The Patriot Post® · Is Big Tech Becoming Big Brother?

One of the realities we have to accept is that technological change has rapidly brought a lot of good things to Americans. It’s great to be able to find just about anything online and have it shipped to your home. Social media, at its best, enables people to share what they think is important with friends, whether it’s a tribute to a pet that has died, news articles, funny memes, or even their thoughts. Online banking has eliminated many of the trips to the ATM or the bank.

One of the things that has emerged is cloud computing. In essence, people can upload a project for work or a hobby online and be able to access it from any computer. This can be a huge lifesaver if a hard drive crashes. A number of the tech giants have various services in this regard, among them Amazon. Amazon, of course, is perhaps the biggest marketplace ever. But it’s not just the private sector getting into cloud computing.

A RealClearInvestigations report is raising some big questions about the merger of Big Tech with Big Government. Don’t get us wrong, cloud computing could be a huge help for many things the government is supposed to do — including important national security applications. It’s not for nothing that the Pentagon was willing to pay $10 billion for a cloud computing contract, currently in dispute between Microsoft and Amazon.

That said, there are concerns about this. Big Tech giants crossed a line in the 2020 election, and the censorship, notably of the New York Post’s bombshell reporting on Hunter Biden, was a massive, unreported, in-kind donation to Joe Biden’s campaign. And many of those who demanded a probe into the National Enquirer’s editorial decisions were fine with those made in the cubicles and corporate suites of Silicon Valley’s giants.

But it goes beyond editorial calls. Amazon tried to kill Parler over its refusal to censor. Amazon also abruptly yanked a book by Ryan T. Anderson after demands from online mobs.

Given what we have seen bureaucrats do during the Trump administration, particularly when they undermined policy decisions, were the decisions an effort to curry favor with a new Democrat administration? Were they an effort to avoid the animosity from some of the more authoritarian-leaning Democrats? Or were they more about the fact that many Silicon Valley bigwigs have preexisting ties to high-ranking Democrats, as LifeSiteNews reported in October?

Many American know that in 1961, as he was leaving office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the “military-industrial complex” gaining too much influence. But what fewer Americans know about were his warnings of a “scientific-technological elite” capturing control of public policy. Could this new merger of politically biased tech giants and governments pose a threat to civil liberties? Elected officials should be asking some very tough questions before they let things proceed.