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