Operation Tulip: Inside Facebook's Secretive Push To Build Holland's Biggest Data Center

[douglas9]

By the time the villagers knew Facebook was coming to town, it was already too late. Three weeks later their local councilors in the idyllic Dutch hamlet of Zeewolde voted 11–8 to rezone a swath of fertile farming land half the size of Central Park and hand it to Facebook to build its “hyperscale” data center — the largest in Holland.

The local councilors, including those who voted in favor of the data center, engaged with the company for almost two years prior to the vote — but without knowing that “Tulip,” the mysterious entity they’d been negotiating with, was Facebook. In fact, the councilors were among the last to know, finding out only after Facebook issued a press release revealing Tulip’s true identity ahead of the vote.

Facebook’s demand for secrecy around its data center in the Netherlands is the latest example of Big Tech’s aggressive but covert strategy to squeeze concessions from local governments. The veil of secrecy minimizes public scrutiny and backlash, often until it is too late.

“It is very strange. Everything is normally very transparent — but with data centers, it is like a big black mystic box,” said Lars Ruiter, a former municipal councilor from Hollands Kroon, who told BuzzFeed News that his village found itself in a nearly identical situation in 2017 with a secret Microsoft data center project.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/operation-tulip-inside-facebooks-secretive-push-to-build?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4

[bucolic_frolic]

1. We've fought big corporate Nazi intruders before

https://www.jta.org/archive/disclose-itt-had-nazi-ties

Article excerpt:

"The protagonist in Sampson’s article is the late Sosthenes Behn who founded the ITT in 1920. Citing a news item that appeared in The New York Times on Aug. 4, 1933, he reports that Adolf Hitler, then Germany’s new chancellor, received a delegation of American businessmen which consisted of Behn and his representative to Germany, Henry Mann. “The meeting was the beginning of a very special relationship between the ITT and the Third Reich,” Sampson notes. “Behn was eager to work closely with the new Nazi government.”
NAZIS JOINED ITT BOARDS

Behn obtained the names of “reliable men acceptable to the Nazis who could join the boards of ITT’s German companies, Sampson continues. One of these men was the banker Kurt von Schroeder, later a general in the Nazi SS “and the crucial channel of funds into Himmler’s gestapo.” Another “important Nazi ally.” Sampson states, was Gerhardt Alois Westrick, whose law firms represented several American companies in Germany, and who also became a director of Standard Elektrizitats-Gesellschaft (SEG) and Lorenz. The SEG was a holding company Behn formed when he brought ITT to Germany in 1930. He later bought Lorenz.

Sampson also writes that after the U.S. entered the war, the Swiss ITT factory “continued to collaborate fully with the Nazis at a time when its Swiss-owned rival, Halser, refused to make equipment for Germans.” But ITT also aided the Allied cause when in 1942 its laboratories in New Jersey invented a high-frequency direction finder to protect Allied convoys, which were simultaneously being attacked by the Focke-Wulfs, Sampson stated. Behn received the U.S. Army highest civilian honor, the Medal of Merit, for his aid to the Allied cause.

Despite its connections with the Nazi regime, ITT later presented itself as a “victim of World War II,” Sampson writes, and in 1967 managed to get $27 million “in compensation from the American government for war damages to its factories in Germany.” This sum included $5 million for damages to its Focke-Wulf plants on the basis that “they were American properties bombed by Allied bombers.” According to Sampson, the ITT “buried its history in a mountain of public relations.”

[empedocles]

2. Telling find.

'The merchant have no country' - T. Jefferson

[bucolic_frolic]

3. And I.T.T. reverberated through Watergate and Nixon's DOJ

https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/behind-nixons-big-sd-scandal/

Behind Nixon's Big SD Scandal


Back in 1972, the GOP planned to hold the Republican National Convention here. It would be a triumphant coronation in Nixon’s “Lucky City” for the man who’d go on to wallop his opponent in the November election.

Then a scandal erupted over a convention-related bribe, and San Diego’s dream of Republican glory vanished. But soon, the city’s young mayor, Pete Wilson, created the new “Finest City” slogan to boost the city’s sagging spirits. The scandal itself was quickly forgotten as Watergate and a presidential resignation captured the public’s attention.

A new book puts the bribery scandal into perspective, revealing its crucial role in the downfall of a president. I interviewed the book’s author, Mark Feldstein, about the dirt he discovered while writing “Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture.”

_________________

https://www.deseret.com/1996/8/9/19259150/tactics-used-during-watergate-were-1st-tested-in-itt-scandal

"On the eve of the 1972 election campaign, the Justice Department suddenly announced it had dropped the ITT suits and settled out of court. The political policymakers never bothered to explain this stunning development. They gambled on the media's limited resources, short attention span, difficulty explaining complicated matters and inability to function when information is cut off.

But sources inside ITT provided us with jigsaw pieces that we were able to put together. The chief piece was an internal memo from ITT's lobbyist-in-chief Dita Beard, tying the $400,000 contribution to the antitrust settlement. The memo ended with a request - "Please destroy this, huh?" - that had been ignored.

The Senate Judiciary Committee immediately convened a hit-and-run hearing, not to investigate but to refute the scandal. A parade of Justice and ITT witnesses soulfully and indignantly professed innocence before a panel that was on the side of miscreants. Most of the senators unashamedly revealed themselves, not as judges sternly searching for the truth, but as a rooting section for the accused.

We asked to appear as witnesses against this righteous breast-beating. With elaborate courtesy, the senators agreed to listen to our testimony after everyone had gone home. So we testified out in the hall in front of the TV cameras."

[2naSalit]

4. +1

[empedocles]

5. More

'Nixon created a criminal presidency, built on illegal wiretapping, break-ins ordered in an effort to discredit political opponents and “dirty tricks” that utterly delegitimized the 1972 election. Watergate was the tip of the iceberg. Nixon believed that as president, he was above the law. This is not a subjective conclusion — the man himself made this clear in arguing U.S. v. Nixon before the Supreme Court and, more plainly, when he told David Frost in 1977: “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

Nixon’s attempt to subvert the presidency and our constitutional system is well worth remembering today, his family’s and friend’s nostalgic feelings notwithstanding. You owed it to your readers to make this clear.'


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/nixon-thought-he-was-above-the-law/2013/01/18/20ed22cc-5e7f-11e2-8acb-ab5cb77e95c8_story.html

[Pinback]

6. Surveillance capitalism is big business. (nt)

[dalton99a]

7. "A project of 'national importance'"

Data centers like the one Facebook proposed suck up enough energy to power a small town, use millions of gallons of water a day to cool their servers, and typically provide few jobs.

The municipality of Zeewolde estimates Facebook’s data center would use twice the energy used by the whole town.