Peter Thiel says FBI, CIA should probe Google for allegedly aiding the Chinese military
Peter Thiel says FBI,
CIA should probe Google
Peter Thiel, billionaire investor and Facebook board
member, on Sunday night said that Google should be federally investigated for
allegedly aiding the Chinese military.
Why
it matters: Thiel is the tech
industry's highest-profile Trump supporter, and one of the most powerful
players in Silicon Valley.
Thiel
spoke at the National Conservatism Conference, a new event that bills itself as being focused on
Trump-era nationalism, with part of his speech focusing on "three
questions that should be asked" of Google:
"Number one, how many
foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for AI?
"Number two, does Google's
senior management consider itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated by
Chinese intelligence?
"Number three, is it because
they consider themselves to be so thoroughly infiltrated that they have engaged
in the seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military and not
with the US military... because they are making the sort of bad, short-term
rationalistic [decision] that if the technology doesn't go out the front door,
it gets stolen out the backdoor anyway?"
He also added that those
questions "need to be asked by the FBI, by the CIA, and I'm not sure quite
how to put this, I would like them to be asked in a not excessively gentle
manner."
Thiel
did not specifically mention Facebook,
but it likely will be mentioned by later speakers at the conference, including
Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has agitated against big tech on the air, and
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who is seeking to strip major web platforms of
certain legal protections.
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