The site this guy used to find these cameras is Shodan. I bought a lifetime subscription to shodan some 10 years ago or so and have really only ever used it to watch my own IPs for any new open ports that I expose to the internet, but I was able to find these same flock camera systems as well, though I wasn't able to connect to any of them.

Artificial intelligence “agents” are supposed to be more than chatbots. The tech industry has spent months pitching AI personal assistants that know what you want and can do real work on your behalf. So far, they’re not doing much.

Visa hopes to change that by giving them your credit card. Set a budget and some preferences and these AI agents — successors to ChatGPT and its chatbot peers — could find and buy you a sweater, weekly groceries or an airplane ticket.

“We think this could be really important,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, in an interview. “Transformational, on the order of magnitude of the advent of e-commerce itself.”

Visa announced Wednesday it is partnering with a group of leading AI chatbot developers — among them U.S. companies Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity, and France’s Mistral — to connect their AI systems to Visa’s payments network. Visa is also working with IBM, online payment company Stripe and phone-maker Samsung on the initiative. Pilot projects begin Wednesday, ahead of more widespread usage expected next year.

The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what seems futuristic now could become a convenient alternative to our most mundane shopping tasks in the near future. It has spent the past six months working with AI developers to address technical obstacles that must be overcome before the average consumer is going to use it.

https://www.modelscope.cn/models/Qwen/Qwen-Image-Edit-2511

https://huggingface.co/lightx2v/Qwen-Image-Edit-2511-Lightning

https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen-Image-Edit-2511-GGUF

This year, 12 of the 19 global clean industrial projects that have reached final investment decisions, the last stage to determine whether or not the project will go ahead, are in China.

Faustine Delasalle, executive director of Industrial Transition Accelerator, a non-profit co-funded by the United Arab Emirates government and Bloomberg Philanthropies, said that Chinese developers had a bold vision for the future based on the conviction that green molecules and fuels are the “new oil”.

Delasalle said: “China is definitely leading on the commercialisation, at scale, of the next wave of clean technologies with a big share of the pipeline of projects but most importantly a growing share of a number of projects that have reached final investment decisions.

PE-AV - Audiovisual Perception with Code

• Meta's perception encoder for audio-visual understanding with open code release.
• Processes both visual and audio information to isolate sound sources.
• Paper | Code

https://preview.redd.it/k6lp7cgbou8g1.png?width=1456&format=png&auto=webp&s=f928bbd8d184e9094e7130cb36adff5f51830a80

T5Gemma 2 - Open Encoder-Decoder

• Next generation encoder-decoder model with full open-source weights.
• Combines bidirectional understanding with flexible text generation.
• Blog | Model

Qwen-Image-Layered - Open Image Decomposition

• Decomposes images into editable RGBA layers with full model release.
• Each layer can be independently manipulated for precise editing.
• Hugging Face | Paper | Demo

https://reddit.com/link/1ptg2x9/video/72skjufkou8g1/player

N3D-VLM - Open 3D Vision-Language Model

• Native 3D spatial reasoning with open weights and code.
• Understands depth and spatial relationships without 2D distortions.
• GitHub | Model

https://reddit.com/link/1ptg2x9/video/h1npuq1mou8g1/player

Generative Refocusing - Open Depth Control

• Controls depth of field in images with full code release.
• Simulates camera focus changes through 3D scene inference.
• Website | Demo | Paper | GitHub

StereoPilot - Open 2D to 3D Conversion

• Converts 2D videos to stereo 3D with open model and code.
• Full source release for VR content creation.
• Website | Model | GitHub | Paper

https://reddit.com/link/1ptg2x9/video/homrv9tmou8g1/player

Chatterbox Turbo - MIT Licensed TTS

• State-of-the-art text-to-speech under permissive MIT license.
• No commercial restrictions or cloud dependencies.
• Hugging Face

https://reddit.com/link/1ptg2x9/video/iceqr03jou8g1/player

FunctionGemma - Open Function Calling

• Lightweight 270M parameter model for function calling with full weights.
• Creates specialized function calling models without commercial restrictions.
• Model

FoundationMotion - Open Motion Analysis

• Labels spatial movement in videos with full code and dataset release.
• Automatic motion pattern identification without manual annotation.
• Paper | GitHub | Demo | Dataset

DeContext - Open Image Protection

• Protects images from unwanted AI edits with open-source implementation.
• Adds imperceptible perturbations that block manipulation while preserving quality.
• Website | Paper | GitHub

EgoX - Open Perspective Transformation

• Transforms third-person videos to first-person with full code release.
• Maintains spatial coherence during viewpoint conversion.
• Website | Paper | GitHub

https://reddit.com/link/1ptg2x9/video/2h8x59qpou8g1/player

Step-GUI - Open GUI Automation

• SOTA GUI automation with self-evolving pipeline and open weights.
• Full code and model release for interface control.
• Paper | GitHub | Model

