Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 11/7/22 Alan MacLeod on the Former Israeli Spies in Top Social Media Jobs

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

Alan MacLeod of Mintpress News is back to talk more about the alarming number of former spies working for the largest internet and social media companies. This time MacLeod dug up evidence of numerous former Israeli military intelligence officials with jobs at Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Scott and MacLeod reflect on how powerful these companies have grown and how much influence they have over what’s considered true. They also talk about how Russiagate was a huge turning point in the history of the internet.  Discussed on the show: “Revealed: The Former Israeli Spies Working In Top Jobs At Google, Facebook And Microsoft” (Mintpress News) Scott’s interview with MacLeod back in July Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. Follow him on Twitter @AlanRMacLeod. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, sorry, I don't mean to go all FDR on you or anything, but here's the new deal. All the interviews are now going up first at Scott Horton's show.substack.com. Of course, they'll all be going up at Scott Horton.org the next day, and the archives going back to 1999. We'll still be free for you there at Scott Horton.org. But I've got to generate revenue, you know. All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already.

Time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you. at scott horton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line again i've got alan mcloud from mint press news and boy is this a hell of a thing as mr burns might say revealed the former israeli spies working in top jobs at google facebook and microsoft oh man You know, I already knew we had to deal with a bunch of so-called former FBI agents and CIA officers, but the Israelis too, huh? Yeah, that's right. A lot of my work in the past year or so has been focused on exposing the links between the U.S. national security state and big tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

But in doing a little bit more research in this, it shows that it's not only just the alphabet soup of three-letter. agencies around Washington, D.C., like the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, who have got all sorts of workers or former staff planted into these social media companies. But it's also allies like Israel as well. And so what I found in a very sort of unscientific way of just going on employment databases was that there are literally hundreds of former Israeli spies intelligence officers from this notorious unit, Unit 8200, that now have influential and important jobs in some of the biggest tech companies in America.

It's funny because, you know, like if you just got here from government school where they teach you about the democracy and this and that, you might think that something like that would be illegal or that would be so scandalous that they wouldn't try that. You can't just have foreign intelligence agencies running all your social media organizations.

Or never even mind, the Israelis, but even having a bunch of FBI agents leaving the FBI and go to work at Twitter, doesn't that scream massive conflict of interest to everyone? It's crazy. And yet this is exactly how it works, huh? Yeah, of course. I mean, listen, nowadays, it's very hard to determine where Silicon Valley ends and where the national security state begins. And this is just one example of this. I mean, as I said, there are hundreds and hundreds of former FBI officials working at these top jobs, but now increasingly unit 8200 is also involved. And the reason they're so controversial is that, you know, this is the biggest unit in the IDF, the Israeli Defence Forces. And they've really made headlines on a world stage partially because they've basically set up a sort of Israeli NSA, which is used to surveil millions of Palestinian citizens, including.

including citizens of Israel as well, that are Arab or Muslim or Christian. And what they do is this secretive spying unit produces all sorts of dossiers on millions of people complying compromise on people, including their sexual proclivities, their medical histories, et cetera. And they're using that against them to try to extort some sort of compliance out of them. And we've had dozens of whistleblowers come forward from Unit 80200. to say that this group basically treats the entire Palestinian population as if they're enemy combatants or terrorists.

One former Unit 8200 operatives said that he, during his training, he was made to learn all the Arabic slang words for gay so he could listen out for them in conversation and then use that as compromise against other people. And this is also not only just against the Palestinian population, but this is really going worldwide because, of course, Unit 8200 is kind of the centerpiece of the Israeli tech industry. It's where everybody gets taught and they go out and start their own companies. But many of these companies have been malware and spyware companies, like, for instance, NSO, which created the controversial, infamous piece of software Pegasus, which was used to spy on tens of

thousands of politicians and human rights workers all around the world, and was almost certainly used by the Saudi government to track down the whereabouts of Washington Post Jamal journalist Jamal Khashoggi right before he was murdered. And so really this company is right at the forefront at the cutting edge of surveillance of malware all around the world. They're even, you know, developing products which are used to hack places like Google and Microsoft. And now it's particularly worrying that many of their agents have basically gone poachers. turned gamekeeper and have gone straight from Unit 80,200, into these organizations. The problem is that there's really no evidence that they're, you know, they've turned over a new leaf and

their, you know, whistleblowers or anything. They're proud of their experience. And so that really raises alarm bells for anybody who's a more sort of libertarian or just generally interested in free speech or privacy. This is the sort of thing that should only be happening in dystopic novels, but it's a very real thing right now. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, there are all different examples here, but the bottom line of it all, the most important part of it all, is Google.

