Google analyzed search terms entered into a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for a censored search engine it has been planning to launch in China, according to confidential documents seen by The Intercept.

Engineers working on the censorship sampled search queries from 265.com, a Chinese-language web directory service owned by Google.

Unlike Google.com and other Google services, such as YouTube, 265.com is not blocked in China by the country’s so-called Great Firewall, which restricts access to websites deemed undesirable by the ruling Communist Party regime.

265.com was founded in 2003 by Cai Wensheng, a Chinese entrepreneur known as the “the godfather of Chinese webmasters.” In 2008, Google acquired the website, which it now operates as a subsidiary. Records show that 265.com is hosted on Google servers, but its physical address is listed under the name of the “Beijing Guxiang Information and Technology Co.,” which is based out of an office building in northwest Beijing’s Haidian district.

265.com provides news updates, links to information about financial markets, and advertisements for cheap flights and hotels. It also has a function that allows people to search for websites, images, videos, and other content. However, search queries entered on 265.com are redirected to Baidu, the most popular search engine in China and Google’s main competitor in the country.

It appears that Google has used 265.com as a de facto honeypot for market research, storing information about Chinese users’ searches before sending them along to Baidu. Google’s use of 265.com offers an insight into the mechanics behind its planned Chinese censored search platform, code-named Dragonfly, which the company has been preparing since spring 2017.

After gathering sample queries from 265.com, Google engineers used them to review lists of websites that people would see in response to their searches. The Dragonfly developers used a tool they called “BeaconTower” to check whether the websites were blocked by the Great Firewall. They compiled a list of thousands of websites that were banned, and then integrated this information into a censored version of Google’s search engine so that it would automatically manipulate Google results, purging links to websites prohibited in China from the first page shown to users.

According to documents and people familiar with the Dragonfly project, teams of Google programmers and engineers have already created a functioning version of the censored search engine. Google’s plan is for its China search platform to be made accessible through a custom Android app, different versions of which have been named “Maotai” and “Longfei,” as The Intercept first reported last week.

The app has been designed to filter out content that China’s authoritarian government views as sensitive, such as information about political opponents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest. The censored search app will “blacklist sensitive queries” so that “no results will be shown” at all when people enter certain words or phrases, according to internal Google documents.

The documents seen by The Intercept indicate that Google’s search project is being carried out as part of a “joint venture” with another company, presumably one based in China, because internet companies providing services in China are required by law to operate their servers and data centers in the country. In January, Google entered into an agreement with the Chinese company Tencent, which Google said at the time would allow it to “focus on building better products and services.” A bipartisan group of six U.S. senators is asking Google CEO Sundar Pichai to explain whether the Tencent deal is linked to the censored search app.

It is unclear whether, as part of the joint venture, Google’s partner company would be able to unilaterally update the blacklists. Documents seen by The Intercept state that that the “joint venture will have the ability” to blacklist websites and “sensitive queries.”

One source familiar with the project told The Intercept that Google has planned to provide the partner company with an “application programming interface,” or API, that it could potentially use to add blacklisted words or phrases. The source said they believed it was likely that the third-party company would be able to “update the blacklist without Google’s approval,” though the source could not confirm this with certainty. The details about the API have not been reported before.

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According to Harper’s Magazine, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley recently delivered a speech to the elite and secretive Council for National Policy (CNP).  On October 4, Haley had previously resigned her UN assignment as of the end of 2018.

Harper’s Magazine reported on the CNP speech as more or less recapping her 19 months of service in the Trump Administration. The article first states,

In a way, Haley had deployed a version of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon’s “madman theory,” holding up Trump as an unstable actor who might do anything. It seemed that she herself also genuinely had no idea what Trump would do. [emphasis added]

This suggests that President Trump was used as a prop to her UN agenda. But, who were the puppeteers? The article explains from her own words:

While learning on the job at the UN, Haley said, she sought out Henry Kissinger as her personal foreign policy mentor, meeting with him every two months to absorb his lessons. During a tense diplomatic standoff with North Korea, she appeared to have embraced a version of Kissinger and Nixon’s notorious “madman theory.” [emphasis added]

Henry Kissinger, of course, was one of the founding members of the elite Trilateral Commission. President Trump considers Kissinger a long-time personal friend, and has received him at the Whitehouse on multiple occasions.

The fact that both Trump and Nikki Haley are taking foreign policy queues from Kissinger is highly disturbing because it suggests that reality and perception of the Trump Administration are far apart.

As Brexit unfolds, come along and hear from the man who wrote Article 50.

John Kerr, Baron Kerr of Kinlochard is to be the keynote speaker at the Insider and Scotland Is Now Top 500 Business Breakfast early in the New Year.

Kerr, as a crossbench or independent peer is right at the heart of the parliamentary debate on Brexit as it goes through the machinery of government.

He has said: “I don’t feel guilty about inventing the mechanism. I feel very sad about the UK using it. I didn’t think that the United Kingdom would use it.”

Former diplomat Kerr has been key to the development of the EU over many years first as British Representative to the EU at the time of John Major’s Government.

As Secretary-General of the European Convention he drafted Article 50, the procedure under which the UK is leaving the EU.

He was Permanent Under Secretary to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the time of Tony Blair’s Government before becoming an independent peer in the House of Lords in 2004.

His business career has been as a director of Shell and then chairing the group of directors who brought about the creation of Royal Dutch Shell plc in 2005. He was deputy chairman and senior independent director of the company until 2012.