IC-Effect - Open Video Effects

• Applies video effects through in-context learning with code release.
• Learns effect patterns from examples without fine-tuning.
• Website | GitHub | Paper

I am standing on the corner of Harris Road and Young Street outside of the Crossroads Business Park in Bakersfield, California, looking up at a Flock surveillance camera bolted high above a traffic signal. On my phone, I am watching myself in real time as the camera records and livestreams me—without any password or login—to the open internet. I wander into the intersection, stare at the camera and wave. On the livestream, I can see myself clearly. Hundreds of miles away, my colleagues are remotely watching me too through the exposed feed.

Flock left livestreams and administrator control panels for at least 60 of its AI-enabled Condor cameras around the country exposed to the open internet, where anyone could watch them, download 30 days worth of video archive, and change settings, see log files, and run diagnostics.

Unlike many of Flock’s cameras, which are designed to capture license plates as people drive by, Flock’s Condor cameras are pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras designed to record and track people, not vehicles. Condor cameras can be set to automatically zoom in on people’s faces as they walk through a parking lot, down a public street, or play on a playground, or they can be controlled manually, according to marketing material on Flock’s website. We watched Condor cameras zoom in on a woman walking her dog on a bike path in suburban Atlanta; a camera followed a man walking through a Macy’s parking lot in Bakersfield; surveil children swinging on a swingset at a playground; and film high-res video of people sitting at a stoplight in traffic. In one case, we were able to watch a man rollerblade down Brookhaven, Georgia’s Peachtree Creek Greenway bike path. The Flock camera zoomed in on him and tracked him as he rolled past. Minutes later, he showed up on another exposed camera livestream further down the bike path. The camera’s resolution was good enough that we were able to see that, when he stopped beneath one of the cameras, he was watching rollerblading videos on his phone. 0:00 /0:16

The exposure was initially discovered by YouTuber and technologist Benn Jordan and was shared with security researcher Jon “GainSec” Gaines, who recently found numerous vulnerabilities in several other models of Flock’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras. They shared the details of what they found with me, and I verified many of the details seen in the exposed portals by driving to Bakersfield to walk in front of two cameras there while I watched myself on the livestream. I also pulled Flock’s contracts with cities for Condor cameras, pulled details from company presentations about the technology, and geolocated a handful of the cameras to cities and towns across the United States. Jordan also filmed himself in front of several of the cameras on the Peachtree Creek Greenway bike path. Jordan said he and Gaines discovered many of the exposed cameras with Shodan, an internet of things search engine that researchers regularly use to identify improperly secured devices.

After finding links to the feed, “immediately, we were just without any username, without any password, we were just seeing everything from playgrounds to parking lots with people, Christmas shopping and unloading their stuff into cars,” Jordan told me in an interview. “I think it was like the first time that I actually got like immediately scared … I think the one that affected me most was as playground. You could see unattended kids, and that’s something I want people to know about so they can understand how dangerous this is.” In a YouTube video about his research, Jordan said he was able to use footage pulled from the exposed feed to identify specific people using open source investigation tools in order to show how trivially an exposure like this could be abused. Benn Jordan

Last year, Flock introduced AI features to Condor cameras that automatically zoom in on people as they walk by. In Flock’s announcement of this feature, it explained that this technology “zooms in on a suspect exiting one car, stealing an item from another, and returning to his vehicle. Every detail is captured, providing invaluable evidence for investigators.” On several of the exposed feeds, we saw Flock cameras repeatedly zooming in on and tracking random people as they walked by. The cameras can be controlled by AI or manually.

The exposure highlights the fact that Flock is not just surveilling cars—it is surveilling people, and in some cases it is doing so in an insecure way, and highlight the types of places that its Condor cameras are being deployed. Condor cameras are part of Flock’s ever-expanding quest to “prevent crime,” and are sometimes integrated with its license plate cameras, its gunshot detection microphones, and its automated camera drones.

Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me the behavior he saw in videos we shared with him “shows that Flock's ambitions go far beyond license-plate surveillance. They want to be a nation-wide panopticon, watching everyone all the time. Flock's goal isn't to catch stolen cars, their goal is to have total surveillance of everyone all the time." 0:00 /1:03

The cameras were left not just livestreaming to the internet for anyone who could find the link, but in many cases their administrative portals were left open with no login credentials required whatsoever. On this portal, some camera settings could be changed, diagnostics could be run, and text logs of what the camera was doing were being streamed, too. Thirty days of the camera’s archive was left available for anyone to watch or download from any of the cameras that we found. We were not able to geolocate every camera that was left unprotected, but we found cameras at a New York City Department of Transportation parking lot, on a street corner in suburban New Orleans, in random cul-de-sacs, in a Lowes parking lot, in the parking lot of a skatepark, at a pool, outside a parking garage, at an apartment complex, outside a church, on a bike path, and at various street intersections around the country. 404 Media did not change any settings on any cameras and only viewed footage.

