John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY WHITNEY WEBB IN MINT PRESS
“Microsoft’s ElectionGuard a Trojan Horse for a Military-Industrial Takeover of US Elections”
“The fact that we are handing over the keys of American democracy to the military-industrial complex — it’s like giving the keys to the henhouse to a fox and saying, ‘here come in and take whatever you want.’ It’s obviously dangerous.
“Earlier this month, tech giant Microsoft announced its solution to “protect” American elections from interference, which it has named “ElectionGuard.”
“In this investigation, MintPress will reveal how ElectionGuard was developed by companies with deep ties to the U.S. defense and intelligence communities and Israeli military intelligence
“Newsguard [an insidious “truth-in-Internet-media-guarantee” system] was among the first initiatives that comprise Microsoft’s “Defending Democracy” program, a program that the tech giant created under the auspices of protecting American “democratic processes from cyber-enabled interference [which] have become a critical concern.” Through its partnership with Microsoft, Newsguard has been installed in public libraries and universities throughout the country, even while private-sector companies have continued to avoid adopting the problematic browser plug-in”
Quite apart from all of Microsoft's connections with the military and state security, to my mind it is one of the last hi-tech companies I would trust about any important matter.
Over many years, Microsoft indulged many predatory practices in its designs and marketing. It worked to put other firms out of business with deliberately-created compatibility problems.
Such sharp practices are part of how Bill Gates accumulated enough money to have a Foundation where he can pose as a kind of secular Dalai Lama and spend his days telling people who've approached him for project money whether they'll get it. As Robert Mitchum once said about film acting, “It sure beats working."
Microsoft's treatment of millions of customers during its introduction of Windows 10 was just shameful in my view, intruding into people's computers without being asked and replacing something people had purchased with something none of them had asked for.
It truly bordered on theft or vandalism, only Microsoft styled the activity as giving something free to its customers.
In the process, Microsoft caused countless incidents of damaging people's files. Large numbers of people discovered incompatibilities in what was downloaded that Microsoft had not anticipated. There were many stories of small businesses hurt and people literally crying over what had been done to their computers.
And it left people with a new operating system that had some dark corners to it in the way it transmitted customer information to Microsoft, all without transparency or permission.
No, Microsoft is an extremely disagreeable company, and putting them into a central role around American election ballots does seem to me reckless.
We also have numerous anecdotes from Africa concerning vaccines associated with the Gates Foundation which proved to contain unauthorized birth control chemicals. I have no way of knowing the truth of such stories, but there have been so many, it seems impossible they are without foundation.
All in all, an outfit to avoid wherever possible, and certainly not one to hand your elections over to.
By the way, another outstanding article on a very important topic by Whitney Webb.
