The residents of Idaho who were wondering why Zuckerberg chose their town to celebrate Independence Day, may now have a bit more information as to why Zuckerberg chose their home for his getaway.
A secretive ‘Bilderberg-Style’ meeting is taking place this week near Boise Idaho, and many tech giants, media moguls, and government officials are on the guest list.
Top executives at the biggest and most influential companies in tech and media, including Apple’s Tim Cook and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, will get together at the Sun Valley Resort, a meeting that dates back to 1936.
The attendees include many Silicon Valley CEOs as well as executives from national mainstream media outlets. Media moguls, tech titans, investors, politicians, and intelligence agency insiders, all gather in the small town of Sun Valley, Idaho, for a week of meetings of big deals and to develop a consensus for media, social media, and emerging communications technology.
Participants arrive in private jets and in between leisure activities, they plot some of the biggest deals in media and tech at an event that is beginning to rival the annual World Economic Forum in Davos.
According to Variety, the lineup includes tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, media moguls like Discovery CEO David Zaslav and Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Hass. Variety also reported that they would be joined by Nikki Haley, but updated their article to indicate that the former ambassador to the UN would not be attending.
In the past, Sun Valley has been the location of such mega-pacts as Comcast’s purchase of NBC/Universal, the Washington Post’s sale to Jeff Bezos, and Disney’s deal for Capital Cities/ABC. AOL and Time Warner’s unhappy union also kicked off in Sun Valley.
The guest list for Sun Valley also includes Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos and Reid Hastings, Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida, and Disney’s Bob Iger They’re also joined by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, ViacomCBS’s Shari Redstone, and WarnerMedia executives. CBS News’ Gayle King, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and Patriots owner Robert Kraft will also be attending.
Sun Valley has often been the host to presidential hopefuls and government officials such as Chris Christie and Cory Booker, but neither of them is on this year’s guest list. Nikki Haley, former US Ambassador to the UN and a potential 2024 candidate was on the invite list, but a spokesperson says she will not make the trip. Other Beltway insiders include Council of Foreign Relations President Richard Haass, former U.S. Secretary of Transportation and wife of Mitch McConnell Elaine Chao, former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, and William McRaven, the former Commander of the United States Special Forces.
According to sources, many intelligence agency insiders will be in attendance, but their names do not appear on any public lists.
Based on big tech’s obvious role with intelligence agencies, it not just big deals and collusion between big tech and big media on the menu at the annual summer camp for billionaires. Discussions regarding surveillance are almost sure to take place.
Social media platforms are the world’s largest database of individuals, and according to CBS News, the CIA ad agencies, and big tech, have been in bed together on a social media data-mining venture since at least January 2009. Yael Eisenstat, who served as a CIA officer, and an adviser to Vice President Biden, joined Facebook in 2018 to tackle its ‘election meddling problem. In 2019, Eisenstat said that Facebook knows you better than the CIA ever will,” and Facebook knows more about you than you know about yourself.”
According to a recent report from the Department of Homeland Security, ‘white supremacists’ allegedly present the gravest terror threat to the United States. While their own department data show this claim is far from reality, discussions about this alleged threat are likely to occur between intelligence officials and big tech execs.
Facebook recently implemented a ‘deradicalization program for extremists’ in the form of annoying pop-ups to their site last week, reaching out to its members so they can “get advice from people who escaped violent extremist groups.”
Two decades ago, the US intelligence community worked closely with Silicon Valley in an effort to track citizens in cyberspace. Google and Facebook are at the heart of that origin story. Some of the research that led to Google and Facebook’s ambitious creation was funded and coordinated by a research group established by the intelligence community to find ways to track individuals and groups online.
A deeper look into Facebook’s apparent military origins and continual military connections reveal that the world’s largest social network was always intended to act as a surveillance tool to identify and target domestic dissent.
Coincidentally, the Navy’s Most Vital and Secretive Submarine Base is around just 30 minutes from Coeur d’Alene Idaho. The small naval base – sometimes called the subsurface area 51 -has supported every major submarine design development of the last 65 years.
Residents of Idaho are correct to feel that it is quite ironic this elite get-together is taking place in their home state.
Idaho is a state with racial demographics the attendees of this meeting would consider ‘backward’ and inequitable. The political and religious beliefs of the state’s residents are regularly banned by the big tech platforms on the guest list and shunned by the mainstream media moguls set to attend.
