Hidden History: The Close Link Between Silicon Valley, the Pentagon and US Intelligence

The Secrets of Silicon Valley: What Big Tech Doesn’t Want You to Know

Directed by James Corbett (2019)

Film Review

This documentary explores the hidden Pentagon and US intelligence role in the development of of Silicon Valley, the Internet and tech giants like Google and Facebook.

Corbett traces the rise of Silicon Valley to the 1946 appointment of Frederick Terman as the dean of Stanford engineering school. During World War II, Terman ran the top secret radio research lab at Harvard. There he supervised 800 scientists in researching microwaves, radar detection and jamming and other forms of electronics warfare. Eleven of these scientists accompanied him to Standford, where they immediately received Pentagon contracts for military projects.

ARPANET, initially funded by the Department of Defense, became known as the Internet in 1991 when it was officially privatized.

Over the years, other technologies that began as Stanford graduate student projects were spun off as private ventures. Examples include Oracle Integrated Cloud Applications and Platform Services, derived from Project Oracle, a vast CIA database project; SunSystems Financial Management Software, also based based on Pentagon-funded research; and Google, which started as a project funded by DARPA, the CIA and the NSA.

In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, initially owned 5,000 shares in Google, which they sold in 2005. On their webpage, the CIA describes Google Earth as a CIA-assisted technology. A 2014 Freedom of Information Act Request indicates Google was (is?) part of a secret government project called Enduring Security Framework Initiative. The latter paid (pays?) the company to share data they collect on search engine users with US intelligence and the Pentagon.

Google’s founder and former CEO Eric Schmidt is now the chair of the Defense Efficiency Initiative. He’s also a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group’s steering committee.

Facebook has a similar history of Pentagon and US intelligence backing. By a remarkable coincidence, Facebook was launched the same day (Feb 4 2004) that DARPA scrapped a proposed study to predict behavior by collecting massive amounts of data on subjects’ daily interests and activities.

Facebook received most of its startup funding from venture capitalists closely linked to the Department of Defense and US intelligence – including $12.7 million from Accel Partners, whose managing director previously served on the board of In-Q-Tel.

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*ARPA – Advanced Research Projects Agency – has since been renamed DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Agency).

 

 

How Big Money Controls the White House

Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters

by Andrew Kreig (Eagle View Books 2013)

Book Review

Presidential Puppetry is a comprehensive expose of the wealthy corporate interests who are the real power behind the federal government. Kreig orients his book around Obama and Romney, the major presidential candidates in the 2012 elections. However in discussing Mitt Romney’s hidden ties to the financial oligarchy, he also explores the Bush family’s Wall Street connections, the history and structure of the Mormon Church (especially as it relates to corporate America) and Karl Rove’s role in orchestrating Republican dirty tricks and voting fraud. Presidential Puppetry is meticulously researched and sourced, with a 17 page bibliography and 110 pages of footnotes and references.

Kreig, a lawyer and respected Washington DC journalist, takes the 2012 presidential debates as his point of departure, noting the deliberate secrecy of both candidates around their personal background. This deliberate secrecy should have been a campaign issue. Yet neither raised it in the debates – there seemed to be a gentleman’s agreement not to do so. Kreig is also scathingly critical of the mainstream media’s failure to challenge either the secrecy or corrupt corporate influences it concealed.

Obama Was Groomed

For his part, Obama refused to release any of his university transcripts, as well as having his passport records secretly scrubbed at the State Department. According to Kreig, this refusal to release educational records is unprecedented, especially for a candidate with virtually no public record of their political background or views. Kreig believes there are two reasons for Obama’s secrecy about his records from Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law School. The first was to conceal his early links to the CIA, via a CIA front organization he worked for called Business International Corporation (BIC). The second was to hide his early “grooming” for political office by Zbigniew Brzesinski and possibly other members of Bilderberg, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission. All three are secretive round table groups that allow wealthy financial elites access to major public officials.

