How one of America’s premier data monarchs is funding a global information war and shaping the media landscape
Through
his purchase of influence over the daily flow of information to
American media consumers, a dizzying array of connections to the
national security state, and a media empire that shields him from
critical scrutiny, Pierre Omidyar has become one of the world’s
most politically sophisticated data monarchs.
by
Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal
Part
2 - The genesis of a private marketplace and surveillance apparatus
“The
origin story of eBay is fairly well known,” according to a 1999
Time Magazine profile spinning out the company’s “small
scale origins.”
Painting
Omidyar as a high-tech Horatio Alger, Time wrote that “other
tech giants have their garages, eBay has its Pez dispenser. Or,
rather, founder Pierre Omidyar’s then-fiancée didn’t have a Pez
dispenser.”
As the
story goes, Omidyar created eBay for his then-fiancée Pam as an
online marketplace for her to improve her collection of Pez candy
dispensers. According to the Time profile, “eBay started out
free, but it quickly attracted so much traffic that Omidyar‘s
Internet service upped his monthly bill to $250. Now that it was
costing him real money, Omidyar decided to start charging.”
In a
more candid interview with journalist Sarah Lacy in 2010, who opened
by informing her audience that Omidyar “does actually exist,”
the billionaire came clean about his company’s cute genesis story.
According to the billionaire, he and his colleagues “may have
embellished it a little bit on the story in those early days.”
But it was not his doing, he insisted: “I think we can blame
that on PR people.”
According
to journalist Yasha Levine, who researched eBay’s formation for his
book Surveillance Valley, the company began assembling an
internal police and intelligence agency comprised of former FBI
agents in 1999 to spy on eBay users and track down fraud. Levine told
MintPress:
“By
the mid-2000s, when Google was still a small company and Facebook
barely existed, eBay had built this global private division into a
behemoth: 2,000 employees and more than a thousand private
investigators, who worked closely with intelligence and law
enforcement agencies in every country where it operated — including
the United States, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia, India, Russia,
Czech Republic and Poland. EBay was proud of its close relationship
with law enforcement, touting efforts to arrest 1,000 people a year
and boasting that it had handed over user data to the NSA and FBI
without requiring subpoenas or court orders.”
By 2015,
eBay was a corporate behemoth worth nearly $69 billion. Omidyar
leveraged his wealth and reputation as one of Silicon Valley’s
premier innovators to forge close ties with President Barack Obama,
visiting him more times in the White House than did tech-giant rivals
like Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Even as
he forged ties with the captains of America’s national security
apparatus, Omidyar held on to an image as a business renegade and
radical disruptor. “There’s something about entrepreneur that
is somewhat sort of anti-establishment,” he told The Henry Ford
Museum of American Innovation.
But this
May, news arrived that Omidyar had begun directing his money into the
political apparatus of a Republican Party operative known as one one
of the most prominent enforcers of America’s permanent war lobby.
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