite facing new codes of conduct designed to protect competition and consumers. Representatives from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apple and Google on Tuesday either declined to reveal their local market shares or underestimated them compared market research in evidence…
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On Friday, RDP called on Rose to recuse himself from Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce v. Becerra, a case that poses a threat to the Biden administration’s popular effort to curb drug costs and rein in Big Pharma’s price-setting power. The Ohio Chamber of Commerce, Michigan Chamber of Commerce, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce are also plaintiffs in the case.
“The Chamber of Commerce’s case against the Inflation Reduction Act, should it succeed, could immediately halt the progress on prescription drug prices that the IRA has been working towards for the past year,” Ananya Kalahasti, a research assistant at RDP, said Friday. “In a case as high-stakes as this, any chance that Judge Rose evaluates this case in his own personal financial interest, rather than by the letter of the law, is a significant threat to judicial ethics.”
In a letter to Rose, the Revolving Door Project argued that the judge could be in violation of the official Code of Conduct for U.S. judges if he oversees the price-negotiation case while having holdings in Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca.
Johnson & Johnson’s blood clot medication Xarelto and AstraZeneca’s Type 2 diabetes drug Farxiga are on the Biden administration’s initial list of drugs set to face price negotiations with Medicare. The companies charge far higher prices in the U.S. for those medications than in other countries.
“Canon 2 of the Code of Conduct states, ‘A Judge Should Avoid Impropriety and the Appearance of Impropriety in All Activities,’ acknowledging that even the appearance of improper incentives that could influence a judge’s decisionmaking can be deeply harmful for public trust in government,” RDP noted in its letter. “Your most recent financial disclosure reports show that you hold $15,001 to $50,000 of stock in Johnson & Johnson, $15,001 to $50,000 of stock in Moderna, and $1 to $15,000 of stock in AstraZeneca.”
“Holding stock in two companies that will be subject to the first round of price negotiations while presiding over a case which may result in the prevention or delay of those negotiations is clearly an instance in which the judge has an ‘interest that could be affected substantially by the outcome of the proceeding,’” RDP added, quoting from Canon 3 of the Code of Conduct. “Given the ethics concerns that your apparent conflict of financial interests in the pharmaceutical industry raise, we call on you to recuse yourself from Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce et al. v. Becerra et al. immediately.”
Filed in July, the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce’s lawsuit is part of a broader legal campaign by industry groups and pharmaceutical giants to prevent Medicare from negotiating drug prices, something it was previously barred from doing under federal law.
Pharmaceutical companies and industry groups have thus far filed a total of eight lawsuits over the impending price negotiations, which are slated to begin for the first batch of drugs later this year and end in August 2024.
“Long-standing legal precedent is no obstacle for this billionaire-friendly Supreme Court, and it seems that given its choice of representation, Big Pharma is prepared for the cases to get that far.”
As Bloomberg Lawsummarized, the legal challenges “make various constitutional claims, including that the negotiation process violates the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on taking private property without just compensation and the Eighth Amendment’s excessive fines clause, based on the excise tax pharmaceutical companies face if they refuse to comply with the negotiations.”
Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told Bloomberg Law that “the drug companies are throwing spaghetti at the wall, and they’re going to hope that some of it sticks.”
Bagley argued that the IRA’s corporate opponents are “really facing an uphill challenge, because there’s an act of Congress that establishes this program.”
But Kalahasti and RDP research intern Will Royce stressed in The American Prospect earlier this week that some legal experts have been “quick to point out that long-standing legal precedent is no obstacle for this billionaire-friendly Supreme Court, and it seems that given its choice of representation, Big Pharma is prepared for the cases to get that far.”
“Who is helping Big Pharma in the courts? In Merck and Bristol Myers’ respective cases, it’s the conservative law firm Jones Day, which famously represented both Trump campaigns, supplied many Trump administration officials, and had a hand in Trump’s Supreme Court nominations,” Kalahasti and Royce observed. “On the case for both companies is Yaakov Roth, who successfully argued for the gutting of the administrative state in West Virginia v. EPA.”
