Al Jazeera America: Goodbye to All That Jazz

by DAVID ANDERSON

This month something unusual happened on TV for many New Yorkers and other Americans – a news channel went blank. After four years, Al Jazeera America has ceased operations.

So an obscure foreign TV network goes dark. So what? The problem here is it leaves the US TV cable viewer almost without a serious international network. At all.  A news cruise around the dial of most cable operators will leave the viewers with a surprisingly small number of news channels.

One can watch cable giants such as CNN or Fox, MSNBC and the like, and be left with the impression that almost nothing happens beyond the borders of the United States.

They have occasional foreign coverage of big bleeding stories, anything about terrorism, and a small amount of international economic news. Cable news here is parochial at best.

Fox and CNN can hardly be called serious news, nor can they ever be accused of being anything except incredibly America centered and infested with two generally extreme and cartoonish points of view; a hard right fairytale on Mr. Murdoc’s side, and CNN’s ceaseless time filing Blitzeresque droning.

The picture is just as awful when it comes to broadcast; a sample of any of the large networks’ evening or morning fare gives the viewer a feeling they are watching TV which is pitched to the intellectual and educational level of a ten year old.

The decline of American  news bureaus outside the US over the past 25 years is a symptom and a cause of American TV news organizations’ ever decreasing geographical range and interest.

This lack of access, and perhaps the horrible possibility that Americans have been trained over the last generation to value a childish celebrity obsessed junk culture of morons, spelled lights out for Al Jazeera.

What’s left for cable subscribers is PBS and foreign news channels with an international bent like the BBC, and increasingly (though increasingly slowly) other Al Jazeera-like foreign government networks such as CCTV from China, NHK from Japan (often joked as being Japan’s BBC) in English, and the hilariously slanted Kremlin mouthpiece RTT.   RTT is what professors of journalism could show their students as an example of utterly biased “reportage”.

Al Jazeera America, a subsidiary of Al Jazeera Media (Qatar) bought Canadian Current TV and combined was the closest thing we had to a serious in depth American international news channel. They have 50 (but no doubt a decreasing number of) non US news bureaus, a large budget, and a wealth of international talent. Their award winning coverage has earned various accolades within their community and an impressive number of American, Australian, British presenters and writers have defected, if you will, to Al Jazeera. They attracted viewers and  journalists who care for more than “celebrities and shouting” – as Al Jazeera themselves put it in reference to US TV infotainment.

The closing of nearly all overseas news bureaus by American media companies is in part due to changed realities of journalism and modern mass communications, but this trend of reduced interest in overseas events  was established by the mid 1990s, well before the internet was a force in journalism.

The main reasons for Al Jazeera America’s death are firstly the dramatically lowered price of oil which effects all of the owner’s -the Qatari government – finances. There has been an across the board cut for everything the petrocarbon rich Gulf Arab country supports. Additionally, Al Jazeera used to be a very unpopular name in the United States with citizens as well as cable companies (in Time Warner’s case) hungry to use the bandwidth in favor of less controversial and intellectual stations. It required a grass roots effort in NYC to even have Time Warner Cable put it on its dial at all.

As a brand, the network has come a long way since before the Gulf War II when Donald Rumsfeld toyed with the idea of actually bombing their office in Afghanistan – mainly in response to their airing of Bin Laden’s tapes. But that is what it is remembered for in the American media sphere and it was often mocked by Fox as being a nest of Islamic terrorism and apologists.  Its general liberal bent has earned it further ire from the big cable and broadcasting establishment.

Being Qatari government funded they are not beholden to advertisers – as their unimpressive advertising suggested. Ads didn’t pay the bills and their advertisers were like those of late night infomericals;- cheap face creams, personal injury attorneys, and late night drunk dial impulse purchases.

Its not the end of the world – there’s still Al Jazera International in its various online forms, but not on our TV screens with American perspectives and talent, and not with a full network in New York with other US branches to provide its 24 hour a day news, analysis, documentaries and specials. Devotees can and will access it online, just as many Americans did before Al J America was on our TVs.

But it is sad fate for the hopeful standard bearer in grown up international news, and is symptomatic of a more isolated, parochial, dumbed down America.

