The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - June 17, 2026


PREVIEW LIVE： Realpolitik #51 ｜ Big Tech and Geopolitics


Episode Stats


Length

20 minutes

Words per minute

131.8

Word count

2,709

Sentence count

98

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hello, good afternoon. Welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firaz Maudad.
00:00:06.180 And today we're going to be talking about a couple of things. We're going to be discussing
00:00:10.760 the origins of some of the major technology companies that are very much in our lives today
00:00:17.180 and how they interface with intelligence, a little bit about their background, a little bit about
00:00:24.040 their relationship with intelligence agencies and their relationship with Israel. And then we're
00:00:29.980 going to talk about the Iran-US deal that was announced yesterday by President Trump and that
00:00:36.060 is supposed to be signed on, I believe, Friday the 19th. So let's just get started. I got into
00:00:42.840 a bit of trouble last week because I said that Facebook and Google were sort of started by the
00:00:48.780 CIA and that they are not separable from intelligence. And that is in fact true. That is
00:00:58.240 actually very very much the truth um there is a gentleman by the name of chester gordon bell
00:01:06.540 who came up with the idea for the product that actually became facebook and in an interview that
00:01:15.120 he had with uh why magazine uh or actually from uh from the pulse podcast as well he pretty much
00:01:26.420 said how he got the idea. Initially, in 1997, a colleague of his asked him if he could scan all
00:01:34.540 of his books and make them digital. And he said, why stop at books? And his idea was how could you
00:01:43.220 scan everything in your life and put it online and capture the data that was impossible to collect
00:01:49.900 without the emerging technology finally at his disposal.
00:01:53.480 He brings the idea to Microsoft and he starts logging everything,
00:01:58.460 his emails, his browsing history, his pictures.
00:02:01.680 He takes to moving around the place with a camera around his neck
00:02:06.120 that automatically took pictures and that was tied to a GPS and to an altimeter,
00:02:11.540 meaning that he could instantly locate each of his photos,
00:02:15.840 which is one of the settings that you now have on pretty much all social media.
00:02:19.900 Do you want to add your location to the photographs?
00:02:23.040 And he started doing it, and he basically was trying to create a log of his life.
00:02:33.700 And it was called, initially, Life Log.
00:02:36.160 And so DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
00:02:44.740 which is the one of the main science outfits within the pentagon all it does is discover new
00:02:53.440 technologies identify new technological requirements and then link up with a private
00:02:58.340 sector in order to get these requirements fulfilled they reach out to him and they start
00:03:05.880 talking about how they could build a product that would be life log that would log all of your life
00:03:13.460 and would get you to pretty much make everything about your life public information and post it
00:03:21.600 online. And it was actually immediately tied into with the guy who developed Google Glass,
00:03:32.160 which was the same guy who built the technology that would kind of give soldiers universal
00:03:40.180 awareness, or at least the commander's universal awareness, because the soldiers themselves would
00:03:45.420 be wearing sensors and cameras, and these would all be interlinked, sent back to headquarters,
00:03:50.660 and so a commander would know pretty much everything that was going on. But anyway,
00:03:56.140 the researchers at DARPA way back then thought that the library of data that was gathered by
00:04:04.500 life log, could be fed into AI models and predict human decision-making. So they were trying to just
00:04:14.340 get the technology that we see today rolling way back in the 1990s and early 2000s.
00:04:22.800 And it instantly met with a bad reaction from the public because of the public's reaction to
00:04:30.680 the Patriot Act, and to the violations of civil liberties that were encoded in the Patriot Act.
00:04:35.660 The Patriot Act, in case you don't remember, was basically authorization for the intelligence
00:04:41.760 agencies to monitor everything that everybody in the United States, and therefore globally,
00:04:47.000 was doing in their communications and in their emails and their digital tags, essentially,
00:04:53.640 so that they could be better surveyed.
00:04:57.340 And DARPA, at that time, in response to the terrorist attacks,
