November, 13 2014, 08:15am EDT
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Google's Rapidly Expanding Political Activity and Information Collection Systems Present Cause for Concern
Public Citizen Report Details Google’s Ambitious Technological Expansions and Its Newfound Status as One of the Most Politically Active Companies in the U.S.
WASHINGTON
Google is so rapidly expanding both its information-collecting capabilities and its political clout that it could become too powerful to be held accountable, a new Public Citizen report finds.
"Mission Creep-y: Google Is Quietly Becoming One of the Nation's Most Powerful Political Forces While Expanding Its Information-Collection Empire" looks at the ways Google is accruing power both in terms of the information it collects about the public and the sway it has over federal and state governments, as well as civil society.
Privacy experts say only the National Security Agency (NSA) rivals Google in terms of information gathering, and a recent survey showed that Americans are more concerned about companies like Google than the NSA. But Public Citizen documents that Google has not always warned the public before collecting or combining users' information in new ways - and some of its collection practices have pushed the boundaries of the law. This is cause for concern as Google expands into new technological developments and acquisitions that collect information beyond what people do on the Internet.
In addition, the company is amassing greater political power than ever. Having recently moved its influence operation into new Washington, D.C., offices as large as the White House, Google has become one of the most politically active companies in the U.S.:
- Over the first three quarters of 2014, Google ranked first among all corporations in lobbying spending, according to OpenSecrets.org, and is on pace to spend $18.2 million on federal lobbying this year. In fact, it has spent $1 million more on lobbying than PhRMA, the powerful trade association of the pharmaceutical industry.
- Since 2012, no company has spent more money on federal lobbying than Google.
- Of 102 lobbyists the company has hired or retained in 2014, 81 previously held government jobs. Meanwhile, a steady stream of Google employees has been appointed to high-ranking government jobs - an indication of the company's growing influence in national affairs.
- Google's political action committee (PAC) spent $1.61 million this year, according to Federal Election Commission records. That surpasses, for the first time, PAC expenditures by Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs.
- Google funds about 140 trade associations and other nonprofits across the ideological spectrum - including some working in issue areas relevant to Google's practices on privacy, political spending, antitrust and more.
- Google has come under scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission on several occasions, including racking up the commission's largest civil penalty ever, $22.5 million, in a settlement over Google bypassing Safari browser settings to track users.
"Google is becoming exponentially more powerful in federal and state governments. At the same time, it's pushing boundaries in technology, and it has shown that it can't always be trusted to do the right thing with people's information," said Sam Jewler, author of the report and communications officer for Public Citizen's U.S. Chamber Watch. "When we see such massive influence, it raises the question, will regulators and lawmakers be reluctant to rein in Google?"
"While Google provides many popular and useful services to the world, its information-collection business model and its history of questionable practices indicate that, if left to its own devices, it may not always do what's best for the public."
Meanwhile, Google is expanding to amass new forms of information about all of us. While its market-leading search, Gmail and Android smart phone operating systems are well-known conduits through which Google collects information, the company is ambitiously expanding its technologies into the skies, onto people's bodies and into homes through numerous new ventures. Along with its ongoing development of potentially revolutionary new technologies such as Google Glass and self-driving cars, Google spent more money on acquisitions than Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Yahoo! - combined - in 2012 and 2013. Meanwhile, Google has steadily adopted more permissive policies about collecting information about its customers, the report shows.
In the report, Public Citizen describes how Google's mass collection of information makes it a treasure trove for agencies like the NSA - to which it is legally bound to comply with most information requests - and to hackers and rogue employees.
Some of the new technologies Google has acquired include Skybox, which owns satellites that capture high-definition images and video around the planet multiple times per day; Nest and Dropcam, home devices that monitor things like temperature, energy usage, proximity of the owner to the house, and take video in the home; and Emu, which could be used to monitor and advertise in online chats and text messages.
"Google has essentially responded to concerns about its practices by saying 'just trust us,'" said Taylor Lincoln, research director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch division and editor of the report. "But Google is gaining so much power that regulators may find it difficult to act if it turns out that the public's trust has been misplaced."
