Little History of our Government and Social Media

Jared Cohen

https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/file2/publication/article/SAAMAG/29494/pending/cohen_connections.jpgJPG

@Vindicator

A. Condoleezza Rice hired him at State Department B. with Rwanda president Paul Kagame C. retained at State Department by Hillary Clinton D. with Colombia president Álvaro Uribe E. with Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai F. judged films with Whoopi Goldberg G. briefing with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney H. with Prince Charles I. with King Abdullah II of Jordan J. with Iraq president Jalal Talabani K. interviewed Mullah Akbar Aghi in Afghan prison

Cohen's ties to Twitter

Jared Cohen, the youngest member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, and Alec Ross,

Ross and Cohen have formed an unlikely and unprecedented team in the State Department. They are the public face of a cause with an important-sounding name: 21st-century statecraft

And then Hillary Clinton arrived. “The secretary is the one who unleashed us,” Ross says. “She’s the godmother of 21st-century statecraft.”

Early this year, Ross and Cohen helped prop open the State Department’s doors by bringing 10 leading figures of the tech and social-media worlds to Washington for a private dinner with Clinton and her senior staff.

Among the guests were Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google;

Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chairman of Twitter;

James Eberhard of Mobile Accord; Shervin Pishevar of the mobile-phone-game-development company SGN;

Jason Liebman of Howcast;

Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby Awards; and Andrew Rasiej of Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference on the intersection of politics and technology. Toward the end of the evening, Clinton delighted those assembled by inviting them to use her “as an app.”

A few days later, they did. On Jan. 12, the Haiti earthquake struck, and within two hours, Eberhard, working with the State Department, set up the Text Haiti 90999 program, which raised more than $40 million for the Red Cross in $10 donations.

It was also the day Google announced that Chinese hackers tried to break into the Gmail accounts of dissidents. In response, Google said that it would no longer comply with China’s censorship laws and for a few months redirected Chinese users to its Hong Kong search engine. The dispute rose to a high-level diplomatic conflict, but it also gave added resonance to the 45-minute “Internet freedom” speech Secretary Clinton delivered a little more than a week later, in which she placed “the freedom to connect” squarely within the U.S. human rights and foreign policy agenda.

At Google, and later at YouTube’s headquarters, Ross and Cohen stressed the political power of viral videos and the potential for mobile phones to become widespread public tools for education, banking and election monitoring

As the recent Wikileaks scandal suggests, new technologies may usher in as many diplomatic catastrophes as breakthroughs. (In June, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst claimed to have given 260,000 diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, a Web site dedicated to publishing confidential material.) When I asked Cohen whether sites like Wikileaks made the kind of diplomacy he advocates harder, he allowed that they posed a challenge: “All of these tools can be utilized by individuals for everything from Wikileaks to other negative purposes” — at least as the State Department sees it — “but that technology isn’t going anywhere. So we can fear we can’t control it and ignore the space, or we can recognize we can’t control it, but we can influence it.”

real dangers when companies are conflated with states. “The risk,” Carlos Pascual, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, told me in February, “is if and when in a particular country — whether that’s China or Iran or Cuba or North Korea — there’s a perception that Twitter or Facebook is a tool of the U.S. government

Cohen was appointed by Condoleezza Rice and still considers her a mentor; Ross was deeply embedded in the Obama campaign. And they pursued very different paths to the State Department.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/magazine/18web2-0-t.html

It was also in 1999 that Schmidt joined the board of a Washington, DC–based group: the New America Foundation, a merger of well-connected centrist forces (in DC terms). The foundation and its 100 staff serves as an influence mill, using its network of approved national security, foreign policy, and technology pundits to place hundreds of articles and op-eds per year. By 2008 Schmidt had become chairman of its board of directors. As of 2013 the New America Foundation’s principal funders (each contributing over $1 million) are listed as Eric and Wendy Schmidt, the US State Department, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Secondary funders include Google, USAID, and Radio Free Asia

Schmidt’s involvement in the New America Foundation places him firmly in the Washington establishment nexus.

The foundation’s other board members, seven of whom also list themselves as members of the Council on Foreign Relations, include Francis Fukuyama, one of the intellectual fathers of the neoconservative movement;

Rita Hauser, who served on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under both Bush and Obama;

Jonathan Soros, the son of George Soros;

Walter Russell Mead, a US security strategist and editor of the American Interest;

Helene Gayle, who sits on the boards of Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive, the Rockefeller Foundation, the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Unit, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the White House Fellows program,

and Bono’s ONE Campaign;

and Daniel Yergin, oil geostrategist, former chair of the US Department of Energy’s Task Force on Strategic Energy Research, and author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power

https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2017/08/09/google-search-engine-or-arm-of-the-deep-state/

The New American Foundation

https://www.newamerica.org/board/

https://www.newamerica.org/our-funding/

Arizona State University gave over One Million

https://voat.co/v/pizzagate/2230412

Now Cohen is on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s team and helped with her speech on Internet freedom. I spoke with him while he was waiting at the airport to board a flight for Moscow. He’s part of an effort that Secretary Clinton calls “21st Century Statecraft.” In January, Clinton held a dinner in Washington to explore how to use technology to promote diplomacy

That’s what Cohen will be doing for the next five days. He has teamed with Howard Solomon of the National Security Council and White House Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra to lead an all-star U.S. delegation to Russia to see how technology can mutually benefit both countries.

Among the luminaries headed to Russia with Cohen are actor Ashton Kutcher;

EBay CEO John Donahoe

Shervin Pishevar, executive chairman and founder of Social Gaming Network;

Twitter co-founder and Square founder Jack Dorsey;

Mozilla Foundation chair Mitchell Baker;

and Cisco System CTO Padmasree Warrior.

They will meet with Russian ministers of health and education, advisors to President Dimitry Medvedev, leaders of technology companies and more. They will tackle issues such as encouraging entrepreneurship and e-government initiatives and combating child trafficking and corruption

https://voat.co/v/pizzagatewhatever/2229726