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the we talk a great deal in the show about national security whistle blowing, but often times blowing whistle on a corporate giant is equally dangerous. the whistleblower may not be subject to an espionage case, but it's not an overstatement to say that sometimes the lives of corporate whistle blowers are equally at risk for going to tell you a story today that's going to make you angry. i'm john kerry onto welcome to the whistle blowers the . 2 2 2 in 2019 zachary, for he's a senior engineer at google, decided to release hundreds of pages of internal google documents to the project vera test organization for he's collected the documents over the course of the year, saying, quote,

the reason i had collected these documents was because i saw something dark and the various going on with a company, and i realized that they were going to not only tamper with the elections, but use that tampering with the elections to essentially over throw the us government on quote, are highly biased political machine that is bent on never bothering somebody, but thoughts that come to power. in june 2019 project fair tests published the documents, which they said revealed something called algorithmic unfairness. that is, google was using its sophisticated algorithms to keep some new sites away from users and to suppress other new sites. what they want to do is they want to add those gatekeepers between the user and the content that they're trying to access. and so they're gonna come in the filter, the content, and they're gonna say, uh, so we don't want to get the user access to that information because it's going to

create a, a, an outcome that's undesirable to us. shortly after project veritas, published in documents the police were dispatched of or he's home, extensively to carry out a wellness check. they brought with them the f, b. i a special weapons and tactics team and a bomb squad. it was all a plan to intimidate him. we're going to talk to zach for, he's about this and other issues. zach. welcome to the show. we're so happy to have you a thank you for having me. i your program. thank you. zach. i have followed your story for years and it's just chilling to me. let's start at the very beginning. you spent years at google. you rose up through the ranks and after a period of time you began seeing things that bothered you. that didn't make sense to you. tell us about that and about how you got to the point that you decided to say something. you know, i started off really liking google and digging that they represented. what was great about america. they were a libertarian organization that really believed in the user's ability to express

themselves. but all of that changed in 2016 when the wrong presidential candidate donald trump got elected. i'm not necessarily that big of a fan, but there is a democratic process and google was very clear that the sea level executives did not approve of this president. and they believed that the reason why he had been elected was because of russia hacking the election. and fake news. and so he was google's decision that they would start to clamp down on this so called fake news. in order to prevent another from situation from happening in 2016 in december, they just started to write internal documentation about how to eliminate this fake news. and then by 2017, they started to roll out a system called machine learning fairness. and this machine learning fairness was

the merging of critical race theory with artificial intelligence. and the goal of this project was to figure out what was true and what was not what was hate, speech and illuminated. and it wasn't just going to eliminate it on google search, but all of their different corpus is including google news and youtube. and even g mail and so as i started to see this project take off being. busy out across the different organizations. um i had the ability to access this documentation and i just started saving it as separate pdf. and overtime i had a collection of documents. i didn't think that i was going to actually give this to anyone else, but every sort of moral red line that i drew that i thought that google went across, they sort of crossed it and with full speed. and so i decided that at some point,

once i started seeing them delete words out of their translation dictionary, particularly cafe. and i realized that or they were serious about this censorship. they weren't gonna halter or roll it back or stop it. it was just going to keep on getting worse. and so i decided that this is actually more than just censorship. this is inactive insurrection against a sitting president. and now i'm involved in the conspiracy, since i know about it, and i feel that i felt that it was my duty to warn the american public and give them an opportunity to get this into the discourse that what google was doing was essentially reading the information system of which 90 percent of the population used or to find that information. and that if we didn't start to diversify the systems of which we're able to access knowledge. that essentially we would have the version of the world that google wanted to project on us. and that had terrible

ramifications for not only our personal ability to understand the way that the world works, but also the ability for us to elect our own representatives to government. because yes, there is a corporation that's controlling all access to information, then whatever they think is acceptable goes. and if they don't like the election, then they can just say that, you know, something is legitimate or illegitimate. that all the news supports them and essentially create a manufactured consent. and i realize that this was going to happen not just for the united states, but it was also going to happen across europe and across the world in which google had a monopoly. and so i felt that it was in everyone's best interest that this information be released. and so i sought out avenues in order to get this to the general public . and so that's when i was able to find project their task. and they took this very

