The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’ by Julian Assange

Photo “THE New Digital Age” is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of , and Mr. Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas. The authors met in occupied Baghdad in 2009, when the book was conceived. The book proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world’s people and nations into likenesses of the world’s dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not. “The New Digital Age” is, beyond anything else, an attempt by Google to position itself as America’s geopolitical visionary — the one company that can answer the question “Where should America go?”

This startup has now raised $1.1 billion - Quartz Silicon Valley venture capitalists like to crow that it’s now cheaper than ever to establish a startup company. While that may be true for internet firms, the amount of money required to fund a Silicon Valley green tech startup can be mind-boggling. Case in point is fuel cell maker Bloom Energy, which Fortune today reported had taken its total raised to $1.1 billion, thanks to a new $130 million round. The company is one of Silicon Valley VCs’ last big bets on green tech, with funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and other marquee venture players. None of those firms, however, appeared have to participated in the latest round. One of the explanations for the mammoth $1.1 billion funding is that Bloom has been around since 2001. As I wrote in The New York Times: In contrast to the usual Silicon Valley practice of announcing a coming product, Bloom spent nearly a decade developing its solid-oxide fuel cell technology while saying nary a word.

Ryan Lizza: Why Won’t Obama Rein in the N.S.A.? On March 12, 2013, James R. Clapper appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to discuss the threats facing America. Clapper, who is seventy-two, is a retired Air Force general and Barack Obama’s director of National Intelligence, in charge of overseeing the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and fourteen other U.S. spy agencies. Clapper is bald, with a gray goatee and rimless spectacles, and his affect is intimidatingly bureaucratic. The fifteen-member Intelligence Committee was created in the nineteen-seventies, after a series of investigations revealed that the N.S.A. and the C.I.A. had, for years, been illegally spying on Americans. The panel’s mission is to conduct “vigilant legislative oversight” of the intelligence community, but more often it treats senior intelligence officials like matinée idols. Toward the end of the hearing, Feinstein turned to Senator Ron Wyden, of Oregon, also a Democrat, who had a final question. “It does not?”

The mysterious story of the battery startup that promised GM a 200-mile electric car - Quartz At the end of November 2012, Atul Kapadia and Sujeet Kumar hosted the staff of their startup company for a holiday lunch of Mexican food at a Palo Alto, California restaurant. For days, the pair—the CEO and CTO, respectively, of a lithium-ion battery company called Envia Systems—had awaited an email from General Motors. It was to contain a deal rare to an industry newcomer—a contract worth tens and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars to provide the electric central nervous system for two showcase GM models including the next-generation Chevy Volt. But the talking had gone on so long and with such uncertainty that neither man had even told Envia’s staff scientists of the impending deal. Kapadia’s cell phone rang as he drove back from the holiday party. Back at Envia, situated across the bay in the industrial city of Newark, company employees gathered in the conference room for a regularly scheduled office meeting. “Just to let you know this is not my achievement. Breaking into GM

WCITLeaks.org - Bringing transparency to the ITU. Daring Fireball