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David Anderson has a B.A. (Hon.) in Middle East politics from Melbourne University and did post graduate work at Georgetown University. He grew up in Australia and is a retired attorney in New York City.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/29/al-jazeera-america-goodbye-to-all-that-jazz/

New McCarthyism: Is London's 'anti-Semitic' scandal a move against Jeremy Corbyn?

John Wight has written for newspapers and websites across the world, including the Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and Foreign Policy Journal. He is also a regular commentator on RT and BBC Radio. He wrote a memoir of the five years he spent in Hollywood, where he worked in the movie industry prior to becoming a full time activist and organizer with the US antiwar movement post-9/11. The book is titled Dreams That Die and is published by Zero Books. John is currently working on a book exploring the role of the West in the Arab Spring. You can follow him on Twitter @JohnWight1

An extraordinary political crisis has erupted in the UK over the alleged prevalence of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party. Most recently, it has resulted in the suspension of a Labour MP along with the party’s former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone.

Anti-Semitism by its very nature is a sensitive issue. You only have to spend five minutes trawling the internet to understand why. All manner of outlandish and racist conspiracy theories exist concerning the Jewish people – i.e. Holocaust denial; Jewish bankers control the global economy; the existence of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world; Jewish control the Western media. Some are even more outlandish than those, dredged up from a swamp of anti-Jewish bigotry that clearly retains a following among an alarmingly sizeable constituency of knuckle-dragging racists who inhabit our world.

However, in factoring this it is also undeniable that a concerted attempt is being made throughout the West to delegitimize any criticism of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian people. Those supporters of Israel, it should be stressed, are both Jewish and non-Jewish. They share in common a commitment to supporting Israel and, in so doing, granting it an exceptionalism that no other state is granted when it comes to upholding international law and the universality of human rights, as enshrined in the UN Charter of 1945.

This is why, despite the very real existence of anti-Semitism and the obligation to confront it whenever it arises, the heart of the matter driving this issue in this context is not anti-Semitism but apartheid – namely, the system of apartheid that underpins Israel and its subjugation of the Palestinian people and their human rights and right to self-determination. By way of a reminder we are talking about the illegal military occupation of the West Bank, the existence and expansion of illegal Jewish settlements across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the ongoing siege of Gaza; the latter involving the collective punishment of its 1.6 million inhabitants, along with periodic military assaults and the slaughter of men, women, and children.

Any one of the aforementioned would result in an uproar of condemnation from the so-called international community, with calls for sanctions and political isolation to be applied. The fact that there are multiple grounds for Israel to be so condemned and yet it is not and, moreover, receives unparalleled political, geopolitical, and economic support from Western governments, constitutes a lamentable case of hypocrisy and double standards.

What the proponents of the new McCarthyism we are witnessing emerge when it comes to criticizing Israel over its treatment of the Palestinians are responding to are twofold: 1. The popularity of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and campaign to return the Labour Party to its founding values of social and economic justice for the many, rather than ever-increasing wealth and power for the few. 2. Growing support for the international campaign of BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) against Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Read more

Tories seize on Zionism comments, unrepentant Livingstone sets out to foil newts

On the first of those points, since being elected leader of the Labour Party last year, Jeremy Corbyn has been placed under siege by the country’s political and media establishment. This has seen him subjected to an unparalleled media smear campaign in which he has been depicted as a ‘terrorist sympathizer, ‘unpatriotic,’ someone who hates ‘Western values’, and so on. His opponents include many within the very Labour Party he currently leads, men and women who remain attached to the Labour Party once led by Tony Blair, who turned it from a party of the millions – of ordinary working people – into a party of the millionaires and big business. They are determined to see the end of Corbyn’s leadership and the Labour Party returned to its ‘rightful owners’.

When it comes to BDS, meanwhile, this is a campaign that draws inspiration from the international boycott campaign that played a key role both in highlighting and ending apartheid in South Africa. In fact, none other than South Africa’s Desmond Tutu, an international renowned champion of that struggle, has stated that the treatment the Palestinians are suffering at the hands of Israel is worse than what black South Africans suffered during the apartheid years in South Africa.

In trying to resist the growing impact of BDS on Israel’s ability to continue to deny the Palestinians justice, it is in the interests of its supporters in the UK and elsewhere to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. It is also in their interests to conflate Zionism with Judaism. This is being done in a transparent attempt to muddy the waters and deter people from raising their voice or raising their voice too loudly at least, when it comes to standing in solidarity with a people whose only crime is that they dare to exist on land coveted by this settler colonial state.