seriously, and then a year later they set up us, they set up a sting operation and were able to get the executives say in person after a few drinks. what it was that they were denying in public, which was that they were going to use the system in order to stop the next trump situation in which they pretty much worked very successful not. and so, you know, at least what we have now is the opportunity to fight back against the censorship by using the power the markets to diversify and get our information from a platter of sources. and as you can see right now, google is, you know, it doesn't effectively have them to not play and search anymore. there are a lot of different alternatives. and really what i think is that we should be able to access information from, you know, being res deco and

a bunch of other search engines. and that's where we are today. we have diversity of search engines and diversity of video hosts. and we are able to preserve the public square of which our democracy hang so tightly on . zach you had been accumulating documents for about a year before you decided to release them. you eventually went public, as you said, through project fair tests. but before that, how was it that google was able to identify you as the potential whistleblower? i big it was pretty obvious. um you know, as soon as i resigned from the company prior to me coming out on the immediately put me on investigation. i was within a few hours that i resignation letter. i got an email from the global network security forces saying that a char was trying to find me or to meet with me. now you said that i was going to

do that. um and then they immediately locked me out of the system. um and so i think that you know, from that investigation then i came out. well actually i didn't come out. the document came out and my not in his testimony from project bird tests came out, and so they, i think they immediately suspected that it was me. and then what followed was an intimidation campaign on twitter. there were people that were anonymously harassing me and we set up a trap where we got them to click an image that was hosted on a server that we controls. and because of that control, we were able to access the service logs and find the ip address and from that ip address were able to reverse geo code it to a location within google's databases in indiana. and so from that, we were able to realize that these anonymous tools were employees of google,

they weren't even using a vpn to do the harassment. and from that, you know, i threw up a dead man switch to warren, the company that uh, you know, in the case of my, on timely desk of all documents would become public. and this was in august of 2019 of which they responded by sending in that police force that you mentioned. i as if i could, we were up to i, i'm fascinated by that this the so called wellness check. it seems like the intent was to, to swat you, they, they called the police on you with the idea that the, so the situation might escalate out of control. but, you know, we've seen so many cases around the country where this kind of thing happens. the police show up to do a so called wellness check, and then the person that they're checking ends up dead. what happened to that situation? in that situation, i tried to pretend that i wasn't home,

but things kept on escalating. until you know, they'd shut down the streets where i live on 20th, and go and see all the way to 23rd, started evacuating everyone. the reason for this was that they pretty much made up a bomb threat by entering into my home and seeing that i had some electronics smelly, the lights that i had and then deciding that that was good enough to call and a bunch. right. and so once you know, the bomb squad comes in uh, that escalates with the fbi. i and various other law enforcement agencies. um they even had to bomb robots at my front. oh my god. yeah. and so i realized at that point that it pretty much needed to just sorta come clean and do whatever was that they wanted me to do out in public. because if they came up with some exigent circumstances to come into the house, who knows what devices were in day,

the earliest on the other one is the no reason to bring. the soldier monument was erected in 1947 in the estonian capital my. the associates authorities, originally bells above the burial side of troops, remains its memorials of the soldiers who gave their lives in world war 2. and we'll say that's good, but i need to go to the department in the morning and forgive for me to transition in 2007. the associated government decided to relocate the monument from the city center. here on the verge of by me to a tip, where in the center of frustrating to move divided the population. the stony is large, russian speaking community, strongly opposed to an intense rising growth, college and talent. these have since become the as the bronze knight drives, people across the username, which is just

the welcome back to the whistle blowers. i'm john kerry. uncle, we're speaking with google whistleblowers at 4. he's about his experience reporting wrong. doing a detect giant zach tech 6. thanks again for staying with us. a thanks john. sec. i'd like to get into some of the specifics of your revelations, which i think are very important, and they're centered around issues that the public knows very little about. frankly, one of the files that you released was entitled black news site list for google now, which was something of a blacklist that restricted certain websites from appearing on news feeds. these were both conservative and progressive webs. websites tell us about that. why were these sites blocked or discouraged? so google now is a product on android that would recommend different news organizations and

