The below article by the editor-in-chief of the website WikiLeaks (
https://wikileaks.org ) Julian Assange concerns the entwinement of the Western (particularly the United States') misnomered "security" state (actually, terrorist and mass-death state) with the highest levels of the supposedly "private" internet sector:
Julian Assange, "Google and the NSA: Who's holding the 'shit-bag' now?", The Stringer, Aug. 24, 2013,
http://thestringer.com.au/google-and-the-nsa-whos-holding-the-shit-bag-now-4691 ,
https://wayback.archive.org/web/20141024204022/http://thestringer.com.au/google-and-the-nsa-whos-holding-the-shit-bag-now-4691 ,
http://www.webcitation.org/6TZUJpEsv ,
http://archive.today/VWQ94 ,
http://megalodon.jp/2014-1025-0541-53/thestringer.com.au/google-and-the-nsa-whos-holding-the-shit-bag-now-4691 .
The following is my response to Julian Assange's above article, posted by me to the above page on August 29, 2013:
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I thank Julian Assange for his present exposé.
Google has long been closely enmeshed with the US intelligence agencies. Dr. Rick Steinheiser in the Office of Research and Development at the CIA and Matt Cutts of the NSA, to name a few, are employed by Google in high-level positions. Google Earth and Google Maps software came from Keyhole, Inc., which was funded by the CIA via In-Q-Tel. As well, Google has been helping the Chinese government in censoring the internet in that country.
Government, whatever its de jure status, strongly tends toward oligarchy. The bigger the government the stronger this tendency will be, since then the stakes of exercising a disproportionate influence over government policy are raised--as big government has the ability to, e.g., make or break business fortunes via its policies and how it chooses to enforce them. That is true every bit as much for formal democracies. Consequently, under government, the strong inclination is a winnowing effect whereby those who rise to the top of the private sector and the government sector are those who are willing to "play along to get along", i.e., amenable to supporting the furtherance of the political establishment's power.
Such applies to media outlets and universities, as well; which, when combined with the government's own schooling and propaganda, inculcates the largest part of individuals' Weltanschauung from cradle to grave: the contents of that worldview being rather thoroughgoing, if muddleheaded and hodgepodge, forms of etatism, accompanying a high degree of political naïveté which such a position implies. Hence, the very intellectual tools which are prerequisite for sustaining an effective defense of liberty are absent most people.
So also due to that effect of winnowing, there tends to be a confluence of ideology at the top level, for accruement of power becomes its own purpose as the government moves toward its logical conclusion: the total state, and all the horrors that come with it. Distinctions such as Democrat and Republican, "liberal" and conservative, etc., are useful for providing hoi polloi with innocuous distractions, but they mean little at the top echelon.
Since all governments (including totalitarian dictatorships) ultimately can only exist due to the "consent" of its subjects (at least "consent" in the sense of resignation), it's understandable why the oligarchic nature of government would not be widely publicized by the political establishment within a formal democracy.
The process of tendency toward oligarchy I've outlined above is intrinsic to government due to the inherent perverse incentive structures which obtain under government (i.e., the internal logic of the system). Ultimately it doesn't matter how pure and good the intentions are of the people who set up the government, nor what type of government is nominally instituted: so long as the defining feature of government exists--that of a regional monopoly on ultimate control over the law--then this process cannot be avoided, since the inherent incentives of the system are such as to reward actors who bring about such outcomes (being that one who is able to inordinately influence the policies of a government can use that influence for his personal benefit and that of his friends, whereas liberty for society is a general benefit which accrues to no one in particular). All the good intentions in the world are no match against perverse incentives.
For those who would like a deeper examination into this most pressing of issue which I touch upon above, see Sec. 8.2.1 of my following article; pp. 63-65 of said section give a methodological analysis of government, with pp. 65-86 giving historical background on some of the more unseemly acts by states, and finally pp. 87-98 of that section giving a history on our present globalist plutocracy: James Redford, "The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything", Social Science Research Network, Sept. 10, 2012 (orig. pub. Dec. 19, 2011), doi:10.2139/ssrn.1974708 [
https://archive.org/details/ThePhysicsOfGodAndTheQuantumGravityTheoryOfEverything ,
http://theophysics.host56.com/Redford-Physics-of-God.pdf ,
http://sites.google.com/site/physicotheism/home/Redford-Physics-of-God.pdf ,
https://alphaomegapoint.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/redford-physics-of-god.pdf ]. This article concerns physicist and mathematician Prof. Frank J. Tipler's Omega Point cosmology and the Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything; however, it also analyzes the societal implications of said, particularly the implications of the exponential advancement of technology and hence also the coming radical life-extension technologies (i.e., transhumanism) in light of a world dominated by a callous oligarchy.