Big Tech News Stories
In 2019, a team of researchers under the leadership of the U.S. science and technology development firm Battelle was awarded a contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to advance its next-gen non-surgical neurotechnology (N3) project — which aims at designing and producing bi-directional brain control technology interfaces for soldiers to use in fields of battle. Initially, brain-computer interface (BCI) research focused on helping those with disabilities achieve partial restoration of a brain-world interface via invasive implant procedures. The overarching DARPA-funded constellation of research projects is called Brain System to Transmit Or Receive Magnetoelectric Signals (BrainSTORMS), and involved the design and production of a nano-transducer capable of being directly injected into specific brain regions to transmit commands from neural activity to an external helmet-based transceiver. The University of Miami revealed that ... magnetoelectric nanoparticles (MENPs) can move through human bloodstreams, permeate the human brain, and identify subtle signals from your neurons, subsequently transmitting information to an external computer device in a helmet. We’re not living in a neo-feudalistic dystopia where our every thought and impulse is pre-determined by the algorithmic encoding of human brains. But the governments of the world are building the technology to enhance bi-directional brain control.
Note: Read about the Pentagon's plans to use our brains as warfare, describing how the human body is war's next domain. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and mind control.
Defense industry tycoon Palmer Luckey [is] the 33-year-old co-founder of sprawling weapons manufacturer Anduril Industries. A longtime GOP donor and activist who spoke on condition he not be identified in order to preserve his political relationships said Luckey was now the “godfather of Republican fundraising on the west coast”. “If you’re raising campaign money in California, you have to go to Palmer Luckey,” he said. “Luckey is the top tier.” Anduril, launched just nine years ago, has emerged as a major military contractor for the Trump administration, working on contracts for everything from drones to autonomous jet fighters to space-based interceptors. In March, the US army awarded a $20bn sole-source contract to Anduril for a variety of drones it sells, though it is not clear which of its weapons systems are operational or have been deployed for combat in US operations. Anduril, though it is not widely known as a space contractor, announced in May it would work, with a team of other companies, on what may be the mother of all contracting opportunities offered by the Trump administration, the so-called “Golden Dome” anti-missile space-based interceptor effort. Estimates for the Golden Dome range between $185bn and $1.2tn. Anduril says in Trump’s first year in office it doubled its revenue – a growth rate of 100%, but still only reached $2.2bn for 2025, which is barely a blip in the Pentagon’s trillion-dollar budget.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and warfare technology.
A small group of experts [were] enlisted by A.I. companies to vet their products for catastrophic risks. Some have shared with The Times more than a dozen chatbot conversations revealing that even publicly available models can do more than disseminate dangerous information. The virtual assistants have described in lucid, bullet-pointed detail how to buy raw genetic material, turn it into deadly weapons and deploy them in public spaces, the transcripts show. The U.S. government has long planned for powerful adversaries unleashing deadly bacteria, viruses or toxins in the American population. Since 1970, there have been a few dozen, fairly small biological attacks around the world, such as the anthrax-laced letters that killed five Americans in 2001. Despite perennial warnings, a major catastrophe has not happened and remains unlikely, most experts say. But even if the probability is low, an effective biological weapon could have an enormous impact. Dozens of experts told The Times that A.I. is one of several recent technological advances that have meaningfully increased that risk by expanding the pool of people who could cause harm. Still, A.I. users would need some real-world expertise to follow a bot’s instructions. Some research, including a study backed by A.I. companies, has found that while chatbots can help novices learn certain lab skills, the technology isn’t particularly helpful for carrying out the range of complex tasks needed to make a virus from scratch.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI, biotech dangers, and science corruption.
Humanity has officially passed a grim milestone: the first confirmed death at the hands of a fully-autonomous robot weapon. A senior figure involved in the Ukrainian defence industry admitted that a fully autonomous drone deployed to the front lines of the Russo-Ukranian war has claimed human lives. The event has been kept under wraps for two years, Ukrainian drone maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy said. The device itself was a quadcopter drone designed to zip to the front line, loiter around a perimeter for roughly 10 minutes, then launch into “terminator mode.” This mode, the Ukranian drone expert explained, involves the use of an unidentified AI model to automatically seek out and attack human targets. During the operation in question ... it identified and ultimately attacked “a couple of [Russian] soldiers” and “one truck.” “We just launch it and we know everything will be dead,” Kokhanovskyy [said]. “There is no connection to the drone at all ... everything it sees will be killed.” While this marks the first known strike of its kind, it’s fair to say the world’s militaries have been inching toward this for a while. The Israeli Defence Forces, for example, have long deployed loitering suicide drones to hover over various demarcation zones across Palestine. More recently, US military operatives used Anthropic’s Claude to select bombing targets across Iran. If Kokhanovskyy is to be believed, humanity has crossed a threshold that can never be uncrossed.
