“What Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the 21st,” wrote Google executives Eric Schmidt and Larry Cohen in their book The New Digital Age as reported in Julian Assange’s review. With the collapse of the legacy media, control over social media and internet platforms becomes the central focus of any efforts to exert control over popular thought. Last November, the CIA announced that it had made its Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) contract — a deal worth tens of billions of dollars — with five companies: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies released a report this month, urging the U.S. to “think creatively about public-private partnerships that can expand its toolkit to defend the legitimate rights of political protesters globally, including preserving the digital rights of peaceful democratic activists while muting harmful mis- and dis-information from violent state and nonstate actors seeking to tip the balance in various countries.” The obvious question arises: who determines which protests are “legitimate” and which are “dis-information"?