By tracing the background of the Bush, Carter, Clinton and Reagan presidencies, Kreig makes a very compelling case that the ruling elite selects and grooms individuals it offers up to us as presidential candidates. What’s more, of our past five presidents, only George W Bush has no documented history of working for US intelligence. Krieg alleges Reagan secretly passed information to the FBI about Hollywood leftists, Bush senior performed various services for the CIA as founder and director of Zapata Oil Company, and Clinton informed on anti-Vietnam War protestors as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.

Romney’s Cayman Island Tax Shelters

Romney’s big secret was his tax returns. It’s standard for presidential candidates to release ten years of returns. What the Republican candidate sought to conceal, according to Kreig, was systematic tax avoidance that included a Swiss bank account and tax shelters in the Cayman Islands. Both the Democrats and the corporate media failed in their duty to the public by refusing to bring any of this to light.

Broken Campaign Promises and a Trail of Bodies

Kreig goes on to examine Obama’s first term in light of his hidden history. The American people thought they were voting for a progressive community organizer but ended up with someone even more pro-Wall Street and pro-war than his Republican predecessor.

The most disturbing aspect of the book relates to cases Kreig details in which both Republican and Democratic insiders have tried to expose corporate interference with specific federal office holders. Largely owing to the refusal of the corporate media to support these whistleblowers, many have ended up dead under suspicious circumstances or in prison on trumped up charges.

Kreig tries to finish on an optimistic note by reminding us of all the brave independent journalists (on whose work Presidential Puppetry is based) whose investigative work is beginning to give us a true picture of how our so-called democracy really works. He encourages people (I assume he means whistleblowers) to send him tips (i.e. leaks) via his Justice Integrity Project website.

A recent post there is a moving tribute to the late John Judge, past president of the Coalition on Political Assassinations. The latter archives and promotes scholarly research offering alternatives to official accounts of the JFK assassination and other high profile political deaths, including those of Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Originally published in Dissident Voice

The 161 Bankers Who Run the World

In following video, Peter Phillips from Project Censored lays out exactly how the richest one-thousandth of 1% maintain iron control over all world governments.

He cites a study Project Censored published in their Top 25 Censored Stories of 2012-2013 edition of the world’s most “integrated”* corporations and those with the largest financial asset concentration.

Unsurprisingly, there’s considerable overlap between the two groups.

The 161 board members of the top 13 companies control $28 trillion of wealth. They also help the 1% hide another $30 trillion offshore so it can’t be taxed.

They’re 88% white (and nearly all male) and 63% come from the US or Europe.

They work with secret (and not so secret) groups, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Bohemian Grove, the World Economic Forum, the G7, the G20, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to ensure that the domestic and foreign policy of all western governments benefits themselves and the capitalist investors they represent.

They also ensure that the national security state, busy killing people in 130 countries, acts in the exclusive interest of transnational capital. The fascist coup they engineered in Ukraine is only the most recent example.

They regularly engage in illegal conspiracies but are always too big and powerful to jail.

Here are the top 13 companies identified in the study:

1 BlackRock US $3.560 trillion
2 UBS Switzerland $2.280 trillion
3 Allianz Germany $2.213 trillion
4 Vanguard Group US $2.080 trillion
5 State Street Global Advisors (SSgA) US $1.908
6 PIMCO (Pacific Investment Management Company) US $1.820 trillion
7 Fidelity Investments US $1.576 trillion
8 AXA Group France $1.393 trillion
9 JPMorgan Asset Management US $1.347 trillion
10 Credit Suisse Switzerland $1.279 trillion
11 BNY Mellon Asset Management US $1.299 trillion
12 HSBC UK $1.230 trillion
13 Deutsche Bank Germany $1.227 trillion

*The researchers use the term “integrated” to describe financial corporations with major holdings in key  non-financial sectors (i.e. energy, defense and mass media).