00:05:02.980 built something literally called Total Information Awareness.
00:05:08.860 It's in the name. It's called Total Information Awareness.
00:05:12.680 And the idea behind it is, as explained,
00:05:17.300 develop and integrate information technologies,
00:05:19.640 enabling the intelligence community to sift through multiple databases, sources, passports,
00:05:26.020 visas, work permits, driver's licenses, credit card transactions, airline tickets, car rentals,
00:05:31.720 gun purchases, to detect and classify and to identify potential terrorist activities.
00:05:39.360 Now, that's what it was doing. It was basically surveying everything.
00:05:43.960 And since it caused that backlash, the Total Information Awareness Program ended up being cancelled.
00:05:53.440 And that is when, again, DARPA picked it up.
00:05:58.840 That is when, again, DARPA picked it up.
00:06:01.900 And they built on it.
00:06:06.120 But then the amount of pressure was so severe that they shut it down.
00:06:10.580 on the same day that the Facebook was launched, on the same exact day that the Facebook was
00:06:18.000 launched. This doesn't provide total and conclusive evidence that this was all an
00:06:24.220 intelligence op from the outset, but what it does show you is that what Facebook does objectively
00:06:30.840 is fulfill an intelligence objective. What it does essentially, yes, it's fun to scroll and
00:06:39.780 who amongst us hasn't done a bit of doom scrolling. I'm old enough to be a bit of a, have been a bit
00:06:46.680 of a regular Facebook user. Thank God I kicked that habit. But what Facebook does is literally
00:06:55.280 in line with the objectives of the intelligence communities in response to the 9-11 attacks.
00:07:01.940 This is precisely what it does. And the transition kind of seemed to have happened seamlessly from the public sector or the government into the private sector. And it happened with support from Microsoft and it happened with support from the intelligence community.
00:07:21.660 And you see that because you look at sort of senior Facebook security personnel and cybersecurity guys, a huge number of them have an intelligence background.
00:07:31.300 And you see that also from the Twitter files, which we will get into, like, at least tangentially during the show, where you see that the government uses these kinds of outfits to control narratives and to spread the narratives that it approves of.
00:07:44.140 so you know yeah i got into trouble for saying that these are intelligence tools but but they
00:07:51.640 literally are google is the same thing google is literally the same thing the initial grants for
00:07:59.580 google were given from the cia and the national uh security agency which is the sort of more
00:08:08.200 digital-oriented, more signals and communications-oriented intelligence branch of the United States
00:08:14.400 government. That's what it does. And the story that you have is that, you know, that's not
00:08:20.800 really it, but the reality is actually pretty clear. The reality of it is that it wouldn't exist
00:08:30.000 without support from the intelligence community. This was the purpose for its founding.
00:08:36.680 The intelligence community hoped, according to this article on QZ, that the nation's leading computer scientists could take non-classified information and user data, combine it with what would become known as the Internet, because the Internet, you have to remember, was actually a military technology, that's a different conversation, and begin to create for-profit commercial enterprises to suit the needs of both the intelligence community and the public.
00:09:04.180 They hope to direct the supercomputing revolution from the start in order to make sense of what millions of human beings did inside the digital information network.
00:09:14.980 That collaboration has made a comprehensive public-private mass surveillance state possible today.
00:09:21.920 Yeah, that's exactly right.
00:09:24.320 That's exactly what is happening.
00:09:28.320 I mean, where is the debate about this?
00:09:30.100 the story of the deliberate creation of the modern mass surveillance state includes elements
00:09:35.060 of google's surprising and largely unknown origin it is a somewhat different creation story than the
00:09:41.300 one the public has heard and explains what google co-founders sergey brin and larry page set out to
00:09:47.620 build and why but it's not just about google it's about the mass surveillance state exactly
00:09:52.300 in the 90s the intelligence community in america began to realize that they had an opportunity
00:09:59.440 The supercomputing community was just beginning to migrate from university settings into the private sector,