This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.
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The world’s biggest technology companies have dismissed concerns by Australian regulators about the potential for self-preferencing and the lack of competition, recommending that the watchdogs focus on “outcomes” rather than algorithms. During a parliamentary inquiry into economic dynamism on Tuesday, representatives for Amazon, Google and Apple played down the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC)…
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Australia risks an exodus of artificial intelligence capability and investment if new technology-specific regulations are introduced and the country’s existing copyright regime is tightened, the Tech Council of Australia has warned. In a submission to the federal government’s consultation on AI, the peak industry body for Australia’s tech sector said that while new “guardrails and…
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Janine Jackson interviewed Gizmodo‘s Thomas Germain about the destruction of online history for the August 18, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: In the 1980s, when we at FAIR would talk about how the goals of journalism as a public service, and of information as a public good, were in conflict with those of media as a profit-driven business, we were often met with the contention that the internet was going to make that conflict meaningless, by democratizing access to information and somehow sidelining that profit motive with—technology!
Well, now we’re here, and much of our lives are online. It’s where many get news and information, how we communicate and learn. But power is still power, and the advertising model that drives so much fear and favor in traditional journalism is still in effect.
So, while much is different, there are still core questions to consider when you’re trying to figure out why some kinds of news or “content” is in your face, like it or not, and why some perspectives are very hard to find, and why there’s so much garbage to get through to get to any of it.
Our next guest’s job is to report on life online. Thomas Germain is a senior reporter at Gizmodo. He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Thomas Germain.
Thomas Germain: Happy to be here.
JJ: There are internet rules that are not visible to all users, particularly those of us who aren’t looking into the gears of the thing, you know? We just want to read articles, or look at cats falling off chairs.
But as “offline” media have unseen rules—like if a sponsor can’t be found to buy ads on a show, well, that show’s not going to air, no matter how much people might like it—there are also behind-the-scenes factors for internet content that are not journalistic factors, if you will.
I wonder if you would talk us through what CNET—which many listeners will know is a longstanding website dedicated to tech news—is currently doing, and what do you think it means or portends?
Gizmodo (8/9/23)
TG: Yeah, so CNET is one of the oldest technology news sites on the internet. It’s been around since 1995, and they have tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of articles that they’ve put up over the years.
But I got a tip that CNET had started deleting its old content, because of the theory about improving the site’s performance on Google. And I went and I checked it out, and what I found was the company has been deleting thousands of its own articles.
Now, there’s a lot of complicated reasons that this is happening, but the No. 1 thing that people need to understand is a lot of the writing that happens on the internet is aimed as much at robots as it is at humans. And what I mean here is the algorithms that run Google search, right? Almost all internet traffic is driven by how high you show up in the search results on Google.
And there’s an entire industry called “search engine optimization” that is essentially a kind of gamified effort to get your content and your website and individual pages to perform better on Google.
And this is actually a huge thing that drives the journalism business. It’s the reason that you look at articles and you see the same keyword repeated over and over. It’s basically one of the things that dictates what subjects journalists write about, what’s covered and how it’s written.
Search Engine Roundtable (4/30/20)
And the performance of your entire site dictates how your individual pages will do. And Google issued some guidance last year which suggested that if you’ve got some content on your site that’s not performing well, it might help if you take it down. It didn’t say this explicitly, but a lot of companies, CNET included, have been going through and looking at pages that aren’t performing well, which tends to be older content.
And some of that content, they’re redirecting the URL of that page to other articles that they want to promote. And in some cases, they’re taking it down altogether.
So the effect of this is this kind of ironic thing, right? Google‘s entire reason for being is to make information easier to find, but in effect, because of the design of their algorithms, they’re actually encouraging companies, indirectly, to take some information off the internet altogether.
JJ: Because if folks are not “engaging”—that’s the word we’ve all learned to use—with a particular piece that a website might have up, then that’s dragging down the SEO of the site generally, is what you’re saying? Like if you have a lot of content that folks are not actively engaging with, then maybe your new stuff might not show up so high up on Google. Is that, vaguely, somewhere in the ballpark of what’s happening?