A recent report by the Center for Political Accountability on the transparency of companies' political spending showed Google ranked as average among all companies, lagging behind some of its biggest technology sector peers. The company has faced calls from shareholders for it to be more transparent. It also does not meet transparency standards set by technology companies like Microsoft, such as disclosing how much money it gives to third-party groups such as the 140 nonprofits and trade associations it supports, using transparent corporate oversight to make political spending decisions, or disclosing information about its state lobbying spending.
Google recently withdrew from the American Legislative Exchange Council (better known by its acronym ALEC) over differences on climate change. But Google continues to provide unknown amounts of funding to major dark money groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which also diverges from Google on energy issues.
See Public Citizen's petition calling on Google to leave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people - not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country.
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The Gaza Project Exposes Israel's 'Chilling Pattern' of Killing Journalists
"This is one of the most flagrant attacks on press freedom that I can remember," said one campaigner. "The impact on press freedom in Gaza, in the region, and the rest of the world is something we cannot accept."
Jun 26, 2024
With more than 100 media professionals—nearly all of them Palestinian—killed in Gaza since October, a group of 50 reporters from 13 international organizations this week shared the results of a new investigative journalism initiative aimed at exposing the deadly toll Israel's onslaught has taken on those reporting it to the world.
The Gaza Project—led by the Paris-based nonprofit Forbidden Stories—"analyzed nearly 100 cases of journalists and media workers killed in Gaza, as well as other cases in which members of the press have been allegedly targeted, threatened, or injured since October 7," when Hamas-led attacks on Israel left more than 1,100 people dead and over 240 others kidnapped.
"Faced with what is being reported as the record number of journalists killed, Forbidden Stories, whose mission is to pursue the work of journalists who are killed because of their work, set out to investigate the targeting of journalists," the group said
"For four months, Forbidden Stories and its partners investigated the circumstances of their killings, as well as those who have been targeted, threatened, and injured in the West Bank and Gaza," it added. "These investigations point to a chilling pattern and suggest some journalists may have been targeted even though they were identifiable as press."
Gaza Project member Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has condemned what it called an "apparent pattern of targeting journalists and their families," noting cases in which media workers were killed while wearing press insignia and after being threatened by Israeli officials.
"This is one of the most flagrant attacks on press freedom that I can remember," CPJ program director Carlos Martínez de la Serna said of the ongoing war. "The impact on press freedom in Gaza, in the region, and the rest of the world is something we cannot accept."
Basel Khair Al-Din, a Palestinian journalist in Gaza who believes he was targeted by a drone strike while wearing a press vest, said, "Whereas this press vest was supposed to identify and protect us, according to international laws, international conventions, and the Geneva Conventions, it is now a threat to us."
"It's this vest that almost got us killed, as has happened to so many of our fellow journalists and media workers," he added.
Groups like Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International have called for official investigations into Israeli killing of journalists including an October 13 attack that killed 37-year-old Lebanese Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah and wounded half a dozen other journalists who were covering cross-border clashes between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon.
Dylan Collins, an American deputy editor at Al Jazeera English, was wounded while administering first aid to Christina Assi, an Italian Agence-France Presse journalist whose legs were blown off in the attack.
Reutersdetermined that an Israeli tank crew "fired two shells in quick succession" at the journalists, who HRW said were "clearly identifiable as members of the media, and had been stationary for at least 75 minutes." HRW "found no evidence of a military target near the journalists' location."
Amnesty International, meanwhile, asserted that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) strike was "likely a direct attack on civilians that must be investigated as a war crime."
Asa Kasher, the lead author of the IDF's Code of Ethics, toldForbidden Stories that "no member of the press should have been killed under normal circumstances of hostilities in Gaza."
"It shouldn't happen, even a single one," he added. "It's illegal. It's unethical. The person who does it should be brought to court."
Israel's alleged deliberate targeting of journalists is part of the evidence presented in a South Africa-led genocide case against Israel being reviewed by the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Separately, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC), also located in the Dutch city, is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity including extermination and forced starvation in the case of the Israelis and extermination, rape, and torture in the case of Hamas.