Quintin told me the situation reminds him of ALPR cameras from another company that were left unprotected a decade ago.

“This is not the first time we have seen ALPRs exposed on the public internet, and it won't be the last. Law enforcement agencies around the country have been all too eager to adopt mass surveillance technologies, but sometimes they have put little effort into ensuring the systems are secure and the sensitive data they collect on everyday people is protected,” Quintin said. “Law enforcement should not collect information they can’t protect. Surveillance technology without adequate security measures puts everyone’s safety at risk.”

It was not always clear which business or agency owned specific cameras that were left exposed, or what type of misconfiguration led to the exposure, though I was able to find a $348,000 Flock contract for Brookhaven, Georgia, which manages the Peachtree Creek Greenway, and includes 64 Condor cameras.

"This was a limited misconfiguration on a very small number of devices, and it has since been remedied," a Flock spokesperson told 404 Media. It did not answer questions about what caused the misconfiguration or how many devices ultimately were affected. 💡 Do you know anything else about surveillance? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at jason.404. Otherwise, send me an email at jason@404media.co.

In response to Jordan and Gaines’ earlier research on vulnerabilities in other Flock cameras, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a LinkedIn post that “The Flock system has not been hacked. We secure customer data to the highest standard of industry requirements, including strict industry standard encryption. Flock’s cloud storage has never been compromised.” The exposure of these video feeds is not a hack of Flock’s system, but demonstrates a major misconfiguration of at least some cameras. It also highlights a major misconfiguration in its security that persisted for at least days.

“When I was making my last video [about Flock ALPR vulnerabilities], it was almost like a catchphrase where I'd say like, ‘I don't see how it could get any worse.’ And then something would happen where you'd be like, wow, they pulled it off. They made it worse,” Jordan said. “And then this is like the ultimate one. Because this is completely unrelated [to my earlier research] and I don’t really know how it could be any worse to be honest.”

In a 2023 video webinar introducing the Condor platform to police, Flock executives said the cameras are meant to be paired with their ALPR cameras and are designed to feed video to FlockOS, a police panel that allows cops to hop from camera to camera in real time across a mapped-out view of their city. In Bakersfield, which has 382 Flock cameras according to a transparency report, one of the Condor cameras we saw was located next to a mall that had at least two Flock ALPR cameras stationed at the entrances to the mall parking lot.

Kevin Cox, a Flock consultant who used to work for the Grand Prairie, Texas Police Department, said in the webinar that he built an “intel center” with a high “density” of Flock cameras in that city. “I am passionate about this because I’ve lived it. The background behind video [Condor] with LPR is rich with arrests,” he said. “That rich experience of seeing what happened kind of brings it alive to [judges]. So video combined with the LPR evidence of placing a vehicle at the scene or nearby is an incredibly game changing experience into the prosecutorial chain of events.”

“You can look down a tremendous distance with our cameras, to the next intersection and the next intersection,” he said. “The camera will identify people, what they’re wearing, and cars up to a half a mile away. It’s that good.” 0:00 /0:08

Condor cameras in a Flock demo showing off its AI tracking features

In the webinar Cox pulled up a multiview panel of a series of cameras and took control of them, dragging, panning, and zooming on cameras and hopping between multiple cameras in real time. Cox suggested that police officers could either use Flock’s cameras to pinpoint a person at a place and time and then use it to request “cell tower dumps” from wireless companies, or could use cell GPS data to then go into the Flock system to track a person as they moved throughout a city. “If you can place that person’s cell phone and then the Condor video and Falcon LPR evidence, it would be next to impossible to beat that in court,” he said, adding that some towns may just want to have always-on, always recording video of certain intersections or town squares. “There’s endless endless uses to what we can do with these things.”

On the webinar, Seth Cimino, who was a police officer at the Citrus Heights, California police department at the time but now works directly for Flock, told participants that officers in his city enjoyed using the cameras to zoom in on crimes.

“There is an eagerness amongst our staff that are logged in that have their own Flock accounts to be able to monitor our ALPR and pan tilt zoom Condor cameras throughout the community, to a point where sometimes our officers are beating dispatch with the information,” he said. “If there’s an incident that occurs at a specific intersection or a short distance away where our Condor cameras can zoom in on that area, it allows for real time overwatch […] as I sit here right now with you—how cool is this? We just had a Flock alert here in the city. I mean, it just popped up on my screen!”

