Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley tech mogul who is an activist libertarian and Trump supporter, hammered Google while giving a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington D.C. on Sunday night.
Thiel is concerned over Google’s extensive ties to China, believing that they may be compromised due to their suspect business practices regarding the totalitarian communist nation aspiring to become the world’s top super power.
He believes that the following questions must be asked by investigators looking into the Big Tech monopoly firm:
“Number one, how many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for AI?
“Number two, does Google’s senior management consider itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated by Chinese intelligence?
“Number three, is it because they consider themselves to be so thoroughly infiltrated that they have engaged in the seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military and not with the US military… because they are making the sort of bad, short-term rationalistic [decision] that if the technology doesn’t go out the front door, it gets stolen out the backdoor anyway?”
Although the Silicon Valley libertarian is typically reticent over the use of government intervention, Thiel believes it is absolutely necessary for these questions “to be asked by the FBI, by the CIA, and I’m not sure quite how to put this, I would like them to be asked in a not excessively gentle manner.”
Thiel, who serves as a Facebook board member, is concerned about Google following news reports that the corporation has been working with communist China on a state-of-the-art search engine that would put an end digital privacy.
Google was exposed last year as working with China on a project called Dragonfly that would blacklist content during searches related to human rights, protest, democracy and other concepts harmful for a totalitarian regime. Those plans have been called off at the present moment after widespread internal and external backlash, but CEO Sundar Pichai rules out restarting the project.
Google has also emerged as an existential threat to election integrity in the United States, after hidden camera video from James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas exposed one of their top executives boasting about Google’s plans to manipulate their algorithms to prevent U.S. President Donald Trump from obtaining re-election.
“Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation, it’s like a small company cannot do that,” admitted Jen Gennai, who works as Google’s Head of Responsible Innovation.
“We all got screwed over in 2016, again it wasn’t just us, it was, the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like, everybody got screwed over so we’re rapidly been like, what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again,” she added.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), who is also scheduled to appear as a keynote speaker at the National Conservatism Conference, has proposed legislation that would strip special immunity privileges granted under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act from tech giants like Google unless they prove they are acting as neutral platforms rather than partisan publishers.
Hawley’s proposed reform or similar measures may be necessary to stop Google from enabling abuses that even George Orwell could never have prophesied. Thiel’s libertarian whistle-blowing against Google’s totalitarian agenda will hopefully open more eyes about this menace.
