Wikileaking embassy-stayer Julian Assange has accused Google of being born bad and getting badder as it grew. We know how Assange feels about Google, and we know how Google feels about Assange.
The WikiLeaks man, writing in a new book entitled When Google Met WikiLeaks, says that Google is an evil, bad, government sanctioned and supporting blight on the internet. Google says that Assange is paranoid.
Assange seems to have more muck to throw around, though, and accuses Google of being something of a state puppet that is possibly dangling from the arm of Hillary Clinton. He reckons that Clinton punked him through Schmidt and bagged a couple of State-suits a free lunch on his tab. Writing about a meeting between him, Schmidt, Schmidt's girlfriend and two other people, Assange realised that perhaps his reasoning for the meeting was different to the other attendees'.
"It was at this point that I realised Eric Schmidt might not have been an emissary of Google alone. Whether officially or not, he had been keeping some company that placed him very close to Washington, DC, including a well-documented relationship with President Obama. Not only had Hillary Clinton's people known that Eric Schmidt's partner had visited me, but they had also elected to use her as a back channel," he wrote.
"While WikiLeaks had been deeply involved in publishing the inner archive of the US State Department, the US State Department had, in effect, snuck into the WikiLeaks command centre and hit me up for a free lunch." Google was asked to comment on the book, and the section that WikiLeaks has chosen to highlight and publicise, but so far it has not reacted. It has reacted to noise from the WikiLeaker in the past, but not very kindly.
"Nobody wants to acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad. But it has. Schmidt's tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the shadiest of US power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation. But Google has always been comfortable with this proximity," he said. "And even as Schmidt's Google developed an image as the overly friendly giant of global tech, it was building a close relationship with the intelligence community."
