National security is the sum total of the individual earned securities
of each citizen, including economic, political, social, health,
cultural, military and <i>all sorts of security</i> that pertain to the
identity we call a nation.<p>What these guys are talking about is something else. They are talking
about the security of the security services, their own self interests
and the status quo of enmeshed relations between three letter agencies
and a few captured tech giants.<p>On the contrary, the exact opposite is true. National security is best
served by a diverse, pluralistic, open, heterogeneous tech industry.
There is no reason intelligence needs cannot function properly with
such an ecosystem, but it would have to do so through the Rule of Law,
and systems of warrants that the incumbents have sought to bypass this
last 20 years.
So there are 3 ways the government could influence Big Tech:<p>1. Infiltration. An agent or asset could be in a position of power to enact desired policies and changes, provide a backdoor or whatever;<p>2. Jurisdiction. The platform falls under US jurisdiction so is subject to various forms of law enforcement, secret or otherwise. National Security Letters, FISA warrants, pen registers, that sort of thing; and<p>3. Propaganda. US companies reflect the cultural and political values of their founders, board and management as will as the will of stockholders. For some issues there is a political divide but for many issues there isn't, most notably when it comes to US foreign policy where Democrats and Republicans are basically indistinguishable.<p>The prevailing foreign policy view is that the US is good and a benign hegemony and a civilizing and democratizing force. The current foreign policy bent also favours interventionism and has since World War Two.<p>You see this at the huge backlash you get, even here among relatively educated and informed commenters, when you dare to suggest that the US bears some responsibility for Ukraine's predicament even though Russia is of course wholly responsible for an unjustifiable invasion.<p>It's a real lesson in the power of US propaganda and how ingrained the benign hegemony meme (and it is a meme) is.<p>My theory is the first 2 points I listed above don't matter. They're of almost no importance. What really matters is the ability of the US media (and I include social media companies in this umbrella) to project US propaganda and to normalize the US-centric view of the world.
On april 17th I made the prediction that the US government was in control of twitter for probably this reason. I got flagged for this.<p>A day later a bunch of former intelligence people basically said this is a good idea. That's funny to me.
I'm sure if it was on the table, intelligence and national security officials would issue a jointly signed letter that implementing a "Great Firewall" in America is necessary for national security.<p>Luckily, these people don't get a say in what congress does. I will continue to vote for legislators who advocate busting tech monopolies.
James Clapper is a signatory?<p>The man who perjured himself in front of congress?<p>I think not.<p><a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/19/james-clappers-perjury-dc-made-men-dont-get-charged-lying-congress-jonathan-turley-column/1045991001/" rel="nofollow">https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/19/james-clap...</a>
Suppression of liberty and free speech is against the founding ethos of America. Should we abandon that ethos, we have abandoned the very idea of America.<p>--<p>"Better to die on your feet than live on your knees."<p>~ Emiliano Zapata<p>--<p>"Live Free or Die"<p>~ U.S. state of New Hampshire<p>--<p>"Give me liberty or give me death!"<p>~ Patrick Henry<p>--<p>“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”<p>~ Benjamin Franklin<p>--<p>"True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else."<p>~ Clarence Darrow
Frances Haugen, the supposed Facebook whistleblower, slipped up in her 60 minutes interview and revealed that she works for US intelligence. The effort she was employed to advance is acceptance of more censorship of Meta and the like. Conspicuously absent from the publicly promoted discussion was any mention of the free alternatives such as the fediverse. 'The Social Dilemma' movie had similar objectives and narrative framing.<p>I anticipate that self-hosters, linux users, and people who are not Facebooked will be further castigated as radicals and worse in the future.<p>Also note the irony that Substack contains Google and Amazon trackers.
None of their arguments are that convincing to me but I do think there's something to the broader argument in a US/China lens. The Chinese govt is backing up the dumptruck investing into AI while good ole boys in DC are passing around billion dollar contracts on fighter jets. Google and Facebook are leading the west in AI innovation in my opinion. If AGI is possible, it would really suck for the world if China got there first.<p>Imagine how different the world would be if China beat us to the internet and the Great Firewall was the world standard, but with AGI it will probably be able to rapidly become more advanced and prevent others from coming close to it.<p>If the US were to get serious in AI investment I wouldn't care about breaking up big tech but that doesn't seem to be the case at all.