This is the center of the Internet universe. And if they're tweaking those algorithms in the interests of these and those particular nation states, then it's a huge violation because, I mean, it only takes the slightest bit of a magic. just to figure out the cascading effects from there, you know, if we're not letting people say this, well, think about how many people you got to shut down who are saying that or who might say that or are connected to somebody might say that. We're going to shadow band this group and we're going to boost that group and all these things. Just completely skews everything. And I remember back a few years ago, maybe where they got the idea, I don't know. There was, I think he was an Australian researcher who said that, because people are used to Googling just the most basic facts. Is it going to rain today or how many, you know, feet in a mile or whatever it is?

And, you know, put in math problems or whatever. And Google gives you this factual kind of answer. And so, but then what happens is you kind of get trained to think of it as this Oracle of truth on factual, you know, yes, no, easy type things. But then once you start Googling candidates, whoever the, you know, the, you know, Google pulls up first, essentially you take that as the most true result. Like, who's running for president this year? If Google emphasizes Hillary Clinton results, that skews the vote later. And this guy, I interviewed him about, I don't remember his name anymore, but he did this,

you know, like in college, they do the social psychology studies over and over and over again. And so, you know, he skewed the results this way and he skewed the results that way. and it absolutely was effective at manipulating people. And this is just the rank of the first few results. That's the only thing he was testing. Never mind completely, you know, shutting your site down through, you know, algorithmic manipulation and putting you on page 10

where you don't even exist at all anymore, that kind of thing. But the power in the answer provided by Google is just incredible, right? It's like your mom said or something. Yeah. It is extraordinary. How much power, a relatively new company, it's only been around for, you know, barely 20 years,

has accrued in that time. I mean, you can't really escape from Google. There are a lot of, like, tech companies or social media companies, which, you know, if you don't use, you can kind of just ignore them. But it's very difficult to escape Google's clutches. I mean, we rely on it, as you said,

for information, for communication, for our emails, for our hardware and our software, our browsers. A lot of us even use Google Pay, for instance, so it's got all of our financial details. It knows where we go all the time because it's tracking us via GPS. So it is really an extraordinarily influential company. What I found was there were at least 99 former Unit 8200 workers

who work for Google right now or have very recently worked for Google. that is certainly an underestimate because it's actually illegal under Israeli law to ever divulge the fact that you worked for Unit 8200. So these 99 people are brazenly flouting Israeli law by mentioning this on their LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. Many of them have really high up positions. So, I mean, just a couple of examples.

For instance, Gabriel Goidal, between 2010 and 2016, he served in Unit 8. 80,200. He was head of learning at unit 80200, which if you read between the lines, might mean kind of counterinsurgency work. But today, he's now head of strategy and operations at Google. So we've got this sort of very easy jump between military intelligence and big tech. And that's a very, very worrying thing. We need to absolutely separate these two things, or if we are more inclined, have an honest conversation about how Google is a public resource, and maybe it should be under government control, and at least we'd have some sort of, we'd at least some sort of, you know, accountability for it. Oh, man, I don't know about that.

I mean, that sounds like just taking the same problem, making it all the way as worse as you possibly could. Well, the worst thing, in my opinion, is to do what we're doing right now, which is what we've got this de facto government control over big tech, but they're kept at arm's length to the point where the government can say, you know, hey, this is a private company, we're not interfering. But at the same time, it's deniable, right? Hundreds of agents into these companies who essentially carry out the government's work.

Either we have them completely private or we have them nationalized or they're broken up. And that's one of the other options that we can have. I'm going for completely private. I like the first one completely private. Which, by the way, you know, the old republic, what's left of it is pretty old. And the courts have ruled on this for generations. We already know that the government cannot ask a private company to violate somebody's rights for them. The courts have ruled on this over and over and over again, that that kind of deniability is not good enough.