Note: This is being called AI's "Oppenheimer moment". For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on war and artificial intelligence.
Neurable, a consumer neurotechnology startup, has partnered with the Air Force to study whether electrode-studded headphones can track service members’ cognitive fitness. The $1.2 million project adds to the Pentagon’s growing investment in the $3 billion market for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) — helmets, earbuds, other wearable devices and medical implants that use artificial intelligence to make sense of brain signals. Now, advances in AI enable BCIs to interpret or change brain activity with unprecedented accuracy and speed. So much so that some scientists and neuroethicists say the capacity to monitor signals that reveal a warfighter’s or a veteran’s mental states, visual perceptions or inner dialogue may outpace the ability to shield that data from misuse. “One could certainly imagine how enforced use of such devices could create a very dystopian basis for behavioral control,” warned James Giordano, director of the National Defense University’s Center for Disruptive Technology. Some neuroethicists, however, cautioned that the use of brain wearables may also invade troops’ privacy and foster prejudice. “We need to be much more reflective on, much more concerned about and much more focused on the implications of altering a person’s brainwaves,” through neurofeedback training, “as compared to having them work out more or do more pull-ups,” said Jared Genser, a lawyer and co-founder of the Neurorights Foundation.
Note: Read about the Pentagon's plans to use our brains as warfare, describing how the human body is war's next domain. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI, biotech dangers, and mind control.
Jonathan Haidt did not expect to become the face of a global movement against social media. As Haidt’s influence has grown, so, too, have objections from critics. At issue is his central claim that smartphones and social media are causing a mental health epidemic in young people. In research released this week, Haidt and his co-author, Zachary Rausch, claim to demonstrate causal links between social media platforms and the harms they say they are doing to children. Not just harms like anxiety and depression, but also frequent sexual harassment and cyberbullying. "The biggest, clearest one, I think, is sextortion," [said Haidt]. "That’s the one that just stands out like a sore thumb. Kids, if they’re on social media, they can get sextorted. If they’re not, they can’t, really. And the kids who get sextorted are deeply shamed. They shared a picture of themselves — teenage boys usually — and then their lives are ruined, and some of them commit suicide. So I’m just saying that there are so many different mechanisms by which kids are getting harmed. Depression and anxiety are just two of the pathways. What parents want to know and what legislators want to know is: Is this consumer product, which all kids are consuming massive quantities of, is this consumer product hurting kids? And guess what? We have seven different lines of evidence saying, “Yes, it’s hurting kids.” And Meta — I mean, my God, the data they have on harm is astonishing."
Note: Read more about the dark side of social media and the sextortion rings where kids target kids. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and mental health.
Hundreds of contractors working on a project for Meta were instructed to pose as minors online and probe how competitor chatbots responded to prompts involving suicide, sex, eating disorders, and other high-risk subjects, according to internal documents and five people familiar with the project. The prompts were often designed to push the chatbots toward responses their safety systems were supposed to refuse. A single round of testing completed in August 2025 saw more than 45,000 prompts run through the rival chatbots. The companies behind the chatbots weren’t aware of the testing. Testing competitors’ products is not, by itself, unusual in the artificial intelligence industry. Former contractors who worked on the project described several aspects as alarming. According to one former worker, employees feared the possibility they could be generating or preserving child sexual abuse material if a chatbot responded to certain sexual prompts involving minors. Another says they worried the project amounted to secretly taking material from competitors’ systems to potentially feed back into Meta’s system. While a dataset of thousands of youth-safety prompts could be useful for comparing how often chatbots refuse harmful requests, the scale and opacity of [this project, known internally as] Cannes, along with the lack of disclosure to the companies being tested, made it very different from other public safety benchmarks.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and mental health.
