Rudy Takala / The Washington Examiner – 2016-04-09 01:02:31
Senators call for AI regulation as concerns for national security grow
Clinton Email Reveals: Google Sought Overthrow of Syria’s Assad
Rudy Takala / The Washington Examiner
(March 19, 2016) — Google in 2012 sought to help insurgents overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to State Department emails receiving fresh scrutiny this week.
Messages between former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s team and one of the company’s executives detailed the plan for Google to get involved in the region.
“Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool … that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from,” Jared Cohen, the head of what was then the company’s “Google Ideas” division, wrote in a July 2012 email to several top Clinton officials.
“Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition,” Cohen said, adding that the plan was for Google to surreptitiously give the tool to Middle Eastern media.
“Given how hard it is to get information into Syria right now, we are partnering with Al-Jazeera who will take primary ownership over the tool we have built, track the data, verify it, and broadcast it back into Syria,” he said.
“Please keep this very close hold and let me know if there is anything [else] you think we need to account for or think about before we launch. We believe this can have an important impact,” Cohen concluded.
The message was addressed to deputy secretary of state Bill Burns; Alec Ross, a senior Clinton advisor; and Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Jake Sullivan. Sullivan subsequently forwarded Cohen’s proposal to Clinton, describing it as “a pretty cool idea.”
Cohen worked as a member of the secretary of state’s policy planning staff from 2006 to 2010, when he was hired to lead Google Ideas, but was tied to using social media to incite uprisings even before he left the department.
He once reportedly asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to hold off of conducting system maintenance that officials believed could have impeded a brief 2009 uprising in Iran, and Julian Assange, who founded the secret-leaking website WikiLeaks, has for years referred to Cohen as Google’s “director of regime change.”
The exchange on Syria was highlighted by Wikileaks on Saturday. Earlier in the week, the site posted more than 30,000 emails that Clinton sent or received during her tenure leading the State Department.
WikiLeaks Publishes Searchable Archive of Clinton Emails
Rudy Takala / The Washington Examiner
(April 5, 2016) — The secret-sharing website WikiLeaks has published a searchable archive of more than 30,000 Hillary Clinton emails that have been released by the State Department.
Unveiled on Wednesday, the archive allows users to browse through 30,322 emails and attachments sent to or from Clinton’s private email server while she was secretary of state. In all, the archive comprises 50,547 pages spanning from June 30, 2010, to Aug. 12, 2014. According to the site, Clinton authored 7,570 of those documents.
The State Department began releasing the emails in May of last year pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request, but it is the first time that the messages have been made easily available in a searchable format. The final PDFs of all the emails were just made available by the State Department last month.
Though the department has completed its publication of Clinton emails, it is now set to review 29,000 pages of emails sent or received by Huma Abedin, who served as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff from 2009-13. The department has said it plans to review at least 400 pages of Abedin’s emails every month. Completion is expected by April 2017.
While Wikileaks’ Wednesday release involved publicly available documents, the site has gained a reputation for illegally leaking classified information, including from the State Department.
Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, now known as Chelsea Manning, is serving a 35-year prison sentence for leaking documents to the site both from the State and Defense Departments.
The site has also published files stolen from defense firm Stratfor, the Saudi Foreign Ministry and the National Security Agency, among others.
Hillary Clinton Email Archive
Wikileaks
On March 16, 2016 WikiLeaks launched a searchable archive for 30,322 emails & email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was Secretary of State.
The 50,547 pages of documents span from 30 June 2010 to 12 August 2014. 7,570 of the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton. The emails were made available in the form of thousands of PDFs by the US State Department as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request. The final PDFs were made available on February 29, 2016.