And so what they're doing really is illegal. It's just that, you know, like in Star Wars One, oh, geez, the court. courts take even longer than the blue panel commission. So, you know, I guess we'll find out in 15 years when a court finally rules that it's all unconstitutional, that kind of thing. But, you know, what they did, especially, and remember it was all in the name of Russia Gate was how it all got going, was the senators, I guess, they went to California, and then they also called the Silicon Valley guys to D.C. And they said, listen, you don't want us to intervene. in all the ways that we imagine we could do you and they said no sir mr senator we'll do it for

you right now ourselves greenwald has written a lot about this that that was really i think senator warner he pins it on that was really the start of i think facebook saying fine fine fine we'll turn all the algorithms down whereas before and this is certainly greenwall's uh point that he's made numerous times these companies did not want to get involved in censoring things they just want click click clicks they don't want to get involved in twisting the algorithm this way and that way because it's essentially just causes them problems and and also costs them money if people want to watch you know kookery then they don't want to turn that off or if they want to watch government lies they don't want to turn that off as long as that's what people are clicking on but so then the government

essentially implied we're going to take all your money away or we're just going to you know take you to court. We're going to regulate you. We're going to send the antitrust divisions after you. We're going to harass you until you do what you know we want you to do. And that's really corrupt. And I agree with you. That is just about the worst of both worlds. I mean, completely nationalizing them, I think, would be the absolute worst. But it is, you know, and this is the like funny puzzle about fascism, right? Is that big business likes being told what to do by big government. They want it to be that way. they're the ones who tell big government what to tell them what to do, and around it goes.

You know what I mean? So they're all, you know, once the relationships are forged, they all rather keep it this way. Like when they went after Bill Gates on the antitrust stuff in the 90s, he hired the most expensive lobbying firm in Washington, D.C., and he's kept them on retainer ever since. You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, Russia Gate really broke many people's minds, and it also was a real turning point in the history of the internet. I mean, if historians, you know, right about this in the future. I think 2016 and the election there will be a key point in history because almost as soon as the election was over, the Clinton campaign decided that it

was misinformation on the net that lost her the election to the most the most disliked candidate in presidential history. It wasn't the fact that she didn't campaign in Wisconsin or she screwed over Bernie Sanders or any of the many reasons that, you know, people could have to not vote for her. It was actually Russian misinformation. And they put pressure on these big tech companies, particularly Google, to do something about that. And almost immediately in early 2017, Google launched Project Owl, which was a complete rewrite of their algorithms to supposedly push more authoritative sources up to the top and demote borderline content or misinformation. But what actually happened was immediately that high-quality alternative news websites, like the one I work for, Mint Press or Democracy Now or Counterpunch, were immediately hit hard by the algorithms.

Anti-War.com too, man. I know anti-war.com was hit really hard as well. Basically, anyone who was on that stupid list put out by prop or not, which is this Atlantic Council front, this list that said, you know, these are peddlers of disinformation. we have to suppress them. It got their algorithm scores really badly hit, which means you're deranged, you're delisted, you're demoted, and so nobody really sees your content. And a similar thing happened with Facebook,

whereby, you know, you might remember in 2018, and everybody started talking about how Facebook was this big peddler of disinformation, which, you know, fair enough, it is. But the solution was, you know, people were in Congress were talking about jailing Zuckerberg or breaking Facebook up. And he was hauled before the Senate committee. and before Congress and made to, you know, just given a grilling, basically. And only a few weeks after that, he announced a partnership with the Atlantic Council,

which is, you know, NATO's think tank, basically, whereby he would give a certain amount of control over the algorithms of every country in the world over to the Atlantic Council to do with what they wish, to promote content that they wanted and suppress other content they didn't want. But, you know, when you look at who the Atlantic Council is, at his board, it's, you know, Henry Kissinger, and all these warmongers like Colin Powell, Wesley Collar, General David Petraeus, all these bushi-era neo-cons as well, plus no fewer than seven former heads of the CIA. You start realizing this is basically government censorship,

but on a global level, and we've never seen that before. Yeah. Hey, all, Scott Horton here for the Libertarian Institute at Libertarian Institute.org. I'm the director. Then we've got Sheldon Richmond, Kyle Ans, alone, Keith Knight, Lori Calhoun, Jim Bovard, Connor Freeman, Will Porter, Patrick Murpharlane, and Tommy Salman's on our staff, writing and podcasting. And we've also got a ton of other great writers, too, like Walter Block, Richard Booth, Boss Spleat, Kim Robinson, and William Ben Wagonin. We've published eight books so far, including my latest, Hotter Than the Sun, Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, and Keith Knight's new

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See the roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. All right, so talk about Amazon.com. Speaking of the centers of the universe here. Yeah, sure. I mean, Amazon, it's, again, created this ginormous retail industry. Not only retail now, it's in, you know, entertainment and all sorts of things. Amazon also has links with Unit 8200 as well, and of course, with the military industrial complex.