00:10:05.120 led by investments from a place that would come to be known as Silicon Valley.
00:10:09.560 A digital revolution was underway, one that would transform the world of data gathering
00:10:14.200 and how we make sense of massive amounts of information.
00:10:19.380 The Intel community wanted to shape Silicon Valley supercomputing efforts at their inception
00:10:26.280 so they would be useful for both military and homeland security purposes.
00:10:33.540 Okay, okay, that seems coherent.
00:10:38.900 Intelligence gathering may have been their world,
00:10:41.200 but the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency
00:10:43.620 had come to realize that their future was likely to be profoundly shaped outside the government.
00:10:49.180 It was at a time when military and intelligence budgets within the Clinton administration were in jeopardy,
00:10:54.160 because that was after the end of the Cold War,
00:10:56.280 And so Clinton was trying to balance the budget, that was his whole pitch, to the voters that he would fix the economy and balance the budget, which he did succeed in doing.
00:11:07.360 And so for the intelligence communities, they looked around and they figured, what if we recruit the resources of the private sector and get the private sector to work under our guidance to shape what kind of products that they would build?
00:11:23.580 and that would mean that the intelligence community
00:11:26.680 would gain even more control.
00:11:30.020 So they started reaching out to the scientists
00:11:32.200 and one of the scientists that they reached out to
00:11:34.980 was Sergey Brin and what's the other guy's name?
00:11:40.760 Whatever.
00:11:42.180 And so this is how the company was actually started.
00:11:49.780 This is exactly how it was started
00:11:52.540 And they go here to explain how basically the internet was a DARPA creation, the same DARPA that sort of deals with Boston Dynamics and the robotics, the attempts at integrating robotics and AI and self-driving vehicles into the same umbrella and into a full-on, fully developed military application that would allow for the use of autonomous weapons and that would integrate the human element with the surveillance.
00:12:22.380 element with the AI and autonomous elements so that the commanders could have total visibility
00:12:27.700 over the battlefield and so that they could basically dominate the enemy because they would
00:12:33.620 know all of the enemy's movements and their own locations and the AI would identify the enemy
00:12:39.840 targets and select the right kind of weapon with which the enemy would be hit. So when you're
00:12:47.600 thinking about this stuff you want to think about the history itself you also want to think about
00:12:51.660 the holistic picture that they're heading towards, which is a kind of semi-autonomous
00:12:56.880 monstrosity, really, with just giant killing machines or appropriately sized killing machines
00:13:04.160 all over the world. And what they tried to develop was something that was called the
00:13:11.040 Massive Digital Data Systems Project, which was launched at Stanford, Caltech, MIT, Harvard,
00:13:19.380 Carnegie Mellon, etc., describing the needs that the intelligence community had in the age of
00:13:27.860 massive computing and trying to figure out how they could get the private sector
00:13:35.540 to build the products that they needed given that they were growing constraints on their budgets
00:13:41.140 in the 1990s as Clinton tried to balance the American budget deficit. So this is the story.
00:13:49.380 Changing demands require that the intelligence community process different types as well as larger volumes of data,
00:13:56.380 they said in the Massive Digital Data Systems white paper in 1993.
00:14:03.380 The date is important. This is older than some of the people in the audience.
00:14:10.380 Consequently, the IC is taking a proactive role in stimulating research
00:14:17.380 in the efficient management of massive databases
00:14:20.480 and ensuring that the Intel's community requirements
00:14:22.520 can be incorporated or adapted into commercial products.
00:14:29.500 Why do you want them to come out of commercial products?
00:14:32.140 Well, obviously, it's cheaper.
00:14:35.020 Second, if you present them as a commercial product
00:14:38.160 that you yourself download on your phone,
00:14:41.220 you make yourself available as a target to the intelligence community and thirdly
00:14:52.100 it gets to a point where the only people aren't who aren't using these kinds of applications
00:14:59.760 are themselves suspect because they're trying to stay away from prying eyes