Harry Truman said in 1945 about the atomic bomb, "We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies". I feel the same way about FAANG and Silicon Valley as a whole (and Wall Street, and Hollywood, and SpaceX/Tesla, and the Ivy League), that they are in the United States.<p>That doesn't mean I approve of everything they do. That doesn't mean I can't or won't decry their putting thumbs on scales toward a certain type of <i>bien-pensant</i> ideology. That does mean that, overall, I am very, very glad that they are American instead of Russian, Chinese, or even British, French, or German.
It's such a financially convenient line of thinking. It's absolute nonsense. Both at face value and once you dig into it. Mainstream media is feeding us constant lies which work against our interests, destroy our ability to trust institutions and the government. Big Tech is clearly the biggest threat to our democracy.<p>Before Big Tech, we did not have such problems. This new narrative is pure self-serving propaganda, a figment of the imagination of corporate-funded lobbyists.<p>Free-market capitalism with freedom of speech is the recipe for economic prosperity. Has been for hundreds of years.<p>Some people will point to China as an attempt to show a counter-example ("Look at China, they're totalitarian and their economy has been booming.") but they conveniently forget the fact that China's growth has been happening during a time of general loosening of policies. The past 20 years in China have overall been characterized by an increasing tolerance for free-market capitalism and more freedom of speech compared to what it was before.<p>China came out of an extreme form of communism. Of course, any loosening would yield huge improvements! Also, they have over 1 billion people, of course any small improvement to even a small fraction of their population would have an impact globally.<p>The problem with the US and the west is not freedom of speech or the free market, it's our debt-based monetary system which is now based on soft money. The decline started in 1971 when USD became detached from the gold standard. It's no longer backed by anything; also, the growth in the currency supply has become unconstrained and the distribution mechanisms for all newly issued currency have been partially hijacked to serve corporate interests. The effects of this were not felt immediately. It's only in recent years that the negative effects of our soft-money system have become difficult to ignore.<p>The important thing to note is that no fiat system has ever survived more than a few hundred years. A monetary system which is founded on the endless debasement of its own currency is doomed to fail sooner or later. There has been hundreds of such monetary systems over thousands of years; not one which remains to this day. It has never worked and will never work in the long run. They're just pyramid schemes.
What is this talk about “the algorithm,” as in Musk saying “they should open source the algorithm.” Is this the traffic boosting and suppression mechanism?
The site linked of the letter appears down or blocked. <a href="https://punchbowl.news/wp-content/uploads/Open-Letter-Cyber-Intel-Defense-HS-1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://punchbowl.news/wp-content/uploads/Open-Letter-Cyber-...</a><p>This seems suspicious.
Being a former government official doesn't mean you lose your first amendment rights.<p>I could write an entire article about Tucker Carlson saying something and title it "Multi-millionaire frozen food heir says <something I don't like>"
But not to individual liberty.<p>I think the aggressiveness that the EU attacks big tech with is proof enough that the national security point is true.
> By contrast, by maintaining all power in the hands of the small coterie of tech monopolies which control the internet and which have long proven their loyalty to the U.S. security state, the ability of the U.S. national security state to maintain a closed propaganda system around questions of war and militarism is guaranteed.<p>> The cynical exploitation could hardly be more overt: if you hate Putin the way any loyal and patriotic American should, then you must devote yourself to full preservation of the power of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon.
I think Greenwald's characterization of the letter's contents is a bit disingenuous. The letter makes the claim that recently proposed legislation that would enforce non-discriminatory access would do so in a way that would include foreign adversaries.<p>Greenwald takes that and elevates the claim to, "Any attempts to restrict Big Tech's monopolistic power would therefore undermine the U.S. fight against Moscow."<p>The letter makes no such claim. This amounts to a straw man.<p>Greenwald goes on to rail at the signees for the letter claiming that Hunter Biden's laptop had the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, but while the NYT recently apparently confirmed the genuine nature of Biden's laptop, that letter was still well-founded at the time. A thing can be genuine and have the hallmarks of developed disinformation.<p>I think Greenwald is being intellectually dishonest.
The hilarious thing about this is that China is at the same time cracking down hard on its own tech sector for reasons of domestic competition and concentration of power.<p>So on the one hand you have the country of freedom that must preserve its monopolistic structures and accept the lesser evil to fight the enemies abroad but the communist security state is busy... reigning their giants in?<p>Probably a good time to quote Sheldon Wolin who thought of the American system as 'inverted totalitarian'<p><i>"Inverted totalitarianism reverses things. It is all politics all of the time but politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash"</i><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism</a>