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Paul Merrell

Google Engineer Leaks Nearly 1,000 Pages of Internal Documents, Alleging Bias, Censorship - 0 views

  • A former Google engineer has released nearly 1,000 pages of documents that he says prove that the company, at least in some of its products, secretly boosts or demotes content based on what it deems to be true or false, while publicly claiming to be a neutral platform. The software engineer, Zach Vorhies, first provided the documents to Project Veritas, a right-leaning investigative journalism nonprofit, as well as the Justice Department’s antitrust division, which has been investigating Google for potentially anti-competitive behavior.
  • When he returned to work, however, Google sent him a letter demanding, among other things, that he turn over his employee badge and work laptop, which he did, and “cease and desist” from disclosing “any non-public Google files.” Afraid for his safety, he posted on Twitter that if something would happen to him, all the documents he took would be released to the public.Google then did a “wellness check” on him, he said. The San Francisco police received a call that Vorhies may be mentally ill. A group of officers waited for him outside his house and put him in handcuffs. “This is a large way in which they intimidate their employees that go rogue on the company,” he said.Vorhies then decided that it would be safer for him to go public.
  • One of the goals of the effort was a “clean & regularly sanitized news corpus,” it reads.
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  • Robert Epstein, a psychologist who has spent years researching Google’s influence on its users, has published research showing that just by deciding the sequence of top search results, the company can sway undecided voters.Epstein determined that this has led to 2.6 million votes shifting in the 2016 presidential election to Trump’s opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He warned that in 2020, if companies such as Google and Facebook all support the same candidate, they will be able to shift 15 million votes—well beyond the margin most presidents have won by.
Paul Merrell

WhatsApp sues Israel's NSO for allegedly helping spies hack phones around the world - R... - 0 views

  • WhatsApp sued Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group on Tuesday, accusing it of helping government spies break into the phones of roughly 1,400 users across four continents in a hacking spree whose targets included diplomats, political dissidents, journalists and senior government officials.
  • In a lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco, messaging service WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook Inc (FB.O), accused NSO of facilitating government hacking sprees in 20 countries. Mexico, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were the only countries identified. WhatsApp said in a statement that 100 civil society members had been targeted, and called it “an unmistakable pattern of abuse.” NSO denied the allegations.
  • Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity research laboratory based at the University of Toronto that worked with WhatsApp to investigate the phone hacking, told Reuters that the targets included well-known television personalities, prominent women who had been subjected to online hate campaigns and people who had faced “assassination attempts and threats of violence.”
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  • NSO came under particularly harsh scrutiny over the allegation that its spyware played a role in the death of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul a little over a year ago. Khashoggi’s friend Omar Abdulaziz is one of seven activists and journalists who have taken the spyware firm to court in Israel and Cyprus over allegations that their phones were compromised using NSO technology. Amnesty has also filed a lawsuit, demanding that the Israeli Ministry of Defense revoke NSO’s export license to “stop it profiting from state-sponsored repression.”
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