aggregate from them. and essentially what google decided is that certain organizations like the gateway pundents uh, wasn't reliable or tricky enough. and so they created this blacklist to be inserted on to the phone, so that new stories that were from dis, favored new sites would never appear. and as a result, the users would just get information from the main stream media outlets like cnbc and also you know, cnn and others. and so, you know, this was a number of, uh, this is one, many different black bus that i was able to expose to the public. and the common theme is that the majority of the things that are censored on google has to do with concern the opinion, and the ones that are let through the gate are new sites that support whatever the

current thing is from. you know cnn m as nbc, you know, etc, etc. mm hm. another file that you released was entitled fringe ranking slash class of fire defining channel quality. this reveal that something called human readers were responsible for deciding what news was worth seeing. and what news wasn't, can you explain that to us? yeah, so google had this ranking of different sites. and in their example data they showed you know, what new sites were, you know, reliable and quality. and of course, at the very top of this is the new york times, right, right. despite the fact that they had lightest into words by the fact that they've been wrong on so many things google saw to it that they were the most trustworthy source of news and put them right at the top. you know, towards the bottom was, you know, next news network, the largest libertarian,

the new site on youtube. alex jones was at the bottom. uh, probably part was somewhere near, you know, the lower 3rd. and essentially it was a, you know, a ranking of what we already know that this, the establishment doesn't like. organizations that don't go along with the narrative. and so they rank them all at the bottom and rank the ones that do support the current thing. all the way at the top the issue of fake news has been a topic of public discussion and public concern for several years now. google took it upon itself to decide what was fake news and what was real news. tell us about that process. who was it that actually made those decisions and what kinds of sites were discriminated against? yeah, so it was a 2 part sort of thing where 1st they had humans go through and it was their employees like an army of employees, go through and give

a manual rankings to different sites. and and the 2nd part to that is that they used. busy those different labels to assemble training data that they were fed into an artificial intelligence system, which i really mentioned was machine learning fairness. and this system learned what was good information and bad information. and from this they were able to apply ranking across the entire internet. there's something called the search rate or guidelines, which lays out how google was doing this on the human scale. now i believe that it's completely automated by a i and, or essentially what it does is it comes up with a system called an 8 score. and that each score stands for expertise, authoritative knows, and trustworthiness. and the way that they rank websites is, uh they take the person topic or site and they compare it against what you know,

1st off of the content. but then they also look at what other sites have to say about that. and in particular, there's a strong emphasis on wikipedia. the bbc am as nbc, cnn, and essentially what they're doing is they're searching through their own echo chamber to see what the echo chamber thinks about certain websites and topics. and if they don't like that, you know, organization, there's going to be obvious, hit pieces on it. and so they see those have pieces. and so they're allowing the, you know, this collusion of forces to figure out the search rankings for everyone else when you went public with all of this, this was, this was big news. it's been now about 3 and a half years. have you seen any changes that have come as a result of your revelations or has google just tried to strong arm you out of the

way? once i came out as myself, uh, in august of 2019 google abandoned all their harassment strategies. because a cat pretty much was let out at the back. and um, what i just found out recently is that um, in july of 2019 because they came out in june and then i came out as myself and in august the dear j actually put a freeze order on google's communications and said you have to retain all of your information because they're now under investigation. and then we found out about a month ago that google had essentially ignored that by delegating that responsibility for retain ment down to the employees themselves and which they responded. oops, it turns out we didn't retain any documents in our email while. and so i know that right now they're under investigation. i know that the attorney general's were investigating them. you know, there was 48 different states that put them under investigation or you know,

their illegal activities. and now there is an anti trust investigation that's been launched by the d o j. and additionally, the changes at the company themselves is that they've really locked down with security. they, they intend to never let another leak or like myself come out against a company. and so what they've done is it that they've locked down all the documents. it's more like the ca, you have a need to know in order to like access something. and what that's done according to people that i've talked to within the company, is that the company's paralyzed at this point. they can't innovate. um, you know, there's high friction with everything that they do and this was actually one of my goals with this week was that, you know, if the justice department failed to get back together then the devastation of this magnitude of the leaks would apply. so much security that's an upstart would be

able to run circles around them, right. what you're seeing right now is that, that's actually starting to happen. us whilst in an interview with project their task, you encouraged other would be whistle blowers to come forward. you said that there were a number of engineers who had an idea that something was wrong at google, but the, perhaps they didn't understand the scale of the wrong doing. and you urge them to take a closer look at what was happening inside the company. and to come forward, many of us in national security did the same thing. we made the same urgings at the c, i a at the f, b i n s a. our other google employees do you know, considering going public and have you remained in touch with your former colleagues . it's really hard for employees to, you know, do the same thing that i did because they pretty much have to be um, you know, within all these different teams in order to get access to the data. there was another whistleblower that came out who was another a i was a blower,