One of the wealthiest corporations in the world is seeking government permission to release 32 million mosquitoes throughout Florida and California. Called “Debug,” the Google-owned company is attempting to flood disease-carrying mosquito populations with ... male mosquitoes that have been infected with a bacteria called Wolbachia that causes cytoplasmic incompatibility — meaning their sperm can’t fertilize the eggs of uninfected females. Over time, the theory goes, this will disrupt the reproduction cycle, thereby increasing competition and decreasing the overall population. The American people aren’t exactly thrilled with the idea of a tech company releasing millions of skeeters into the wild. “Ask yourself who is to benefit most from this, and why is it being done?” one anonymous citizen commented. “Corporations should not play a part in regulating or artificially altering ecosystems, that is the job of the EPA. This project should NOT be approved.” Another unnamed commentator concurred, writing that “we are not experimental rats. A separate 2019 project in Brazil using genetically modified ... mosquitoes was found to have inadvertently introduced lab DNA into wild populations, because the mosquitoes began reproducing anyway. Debug’s approach is substantially different, but the incident illustrates the highly experimental and uncontrollable nature of large-scale releases: the specter that a bug drop might not just fail, but backfire entirely.
Note: Oxitec, a biotech firm bankrolled by the Gates Foundation, has been authorized to release up to 2.4 billion genetically modified mosquitoes in California’s Central Valley by 2024. A plan to release over 750 million genetically modified mosquitoes into the Florida Keys in 2021 and 2022 received final approval from local authorities, against the objection of many local residents and a coalition of environmental advocacy groups. These Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are engineered so that only non-biting males survive, supposedly to curb Zika, dengue, yellow fever, and chikungunya. Yet California has had no significant outbreaks of these diseases, which means billions of engineered insects are being released into the environment without a genuine health crisis to justify it. Read more about the "Pandora's Box" of bioengineered insects.
Tech writer Eoin Higgins [recently] published Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. The main subjects of the book—fellow reporter Glenn Greenwald and myself—are [portrayed as] puppets controlled by Big Tech overlords such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks. Higgins’s case against me concerns my involvement with the Twitter Files—a trove of the social media website’s internal communications that Musk sent to reporters, including me, after he acquired the company in 2022. I took significant heat for my coverage, which included Twitter employees’ deliberations about whether to suppress the report about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 election. IRS agents made an unannounced visit to my home the day I testified in Congress about my findings, and delegate Stacey Plaskett falsely accused me of perjury and threatened to jail me. Despite this, Higgins says I sold out—literally—by working on the Twitter Files. He claims that I “fully dispensed with any pretense of challenging power” after having “cash[ed] in” with my “benefactor,” Musk. I’ve never taken money from Musk or any other “tech billionaire on the right,” as Higgins implies. The trend of casual defamation that prevails on social media—where pseudonymous accounts blithely accuse people of rape or pedophilia all day, every day—has seeped into the regular press, where “reckless disregard” has become the norm.
Note: Read the complete article to learn how Matt Taibbi fell out of favor with mainstream media when he started questioning the lies underpinning the Russiagate narrative. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and media manipulation.
Dialog, the private network cofounded by Peter Thiel, grades its event attendees on a hidden scale, ranking them by wealth and fame, tracking their relationships, and using algorithms to help decide who they should meet, who they should sit with, and who no longer belongs. Founded in 2006 by Thiel and data broker Auren Hoffman, Dialog is a private club that convenes politicians, investors, entrepreneurs, military leaders, executives, academics, and journalists for invitation-only, off-the-record retreats. According to a Dialog document shared by a past participant, it has “over 1,000 paying members,” and more than 2,500 people have attended its annual retreats. Dialog assigns people grades before they join. Of the 192 dossiers examined by WIRED, 130 are tagged as members. The rest are prospects with files bearing markings like “First Time Dialoger” or “Warm.” Everyone—members and prospective invitees alike—is assigned a grade of A, B, or C. The “C” grade appears reserved for the most famous and influential; only one in seven received it. Most people—141 of 192—received a “B.” The final tier, “A,” appears primarily assigned to older, established members whom the graders consider less notable. The leak also points to a built-in matchmaking system that pairs members for both networking and dating. (Roughly 10 percent of respondents opted into a singles pool.) More than three-quarters already have a list of algorithm-suggested matches.
Note: Is this Dialog Society the Bohemian Grove of Big Tech? Read how Thiel worked with the CIA to influence the origins of Facebook, and how Palantir software helped the NSA spy on the entire planet.