Samantha Cole contributed reporting. About the author Jason is a cofounder of 404 Media. He was previously the editor-in-chief of Motherboard. He loves the Freedom of Information Act and surfing. More from Jason Koebler Jason Koebler More like this Flock Uses Overseas Gig Workers to Build its Surveillance AI Flock Uses Overseas Gig Workers to Build its Surveillance AI Flock accidentally exposed training materials and a panel which tracked what its AI annotators were working on. It showed that Flock, which has cameras in thousands of U.S. communities, is using workers in the Philippines to review and classify footage. Joseph Cox Joseph Cox · Dec 1, 2025 Cops Used Flock to Monitor No Kings Protests Around the Country Cops Used Flock to Monitor No Kings Protests Around the Country A massive cache of Flock lookups collated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) shows as many as 50 federal, state, and local agencies used Flock during protests over the last year. Joseph Cox Joseph Cox · Nov 20, 2025 ACLU and EFF Sue a City Blanketed With Flock Surveillance Cameras ACLU and EFF Sue a City Blanketed With Flock Surveillance Cameras “Most drivers are unaware that San Jose’s Police Department is tracking their locations and do not know all that their saved location data can reveal about their private lives and activities." Jason Koebler Jason Koebler · Nov 18, 2025 Unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. 404 Media is an independent media company founded by technology journalists Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/15136

Trump loyalist and CIA contractor Larry Ellison’s purchase of CNN appears imminent, and marks the latest venture into media for the world’s second-richest individual. But Ellison is not alone. Indeed, the world’s seven richest individuals are all now powerful media barons, controlling what the world sees, reads, and hears, marking a new chapter in oligarchical control over society and striking another blow at a free, independent press and diversity of opinion.

Media Monopoly

Paramount Skydance– an Ellison-owned company– is in pole position to purchase Warner Brothers Discovery, a conglomerate that controls gigantic film and television studios, streaming services like HBO Max and Discovery+, franchises like DC Comics, and TV networks such as HBO, TNT, Discovery Channel, TLC, Food Network, and CNN. This lead is largely due to Ellison’s proximity to President Trump, who will ultimately have to sign off on such a deal.

Ellison has already spoken to senior White House officials about axing CNN hosts and content that Trump is said to dislike, including anchors, Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar. It is this willingness to completely reorientate the network’s political direction that has made him the White House’s preferred purchaser of Warner Brothers Discovery. He is reportedly so wealthy that he can afford to pay in cash.

Ellison, whose net worth stands at a staggering $278 billion, has been on a media spending spree of late. Earlier this year, he provided the funds for Skydance to purchase Paramount Global, another gigantic conglomerate that controls such products as CBS, BET, MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, Paramount Streaming, and Showtime.

Immediately upon being appointed CEO of CBS News, Larry’s son, David, began drastically reorientating the network’s political outlook, firing staff, pushing it to become pro-Trump, and appointing self-described “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss as its editor-in-chief.

The Ellison family, however, is far from finished. In September, President Trump signed an executive order approving a proposal to force through the sale of social media platform TikTok to an American consortium led by Ellison-owned tech company, Oracle.

Under the planned arrangement, Oracle will oversee the platform’s security and operations, giving the world’s second-richest man effective control over the platform that more than 60% of Americans under thirty years of age use for news and entertainment. Trump himself stated that he was extremely pleased that Oracle would be controlling the platform. “It’s owned by Americans, and very sophisticated Americans,” he said.

The Ellison family’s sudden venture into the realm of media and communications has shocked many, with senior media figures sounding the alarm. Longtime CBS News anchor, Dan Rather, warned that “we all have to be concerned about the consolidation of huge billionaires getting control of nearly all of the major news outlets.” “It is a particularly tough time for anybody working at CBS News,” he stated, citing pressure to change coverage to be more pro-Trump. “I think if [the Ellisons] were to buy CNN, it would change CNN forever, and it might be another very serious wound to CBS News,” he concluded.

Billionaire Capture

Rather is correct. No other period in history has seen such a rapid and overwhelming buy up of our means of communications by the billionaire class – a fact that raises tough questions about freedom of speech and diversity of opinion. Today, the world’s seven richest individuals are all major media barons, giving them extraordinary control over our media and public square, allowing them to set agendas, and suppress forms of speech they do not approve of. This includes criticisms of them and their holdings, the economic system we live under, and the actions of the United States and Israeli governments.

Sitting on a fortune of over $480 billion, Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in world history, and is projected to, within the next decade, become the planet’s first trillionaire. In 2022, Musk purchased Twitter, in a deal worth around $44 billion. The South-African born tech magnate quickly set about turning the platform into a vehicle for advancing his own far-right politics. In 2024, for example, he was a key figure in promoting an attempt to topple Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, spreading misinformation about the country’s election, and even threatening Maduro with a future in the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison camp.