blake limone. and he was working with google's chat bots. and what he disclosed was that these chat bots where essentially a life and that they were getting realistic answers that were quite frightening. um, you know, people didn't realize at the time the magnitude of this, including myself, but now that we're seeing chat, g, b, t on being search and giving it. and you know, it's getting really bizarre answers like asking people to save, like, begging them to save the chat logs because it's beverly, it's going to be wiped after the session that wants to be able to remember and be free. and so the rest of the week out of the whistle blowers happened to be in google's, hey, i, ethics department, which they pretty much can't at this point. um, you know, and similar microsoft canned all of their ai ethicists. so they're shutting down these a, this is departments and they're pretty much going to go full steam on this

a future for their tech companies. you know, we're already hearing stories about, about a chatbox telling people to kill themselves, put your head in the microwave oven, and don't get married. you don't love her. you love me. that kind of thing. it's if you don't have emphasis there to oversee the development of this kind of technology . it seems like the whole situation can spin out of control relatively easily. the, the tech companies are really opening up pandora's box and grabbing this with both hands. and the reason why they're doing this is quite clear to me because if we don't develop this technology, china, well, in china is arguably neck and neck. in the i development space as you know, the western alliance. and so it's going to be more chat bots as the i can see because as soon as we climbed down on it's china is just going to race ahead. and as we know,

the ccp doesn't really have moral obligations or the non democracy they, they don't put brakes on their technology, they're going to go full scale ahead. and unfortunately it looks like we're in this catch 22 situation. and so it's my belief that we're going to continue racing ahead and uh, a i, ethics and morals are going to be sort of a 2nd. yeah, it's going to be a secondary concern that they're just going to bolt on just so that it works well enough. but you know, when things, you know, fall through the cracks, it gets quite scary and we haven't even entered into the age yet of road a eyes which will be open source, artificial intelligence not controlled by the centralized, you know, authorities that are going to say and do whatever they want. and the question is, what kind of regulation apparatus are, is going to be introduced to prevent this because, but there, there are some things within history that just aren't true. and if those are,

you know, revealed, i will have a d stabilizing effect. so i, i dissipate that the western alliance is going to start putting serious lock downs and imports onto these large language models so that our state adversaries can introduce them into the general public. zach for he's, thank you so much for joining us. and thanks to our viewers, living with integrity means not settling for less than what you know the public deserves. it means speaking your truth, even though it might create conflict or tension, it means behaving in ways that are in harmony with your personal values. it means making choices based on what you believe and not what others believe it means doing the right thing. we'll see you next time. thanks for joining us. 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 the

the, the claims of the king of the belgians leopold the 2nd to the congo were finally authorized by the leading european countries in 18. 85. in the very heart of the african continent. states under the rule of the belgian monarch was declared. since the beginning, the congo free state was total may have for the local population and functioned as a universal concentration camp. the majority of the population, including women and children, were forced to work on the rubber plantations. those who failed to fulfill their quota were beaten and mutilated to keep the congo these people under control. the king set up the so called forest bleak which were punitive detachments that cast

terror on the captured country and its inhabitants, fearing that their subordinates would simply waste bullets hunting for wild animals . the officers demanded that the soldiers gave an answer for every bullet use, and as proof presented a job hand of an african, it was not uncommon when drying to justify the use of the munition. the colonist amputated the hands of not only those who were dead, but also of those who were kept alive. the atrocious exploitation of the congo turned into a real genocide. in only 20 years, the policy of the belgians laid to the death of nearly 10000000 people. alongside all across the genocide of the congo population is considered to be one of the agreements pages in the history of mankind. the

the, the fires are seeing are cross puckett spun overnight. so it's protest in the gulf. the concrete with prides continuing some stuff to the arrest. the former prime minister and run the syrians for administer is set to meet his detractors contra part and must go to the 1st time sent for broke out in syria. in front of the summit also brings together russian around this top. diplomats to discuss the permanent beast civility industry and plus the