This is particularly egregious when you consider that the vast majority of pro-Palestinian activists and campaigners are anti-racists to the core of their being, people acting in the best and most noble traditions of human solidarity across religious, national, and ethnic lines. It is precisely this international solidarity that Israel and its supporters fear most, for it confronts the assertion that Israel stands as a beacon of civilization and progress whose existence is under threat. This is false. The only people whose existence is under threat when it comes to this question is the Palestinians. In this regard, Israel’s Jewish character is not the issue, its apartheid character is. And a world in which apartheid is allowed to exist is not a world worth living in.

Read more

Israel connects BDS with terrorism while cracking down on German banks

Finally, on Ken Livingstone specifically, we are talking about a politician who has spent his entire life raising his voice against and fighting racism. In fact, it would be impossible to identify a politician in the UK who has done more to stand up for the rights of minorities. It is a record that has earned him the enmity of a significant section of the political class and right wing media establishment. To see him labeled anti-Semitic is an absolute travesty of justice, as is his resulting suspension from the Labour Party he has served so loyally and with great distinction over four decades.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/341478-new-mccarthyism-corbyn-antisemitism/

‘Stay away from Russian borders or keep transponders on’: Russian MoD on US spy planes in Baltics

Russian Defense Ministry suggests US surveillance planes should either keep their distance from Russian borders while performing flights over the Baltic Sea, or at least keep aerial transponders switched on for identification.

“There are two solutions for the US Air Force [operating in the Baltic Sea]: either do not fly near our borders, or turn on transponders for automatic identification by our radars,” Defense Ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov said in an official statement on Saturday.

Read more

Pentagon claims Russian jet fighter barrel rolled within 25 feet of US reconnaissance plane

The statement comes after a Russian fighter jet intercepted a US surveillance plane, which was spotted in international airspace above the Baltic Sea on Friday with the transponder switched off.

“The RC-135U reconnaissance plane is frequently trying to sneak up to the Russian border with the transponder off. Our anti-aircraft defense has to order our fighters off the ground simply to visually identify the type of aircraft and its ID number,” Konashenkov explained.

Read more

‘Erratic & aggressive’: Pentagon protests Russian interception of US spy plane

A Russian Sukhoi Su-27 performed a barrel roll within 25 feet from the US plane, with the Pentagon describing the move as “dangerous” and “unprofessional.”

“We are already starting to get used to insults coming from the Pentagon regarding the alleged “unprofessional” maneuvers when our fighters intercept the US spy planes near Russian borders.

Yet, all flights of Russian aircraft are held in accordance with international regulations on the use of airspace,” Konashenkov states, adding that another reconnaissance aircraft  Boeing OC-135B – has landed in Ulan-Ude earlier on Saturday under an international “Treaty on Open Skies,”  and “no one raised the fighters to identify it.”

Fifteen days prior to this latest incident, on April 14, another Su-27 fighter jet conducted a barrel roll over another US reconnaissance plane, and between April 11 and 12, the USS Donald Cook ship was flown over by Su-24 fighter jets, with the Pentagon releasing footage.

The deputy head of Russia’s Upper House committee for defense and security Frants Klintsevich commented on the frenzy over the latest incidents in Baltic airspace, saying the fizzbuzz has a clear goal – to put a smokescreen for NATO plans to deploy additional troops in Eastern Europe.

READ MORE: NATO to send 4,000 troops to border with Russia - report

“It is now completely clear why the United States needed a hype around the interception of the US spy plane over the Baltic Sea and the incident with the destroyer Donald Cook.

It was to prepare the information space for deploying four additional NATO battalions to the Baltic region […] On the tip from US, the North Atlantic alliance continues its strategy of encircling Russia,” Klintsevich said, as quoted by his press service. He also noted that the turmoil began immediately after the latest Russia-NATO Council meeting, throwing into question the expediency of such gatherings.

Moscow has been unhappy with the NATO military buildup on Russia’s borders for some time now, with Russia’s envoy to NATO Aleksandr Grushko stating that Moscow would definitely compensate militarily for an “absolutely unjustified military presence.”

