Google dystopia. All-seeing Google lacks transparency. Oakland emails give another glimpse into the Google-Military-Surveillance Complex. By Yasha Levine On March 7, 2014 OAKLAND—On February 18, several hundred privacy, labor, civil rights activists and Black Bloc anarchists packed Oakland’s city hall.
They were there to protest the construction of a citywide surveillance center that would turn a firehouse in downtown Oakland into a high-tech intelligence hub straight outta Mission Impossible. It was a rowdy crowd, and there was a heavy police presence. Some people carried “State Surveillance No!” Signs. During the meeting, city officials argued that the DAC would help police deal with Oakland’s violent crime and invoked 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina, saying that a streamlined intelligence system would help protect residents in the event of natural disaster or terrorist attack. Their explanation was met with hisses, boos, outbursts and constant interruption from the packed gallery, and the city council struggled to retain order, repeatedly threatening to clear the room. Are Governor Malloy’s new Google Chromebooks data mining our kids? Feb 15.
Why I Disrupted the Wisdom 2.0 Conference. The invisibility of the crisis in San Francisco right now is reminiscent of that of the AIDS epidemic.
To quote from Vito Russo, a founder of the AIDS activist group ACT UP, film historian, and rabble rouser, it’s “like living through a war which is happening only for those people who happen to be in the trenches.” He lived in this city when it was a haven for political radicals, queer people, artists, and immigrants, when it was America’s great city of sanctuary. “You look around and you discover that you’ve lost more of your friends, but nobody else notices,” he said. “It isn’t happening to them.” People are not dying, but they’re disappearing every day, from all over the city. I came to San Francisco like generations of people before me because I wanted to find the freedom to live out my ideals. The pace of displacement in the city’s Mission District makes whole sections of the neighborhood unrecognizable to people who lived there just a year before. Protesters crash Google talk on corporate mindfulness at Wisdom 2.0 conference.
On Saturday morning at the Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Karen May, vice president for "people development" at Google, was taken by surprise.
Not long after she opened a panel discussion dubbed "3 Steps to Build Corporate Mindfulness the Google Way," protesters stormed the stage, unfurling a banner that read, "Eviction Free San Francisco. " Lately, Bay Area activists have been blaming Google and other tech giants (and their allies in government) for displacing residents, and the annual gathering of Silicon Valley's mindful elite presented them with the perfect opportunity for protest. The crowd at first applauded ("Was this some kind of new Google performance art? "), but they soon caught on. Wisdom 2.0 cut the live feed and deleted the interruption from their video archive. Google plans move into San Francisco's Mission District. SAN FRANCISCO -- There goes the neighborhood.
First came the Google bus. Now the Google building. The Mission District -- which used to be a largely Latino working-class neighborhood -- has been ground zero for growing tensions over tech-driven gentrification in San Francisco.... Google: Do Yourself a Favor and Just Come Clean Already. By Sarah Lacy On January 23, 2012 The issue over whether Google is giving preferential treatment to its own products is back in the news, and this time the evidence is pretty damning.
I’m not sure how Google will tap dance around it. (See Trevor’s reporting about another Google+ tapdance here.) Hopefully, they won’t even try. They’ll just come clean and admit the rules have changed. The new shoe that’s dropped: Engineers from Facebook, MySpace and Twitter created a “Don’t be evil” toolbar that allows users to see what results would have been before Google started the Search Plus Your World product as the default for users. Every reporter loves a big nerd fight– and make no mistake, this is one. But ultimately, none of that matters. The Techtopus: How Silicon Valley’s most celebrated CEOs conspired to drive down 100,000 tech engineers’ wages.
By Mark Ames On January 23, 2014 In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple’s Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google’s Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators.
On February 27, 2005, Bill Campbell, a member of Apple’s board of directors and senior advisor to Google, emailed Jobs to confirm that Eric Schmidt “got directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple.” Later that year, Schmidt instructed his Sr VP for Business Operation Shona Brown to keep the pact a secret and only share information “verbally, since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?” These secret conversations and agreements between some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley were first exposed in a Department of Justice antitrust investigation launched by the Obama Administration in 2010.