Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe. Ian Shircore
most important of all – its ability to get away with sailing close to the wind on issues of privacy and confidentiality.
There have been real controversies over the intrusiveness of Street View and serious copyright issues around the Google Books Library Project. But Google still has a reservoir of goodwill.
REASONS TO BELIEVE
Cynics – and competitors – have long thought Google looks too good to be true. From the competitors’ point of view, any opportunity to tarnish the company’s golden reputation or call its motives into question is obviously welcome. But, other than people’s vague unease that Google simply knows too much, there have been remarkably few openings to exploit.
The accusation that Google is already ‘in bed with the CIA’ has been bubbling around for years. But it gained a lot of exposure and some credibility when a maverick ex-CIA agent, Robert Steele, began spelling it out to the world.
Steele is not everybody’s idea of the perfect witness, despite his genuine CIA background. He is an arch-conspiracist, enthusiastically joining all the dots to link the CIA and Google, the bankers and the US military/industrial complex, the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers in one big plot to profit from depressions, wars, terrorism and genocide. But he does have connections from several years in US Marine Corps Intelligence and as a clandestine services case officer for the CIA. Steele claims the CIA provided early-stage investment funding to help Google when it was starting up. ‘They’ve been together for quite a while,’ he says.
Steele believes it is ‘very, very wrong’ of Google to have the cosy relationship he alleges with his ex-employers at the CIA. ‘I think that Google has made a very important strategic mistake in dealing with the secret elements of the US government. I’m hoping they’ll work their way out of it and basically cut that relationship off.’
Others who see Google as deeply implicated in CIA activities point to the fact that it has supplied the search technology for Intellipedia, an ‘internal Wikipedia’ that pools the knowledge of 37,000 CIA agents and other US intelligence personnel.
They are quick to remind you that Google Earth springs from technology developed by Keyhole Inc, a start-up funded by the CIA through its In-Q-Tel venture capital firm and eventually acquired by Google in 2004. And they like to draw attention to the career of Rob Painter, Director of Technology Assessment at In-Q-Tel, who jumped straight across to spend the next four years in senior ‘federal technology’ roles at Google.
In July 2010, Wired magazine revealed that the spooks and the don’t-be-evilers were both putting investment money into a tiny 16-person artificial intelligence company in Massachusetts that monitors websites and social networks in real time and then links scraps of information together in an attempt to predict future events. Combining this kind of technology with Google’s huge networks and computing firepower, plus the fact that most internet users perform searches many times a day, presents obvious potential for serious intrusion, abuse and breaches of privacy.
Both Google and In-Q-Tel now have directors on the board of the software company, Recorded Future, which, according to its CEO, Christopher Ahlberg, brings new techniques to the art of sifting the mass of publicly available information. Smart ‘data mining’ enables it to plot the chatter of mentions on the internet to spot the online momentum around a given event.
‘The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,’ says Ahlberg. ‘We’re right there when it happens. We can actually assemble real-time dossiers on people.’
That kind of talk may be good for business for Recorded Future. It may make the CIA confident that its investment money is well spent. But it worries some observers a lot (see bit.ly/ciagoogle). And it does nothing to dispel the idea that the helpful idealists from Mountain View are starting to get very close to the sort of people we’ve learned we can’t trust and the sort of high-tech Big Brotherdom we should all be worried about.
EVIL IN THE AIR, TERROR ON THE STREETS
The vicious, murderous plan was finally exposed, in all its gruesome detail, less than six months before the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center.
Airliners were to be hijacked and other aircraft blown up. Bombs were to be planted in public places. Gunmen would mount assassination attempts on key individuals. Ordinary citizens were to feel the dread and anxiety of a terror campaign targeting several major cities, including the capital.
The victims who would be exposed to the threat of terror and suffer the results of bombings and violence were the people of America, specifically those in Miami and Washington DC.
But the conspirators behind the plans for this despicable terror campaign were their own leaders, America’s top generals.
Operation Northwoods was an extraordinary ‘false flag’ operation aimed at justifying an American invasion of Fidel Castro’s Communist Cuba. And it was dreamed up, planned out and signed off as a serious proposal in 1962 by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, under the chairmanship of General Lyman L Lemnitzer.
This breathtakingly insane plan also included bright ideas like faking the downing of a chartered airliner over Cuba, using an empty, pilotless, radio-controlled aircraft.
Real passengers – ‘a group of college students’ was suggested – would board a plane for Jamaica or Venezuela, painted and numbered to look identical to an airliner owned by a CIA front company. The disguised plane and the real one, already being flown by remote control, would rendezvous over the ocean. The disguised plane, carrying the students, would quietly sneak back to a remote airfield, unload its passengers and be repainted to resume its normal identity, while the radio-controlled aircraft flew on into Cuban airspace.
Once there, it would send out Mayday distress calls saying it was being attacked by Cuban fighters, before being detonated in a spectacular explosion, with the apparent loss of dozens of innocent lives.
There was also a scheme to sink an unmanned, radio-controlled US ship off the coast of Cuba and pretend that many sailors on board had been killed.
‘Conduct funerals for mock victims,’ the provisional plan suggested. A further embellishment carried the note: ‘Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.’
Many more bloodcurdling ideas were listed.
‘We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated),’ the generals proposed.
Credibility would be important, though, and some people might have to pay a price for that.
‘We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States, even to the extent of wounding,’ the top brass continued.
Not one of the military leaders seems to have had qualms about the proposals, which were forwarded as ‘a preliminary submission suitable for planning purposes’, with the recognition that individual projects would be considered on a case-by-case basis.
The declared aim was to put the US in the position of ‘suffering justifiable grievances’ in order to get world and United Nations opinion firmly behind military action.
‘These suggestions provide a basis for development of a single, integrated, time-phased plan to focus all efforts on the objective of justification for US military intervention in Cuba,’ the planning memorandum concluded.
Within a couple of days of the meeting at which the generals gave their approval, the proposal document was put before President John F Kennedy by his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara.
JFK’s reaction to the Northwoods plan was less than sympathetic. Like McNamara, he was appalled by the generals’