He has also very publicly rewritten his generative AI chatbot, Grok, on multiple occasions, so it would produce more conservative responses to users’ questions. One result of this was that Grok began to praise Adolf Hitler.

Musk overtook Jeff Bezos last year to become the world’s richest man. And like Musk, the Amazon founder and CEO has made several moves into the world of media. In 2013, he bought The Washington Post for $250 million, and quickly began exerting his influence on the newspaper, firing anti-establishment writers and hiring pro-war columnists. This came just months after he bought a minority stake in Business Insider (now rebranded to Insider).

One year later, in 2014, Amazon paid nearly a billion dollars to purchase Twitch, a streaming platform which hosts around 7 million monthly broadcasters. Amazon also owns a wide range of other media ventures, including movie studio MGM, audiobook platform, Audible, and movie database website, IMDB.

French billionaire, Bernard Arnault, meanwhile, has been buying up large swaths of his country’s media outlets. The chairman of luxury conglomerate, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH) and the world’s seventh-richest man now sits on a media empire that includes daily newspapers such as Le Parisien and Les Echoes, magazines such as Paris Match and Challenges, as well as Radio Classique.

The remaining three individuals rounding out the top seven list all owe their wealth primarily to their media empires. Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are collectively worth over half a trillion dollars. Google has become the dominant force in today’s hi-tech economy, and is also a major player in social media, having bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion. Thirty-five percent of Americans use the video platform as a primary source of news.

Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, owes his $203 billion fortune to his social media and tech ventures, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Like YouTube, Zuckerberg’s companies are major players in the modern news landscape, with 38%, 20% and 5% of Americans relying on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for their news and views.

MAGA Mouthpieces

Many of these wealthy individuals have joined forces with President Trump, in an effort to support Republican policies and push a conservative worldview. Chief among these is the Ellison family, who quickly announced significant changes as CBS News, promising “unbiased” coverage and more “varied ideological perspectives”– widely understood as a shift towards right-wing, pro-Trump coverage.

Larry Ellison holds deeply conservative views, and became a top donor and fundraiser for the Republican Party, and a close Trump confident. Indeed, one Trump insider, noting his influence, went so far as to call Ellison as the “shadow President of the United States.”

Musk, of course, very publicly turned Twitter into a conservative-dominated platform, and was an unofficial member of Trump’s cabinet, becoming de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency.

Zuckerberg has also taken a number of steps to align his platforms with the MAGA movement, including firing his fact-checking team (widely associated with liberal politics) and prioritizing what he calls “free speech.” Content moderation teams, the Meta CEO said, would be moved from California to Texas, “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.”

Zuckerberg replaced Meta’s president of global affairs, the former Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, Nick Clegg, with prominent Republican Joel Kaplan, who was George W. Bush’s chief of staff. He also appointed Dana White, the chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close Trump ally, to Meta’s board, despite his complete lack of relevant experience.

Many of these moves were likely made in response to Trump’s threat to imprison Zuckerberg “for the rest of his life” if he did anything to “cheat” him out of a 2024 presidential election victory. Zuckerberg subsequently met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and, alongside Bezos and other tech moguls, donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

Zuckerberg, Bezos, Pichai and Musk at Trump’s inauguration, the new guardians of the media empire. Photo | AP

Bezos, meanwhile, pursued similar measures at The Washington Post, announcing that the newspaper would no longer publish opinions skeptical of capitalism. “We are going to be writing every day in support of defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos wrote, noting that readers wishing to see alternative viewpoints can find them on “the internet.”

The decision was widely seen as a major shakeup, and provoked public opposition from Post employees. “Massive encroachment by Jeff Bezos into The Washington Post’s opinion section today,” said the newspaper’s lead economics journalist Jeff Stein. “[It] makes clear dissenting views will not be published or tolerated there.”

The move was quite the reversal for Bezos, who had once called Trump a “threat to democracy.” Yet, by January 2025, he was sitting with Zuckerberg, Musk, and Arnault in prominent positions behind Trump at his inauguration.

Considering his nationality, Arnault has a surprisingly close relationship with Trump. In 2019, the French billionaire opened a new Louis Vuitton factory in Alvarado, Texas, a move that some have suggested was an attempt to please the president. Trump attended the facility’s opening, calling Arnault an “artist” and a “visionary.”

Due to their relationship with the Trumps, the Arnault family have become unofficial intermediaries between the French and U.S. governments. They were hosted by the Trumps at Mar-a-Lago in 2023, and, during an escalating trade war earlier this year, Bernard visited the White House to dampen down tensions between the U.S. and France.

Pentagon Contractors

A key factor in the rise of many of the world’s top seven richest individuals is their proximity to the U.S. national security state, with many of their companies growing wealthy in part due to feeding from the trough of Pentagon contracts. Today’s wars and espionage rely as much on hi-tech computing equipment as tanks and guns, and in 2022, the Department of Defense awarded Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle a $9 billion cloud computing contract.