00:15:06.340 But if they just have a mobile phone that pings with mobile telephone towers, they are still identifiable.
00:15:16.040 So it serves a bunch of purposes.
00:15:19.280 The aim was to provide grants of several million dollars each to advance this research concept
00:15:24.560 so that this kind of management of massive amounts of data could happen.
00:15:29.080 And this type of public-private innovation helped launch powerful science and technology companies
00:15:35.780 like Qualcomm, the chips makers, Symantec, which are the internet security guys, Netscape,
00:15:42.340 forget about that, and funded research in areas like radars and fiber optics,
00:15:50.660 leading to companies like AccuWeather, which the weather is incredibly important
00:15:56.260 to predict accurately if you're conducting a bombing run, Verizon and AT&T.
00:16:02.120 and now the fund that they have to do these kinds of things
00:16:06.380 provides 90% of all federal funding
00:16:09.060 for university-based computer science research.
00:16:11.800 So the entire tech environment is captured.
00:16:16.860 The research arms of the CIA and NSA
00:16:19.460 hoped that the best computer science minds in academia
00:16:21.900 could identify what they called birds of a feather.
00:16:24.840 Just as geese fly together in large V-shapes
00:16:27.560 or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together,
00:16:30.480 they predicted that like-minded groups of humans would move together online this is a critical
00:16:36.340 insight right when you ask yourself why is it that pretty much all of the social media companies
00:16:44.260 especially before the acquisition of twitter by elon musk think in exactly the same way and have
00:16:50.460 the same priorities they all have crappy enforcement of child protections they all have an insane
00:16:57.260 left-wing bias. They all tell you that diversity is our strength. They all believe in troons and
00:17:04.240 the importance of having troons. Well, because by design, the people that were selected to do 1.00
00:17:11.360 the work that were given the grants were in an environment that rewarded compliance and that
00:17:17.620 wanted to ensure that they would obey central control.
00:17:21.260 and if they manage to control the people who give you your media feed
00:17:27.660 they also get to control you that's the idea
00:17:33.300 and so the research aim was to track digital fingerprints inside the rapidly expanding
00:17:41.800 global information network which was then known as the world wide web could an entire world of
00:17:48.280 digital information be organized so that the requests human-made inside such a network
00:17:52.520 be tracked and sorted.
00:17:58.040 Surveillance was itself the objective.
00:18:01.540 So in the early days of the internet, you had these idealists who said that the internet
00:18:05.300 was going to liberate everybody, and as everyone gets access to information, what is going
00:18:10.480 to happen is that everybody's opinions would improve, they would become better people,
00:18:17.060 They would end up agreeing on things. They would see that the enemy is whatever it was, inequality, injustice, etc.
00:18:26.960 And the internet would provide a universal, all-encompassing kumbaya moment where we all unite with one another.
00:18:38.620 Well, actually, the purpose of some of the earliest products of the Internet
00:18:44.520 was to corral you and control you.
00:18:48.500 And it was to make sure that you would be obeying the intelligence community,
00:18:54.240 which was seeking a way to compensate for its loss of power
00:18:59.820 because of the loss of budget by transforming itself
00:19:06.460 and grabbing control of the new products in the private sector.
00:19:12.440 That's what actually happened.
00:19:15.680 The intent was to, by engaging with emergent commercial data,
00:19:20.680 the intent was to track like-minded groups of people across the Internet
00:19:24.220 and identify them from the digital fingerprints they left behind,
00:19:28.000 like forensic scientists.
00:19:30.380 They predicted that potential terrorists would communicate with each other
00:19:33.700 in this new global connected world,
00:19:35.440 and they could find them by identifying patterns
00:19:38.500 in this massive amount of new information.
00:19:42.180 And so enter Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
00:19:45.780 One of the most promising grants
00:19:48.200 under the massive data distribution system,
00:19:53.380 whatever it was called,
00:19:55.040 went to a research team at Stanford
00:19:58.060 with a decade-long history of working with the NSF and DARPA.
00:20:03.220 That was the idea.