Well, data leaked by the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew (who also brought us the justice department’s no-fly list back in 2023) is shedding new light on Dialog, the private social club co-created by the former PayPal boss Peter Thiel and the angel investor Auren Hoffman. The network has been around since 2006, and regularly gathers politicians, entrepreneurs, foreign officials, academics, Silicon Valley founders and even Hollywood folks for invitation-only retreats. there are a few weird things we’ve discovered from this leak. Dialog grades its retreat attenders on a hidden scale, ranking them according to their wealth and fame. Everyone is assigned a grade of A, B or C, with the “C” grade being awarded to the most famous and influential. Lower-grade attenders are charged full-price roughly 70% of the time, while only about a quarter of VIPs have to shell out the bigger bucks. Planned events range from sessions like “Bring Back Nuclear” to others focused on “Disinformation and Deepfakes”, “Contrarian AI Takes”, “Democracy Under Surveillance” and “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness.” The agenda also includes sessions on cult-building (moderated by the founder of the Christian site Pray.com, no less), one on “Navigating WWIII” and a session titled “How’s Your Sex Life?” Dialog has a matchmaking system that pairs members for networking and dating. The data exposed in the leak includes home addresses, phone numbers, emails, dates of birth, and other bio-datas.
Note: Is this Dialog Society the Bohemian Grove of Big Tech? Read how Thiel worked with the CIA to influence the origins of Facebook, and how Palantir software helped the NSA spy on the entire planet.
The 72nd meeting of the Bilderberg group, the elite and secretive policy conference that is the longtime subject of endless conspiracy theories, was held at the weekend in Washington DC. A security cordon went up around the opulent Salamander hotel for the notoriously media-shy summit, which was packed as ever with prime ministers, military leaders, tech billionaires and the heads of giant investment companies. Bilderberg, which since the 1950s has been the intellectual engine room of Nato, took place this year at a time of immense crisis and uncertainty. Away from Trump’s bluster, and for all his rhetoric about abandoning Nato, there were no signs that the Americans are withdrawing from Bilderberg. Far from it – the Americans were there in force. Wall Street titans, including the CEOs of KKR and Lazard, and the heads of huge corporations like Pfizer, met behind closed doors with a delegation of senior politicians close to the president. Big business lobbying in private is Bilderberg’s speciality, and this secretive mix of the private and public sectors fits perfectly with Trump’s brand of crony-capitalism. This year’s conference had a wartime flavour: with the “Future of Warfare” on the agenda, and a participant list including the four-star admiral Samuel Paparo, head of the US Indo-Pacific Command. From the private sector there was a healthy contingent of military contractors and drone manufacturers.
Note: Is this Dialog Society the Bohemian Grove of Big Tech? Read more about the shadowy history of the Bilderberg secret society.
Former Meta employee Sarah Wynn-Williams [was] silenced by Meta’s legal threats to bankrupt her if she spoke. Wynn-Williams has written a book, Careless People, about her time at Meta (then Facebook), where she was an early director of global public policy. But Meta does not like the book. It has done everything in its power to stop it, including seeking an emergency arbitration order that prevents Wynn-Williams from promoting the book, and threatening punitive damages. These serve both to punish Wynn-Williams for writing it, and to send a warning to any future critic. A certain kind of libertarian responds by saying that Meta is not “censoring” Wynn-Williams, because only governments can censor. A certain kind of lawyer may say she brought this on herself by signing a contract agreeing not to criticise Meta. Private censorship is real and, in the time we live in, often more impactful than the public kind. Not all contractual provisions are, or should be, enforceable. You cannot write an enforceable contract to sell a child, to bind someone never to marry or to give up other fundamental rights. Why should the right to speak critically be any different? A contract in which someone agrees never to criticise their employer should be void and unenforceable. That is why we need legislation that makes clear a simple principle: that the free-speech right to criticise your employer is important, fundamental and cannot be sold.
Note: Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams once told US senators that the company targeted teenage girls with beauty and weight-loss advertisements during moments of heightened vulnerability such as after deleting a selfie. According to her testimony, Meta could detect when users were feeling "worthless," "helpless," or like a "failure," and then make that information available to advertisers. For more along these lines, read about a new nonprofit called Psst, which is designed to make it safer for Big Tech whistleblowers to report wrongdoing without immediately exposing themselves to retaliation.
Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post is facing a scathing new class-action lawsuit accusing it of using surveillance pricing to gouge loyal readers – in a case that attorneys believe could rack up millions in damages. Since the mid-2010s, WaPo has “covertly harvested” subscriber data, using “deeply personal information” to determine how much they could squeeze out of each loyal reader, according to the suit, which was filed Thursday in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Readers largely expected their personal data would be used for “mutually beneficial purposes” like “relevant advertisements” – and did not consent to their personal information being used to hike prices on their subscriptions, the suit alleged. After billionaire Bezos bought WaPo in 2013 for $250 million, the paper started heavily investing in technology and digital subscriptions, the suit noted. “The more loyal a reader became, the more data The Post could gather to estimate how much more that person might tolerate paying at renewal,” the complaint said. “Rather than rewarding loyalty, The Post’s system converted subscribers’ engagement into leverage against them.” The suit also alleged WaPo might be collecting extra information from subscribers’ use of “affiliates” – including Amazon, Bezos’ e-commerce giant. Last year, the publication was forced to reveal it was engaging in surveillance pricing techniques because of a 2025 New York disclosure law.