Gizmodo (11/15/19)
TG: That’s basically it. It’s really complicated. And also, we don’t really know exactly what’s going on here. Google isn’t super transparent about the way that its algorithms function, and search engine optimization, or SEO, is as much a guessing game as it is based on actual data. There’s some information that journalists and content publishers have access to, about how certain things are performing, but in other cases, it’s just best practices, and people crossing their fingers, essentially.
So the one thing we know for sure is the more content that’s on your website, the longer it takes Google‘s robots, they call them “crawlers,” to go through every page, which is how the company determines how certain pages will rank for search results.
So what they’ve said is, you’ve got a giant, old site like CNET, and there’s some content that’s not performing well, shrinking that down, they call it “content pruning,” can help you increase the performance of the content that you want to promote. So in effect, it could be an advantage to you, if you’ve got a giant site, to take some of that content down.
JJ: I think listeners will already understand the harm that that does to public information and to journalism, because obviously we think of the internet, dumbly perhaps, as an archive, and there is a severe loss implied in sites like CNET, and others if they follow their lead, in deleting old material.
TG: Yeah. Journalism, they say that it’s the first draft of history, right? And if you’re doing any kind of archival research, if you want to know what people were talking about in 1997, it helps to be able to have a record of all these old articles, even if no one’s reading them, even if they’re about topics that don’t have any obvious importance now. CNET used the example of old articles that talk about the prices of AOL, which is a thing that you can’t even get anymore.
But this stuff can be important for reasons that aren’t immediately obvious. And the loss of this information can really have a serious detrimental effect on the public record.
There are some companies that are working to preserve this stuff. The most well-known one is the Internet Archive. It’s got this tool called the Wayback Machine, which goes and preserves copies of webpages.
And CNET says that before it deletes content, it lets the Internet Archive know to make a copy of it, so it’s not gone forever. And they say they preserve their own copy, but they’re relying on a third-party service that’s a nonprofit to maintain this content, and who knows whether it’s going to be around in the long term.
But there’s an effect on the journalists, right? Because you want a record of your work in order to just keep track of what you’ve done, but also to have stuff to put in your portfolio to get new jobs. So the erasure of this content can be a problem, for just the general public and for history, but also for the people who are tasked with writing this stuff in the first place.
JJ: Absolutely. And, of course, who knows what’s going to be interesting from the past to look back on, because, who knows, you can’t predict what you might want to go back and look through. You know, maybe AOL will come up in the future, and we’ll want to know what was said about it at the time. So it seems like a loss.
Futurama (4/27/99)
Well, I’m going to ask you to switch gears just for a second. I have been recently thinking about a line in the show Futurama, when Fry, who has been transported to the far future, is shocked because a commercial appears in his dream. And Leela says, “Didn’t you have ads in the 21st century?” And Fry says:
Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio and in magazines and movies and at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams! No siree.
I think of that every time my phone beeps at 2:00 AM and it’s Spotify saying, “Hey, uh, there’s a playlist that you might like,” that’s not anything I signed up for. What is up with what definitely feels like an increase in ads, and in intrusive ads, in all of the online spaces that we see? What’s going on there?
TG: Yeah, I think this is something that everybody experiences, you’re aware of it, we all know that we’re seeing more ads, but I think people don’t quite recognize how prevalent it is and how dramatically it’s changed.
And it’s actually a recent change. So over the last year, we’ve seen a massive increase in the amount of advertising. We’re seeing it in places we’ve never seen before; Uber, I think, is an example, where we’re getting pop-up notifications that have ads in them, but just about every context you can think of: I saw an ad in a fortune cookie the other day. If there’s a space where there’s people’s eyes, it’s being turned into a space for advertising.
And there are two, I think, counterintuitive reasons that this is happening. And the first one’s actually because there are increasingly regulations and restrictions about privacy, right? There’s laws, more so in Europe than in the United States, that are restricting the ways that companies can collect and use your data.