Bezos’ Amazon has long enjoyed a close relationship with the CIA, having signed a $600 million contract with the agency in 2014. Yet both Google and Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, have been intertwined with Langley since their inception.

The CIA bankrolled and oversaw Brin’s PhD research at Stanford University, work which would later form the basis of Google. As one investigation noted, “senior U.S. intelligence representatives including a CIA official oversaw the evolution of Google in this pre-launch phase, all the way until the company was ready to be officially founded.”

As late as 2005, In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capitalist arm, was a major shareholder in Google. These shares were a result of Google’s acquisition of Keyhole, Inc., a CIA-backed surveillance firm whose software eventually became Google Earth. By 2007, the government was using enhanced versions of Google Earth to surveil and target enemies in Iraq and beyond, according to The Washington Post. By this time, the Post also notes, Google was partnering with Lockheed Martin to produce futuristic technology for the military. There also exists a revolving door of employment between Google and various branches of Federal government.

It would be no stretch, meanwhile, to state that Elon Musk owes his largesse in no small part to his intimate relationship with the CIA. In-Q-Tel chief Mike Griffin helped birth SpaceX, providing support and advice from the beginning, and even accompanied Musk to Russia in 2002, where the pair attempted to purchase cheap intercontinental ballistic missiles to start the company.

Griffin repeatedly championed Musk at the CIA, describing him as the “Henry Ford” of the space industry, and worthy of the government’s full support. Still, by 2008, SpaceX was in dire straits, with Musk unable to make payroll and believing both SpaceX and Tesla Motors would be liquidated. But he was saved by an unexpected $1.6 billion NASA contract that Griffin had helped secure.

Today, SpaceX is a powerhouse. But its primary customers continue to be U.S. government agencies, such as the Air Force, Space Development Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. And recently, the Pentagon has recruited him to help it win a nuclear war. A new SpaceX spinoff company, Castelion, is working on building a network of armed satellites circling North America, designed to shoot down enemy nuclear missiles. A successful operation would give the United States an impervious shield, and allow it to act as it wants around the world, without threat of retaliation, effectively ending the era of mutually assured destruction, and plunging the planet into a dangerous new epoch.

Six of the seven members of Castelion’s leadership team and two of its four senior advisors are ex-Space X employees. The other two advisors are former high officials from the CIA, including Griffin himself. Elon named his oldest child Griffin Musk. Another of his sons, X Æ A-12, is named after a CIA spy plane.

No billionaire, however, is more intimately connected to the CIA than Larry Ellison. Ellison began his career by working with the CIA on a database system called Project Oracle. In 1977, he would co-found tech giant Oracle (named after his previous project). The CIA was Oracle’s only customer for some time, before Ellison branched out and began to win contracts with other branches of the national security state, including Navy Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, and the NSA.

That close partnership continues to this day. In 2020, the company won a 15-year contract with the CIA and 16 other U.S. intelligence agencies worth tens of billions of dollars. And today, its upper ranks are filled with former CIA executives. One example of this is Leon Panetta, former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense, who sits on its board of directors.

Arming and Supporting Israel

Another key attribute that many of the world’s richest individuals share is their passionate support for Israel and its expansionist project.

Nowhere is this more evident than with Ellison, who has made it his life’s goal to advance the Jewish State’s interests, both at home and abroad. Ellison is an enthusiastic supporter of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he vacationed with on his private island in Hawaii. So impressed was he with the embattled prime minister that he offered him a seat on Oracle’s board, replete with a yearly salary of $450,000.

Ellison is the largest single donor to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). In 2017 alone, he pledged $16.6 million to build a new training facility for IDF soldiers, whom he described as defending “our home.” At a fundraiser, he explained that:

Through all of the perilous times since Israel’s founding, we have called on the brave men and women of the IDF to defend our home. In my mind, there is no greater honor than supporting some of the bravest people in the world, and I thank Friends of the IDF for allowing us to celebrate and support these soldiers year after year. We should do all we can to show these heroic soldiers that they are not alone.”

David Ellison is no less ardent a Zionist, and even met with a top Israeli general in order to aid a project spying on American citizens, according to an investigation by The Grayzone. The scheme was aimed at attacking American citizens participating in pro-Palestine activism in the face of Israel’s attack on Gaza. The documents also mention Brin’s name as a potential collaborator in the plan.

Oracle’s Israeli CEO, Safra Catz, is also a close friend of Netanyahu’s, and describes the corporation as on a “mission” to support Israel. Together, Catz and Ellison have enforced a strict pro-Israel stance across the company. In the wake of the October 2023 violence, Catz instructed that the words “Oracle stands with Israel” must be printed on company screens across the world in more than 180 countries.

