Tag: cia

Google and the CIA: How Independent Are Multinational Giants?

How independent are the largest corporations in the world? It is often portrayed that companies such as Google are simply private corporations that have very few connections to the establishment. Yet, as It turns out, there are endless connections between many corporate giants and the military-intelligence complex.

We got a glimpse into this relationship back in 2016, when the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, who, at the time, was Executive Chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc, became the head of a new innovation board at the Pentagon. Later that year, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, joined the same board at the Pentagon.

Google and DARPA

The ties between Google and US government agencies run much deeper than this, however. The relationship started even before the tech company was founded in the late 1990s. In 1994, the US government launched the Digital Library Initiative (DLI). This initiative awarded research grants to various university projects, mostly those who focused on developments in the early and emerging internet, with the overarching aim of this initiative being the creation of a global digital library.

Multiple organizations were involved in selecting projects for DLI funds. Three of these organizations were the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is the arm of the US Department of Defense that funds and develops emerging technologies.

Keep reading

Modern art was CIA ‘weapon’

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art – including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko – as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince – except that it acted secretly – the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art – President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: “If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot.” As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

Keep reading