According to the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, the permanent presence of large NATO formations at the Russian border is banned. Yet some voices in Brussels are saying that since the NATO troops stationed next to Russia are going to rotate, this kind of military buildup cannot be regarded as a permanent presence.

https://www.rt.com/news/341495-russian-borders-defense-baltics/

US spy court approved all 1,457 govt surveillance orders in 2015 - report

A secretive court that authorizes applications made by the US government for approval of electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes didn’t deny a single government request in 2015, according to a Justice Department document.

The US Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court (FISC or the FISA Court) received 1,457 requests last year on behalf of the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for authority to intercept communications, including emails and phone calls, Reuters reported, citing a Justice Department memo, which was sent to leaders of relevant congressional committees on Friday.

In 2014, the court, established by the US Congress in 1978, reportedly received 1,379 applications and rejected none.

Since its creation, the court has rejected 11 applications and approved 33,942, modifying 504 applications. Civil liberties advocates have repeatedly accused FISC of acting as a "rubber stamp" for government surveillance operations. Government officials argued that the Justice Department is careful about its applications and that sometimes orders are modified substantially by the court. FISC is composed of eleven federal district court judges who are designated by the Chief Justice of the US.

Read more

‘Terrorism investigation’ Court lets NSA collect telephone records data

The court modified 80 applications in 2015, a huge spike from the 19 modifications made in 2014, Reuters reported.

The memo also stated that 48,642 National Security Letter (NSL) requests were made in 2015 by the FBI. NSL is a letter request for information from a third party that is issued by the FBI or by other government agencies with authority to conduct national security investigations. The FBI says it can obtain the following transactional records: subscriber information; toll billing records; internet service provider (ISP) login records; electronic communication transaction records; financial records; money transfers; credit records, and other consumer identifying information. 

The majority of NSL requests made in 2015 (31,863) sought information on foreigners, regarding a total of 2,053 individuals, the memo stated, according to Reuters.

The FBI made 9,418 requests for national security letters in 2015 for information about US citizens and legal immigrants, regarding a total of 3,746 individuals.

The FBI also made 7,361 NSL requests for only "subscriber information," typically names, addresses and billing records of Americans and foreigners, regarding 3,347 different people.

In addition, the US government made 142 applications to the surveillance court for access to business records, which did not deny any of those requests, the memo said.

https://www.rt.com/usa/341486-fisc-court-surveillance-orders/

U.S. Chamber Works Behind the Scenes to Gut Whistleblower Protections

JESSICA MASON

Jessica Mason is a CMD researcher. She has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Efforts to gut the federal False Claims Act backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce got a hearing on Capitol Hill Thursday. The federal push builds on previous back-door Chamber efforts through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to discourage states from pursuing fraud claims.

The False Claims Act (FCA) allows the government to recover from businesses that defraud government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and protects whistleblowers who report suspected fraud on government contracts. According to the Department of Justice, cases brought under the FCA resulted in the recovery of $42 billion from 1987-2013, making it an important legal tool for deterring fraud and protecting public funds.

Ensuring that contractors don't defraud the government is clearly in the public interest. Yet for a number of years, the Chamber has been targeting the FCA through its lobbying efforts and its Institute for Legal Reform, which advocates policy changes that would reduce financial penalties on many companies and make it harder for whistleblowers to report alleged misconduct.

Three of the four scheduled speakers at Thursday's hearing on "Oversight of the False Claims Act," held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice, called for the FCA to be overhauled; two have clear ties to the U.S. Chamber.

Larry D. Thompson of the University of Georgia School of Law advocated for "greater creativity" in ethics oversight—offering the U.S. Chamber's proposal as an exemplar.

Thompson served as Deputy Attorney General under President George W. Bush and was previously a member of the U.S. Chamber's Board of Directors.

Jonathan Diesenhaus, a lawyer with Hogan Lovells US LLP, claimed that the qui tam statute gives too much power to whistleblowers "with less than honorable intentions." Diesenhaus wrote a report on state qui tam statutes and FCAs for the Chamber's ILR, and presented on potential FCA "reforms" at an Institute for Legal Reform summit in 2013.

U.S. Chamber Blocks State Anti-Fraud Efforts through ALEC

This won't be the first time the U.S. Chamber has gotten seemingly independent sources to mouth its talking points.