Note: Read more about the rise of AI surveillance pricing. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and mass media.
[Taylor] Little is among more than 1,800 plaintiffs suing major social-media companies, including Instagram and its parent company Meta, in a massive multidistrict litigation in Northern California. The plaintiffs allege these companies have been “recklessly ignoring the impact of their products on children’s mental and physical health,” and that they are “direct victims of intentional product design choices made by each defendant.” Little’s own complaint seeks to hold Instagram accountable for “knowingly unleashing onto the public a defectively designed product that is addictive, harmful, and at times fatal to children.” They allege the platform fed them a persistent stream of self-harm content that altered their brain and perpetuated constant thoughts of death. “The fact that I was obsessively suicidal at the age I was, that was not just my brain chemistry. That was my brain chemistry being altered by the platform I was on,” Little tells TIME. “Social media shaped my brain.” On Instagram, depression was “romanticized,” Little says. The self-harm content “was kind of comforting”—it felt like a twisted validation of their depression in a way. By the time Little turned 12, [Little's] Instagram feed was filled with images of girls falling off buildings, videos of blades cutting into unscarred flesh, and soft music framing stylized photos of hanging bodies. Teen suicides increased more than 57% between 2007 and 2018. Another 2019 study ... found that 38% of teens who used social media for an average of more than five hours per day showed signs of clinically relevant depression. Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan found that kids who were more addicted to social media were at two to three times higher risk of suicidal behavior.
Note: Former Facebook executive Tim Kendall told Congress that the company intentionally made its product as addictive as cigarettes. Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams told US senators that the company targeted teenage girls with beauty and weight-loss advertisements during moments of heightened vulnerability such as after deleting a selfie. According to her testimony, Meta could detect when users were feeling "worthless," "helpless," or like a "failure," and then make that information available to advertisers. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and mental health.
A trove of internal records from a secret society for powerful figures in US politics, finance, and tech was left exposed online. The group, called Dialog, is a private, invitation-only organization cofounded in 2006 by the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. It convenes US officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives at off-the-record annual retreats. Dialog has spent two decades declining to disclose its members. A directory in the website's code was first revealed by the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew. Known for exposing the US government’s No Fly List and breaching the surveillance-camera company Verkada, crimew tells WIRED the directory surfaced via an anonymous tip. The registration records list General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO's supreme allied commander Europe and the head of US European Command, who took the post in July 2025 and is recorded on the leaked list as having attended Dialog gatherings since 2021. The website directory names sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country's largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies. What ties the roster together more than any title or office is a shared preoccupation with artificial intelligence, longevity, and the near future.
Note: Read how Thiel worked with the CIA to influence the origins of Facebook. Watch a 7-min video with WTK Director Amber Yang and Joe Martino from Collective Evolution discussing the links between Thiel, Palantir, Jeffrey Epstein, the Rothschild banking family, and intelligence agency operations. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech.
In a landmark decision, a Los Angeles jury has found that social media company Meta and video streaming service YouTube harmed a young user with addictive design features that led to mental health distress, including body dysmorphia, depression and suicidal thoughts. Commentators have referred to this as social media’s “Big Tobacco” moment and further lawsuits are pending. Neuroscience shows that heavy social media use can overstimulate the teen brain’s still-developing reward pathways in ways similar to addictive behaviours like gambling. This immature system also makes teenagers more sensitive to social feedback and less able to cope with rejection. Many Canadian teens describe [being] constantly connected online, yet increasingly disconnected in real life. They report pressure to present idealized versions of themselves and to keep up with peers. Trial data in a case between the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Meta show that only a small fraction of time on Meta platforms involves engaging with friends — about seven per cent on Instagram and 17 per cent on Facebook. The rest is mostly scrolling and watching rather than interacting. This results in an illusion of connection while deepening a sense of isolation. Research involving more than 9,000 adolescents across eight countries found a strong association between problematic social media use and higher rates of depression and anxiety. Large studies across high-income countries consistently link heavy social media use to poorer physical health outcomes too, including shorter sleep and higher rates of obesity.
