Facebook Board Member Accuses Google of 'Seemingly Treasonous' Acts, Calls for Investigation
Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel lashed out at tech giant Google on Sunday for its “seemingly treasonous” work that he said supports China’s military.
Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and a Facebook board member who spoke on President Donald Trump’s behalf at the 2016 Republican National Convention, made his comments during remarks at the National Conservatism Conference, Axios reported.
Thiel said there were “three questions that should be asked” of Google.
“Number one, how many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for AI?” he said. Google was working with China on something called Project Dragonfly, which was a highly censored search service for China. Google has since said it is no longer working on the project.
“Number two, does Google’s senior management consider itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated by Chinese intelligence?” Thiel said.
Thiel then wondered why Google aligned itself with China’s military and not America’s. Google had been working on something called Project Maven, which was designed to use artificial intelligence to analyze images from surveillance drones. The project was dropped over employee protests, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reported.
“Number three, is it because they consider themselves to be so thoroughly infiltrated that they have engaged in the seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military and not with the US military … because they are making the sort of bad, short-term rationalistic [decision] that if the technology doesn’t go out the front door, it gets stolen out the backdoor anyway?” he said.
Thiel said the issue requires the kind of urgency and force only America’s intelligence community can muster.
He added that his questions “need to be asked by the FBI, by the CIA, and I’m not sure quite how to put this, I would like them to be asked in a not excessively gentle manner.”
During his speech, Thiel said that the AI work Google has done in its Deep Mind subsidiary should be thought of as a “military weapon,” Bloomberg reported.
Peter Thiel says we need to be asking how many foreign intelligence agents have infiltrated DeepMind, which he held a lot of stock in before the Google buyout pic.twitter.com/WJCLBehw7q
— Sam Shead (@Sam_L_Shead) July 15, 2019
“We’ve been a lot more dishonest about that in Silicon Valley than the nuclear physicists were in the 1940s,” Thiel said.
The Western Journal has reached out to Google for comment but has not yet received a response. We will update this article if and when we do.
During his speech, Thiel praised Trump’s tough trade stance against China, which he called a “signature achievement” of the Trump administration.
The conference was focused on the emergence and importance of nationalism.
“We see nationalism as integral to the rise of conservatism,” said Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony, chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which organized the event.
Hazony said technology was not the conference’s main focus but will be a major topic.
“Facebook and Google are good examples of what we’re talking about,” Hazony said. “These are spectacularly impressive entrepreneurs, but you need to ask if Americans are better off with [Google and Facebook] single-handedly determining what should be censored?”
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