The Chamber has also worked through ALEC to pressure state lawmakers against strengthening state-level false claims laws, as shown in documents uncovered by Common Cause and reported on by The New York Times.

In 2012, a U.S. Chamber lawyer was the co-chair of ALEC's Civil Justice Task Force, along with Ohio state legislator Bill Seitz. After consulting with the Chamber's representative about a proposed False Claims Act to protect whistleblowers in Ohio, Seitz told The New York Times, "he learned that the bill, as originally written, would have been 'a trial lawyer’s bonanza.'" Seitz then began drafting an ALEC-friendly model and sent a warning to a fellow state legislator about the push to increase false claims litigation.

"While this is understandable, as states are broke, the considered advice from our friends at ALEC was that such legislation is not well taken and should not be approved," Seitz wrote.

Seitz's efforts on the Chamber's behalf did not go unnoticed. He received the Institute for Legal Reform's "State Legislative Achievement Award" the following year.

ALEC Exposed

Lobbying

News

- See more at: http://prwatch.org/news/2016/04/13098/us-chamber-works-behind-scenes-gut-whistleblower-protections#sthash.Vkin2N7S.dpuf

'Unacceptable': Kunduz Survivors Lambaste Pentagon Claim of No War Crime

'They should be treated as murders'

by

Andrea Germanos, staff writer

"Unacceptable."

That's the reaction from 27-year old Hamdullah to the Pentagon's   announcement Friday that the U.S. military's deadly airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan did not amount to a war crime. 

His uncle was among the 42 people killed in the October 3, 2015 strike.

"This was a deliberate bombardment by the American forces, and we are not satisfied that they have said this was not a war crime," Hamdullah told Agence France-Presse. Those responsible, he said, "should be publicly put on trial."

Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French acronym, MSF, along with other human rights groups criticized the U.S. military's assessment of the strike, and the fact that 16 individuals involved face no criminal charges for their roles in the attack.

"The threshold that must be crossed for this deadly incident to amount to a grave breach of international humanitarian law is not whether it was intentional or not," said Meinie Nicolai, MSF President, in reference to CENTCOM head General Joseph Votel's statement that it was not a war crime because it was not intentional. Donna McKay, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, said that the mere administrative punishments represent "an affront to the families of the more than 40 men, women, and children who died that night, punished merely for being in a hospital, a supposed safe haven in a time of war."

Abdul Samad,who lost his nephew in the bombardment, told Stars and Stripes, "Right now, they are 100 percent murders and they should be treated as murders in their own country ... and we want the United States to implement the law over them as murders."

Twenty-four year old Zahidullah, whose cousin was killed in the strike, told AFP the military's assessment that it wasn't a war crime was "a joke" and "unacceptable."

A press statement from MSF Friday referred to the punishment of the personnel—whichincluded "suspension and removal from command, letters of reprimand, formal counseling and extensive retraining"—as "out of proportion to the destruction of a protected medical facility, the deaths of 42 people, the wounding of dozens of others, and the total loss of vital medical services to hundreds of thousands of people."

MSF continues to call for an independent and impartial investigation into the Kunduz strike.

Ahead of a UN Security Council vote May 3, 2016 on a resolution meant to prevent future strikes on hospitals, healthcare workers, and patients, the medical humanitarian organization is hoping to strengthen the message, and is encouraging people to convey support on Facebook and Twitter with hashtag #NotATarget, and to share the video below:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

http://prwatch.org/news/2016/04/13098/us-chamber-works-behind-scenes-gut-whistleblower-protections

The Lingering Danger of Google & Facebook

Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Column: Politics

Region: USA in the World

During the 2011 Arab Spring, it was clear to those who bothered to look, that the US State Department and the various arms of soft power attached to it were directly responsible for what was otherwise initially passed off as a spontaneous, region-wide uprising.

Eventually, what was dismissed as “conspiracy theory” regarding the US-backed nature of the uprising, was finally admitted to by the New York Times in an April 2011 article titled, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” which admitted that:

A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington, according to interviews in recent weeks and American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.

 The New York Times would go on to admit direct ties between the above-mentioned organizations and both the US Congress and the US State Department.

