In a series of Hillary Clinton’s emails, WikiLeaks have revealed that Google attempted to aid Syrian rebels and boost defections from President Bashar al-Assad in 2012.
The emails between former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton and the former head of Google Ideas discussed how the leading tech company could help topple the Assad regime in Syria using technology.
“Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from,” wrote former Google Ideas head Jared Cohen in an email to several White House figures.
Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition. Given how hard it is to get information into Syria right now, we are partnering with Al-Jazeera who will take primary ownership over the tool we have built, track the data, verify it, and broadcast it back into Syria. I’ve attached a few visuals that show what the tool will look like. Please keep this very close hold and let me know if there is anything eke you think we need to account for or think about before we launch. We believe this can have an important impact.
The email, which was signed by Cohen, appears to have then been forwarded to Clinton with the comment, “FYI – this is a pretty cool idea.”
According to the Washington Examiner, Cohen has previously been very interested in uprisings in the Middle East. In 2009, the Google Ideas head reportedly asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to delay a scheduled maintenance on the site as it was believed that it could interfere with an uprising in Iran.
WikiLeaks, run by the controversial Julian Assange, have posted over 30,000 unsecure emails either sent or received by Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state. The emails are easily searchable for the public on the WikiLeaks website, and since the emails have surfaced, numerous embarassing discoveries have been made.
Charlie Nash is a frequent contributor to Breitbart Tech and former editor of the Squid Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.