The international press freedom group Reporters Without Borders last month filed a third ICC complaint alleging "war crimes against journalists in Gaza."
According to Palestinian and international officials, at least 37,718 Palestinians—mostly women and children—have been killed during Israel's 264-day assault on Gaza, which has also left more than 86,300 people wounded and 11,000 others missing and feared dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of homes and other bombed-out buildings.
Around 90% of Gaza's 2.3 million people have also been forcibly displaced, and the Israeli siege on Gaza has caused widespread—and deadly—starvation and what the head of the United Nations food agency called a "full-blown famine" in northern parts of the strip.
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'Democracy Must Be Respected': Bolivian Leader Replaces Military Chiefs Over Coup Attempt
Leftists and political leaders around the world slammed the coup effort as Bolivia's trade union federation called for an emergency mass mobilization and a general strike.
Jun 26, 2024
This is a developing story… Please check back for possible updates...
Bolivian President Luis Arce replaced top military leaders on Wednesday in response to an attempted coup d'état in which troops took over Plaza Murillo in La Paz and rammed an armored vehicle into the doors of the presidential palace so soldiers could storm the building.
"We denounce irregular mobilizations of some units of the Bolivian army," Arce, a member of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) party,
said on social media. "Democracy must be respected."
As
The Associated Pressreported:
In a video of Arce surrounded by ministers in the palace, he said: "The country is facing an attempted coup d'état. Here we are, firm in Casa Grande, to confront any coup attempt. We need the Bolivian people to organize."
Arce confronted the general commander of the army—Juan José Zúñiga, who appeared to be leading the rebellion—in the palace hallway, as shown on video on Bolivian television. "I am your captain, and I order you to withdraw your soldiers, and I will not allow this insubordination," Arce said.
Zúñiga told local media that "the three chiefs of the armed forces have come to express our dismay. There will be a new Cabinet of ministers, surely things will change, but our country cannot continue like this any longer."
Sharing his demands, Zúñiga said, "Stop destroying, stop impoverishing our country, stop humiliating our army."
The general claimed that the air force, army, and navy were "mobilized" and "the police force is also with us."
Meanwhile, "Arce swore in three new leaders of the armed forces," according toBuenos Aires Herald managing editor Amy Booth. "At the ceremony, army Commander in Chief Wilson Sánchez ordered the forces back to their barracks and at the moment they seem to be listening."
Despite the rift between former Bolivian President Evo Morales, who remains head of MAS, and Arce, who was his finance minister, Bolivia's ex-leader also spoke out against the military action on Wednesday, declaring that "the coup d'état is brewing."
"At this time, personnel from the armed forces and tanks are deployed in Plaza Murillo," Morales said. "They called an emergency meeting at the army general staff in Miraflores at 3:00 pm in combat uniforms. Call on the social movements of the countryside and the city to defend democracy."
After the change in military leaders, Morales—who has denounced his own 2019 ouster as a coup—demanded that "a criminal process" targeting "Zúñiga and his accomplices" begin immediately.
Wednesday evening, Bolivia's attorney general ordered "all legal actions that correspond to the initiation of the criminal investigation against Gen. Juan José Zúñiga and all other participants in the events that occurred," according toKawsachun News.
The Bolivian Workers' Center (COB), the South American country's trade union federation, had "called for an emergency mass mobilization and a general strike in response to the ongoing coup attempt," Progressive International highlighted on social media.
Progressive International also urged "international attention to these grave violations of Bolivian democracy."
Condemnation of the coup attempt and expressions of solidarity with those opposing it were shared around the world.
"We condemn the attempted coup in Bolivia and send our solidarity to President Luis Arce and his democratically elected government," declared the Peace & Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn, a member of the U.K. Parliament who used to lead the Labour Party.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that "I firmly condemn the attempts to overthrow the democratically elected government of Bolivia. The European Union stands by democracies. We express our strong support for the constitutional order and rule of law in Bolivia."
U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) emphasized that she is "standing in solidarity with the Bolivian people as they fight to preserve their democracy," and "the coup attempt must be unequivocally condemned."
