The tech industry is chock full of spies working for one side or the other. FAANG has been an intelligence front since the beginning. The only bullshit here is targeting KSA, when everyone's involved.
As for the rest, it is just a matter of checking funding from inqtel and associated groups
The UK has information warfare agents on Twitter as well [2]
None of this is a disputed topic, back on the 70s with operation mockingbird US intelligence agencies bragged that they had an agent/asset on every important editorial board on the country [3] which all goes back to the church committee
So your proof is one bullshit story made up by someone who wants to claim Google was created by the CIA but lacks any real evidence. The fact that a mid-level exec at twitter was an Army reservist, and an claim that TLAs were controlling newspapers that is even more poorly sourced than the Google claim. Did you even read the first and third story you cite to see the level of innuendo and hand-waving suggestions without supporting evidence that this 'reporting' was using? Try again paranoia troll.
Because all of Silicon Valley has a strong/long history with the military industrial complex and various intelligence services? It's not exactly a secret...
Now take a look at how many ex-intelligence run tech companies (may i remind you that former NSA head is on Amazon board?) and how many tech companies happily collaborate with intelligence services (Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir).
No it would not. It would only suggest that once the data existed there was an interest on the part of certain government agencies to gain access to the data. The idea that these companies are 'fronts' for these agencies is moronic to the point of being self-parody.
As another commenter suggested: it's absurd beyond parody and a flagrant abuse of language to conflate being a "front" with being compelled by a third party (especially one with legal authority) to do some action(s). Being a "front" suggests an entire business model created by and built around propping up that third party such that the two are indistinguishable actors on everything but the surface level.
> Being a "front" suggests an entire business model created by and built around propping up that third party such that the two are indistinguishable actors on everything but the surface level.
No. One party being a front for another party suggests that the two are indistinguishable actors on everything but the surface level, or more accurately that any action taken by the first party might be better viewed as being "really" taken by the second party, that any information given to the first party is also being given to the second party, etc. It does not suggest that fronting for the second party is the only thing the first party does, or that the first party was created to serve the purposes of the second party.
Taking an example out of the dictionary, it would be unusual to claim that a massage parlor serving as a front for prostitution is obviously, by its nature as a "front", unwilling to provide massages.
I am secretly controlled by the state because they force me to pay taxes. We are all IRS assets in their quest to build a global American tax-base imperial seat of power.
Yes, because at the time there were only four or five main junctions for cross-country internet peering locations. Seattle was not on that list and if you are not going to be local then why go to CA and compete for space, data-center engineers, and peering with every other late-90s dot-com on the planet when you could go to an area with equivalent infrastructure and less competition for the resources. The reason so much telecom infrastructure terminated in that region was due to proximity to the government center of gravity, but also due to simple geography and the tendency of new telecom infra to be built out in parallel to existing telecom infra.
Oh, you were trying to make some sort of sinister innuendo based upon your complete lack of understanding of the telecom industry in the original dot-com era and the existing long-haul infrastructure at the time? Ok.
The suggestion implied was that the infra was there so that it could be monitored. The reality is that the infra was there because the US federal government was, and continues to be, one of the largest customers of telecom on the planet.
Yeah I’m just saying they have a close relationship as evidenced by the location of us-east-1. How far that relationship goes you or I do not know, but clearly there is a close relationship