Rampant Silicon Mafia, or a Game without Rules

On the night of July 27-28, Google deleted the YouTube accounts of a number of Russian media outlets — the TV channel Tsargrad, the historical society Two-Headed Eagle, the anti-abortion society For Life!, Geopolitics.ru — and private emails, citing a "violation of export laws."

The muddy explanation about the United States' "export laws" should be understood as follows: Russia produces and “exports" outside the information that Big Brother expects from it. Professor Valentin Katasonov describes Google as part of a powerful "deep state" that has spread its tentacles all over America and encroaches on the rest of the world.

Previously, Facebook and Twitter were running rampant in the same way, deleting and blocking the accounts of user groups, politicians, public figures and the media. In Russia, ANNA News, News Front, Crimea 24 and the Federal News Agency were blocked, and European countries were also blocked.

References to some “export laws" are not taken seriously by anyone. There is a game without rules. Censorship imposed by American monopolies in the field of information technology is becoming a totalitarian pattern.

For a liberal society, as the society that the modern West calls itself, such a frenzy of censorship is, first of all, the death of the social contract, when it is considered that citizens cede part of their rights to the state in return for ensuring their own interests, again with the help of the state.

Several major information technology corporations are carrying out information aggression, to which there has not yet been adequate resistance. And it seems that the Western world is ready to accept this. Recently, French Parliament Member Meyer Habib said, for example, commenting on the arrest of French writer Alain Soral, that "Facebook and YouTube have finally started a purge; France should follow them.”

The "purge" has really begun and is unfolding in earnest. If Google, Facebook and Twitter are searching for and destroying accounts of "dissidents," then PayPal, for example, blocks users' money. It is almost impossible to get your money back after such expropriation. Amazon generally refuses to allow Russian citizens to use its platform for sales.

Most certainly, state regulatory authorities should have questions concerning the servers and locations on which user data is stored for Google and other companies (which have been called the Silicon Mafia). From the point of view of the security interests of any state, it is necessary to analyze Google Maps, given that this corporation works in the interests of the Pentagon, implementing projects with cloud storage and artificial intelligence.

Katasonov suggests that the Silicon Mafia has become entrenched in the position of America’s owner, and political differences before the election — for example, Amazon and The New York Times owner Jeff Bezos is a critic of Donald Trump — do not prevent this.*

However, instead, here is another established symbiosis of the American state and the Silicon Mafia. There are many facts to support this.

The national cybersecurity alliance of the United States works closely with Google, Facebook, Dropbox and Microsoft. Palantir was created as one of the projects of PayPal founder Peter Thiel in 2004, and its first outside investor was the CIA venture capital firm In-Q-Tel. Palantir's client list includes the U.S. State Department, the CIA, the FBI, the U.S. Army, the Marine Corps, the U.S. Air Force, the New York and Los Angeles police departments and a large number of financial institutions.

Regina Duncan, the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, went to work at Google. One of Google's founders, Eric Schmidt, is a technical adviser to Alphabet and serves on its board of directors, while also serving as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Board. And so on.

Now all the world's problems are considered by the owners of money and the American establishment from a single angle: Who will be in the White House after the presidential election on Nov. 3, 2020?

And as if confirming the symbiosis of the American state and the Silicon Mafia against the background of piratical manipulation of social media accounts, against the background of attempts to destroy any alternative point of view, the State Department celebrated on Aug. 4 with the publication of a special report, "Russia's Pillars of Disinformation and Propaganda." (It was 77 pages.) The next day, at a State Department briefing, the report was declared "the first-ever comprehensive analysis of Russia's disinformation and propaganda ecosystem." It turns out that “Russia wants to undermine democratic institutions and democratic norms," and also "spread fear and confusion.

But they are really scared that someone looks at the world and the problems of modern man differently from them!

If you look at the rampant Silicon Mafia from the point of view of an ordinary internet consumer — whether in Russia, Europe or Asia — then such a consumer is in a difficult situation. He is forced to trust his data (author's works, personal letters, stored files) to unknown people. And one day his intellectual property may disappear, and he'll be told that he violated the "export laws of the United States”! What is the “sovereign internet," really?

So we should thank the authors of the State Department report on "Russian disinformation." They have brought us face-to-face with a very serious problem that needs to be urgently addressed.

*Editor's Note: Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, not The New York Times.