And simultaneously, Google and Apple, who control all of the phones, understand that the writing is on the wall here, and they’re trying to get out in front of regulation before it happens, by putting their own limits on how companies collect data on their platforms.
Now what this does is it makes advertising less profitable, right, because targeted ads make more money than regular ads. But those targeted ads need lots of data. And if the data’s harder to find, it’s harder to make money if you’re a company that makes its cash on ads.
So what do you do in that situation? You just increase the number of ads that you’re showing people.
Thomas Germain: “If…you need to add a new revenue stream and you don’t have any great ideas, the obvious one is to add more ads to your platform.”
Simultaneously, there’s this other thing that’s happening in the technology industry, which is the economy, right? The federal government has raised interest rates; that makes it more expensive to borrow money. And all of this endless runway that the technology companies had for the better part of the decade is suddenly drying up.
And there’s been this shift where investors have started to understand that the technology industry isn’t some kind of magic money printing machine, and people are expecting more return on their investment.
So if you’re a company, and you need to add a new revenue stream and you don’t have any great ideas, the obvious one is to add more ads to your platform, or put them in places where they’ve never been before.
So there’s these two competing forces, right, privacy and the economy, that are pushing companies to inundate us with ads. And it’s really grown to an astonishing level.
I saw a study—and this is from a couple years ago, it’s gotten worse—where in the ’70s, we saw on average between 500 to 1,000 ads a day. Now the number is somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 ads that everyone is seeing on average in a single day, which seems like a lot, but we become blind to it.
If you add up the ads you’re seeing on TV, all the sponsored posts, all the videos on TikTok where someone’s been paid to promote a product, the ads we’re seeing on bus stops and, you know, the little TVs at the grocery station…. There’s just constant advertising being blasted at us.
And we don’t know, for example, among other potential problems, how this might affect people’s psyche. It’s kind of a mass experiment that we’re all going through at the same time, and we don’t know what the effects are going to be.
JJ: We did have laws at some point about that, but it certainly seems that laws and regulation are, let’s just say, not keeping up.
TG: Yeah, absolutely. You know, most of the laws that govern the internet are laws that were adapted from other purposes, from the ’90s. For example, health privacy rules are based on a law that was written in 1996 in the United States.
Part of the problem here is regulators don’t really understand what’s going on, and that’s to say nothing about our aging population of politicians. People don’t really understand how the internet works in the first place, let alone the ability to come to a consensus on what we should do.
So the internet, more or less, is a place that is unregulated. It’s getting a little better, but we’ve got a lot of catching up to do.
JJ: We’re going to end on that note, which is not an end note, but a question about moving forward. We’ve been speaking with Thomas Germain, senior reporter at Gizmodo, online at Gizmodo.com. Thomas Germain, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
TG: Thank you. Great to talk to you.
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Water. Data centres. The continuous, pressing need to cool the latter, which houses servers to store and process data, with the former, which is becoming ever more precious in the climate crisis. Hardly a good comingling of factors.
Like planting cotton in drought-stricken areas, decisions to place data hubs in various locations across the globe are becoming increasingly contentious from an environmental perspective, and not merely because of their carbon emitting propensities. In the United States, which houses 33% of the globe’s data centres, the problem of water usage is becoming acute.
As the Washington Post reported in April this year, residents in Mesa, Arizona were concerned that Meta’s decision to build another data centre was bound to cause more trouble than it was worth. “My first reaction was concern for our water,” claimed city council member Jenn Duff. (The state already has approximately 49 data centres.)
The move to liquid cooling from air cooling for increasingly complex IT processes has been relentless. As the authors of a piece in the ASHRAE Journal from July 2019 explain, “Air cooling has worked well for systems that deploy processors up to 150 W, but IT equipment is now being manufactured with processors well above 150 W where air cooling is no longer practical.” The use of liquid cooling was not only more efficient than air cooling regarding heat transfer, but “more energy efficient, reducing electrical energy costs significantly.” The authors, however, show little concern about the water supplies needed in such ventures.