It's a big CIA contractor. There are many, many employees at Amazon that used to work for Unit 8200. And what's perhaps most startling and most worrying is the fact that a lot of these big tech companies seem to actually actively recruit from Unit 8200, while these people are still. still officially members of the Israeli military. So it's true that Unit 80200 has a really high profile and it's got a very good, a very good reputation around the world in the sort of the milieu of tech. But unfortunately, a lot of the things that it's best at is extortion, spying, hacking and planting malware.

And often it's hacking exactly the sorts of organizations and communications companies that they then go on to work for. And that is extremely worrying. Yeah, man, I mean, think about if they give just whatever business, the algorithm treatment, the way they did us in the name of Russia Gate. Oh, you're a trucker protesting against vaccine restrictions, huh? We can turn your bank account off. Not only that, we can turn off your online store put you right out of business uh you know something like that you're a spreader of disinformation we can't let you go around spreading disinformation on our servers and click and they have these i mean amazon server farms or i don't know some significant proportion of everything

or something at this point aren't they yeah not just the cia but like everybody else is on that amazon web services you know yeah that's right Amazon Web Services is an enormous company, and it's one of the centerpieces of the modern internet. And I'm certainly not denying that there is a ton of misinformation on the net. It's absolutely true. The internet is assess pool sometimes. But what I would say is, is the solution really to empower these giant corporations or these faceless bureaucrats in these organizations to decide what is true and what is false? Would it not be better to, have a sort of widespread campaign of critical media literacy, whereby we give people the tools

to make their own decisions and to spot, you know, how to, how companies manipulate us with biases, etc. Would that not be a better solution than to just, you know, give enormous power to either these big corporations or to government officials who we don't even know their names of? Yeah, seriously, man. And look, they're wrong about everything. I mean, just their track record in last few years, getting everything wrong. They, you know, censored an interview I did a Matt Taibi because they said that we said that the election was rigged when neither of us said that. We were just talking about how YouTube censors people for not saying that when the YouTube people think that they do. Then they censored us for that. They don't know what the hell they're

talking about. Then when we said to them, hey, you got it all wrong. They said, oh, thank you very much for this additional context. In other words, they proclaim that they're too damn stupid. to even know what they're listening to while they're listening to it. And they have to have it explained to them. But then they're the computer gods of what I can say or not based on whether they think it's true or not. When they've already admitted to me that they don't even understand without my help, what the hell is that?

The whole thing is completely stupid, man. Yeah, I mean, it is extraordinary how often fact checkers get the most basic facts wrong. This sort of cottage industry, again, that sprung up in the wake of the 2016 election has been a boon for journalists who want to get on the sort of gravy train of basically ratting other people out. And it is really quite worrying to see the people who are most vociferously calling for a greater censorship tend to be journalists at elite publications themselves. But what I would argue is that fake news is much more profound than just some Macedonian bloggers on the internet or some Georgian teenagers posting stuff on Facebook. I would say that the most pernicious fake news of the 21st century is the kind of fake news that led us into wars in Iraq or bombing Libya, which destroyed entire countries and killed millions of people. And where did that emanate from? It emanated from the government.

and it emanated from supposedly trustworthy mainstream sources like CNN or Fox or the New York Times or the BBC. And a bunch of Israeli agents in the Vice President's Office, National Security Council, and the Pentagon. Yeah, I bet they were all involved as well. So ultimately what I'm saying is I think we have quite a sort of immature version or understanding of fake news. And actually, all organizations can put out fake news at some points. We really have to train people to use their brains to think critically. That's ultimately the only way out of this, I think. Yeah.