The Democratic Socialists of America's International Committee wrote on social media that "we extend our solidarity to the Bolivian people during this imminent emergency."
Morales said later Wednesday that "we appreciate all the expressions of solidarity and support for Bolivian democracy expressed by presidents, political and social leaders of the world. We are convinced that democracy is the only way to resolve any difference and that institutions and the rule of law must be respected. We reiterate the call for all those involved in this riot to be arrested and tried."
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'Insult to Democracy': Sanders Says Citizens United the Real Story of Bowman Defeat
"Campaigns should be about a clash of ideas, not which candidate can raise more money from the oligarchs," Sanders said after the defeat of Bowman, a progressive who was the target of huge dark-money spending.
Jun 26, 2024
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday responded to the defeat of Rep. Jamaal Bowman, whom outside groups spent record-breaking sums to oust in a Democratic primary in New York this week, by condemning Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and calling for a public campaign finance system.
Outside groups, mainly super political action committees (PACs), poured in more than $17.7 million to oust Bowman (D-N.Y.) and less than $3 million to help him. The beneficiary of the lopsided spending was challenger George Latimer, a Westchester County official, who won the primary with about 58% of the vote to Bowman's 42%.
Progressives have decried the role of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which, through its super PAC, paid more than $14 million for ads that either supported Latimer, who is pro-Israel, or attacked Bowman, who is pro-Palestine—the most ever spent on a U.S. House of Representatives race by a non-party-affiliated group.
Sanders (I-Vt.), in a statement, drew a wider target: the campaign finance system that AIPAC was able to exploit.
He called for a reversal of the "disastrous" Citizens United decision—a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that allowed unlimited outside spending on elections, on the basis of freedom of speech, increasing the power of rich donors and corporations.
"Buying elections is not 'freedom of speech'," Sanders, who campaigned for Bowman, said.
"It is an outrage and an insult to democracy that we maintain a corrupt campaign finance system which allows billionaire-funded super PACs to buy elections," he added.
The pundits will draw their conclusions about the NY-16 race. Here’s mine:
$23m was spent to defeat @JamaalBowmanNY.
It is an outrage and an insult to democracy that we maintain a corrupt campaign finance system which allows billionaire-funded super PACs to buy elections. pic.twitter.com/x3W8JlLwK3
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) June 26, 2024
Sanders' statement comes amid a flurry of analyses of the race from legacy media outlets, many of which frame the result as a blow to the left wing of the Democratic Party.
"Bowman's win in 2020 seemed to herald an ascendant progressive movement," according toThe New York Times. "In 2024, the center is regaining power."
As The Atlanticreported, "The New York progressive veered too far left of his constituents."
Neither article mentions Citizens United or campaign finance reform, or the fact that redistricting in 2022 left far more of Bowman's seat in the suburbs than had been the case in 2020, with just a small slice in the Bronx that remained in the 16th district.
Bowman won 84% of the vote in the northern slice of the Bronx that remained in his district, but was beaten soundly in Westchester County, which is wealthy and has a sizable Jewish population that mobilized for Latimer.
Bowman had weaknesses as a candidate that may also make his race of limited use as a bellwether in other centrist v. progressive primary battles, the most notable of which features Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) against an AIPAC-backed challenger, Wesley Bell. Polling shows a very tight race.
Bowman received some criticism after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor for pulling a fire alarm at the Capitol last year, in what he said was an accident. He has also been accused of "subpar constituent work," according toThe New Republic.
Most notably, Bowman was caught on video saying that claims of Hamas sexual violence on October 7 were unsubstantiated "propaganda," though he later reversed his position and condemned the sexual violence.
If the political establishment has drawn significance from the Bowman defeat, it's a significance that progressives to some degree invited, albeit in a different framing.
During the campaign, Sanders had called the Bowman-Latimer race "one of the most important in the modern history of America" because it was about whether the "billionaire class" could control Congress.
For Sanders, the lesson of the race should be the need for fundamental reforms, including the abolishment of Citizens United and the institution of public campaign finance mechanisms.
"We must also move to the public funding of elections," Sanders said. "Campaigns should be about a clash of ideas, not which candidate can raise more money from the oligarchs."
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