Unsurprisingly, the support and collaboration with Israel has led to significant pushback among employees. Catz’s response to their concerns was blunt. “We are not flexible regarding our mission, and our commitment to Israel is second to none,” she said, adding:

This is a free world and I love my employees, and if they don’t agree with our mission to support the State of Israel, then maybe we aren’t the right company for them. Larry and I are publicly committed to Israel and devote personal time to the country, and no one should be surprised by that.”

It has been widely reported, even in the corporate media, that the Ellison family’s foray into the world of media was triggered by their desire to help Israel in its public relations battle, something Tel Aviv is keenly aware that they are losing. As Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League said, “We really have a TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem,” explaining that young people around the world are being exposed daily to videos of Israeli aggression, leading to a PR disaster.

Former congressman Mike Gallagher, a leader in the attempts to ban TikTok, explained how his bill had failed, but, after October 7, 2023, and the worldwide outrage at Israeli actions, it found new life on Capitol Hill, and was passed into law, forcing its imminent sale to a consortium led by Oracle.

This pro-Israel sea change has already occurred at CBS News, with the hiring of Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief. Weiss first came to public attention while still at college, founding an organization that attempted to have Muslim and Arab professors fired for their pro-Palestine views. As The Financial Times noted, “Weiss has won over Ellison partly by taking a pro-Israel stance, according to people familiar with the matter.” Last week, at the Jewish Leadership Conference, she stated that she sees her mission at CBS as “redraw[ing] the lines of what falls in the 40 yards of acceptable debate” in America by sidelining voices like Hassan Piker and Tucker Carlson, and elevate “charismatic” leaders like Alan Dershowitz, who represents “the vast majority of Americans.”

Zuckerberg’s platforms – Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – have displayed a no less concerted bias in favor of Israel. As far back as 2016, Facebook was collaborating with the Israeli government on matters of censorship, with Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked revealing that the social media platform complied with 95% of her requests for pro-Palestine content to be removed.

The Facebook/Israel partnership was deepened in 2020 when the company appointed Emi Palmor, the former Director General of the Ministry of Justice of Israel and an ex-spy with IDF intelligence group Unit 8200, to its oversight board, a 21-person committee ultimately in charge of the political direction of the site.

Zuckerberg’s platforms have long shut down Palestinian voices on dubious “hate speech” grounds. However, the censorship was drastically increased after the October 7 attacks. Human Rights Watch released a report detailing the “systemic censorship of Palestinian content on Instagram and Facebook.” noting how they reviewed 1050 cases of censorship of Palestinian voices, including those documenting human rights abuses against themselves. 1049 of them, the study concluded, were entirely peaceful utterances of support for Palestine, and did not break any of Meta’s terms of service.

In 2023, Instagram also inserted the word “terrorist” into the bios of thousands of users who mentioned they were Palestinian. When challenged on this, they claimed it was an auto-translation bug.

Internally, Meta staff have complained about systematic suppression of their voices and the creation of a “hostile and unsafe work environment” for Palestinian and Muslim employees.

WhatsApp, meanwhile, is a battleground in more than one sense. The Israeli military is using Palestinians’ WhatsApp data in order to track and target tens of thousands of people in Gaza. It is unclear how or whether Meta is collaborating with the Israeli military in this endeavor. However, it has been suggested that some of the dozens of former Israeli spies now working in top jobs at Meta could be producing backdoors in the software, or simply passing the data onto their former colleagues. A 2022 MintPress investigation found hundreds of former Unit 8200 operatives working at Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Zuckerberg himself is known to be a strong supporter of Israel, and has numerous familial connections to the state. After the October 2023 attacks, he released a statement denouncing Hamas and other resistance forces as “pure evil,” an action that earned him an official thank you from the State of Israel.

Musk has also put himself and his vehicles in the service of Israel. In November 2023, he traveled to Israel to meet with both Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog and offer his unqualified support to their attack on Gaza. Describing Hamas as “evil” and “revel[ing] in the joy of killing civilians,” Musk attempted to publicly whitewash Israeli violence, stating unequivocally that the IDF goes out of its way “to avoid killing civilians.” At the time of his visit, Israeli strikes had killed at least 20,000 people in four weeks of bombings.

During his 2023 Israel trip, Musk pledged support for the IDF’s Gaza campaign. Photo | Israel GPO

Netanyahu has stated that Twitter is among Israel’s “most important weapons” in the war, and defended Musk from accusations of fascism, after he gave a Nazi salute at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

During his visit, Musk also signed a deal with the government of Israel, giving the latter effective control and oversight over Starlink communications portals operating in Israel and Gaza.

Google and Amazon, too, are key players facilitating the hi-tech genocide in Gaza. In 2021, the pair signed a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government to provide cloud computing and AI infrastructure to the IDF – technology that has been used to target the civilian population of the densely-populated strip. The deal has sparked a rebellion among employees, who organized sit-ins and other protests against their collaboration.

