When Google announced on Tuesday that it would buy Skybox for $500 million, it explained that it was all about updating its Google maps application:
[Skybox’s] satellites will help keep our maps accurate with up-to-date imagery. Over time, we also hope that Skybox’s team and technology will be able to improve Internet access and disaster relief — areas Google has long been interested in.
David Cowan, a partner in the venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners that has invested in Skybox, was only slightly more forthcoming: “Google bought this because [Google founders] Sergey [Brin] and Larry [Page] have ambitious designs on space.”
Nothing was mentioned in the announcement about Google’s real interest in obtaining more and closer observation of people on planet Earth, nor was there any reference to the intents and purposes of the third member of the Google management team behind the purchase, Eric Schmidt.
Serving as Google’s CEO from 2001 to 2011 and as the company’s executive chairman since then, Schmidt has made clear his real purposes in building Google as an extension of the federal government agencies’ tracking, following, recording, storing, and analyzing movements of citizens around the world, especially American citizens. Aside from his avid personal and financial interest in getting Barack Obama elected president in 2008, and later becoming a member of Obama’s transition advisory board, Schmidt has also had an abiding interest in helping create momentum for the New World Order. He holds membership in three of the most prominent internationalist groups on the planet: the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations. But his primary interest is in a far-left think tank, the New America Foundation (NAF), where he also serves as chairman of the board.
The New America Foundation began in 1999 with funding from George Soros’ Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, all long-time backers of the New World Order. Illustrative of this, Michael Lind, an NAF “fellow,” wrote in The Radical Center: “Our goal [is] not to repeal the New Deal but to adapt it to the circumstances of the 21st Century.”
In addition, the head of NAF’s Global Governance Initiative, Parag Khanna, contends that the New World Order is inevitable and that America will, also inevitably, be part of it.
A large part of managing that new order must be knowing where everyone is and what they are doing at any given moment. Skybox’s technology represents a huge leap forward for Google in that effort. Google’s real intentions were made clear back in 2009 when Schmidt admitted that Google is essentially a data-gathering tool of the government:
If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But … the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information….
And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States, to the Patriot Act [and] that information could be made available to the authorities.
Writing in Wired magazine, Marcus Wohlsen raved over the new “all-seeing satellites”: “Google can extend its reach far across the offline world. Thanks to its [ability] to transform mass quantities of … data into revenue-generating insights, the unprecedented stream of aerial imagery … could spark a whole new category of high-altitude insights into the workings of economies, nations and nature itself.”
Its first satellite — about the size of a hotel room refrigerator and weighing just 200 pounds — was successfully launched from Russia last fall and is expected to be followed by 23 more shortly. This will allow its eyes in the sky to observe every part of inhabited Earth, with images of less than three feet resolution. That means that cars, trucks, and people can be tracked and, with continued improvements in technology, face and license plate recognition will shortly be available.
Google is buying not only the technology but the influence as well. One of the co-founders of Skybox, John Fenwick, had previously worked as a liaison in Congress for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), one of the “big five” U.S. intelligence agencies (along with the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the NSA, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency). That agency coordinates the collection and analysis of information downloaded from satellites such as Skybox’s and then funnels it to various state and federal law enforcement agencies.
Last June, David Samuels, in doing an article on Skybox for Wired magazine, interviewed Fenwick and asked him whether his government connections were helpful in his work at Skybox. Fenwick’s response is instructive. Wrote Samuels:
When I asked him whether his government experience came in handy in helping to design and build Skybox, he pauses and raises his hand to his head. “Every day I bite my tongue so I don’t go to jail,” he says, quite seriously.
Fenwick was more revealing last November when he was interviewed by Stanford University’s graduate school of business:
Ultimately, the real value we deliver is saving the trouble of having to send someone to physically check up on something … satellites are a pretty efficient way to do it, whether you are an oil and gas company … a telecommunications company … or a [government] agency….
We can also track the movement of consumers.
Samuels ended his article at Wired with this tidy summary of what the purchase of Skybox by Google is really all about:
Skybox is planning to put the equivalent of cheap cell phone cameras into space, to beam the pictures down … to use cheap eyeballs to count cars or soybeans or whatever else someone will pay to count….
The data those cameras provide … are thrillingly infinite.
With globalists such as Schmidt in the driver’s seat at Google and techies such as Fenwick in the lab, the day is almost here when the government will know what everyone is doing everywhere at any time. The media has dressed it up as an innocuous expansion of technology to be celebrated. The reality is that it fits perfectly with the agenda of globalists seeking to put in place one of the final pieces necessary to implement their New World Order.
Photo of Google sign: AP Images
A graduate of Cornell University and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics.
