Via America’s Lawyer: Several tech companies have been accused of aiding foreign governments who are attempting to stifle dissents in their countries. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins to discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Several tech, tech companies have been accused of aiding foreign governments who are attempting to stifle dissent in the countries. This, this is awful. This is the worst. I mean, this is the worst I think I could say. Twitter, you take the story. Twitter.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, a Twitter employee who left back in 2015, but for several years had been working, being bribed essentially by the Saudi Arabian government, because they had come and done a tour of Twitter headquarters. They met this guy and they worked out an agreement with him through emails and secret phone calls for him to provide information on political dissidents, anyone criticizing Saudi Arabia, this guy who worked at Twitter, he has dual US and Lebanese citizenship.
Mike Papantonio: He was given.
Farron Cousins: I’m searching for his name because it’s very difficult to pronounce.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, $300,000. Well, the point is he was given $300,000.
Farron Cousins: Right. And he would send a here, here’s their location. Here was their last IP address. So that the government could do, I don’t know, maybe whatever it is the Saudi Arabian government has been known to do.
Mike Papantonio: Well.
Farron Cousins: To dissidents.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: And that is terrifying and this employee of Twitter, aided and abetted it. He’s now facing 23 criminal counts.
Mike Papantonio: Emails, addresses, phone numbers, data over everything that’s being transmitted by, by these dissidents. And you don’t think the Royal family is going to deal with that? You know that, Twitter cannot, Twitter cannot sit back and say, it’s okay.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: This is one hell of a lawsuit and somebody needs to pull that trigger because this, matter of fact, the Yahoo, the Yahoo case is a, is another example. Yahoo is the same thing. Yahoo, a friend of mine is actually handled that case, a guy named Mark Lanier, a very good trial lawyer and he’s going to bust them up. Tell, talk about this story.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, this one it’s very similar. You had survivors of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, who had been criticizing the Chinese government outside of the country. Yahoo comes in and says, hey, China, we want to be allowed in your country. You don’t allow us right now. So what if we give you the names of dissidents? What if we tell you where these people are in exchange for being allowed to operate in China? China says, okay, that’s a great idea. Yahoo starts feeding them all of this information about these dissidents. This one in particular, he was rounded up, driven 50 hours.
Mike Papantonio: Black site.
Farron Cousins: Deprived of sleep, torture, all kinds of horrendous actions because Yahoo made it happen.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, well there’s no question Yahoo actually had a deal. What they were trying to do is expand, it was all about money, Farron.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: It’s all about money. We’ll help you, China, if you will help us expand. We’ll help you, China, if you will do A, B and C. There’s an arms length transaction and the folks, the leadership, the very top, the owners, the CEOs of Yahoo said this, we’re going to allow to happen. This guy spends two years in prison. He gets out of prison. They arrest him again. They burn his house down. They threaten his family. They take a couple of them off and threaten them. This guy’s brought a lawsuit, I just can’t wait to see the result. Bodily, you know, he has a loss of bodily functions. He has disfigurement. The damages are huge in this case and I don’t, you know what, I know the players involved here. I know Mark very well. He tries cases with me. He’s gonna, he’s gonna rock their world and maybe, maybe somebody will get it. Huh?
Farron Cousins: Well, you know, these social media giants have been going through all these extra steps to try to label people that they think are somehow affiliated with foreign governments when they really need to be looking inside themselves.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Because these are the people who are legitimately working for foreign governments to get people killed.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: That’s the bottom line.
Mike Papantonio: Right. Thank you for joining me, Farron.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