All right. Now, so one thing I wanted to bring up that we know from the Snowden documents, they published this in The Guardian, and then the New York Times never even mentioned it. The Washington Post never even mentioned it. But they turn over their entire hall to the Israelis every day. And their entire hall is everything that happens on the Internet, on the planet. They get it all through their Five Eyes part. partners and the rest, and they turn it all over to the Israelis on a daily basis.

Now, it's right there in The Guardian. People can read about that, and the Snowden documents prove it. So, you know, there's essentially, I don't want to say no limit, but virtually no limit on their capability there when they got the Americans doing it all for them that way and the extent of their reach. I wonder, you know, what indications do you have here about this same kind of thing happening say all over the world right israeli 8200 veterans going and working for um you know i don't know ali baba or whatever like major um you know the centers of the universe over in eurasia that are a bit different you know their own versions of facebook and google and so forth yeah i wasn't looking at that specifically my sense

sense would be that, you know, frankly, Israel has such a bad reputation in much of Asia and the global south, that they might not be quite as welcome in companies in China or India or wherever than they are in Western Europe and North America. So, yeah, my sense is they probably wouldn't have quite as much success. And that really, I think, I don't want to say their goal is that, because this is like an individual case. Obviously, if you're an ex-soldier, you just want to get a new job in a tech industry and if there a job comes up at Google that's fantastic for you you can make some money work at a high profile company but on a sort of wider scale i'm sure the israeli military is very pleased indeed that so many people that used to be under the unit 8200 umbrella and are

working at these big companies okay so what about the argument that yeah but all tech people in israel come out of 8200 and so that doesn't necessarily mean anything unless you assume that it does or something like that on. Yeah, sure. I mean, listen, as I said, pretty much everyone in Israel has to, you know, join the IDF or whatever. But there's a big difference between working for, you know, just being some like private in the army slogging away for three years and leaving than joining one of this most elite groups in the Israeli military. I mean, it's been dubbed the Harvard of Israel because ultimately pretty much the brightest minds in the STEM field. actually compete to be sent to this place because they know that this is the cornerstone of the

Israeli tech industry. So it's extremely competitive to get in there. And we have to ask, what is, you know, military, what is military intelligence for Israel doing right now? Of course, it's being used to suppress and oppress Palestinian voices, Syrian voices, people from around the region. And so ultimately, you know unless these people are coming forward and you know basically blowing the whistle on what they've been doing I do think it is suspicious enough just because of the fact that this organization this unit is so infamous and is involved in so much skullduggery and so ultimately you know when you read biographies of unit 8200 they often in the western press they'll say that this is the best and the worst of Israel you know and what they mean by that is you know, they're obviously at the cutting edge of tech and communications, but they're also using it for some of the most infamous and debatable uses that you can

possibly think of, which include, as I said, widespread spying on Palestinians and on people all around the world. Yeah. Well, that has Barra. It's really important to them. And anyone can understand, I mean, if we were the National Security Council cabinet of Israel, keeping the Americans and I guess everybody else in line is pretty damn important. So you could see why they work so hard at it.

It's just that there should be a check and balance over on this side that prevents this kind of thing from happening. And evidently there's not. The FBI counterintelligence division is too busy framing up the last president, you know? Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I guess this really proves, this puts an underlying on the fact that Israel is really treated like a very close ally. It's a very trusted ally of the U.S. national security state. It, you know, it's basically the United States as lieutenant in the Middle East. It carries out quite a lot of its dirty

work. And this is one of the perks of being one of the United States special friends that you get treated like this, that you get pulled into the inner circle and you get to influence what happens online in a way at which U.S. enemy countries like Venezuela or Iran or Russia just don't. You know, I did check there were no ex-FSP officials working at these big tech companies, none from the Iranian government or the Iranian Ministry of Information or the Venezuelan Sabin. So ultimately, it really is, you know, down to the US and countries that it considers close enough allies to let in this sphere. And I think that's one of the things that basically one of my main messages is that the

internet is not this free peer-to-peer network. It's really, to a remarkable extent, controlled by the national security state. Always was, man. And everybody can read your Bamford on that. Listen, thank you so much, Alan. You do great journalism, and I appreciate your time on the show a lot. Great to talk to you again. That's Alan McLeod.

He's over there at mintpressnews.com. This one's called Revealed, the former Israeli spies, working in top jobs at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. and he profiles quite a few of the individuals there too. It's a really great piece. Please check it out. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com,

anti-war.com, ScottHorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.