The same cannot be said about a co-authored study on the environmental footprint of US-located data centres published two years later. During their investigations, the authors identified a telling tendency: “Our bottom-up approach reveals one-fifth of data center servers’ direct water footprint comes from moderately to highly stressed watersheds, while nearly half of servers are fully or partially powered by power plants located within water stressed reasons.” And to make things just that bit less appealing, it was also found that roughly 0.5% of total US greenhouse gas emissions could also be attributed to such centres.
Google has proven to be particularly thirsty in this regard, not to mention secretive in the amount of water it uses at its data hubs. In 2022, The Oregonian/Oregon Live reported that the company’s water use in The Dalles had almost tripled over five years. The increased usage was enabled, in no small part, because of increased access to the municipal water supply in return for an upgrade to the water supply and a transfer of certain water rights. Since establishing the first data centre in The Dalles in 2005, Google has also received tax breaks worth $260 million.
The city officials responsible for the arrangement were in no mood to answer questions posed by the inquisitive paper on Google’s water consumption. A prolonged 13-month legal battle ensued, with the city arguing that the company’s water use constituted a “trade secret”, thereby exempting them from Oregon’s disclosure rules. To have disclosed such details would have, argued Google, revealed information on how the company cooled their servers to eager competitors.
In the eventual settlement, The Dalles agreed to provide public access to 10 years of historical data on Google’s water consumption. The city also agreed to pay $53,000 to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which had agreed to represent The Oregonian/Oregon Live. The city’s own costs had run into $106,000. But most troubling in the affair, leaving aside the lamentable conduct of public officials, was the willingness of a private company to bankroll a state entity in preventing access to public records. Tim Gleason, former dean of the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, saw this distortion as more than just a touch troubling. “To allow a private entity to essentially fund public advocacy of keeping something out of the public domain is just contrary to the basic intent of the law.”
Instead of conceding that the whole enterprise had been a shabby affront to local residents concerned about the use of a precious communal resource, compromising both the public utility and Google, the company’s global head of infrastructure and water strategy, Ben Townsend, proved benevolent. “What we thought was really important was that we partner with the local utility and actually transfer those water rights over to the utility in a way that benefits the entire community.” That’s right, dear public, they’re doing it for you.
John Devoe, executive director of the WaterWatch advocacy group, also issued a grim warning in the face of Google’s ever increasing water use, which will burgeon further with two more data centres promised along the Columbia River. “If the data center water use doubles or triples over the next decade, it’s going to have serious effects on fish and wildlife on source water streams, and it’s potentially going to have serious effects for other water users in the area of The Dalles.”
Much of the policy making in this area is proving to be increasingly shoddy. With a global demand for ever more complex information systems, including AI, the Earth’s environment promises to be stripped further. Information hunger risks becoming a form of ecological license.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Australia’s regulatory response to artificial intelligence is shaping up as a battleground for the Albanese government, with a divergence of views emerging from its two-month long consultation on the world-changing technology. As the Industry department takes its last submissions to the consultation that ends on Friday, there is little consensus, based on the handful of…
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Australia’s media watchdog has hired Google Australia’s government relations lead directly from the tech giant, insisting it can manage any conflicts of interests through established processes as it gears up for a crackdown on platforms. But the move to hire directly from a regulated entity that has clashed with the government raises questions about regulatory…
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Australian app developers have joined a class action lawsuit against Big Tech giants Google and Apple alleging abuse of power in their respective app stores. The class actions, being jointly run by Phi Finney McDonald and Maurice Blackburn Lawyers, will be expanded to include Australian app developers following a decision by the Federal Court of…
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Australia’s access to cutting-edge compute capabilities would be restricted if the federal government was to introduce data localisation requirements for certain sensitive datasets, according to Google’s local public policy manager Alex Lynch. Speaking on the United States Studies Centre’s latest ‘Technology and Security’ podcast, Mr Lynch raised the prospect of reduced access to “huge compute…
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Big Tech search and media giant Google has moved to reassure the federal government that its global workforce reduction plans will not have any impact on its research commitments in Australia. The company has also assured Industry and Science minister Ed Husic’s office that it would continue to invest in its much-vaunted Digital Future Initiative….
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