He was a director of Rio Tinto Zinc from 2003 to 2015.

He has been a director of the Scottish American Investment Trust since 2002 and of ScottishPower since 2009. He became deputy chairman of ScottishPower in 2012.

He is chairman of the Centre for European Reform and a member of the Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission

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Longtime Merkel critic Friedrich Merz launches political comeback

The conservative politician left politics in 2009 after a protracted battle with the German chancellor. Now he will vie to replace her at the top of the CDU. Although they share a party, he and Merkel are poles apart.

It was the surprise after the surprise: First, Angela Merkel announced she would not stand for re-election as the Christian Democratic Union’s (CDU) party leader — a position she has held since 2000 — after the CDU suffered yet another embarrassing defeat in state elections on Sunday. Then, of all people, one of her most ardent critics, Friedrich Merz, announced on Tuesday that he would stand for the position.

The party leadership election will take place at the CDU’s annual convention in Hamburg this December. Should Merz be successful in his bid it would be a moment of personal satisfaction as well as political revenge, for he was one of those who most clearly lost out as Merkel’s political star rose.

During her ascent to party leadership, Merkel successfully dislodged Merz from the party’s top echelons after a series of inner-party disputes. When the CDU and its Bavarian sister party — the Christian Social Union (CSU) — lost Germany’s 2002 federal election Merkel also insisted on taking over parliamentary group leadership in the opposition, a position Merz had held for two years.

The dramatic break between the two would continue to deepen over the coming years. Merz’s constant criticism of the Merkel-led grand coalition between CDU/CSU and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) that governed Germany between 2005 and 2009 was seen by many as sour grapes from a political loser.

Consequently, a frustrated and disappointed Merz withdrew from politics in 2009. When he announced his retirement he said he had made the decision in reaction to “the grand coalition’s current policies.”

Prior to that point, Friedrich Merz had been a powerful political player within the CDU. Trained as an attorney, he had served as the party’s parliamentary leader from 2000 until 2002, as well as serving as deputy parliamentary leader from 2002 to 2004. A financial expert, he was considered to be one of the party’s most-talented members and in many ways Merkel’s political antipode: More business-friendly and conservative but also more provocative and entertaining.

Merz gained attention in parliament for his pointed and sharp-tongued floor speeches, something that further differentiated him from Merkel, who has a reputation for delivering analytical, sleep-inducing lectures.

Merz was well known for seeking to reduce complex issues into the simplest of terms. In 2004, he demanded a tax system where a family could calculate what they owed on the back of a beer coaster. The plan amounted to a 12 percent flat-rate tax on income, with a fixed rate of deduction per member of the household.

Perhaps his most contentious political appeal concerned immigration and what Merz called a “Leitkultur.” The term roughly translates as leading, guiding, or even prominent culture. Merz never defined the term himself, but urged the government to incorporate it into migration policy, and to apply more strict rules on immigration and integration. The comments unleashed a wave of public debate and became a battle cry for those opposed to multicultural society. At the time, Merz said that anyone who wanted to live in Germany “must conform to liberal German leading culture.”

Merz was vehemently attacked by politicians from the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the Left Party for the concept. Green Party politicians accused him of racism. Only the conservatives thanked him for his contribution to sociopolitical discourse — and they continue to do so to this day. Although Chancellor Merkel did not agree with Merz’s vision, she nevertheless stood by him. The refugee issues that dominate German political debate today were not on the horizon at the time he made the contentious statement, though migration to Germany from the Balkans following the wars in the region in the 1990s was high.

Since leaving parliament, the conservative Christian Democrat has taken on a number of different jobs. In 2010, he managed the privatization of the beleaguered German state bank WestLB. He is also a board member at a number of German businesses, such as the Cologne/Bonn Airport. He has served as chairman of the non-profit Atlantik Brücke (Atlantic Bridge) association, which promotes German-American Atlanticism, since 2009. He is also a member of the Trilateral Commission, which seeks to foster cooperation between Europe, Japan and the US.

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George Shultz has observed that the world ahead will not be like the world behind us. His Project on Governance in an Emerging New World explores the challenge to governance posed by changing demographics, the information and communications revolution, emerging technologies, and new means of production of goods near where they are used. Its contributors aim to understand the impact of these global transformations on our democracy, our economy, and our national security and inform strategies for how best to proceed in a rapidly changing world.

New and rapid societal and technological changes are complicating governance around the globe and challenging traditional thinking. Demographic changes and migration are having a profound effect as some populations age and shrink while other countries expand. The information and communications revolution is making governance much more difficult and heightening the impact of diversity. Emerging technologies, especially artificial intelligence and automation, are bringing about a new industrial revolution, disrupting workforces and increasing military capabilities of both states and non-state actors. And new means of production such as additive manufacturing and automation are changing how, where, and what we produce. These changes are coming quickly, faster than governments have historically been able to respond.

Led by Hoover Distinguished Fellow George P. Shultz, his Project on Governance in an Emerging New World aims to understand these changes and inform strategies that both address the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities afforded by these dramatic shifts.

The project will feature a series of papers and events addressing how these changes are affecting democratic processes, the economy, and national security of the United States, and how they are affecting countries and regions, including Russia, China, Europe, Africa, and Latin America. A set of essays by the participants will accompany each event and provide thoughtful analysis of the challenges and opportunities.

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See also: America Can Ride The 21st Century’s Waves Of Change