Note: Former Facebook executive Tim Kendall told Congress that the company intentionally made its product as addictive as cigarettes. Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams told US senators that the company targeted teenage girls with beauty and weight-loss advertisements during moments of heightened vulnerability such as after deleting a selfie. According to her testimony, Meta could detect when users were feeling "worthless," "helpless," or like a "failure," and then make that information available to advertisers. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and mental health.
The construction of ... hyperscale data centers — giant facilities that house servers and computing resources — is booming nationwide. President Donald Trump’s AI action plan and related executive orders have recently facilitated their speedy approval, in part by loosening environmental regulations. As the facilities have spread into suburbs and farmland, they’ve drawn pushback from dozens of communities concerned by how they could upend daily life. Data centers often draw enormous amounts of water and electricity, causing residents to complain about rising power bills and water shortages. The confidentiality behind some of the projects has only added to the level of concern. An NBC News review of over 30 data center proposals across 14 states found that in a majority of cases, local officials signed NDAs and worked with what appeared to be shell companies that can conceal visibility into the project developers. Five elected officials in different counties said the agreements barred them from sharing information with their constituents. Some local officials ... said they felt pressured to sign NDAs to keep their communities in the running. Data center NDAs can extend years beyond the initial proposal dates. Many of them also include clauses requiring local jurisdictions to limit disclosure of records as much as legally possible under Freedom of Information Act laws and notify the companies first so they have a “reasonable opportunity to prevent disclosure.”
Note: Read about a small Wisconsin city that successfully defeated a giant data center. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and Big Tech.
Tech mogul Peter Thiel ... is more entwined in the Middle East than he is in most other regions of the world. Thiel’s firm, Palantir, has a strategic partnership with the Israel Ministry of Defense to supply its artificial intelligence tools and other technology to the Israeli military. As the United States and Israel wage war on Iran, Palantir is now providing one of the AI tools being used by the Pentagon for the war effort, which kicked off with the mass slaughter of Iranian schoolchildren. The germ of Palantir’s involvement in the region may well have had its origins with Epstein, according to documents released earlier this year by the Department of Justice. Emails show Epstein connected Thiel with another friend, former Israeli defense minister and prime minister Ehud Barak, on account of their mutual interest in leveraging the tech sector for national security. That Epstein was the point of connection between the two men ... was suggested by a February 2013 audio recording unearthed last month. But emails show that Epstein’s efforts to connect the two went much further than this conversation, including arranging multiple meetings between them across several years and ensuring that one of Thiel’s investment vehicles financed one of Barak’s security-related ventures. As Epstein quietly advised Barak on his private sector ventures, many of which involved Israeli tech firms, emails show that both he and Barak leaned on Thiel for his expertise.
Note: Watch a 7-min video of WTK Director Amber Yang and Joe Martino from Collective Evolution discussing the links between Epstein, Thiel, Palantir, the Rothschild banking family, and intelligence agency operations. According to a former CIA officer, "It is inconceivable given Jeffrey Epstein’s travel record and associations that he was not approached by the [CIA] at some point before his death." Don't miss part one and part two of our investigations into the Epstein files so far.
The former chief investigations counsel for the House Oversight Committee has been helping to prepare Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, to testify privately in the panel’s Jeffrey Epstein investigation on Wednesday. Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman of the committee, formally requested in March that Mr. Gates appear before the committee for a transcribed interview. His request came after files released by the Justice Department showed that Mr. Gates met with Mr. Epstein, the convicted sex offender, multiple times and that his closest advisers were in frequent contact with the disgraced financier until 2019, the year of his death in prison. In preparing for the deposition, Mr. Gates has turned to Jake Greenberg, who until December was spearheading the oversight panel’s Epstein inquiry in his role as the committee’s top investigative official. Mr. Gates’s close relationship with Mr. Epstein has roiled his foundation, which has authorized an outside review of its ties to Mr. Epstein. Representative Suhas Subramanyam, Democrat of Virginia, said in an interview that he wanted to know what Mr. Gates “knew of Epstein’s crimes, and the nature and extent of their relationship.” He added, “Epstein was known for befriending and even blackmailing rich and powerful men, and I want to know if Gates was one of them.” Mr. Gates has sought out powerful inside players to help him weather the scrutiny. He hired John Moran, a former lawyer for the Justice Department, who helped him secure an agreement with the committee for him to appear off camera, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Note: Don't miss part one and part two of our investigations into the Epstein files so far. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and Jeffrey Epstein.
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