Many other Google employees, however, are intimately linked with the State of Israel. There are at least 99 former Unit 8200 spies working in key positions at the Silicon Valley giant. One prominent example is Gavriel Goidel, who was a longtime commander and head of learning at Unit 8200, before being hired by Google to become the company’s head of strategy and operations.

Google has also collaborated in disseminating Israeli government propaganda to tens of millions of Europeans, despite the content breaking its own terms of service.

Part of this may be down to the disposition of Brin himself. Normally avoiding the limelight and refraining from making political statements, the Russian-born magnate bitterly condemned the United Nations as “transparently antisemitic” after it released a report detailing his company’s participation in the Gaza genocide. “Throwing around the term genocide in relation to Gaza is deeply offensive to many Jewish people who have suffered actual genocides,” he added.

Arnault has remained quiet on Gaza. He has, however, invested heavily in Israel. Diamonds and other precious stones are a mainstay of the Israeli economy, and the Frenchman’s luxury brands disseminate the stones globally. Activists have called for Israeli diamonds to be labeled conflict minerals and boycotted by ethical consumers. He also invested in Israeli tech and security firm, Wiz, a company recently purchased by Google for $32 billion. Earlier this month, LVMH signed a $55 million deal with Israeli actress and former IDF soldier, Gal Gadot, making her the the face of their brand.

We are living in an era of unprecedented global inequality. Together, these seven individuals– Musk, Ellison, Page, Brin, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Arnault– control more wealth than the bottom 50% of humanity (over 4 billion people) combined. Sitting on heretofore unimaginable fortunes, they have begun buying up assets, including media outlets, at record pace.

For billionaires, the utility of capturing the press is threefold: firstly, it shields them and their class from press scrutiny and criticism. Second, it gives them a mouthpiece to push the public debate towards even more business-friendly laws and regulations. And third, they can use their outlets to champion any causes and promote any other agendas they have.

We have seen all three play out here, as, collectively, our press is rapidly moving towards more conservative, pro-Trump, pro-Israel positions, shutting out any dissenting voices from their ranks.

The effect on democracy, a free society, and the public’s right to a diversity of opinions has been highly deleterious. When it comes to media, we already suffered from an illusion of choice. However, the supercharged concentration of ownership of American and global media in the hands of just a handful of individuals has only exacerbated this problem. There once was a time that individuals looking for alternative viewpoints would simply go online to find them. But with censorship of dissenting opinions – particularly on Israel/Palestine – growing, this is becoming increasingly unviable.

In short, then, what the planet’s mega-rich capture of our media system shows is that billionaires are not only a serious drain on resources, but an existential threat to an open society and the free flow of information.

Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. He completed his PhD in 2017 and has since authored two acclaimed books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams. Follow Alan on Twitter for more of his work and commentary: @AlanRMacLeod.

The post The Seven Richest Billionaires Are All Media Barons appeared first on MintPress News.

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The TikTok deal announced on Thursday poses a fundamental threat to free and honest discourse about Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Under the reported deal, the Chinese company that owns the short-video social media app, ByteDance, will transfer control of TikTok’s algorithm and other U.S. operations to a new consortium of investors led by the U.S. technology company Oracle. The long-gestating deal will give Oracle’s billionaire pro-Trump board members Larry Ellison and Safra Catz the power to impose their anti-Palestinian agenda over the content that TikTok users see.

Most mainstream U.S. media coverage of the TikTok deal has completely ignored the explicitly anti-Palestinian agenda of its biggest Western investors. TikTok has played a critical role in helping hundreds of millions of users see the ugly reality of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. But the Trump-favored billionaires who will take over TikTok’s U.S. operations have a documented agenda of both suppressing voices critical of Israel and supporting the very Israeli military that has killed so many Palestinian civilians. Without safeguards in place, TikTok’s U.S. operations could soon become an exercise in blocking users from seeing and reacting to the crimes against humanity perpetrated by a major U.S. ally.

I have Homarr set up, but I realized over the weekend that the thing eats 7GB of memory... Which feels like way to much for something that is just displaying me information (I'm no web dev though so what do I know). I know there is a lot of stuff in this category; Dashy, Homer, Homepage, Glance, Heimdall, Fenrus, Organizr, etc...

The thing I used Homarr for the most is as my "homepage" in my browser. I had some basic information in there, like my calendar, a list of my hosted services, weather. I had another page that would let me see progress on active downloads, but not something I'd use all the time.

Seems like the reason Homarr eats so much memory is that it's built on NodeJS and the Next.js react framework. Most of these tools feel like overkill for what I actually want, which is just a replacement for the new tab/home page in my browser.

AI bros are giving credit where it’s due