The article would also admit:

Some Egyptian youth leaders attended a 2008 technology meeting in New York, where they were taught to use social networking and mobile technologies to promote democracy. Among those sponsoring the meeting were Facebook, Google, MTV, Columbia Law School and the State Department.

The 2008 meeting wasn’t the only one. And, as it would turn out, Facebook and Google’s role in preparing the ground for the Arab Spring, quite literally years before the “spontaneous” protests erupted, was much more complicated than merely being sponsors of a single event in New York.

Hillary Clinton was serving as US Secretary of State both during and in the lead up to the Arab Spring. She even attended via teleconference one of these “technology meetings” briefly mentioned by the New York Times.

Also attending the meetings were actually staff from the US State Department and various staff from both Google and Facebook. Also in attendance were members of the US media. In other words, the event was not sponsored by the US government and these two tech-giants, it was organized and conducted by them as well. Their event program (PDF) makes this abundantly clear.

The purpose was clearly to create a unified network combining the US State Department’s direction, the tech-giant’s technical capabilities, and influence of the US media together to overwhelm the information space when finally the time came for the Arab Spring to unfold. And overwhelm it did. The governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya fell, with violence and even war breaking out in the latter three, while Syria to this day remains engulfed in violence that began in the wake of the 2011 operation.

More recently, e-mails leaked from then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reveal further details on just how close the tech-giants work with the government. Some could even say they are an extension of the government.

A CBS article titled, “Clinton Emails Show State Department’s Close Relationship With Google,” reveled that:

The latest release of emails sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server reveals a close relationship between Google and the State Department. 

A 2012 email recently uploaded onto Wikileaks’ searchable archive came from Google Ideas director Jared Cohen, who formerly worked as an advisor to Secretary Clinton, indicates that Google wanted to help bolster support for those who defected from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military. 

It also showed that before launching a “defection tracker” Cohen wanted the State Department to weigh in on the idea and potentially provide feedback.

Not only does the leak expose what appears to be a revolving door between the tech-giant and the US State Department, but it exposes the fact that regardless of who is working where, Google was working in tandem with the State Department. Cohen was actually listed in the above cited event program as Policy Planning Staff of the Office of the Secretary of State meaning that before moving to Google he was working with Google to undermine various foreign governments, and continued to do so after he moved from government to the private sector.

Just Warming Up 

Google and Facebook are still very much engaged in information warfare for the US government and the special interests that it serves. Likewise, the US State Department is still very much in the business of subverting foreign nations by recruiting, training, equipping and directing collaborators from targeted nations.

Facebook, for example, has expressed plans to get everyone on the planet on the Internet. The seemingly humanitarian mission is in all actuality an attempt to get the world on Facebook, which through its algorithms and ability to censor, ban and delete accounts at will, would virtually control what the world saw and didn’t see.

More forward-thinking states like Russia and China have noted this reality of the 21st century battlefield and have responded by creating their own domestic versions of Google and Facebook. An arms race of sorts has begun between these competing services both in terms of reach and capabilities for everything from artificial intelligence deep learning algorithms to the ability to control and influence the flow of information over and within borders.

Tech-centric US-funded nongovernmental organizations have begun to spring up alongside their traditional US-funded collaborators in nations around the world, specializing in doing many of the sort of workshops initially conducted by the US State Department, Google and Facebook before the Arab Spring. For nations either not aware of this or incapable of responding to this threat, it could be comparable to a new weapon of war taking to the battlefield one has no defense to or anything which which to strike back with.

This threat will only increase, with the “information war” becoming more and more literal as advances are made in information technology. The US is openly using information technology to augment its hegmonic ambitions around the world, with e-mail leaks confirming what many have already suspected all along. What is more worrisome is the collaborations and technologies being used now that are not being disclosed or “leaked.”

For nations around the world, raising literacy in terms of information technology and the threat it poses can help inoculate their populations from the overwhelming nature of foreign-backed operations like the Arab Spring. By creating and cultivating a domestic information technology sector and recruiting talent before the US does, creating competitive services like Russia’s VK and China’s Baidu not only serves as a means of improving and diversifying one’s economy, but can also serve as an important pillar of national security in the 21st century.

http://journal-neo.org/2016/04/30/the-lingering-danger-of-google-facebook/
http://journal-neo.org/2016/04/30/the-lingering-danger-of-google-facebook/