Syria

One of the more amazing revelations in the 30,000 Hillary Clinton emails posted on Wikileaks last week was that Google was in 2012 working on a tool to support the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The Washington Examiner highlights an email originally sent by Google Idea‘s Jared Cohen to Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Jake Sullivan, who forwarded it on to Clinton. Cohen was a former State Department staffer who subsequently became a senior Google exec.

Cohen described a tool that Google believed could help to destabilise the Assad regime, and Sullivan said to Clinton that it was ‘a pretty cool idea,’ no-one realizing at that point how things were going to unfold …

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Google has announced a new philanthropic partnership with NetHope aiming to help Syrian refugees in Germany get reconnected by making 25,000 Chromebooks available to nonprofits. The goal — as described on the Project Reconnect home page — is “to help refugees as they strive to rebuild their lives, by facilitating access to education and information resources on the web.”

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Following Google’s donation-matching program, which has so far raised more than $12M to fund humanitarian aid for refugees from Syria and other war zones, the company says that it is now providing technological assistance too.

In a blog post today, Google says that it has developed an open source project called the Crisis Info Hub to provide migrants with access to the immediate information they need on arrival in Greece in a lightweight, battery-saving way. The company says that it is also helping to beef-up mobile data connectivity locally … 
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