by B. R. GOWANI
Mark Zuckerberg called the press reports about the existence of Prism ‘outrageous’. PHOTO/Robert Galbraith/Reuters
Dan Gillmor, Director of Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, was overjoyed about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s call to President Barack Obama about the breach of people’s privacy due to government’s surveillance program. In the Guardian of 13 March 2014, he wrote:
He further said:
“Now Zuckerberg has complained directly to President Obama about ‘the damage the government is creating for all of our future’. When Facebook works to improve security, he wrote users, ‘we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government. The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat.’ (Do read the whole thing – it’s not very long – before you continue reading this.)”
Within a week, Gillmor’s euphoria over his hero’s brave stand against the spying President was punctured. The Guardian of 19 March 2014 reported that Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, made it clear during the government hearing that all the big companies, including FACEBOOK of MARK ZUCKERBERG were aware of the government’s surveillance program.
(Back in February 2013, at George Town University Law Center, De had defended the wiretapping and praised his agency:
Lying doesn’t cost anything. Rather it saves your job because lying is the job. To be fair to De, he did give out some truths in his nine pages lecture, such as the NSA provides jobs to the largest number of mathematicians. Mathematicians should be grateful for that.)
Just last June, Apple, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook had denied having any knowledge of PRISM.
(Apple was as innocent as Adam and Eve.)
SOURCE/Russia Today
Even the former US President Jimmy Carter avoids using emails because he is scared of his government. He instead uses snail mail, that is, he writes/types letters and sends it by post office.
“When I want to communicate with a foreign leader privately, I type or write a letter myself, put it in the post office, and mail it. … I have felt that my own communications are probably monitored.”
The world over, people are so used to blaming their governments-for corruption, wars, poverty, and what not-that they never bother to look at the real culprits: the giant corporations and their CEOs, and the role they play directly or indirectly in the ills which besets their countries and the world.
It is absolutely criminal to think that people like Zuckerberg or CEOs of Apple, Google, and other giant companies are worried about the future or privacy of the people they’re serving. If that was so, they wouldn’t be part of the wage-fixing cartel to suppress the wages of their employees. They’re out there to make as much money as possible in as short a time-period as possible. This grants them more power and easy access to White House or Congress. Do millions of people wrongly incarcerated and rotting in the US prisons have such access?
And the politicians go along with the CEOs because those are the people who’ll be financing their election campaigns. Listen to Obama, who was at David Cohen’s (Comcast’s chief lobbyist) house to attend a fundraiser:
“I have been here so much, the only thing I haven’t done in this house is have seder dinner [Jewish ritual feast served at Passover].”
Comcast is planning to buy Time Warner Cable (TWC) for $45 billion. After Comcast, TWC is the largest provider of TV and broadband. On the other hand, the internet speed in the US is slower than the people in the North European country of Estonia are getting! While Apple is trying to get a special deal from Comcast.
Coming back to Zuckerberg, if you listen or read his, or for that matter most of the giant CEOs’, ideas, you can’t escape a thought that he is the greatest humanitarian Mother Earth has produced because he wants to serve all the seven billion people inhabiting this earth. While talking to CNN he said:
“We want to make it so that anyone, anywhere — a child growing up in rural India who never had a computer — can go to a store, get a phone, get online, and get access to all of the same things that you and I appreciate about the Internet.”
“They’re going to use it to decide what kind of government they want, get access to healthcare for the first time ever, connect with family hundreds of miles away that they haven’t seen in decades.”
He then added:
“Connectivity is a human right.”
The members of the US ruling class get the “human rights” notion from their mothers’ (or bottles’) milk.
What kind of government do they want? Let’s say the people don’t want the US style capitalist government where a few billionaires decide the fate of millions of people, are Zuckerberg and the others going to support them?
If the entire world is connected thru internet, Alfredo Lopez points out:
“On its face, it’s a wonderful idea until you realize that this would put all the world’s connectivity in the hands of one company and a coalition of partners it’s brought on to realize the project. Those partners, by the way, include — are you ready? — the National Security Agency of the United States.”
They have a website called internet.org for this project. The goal to be accomplished, as Lopez tells us,
“Using a combination of drones, satellites and other technologies, Facebook seeks to bring connectivity to the entire world. The picture is remarkable: Facebook satellites and drones with six month life cycles will bounce every connection signals (like Wify) to people in every corner of the earth. Every human being will now have access to the Internet.”
In a white paper named “Is Connectivity a Human Right?” Zuckerberg wrote:
However, David Talbot points out that there is no information as to where and how the money was spent. Through his spokesman, Zuckerberg turned down an interview request. Talbot explains that connectivity means “’connect people to Facebook.’”
At least people like Gillmor can perform some service for the human rights of their fellow human beings – just don’t mislead people by applauding capitalist fundamentalists like Zuckerberg.
Many a time people fed up of senior politicians and CEOs complain about a dearth of young blood in various fields. Well here is our youngest hero Zuckerberg. But the problem is that he is two steps ahead – he wants to control all the 7 billion people of this world. One man wants to eat the entire pie. Now, that is no good. Even his fellow billionaires with similar dreams are not going to be happy about this.
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com