Google suppressed a map of US defense contractor plants. Until we asked why.
Google took down a map of publicly available addresses of arms plants for violating its policy on “dangerous & illegal activities.” It did so shortly after an outlet critical of Israel republished it.
Hi,
Today I want to share a twist to a story we first brought you in December.
It starts with Air Force veteran and Arabic linguist Christian Sorensen, who knows the paper trail of the military-industrial complex like few others. He’s nowadays a fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, which brings together dissenting former national security officials and military officers who question the status quo of US foreign policy. He digs into Pentagon contracting announcements, trade publications, and SEC filings for defense contractors to shine light on the business of war. He’s my first stop when I have data and document questions on this beat.
Sorensen told me he spent 10 months last year putting together a remarkable map of military-industrial America. He plotted the addresses of the facilities of the top six defense contractors to a Google map, giving a brief synopsis of what each plant currently does and what it could do in a peacetime economy. He found the addresses through publicly available sources like military contracting announcements, corporate press releases, and job postings. I come across these addresses routinely in records I use in my work — while we’re on the topic, if you’d like to see a list of all of the Northrop Grumman facilities in Utah working on the new intercontinental ballistic missile, it’s on page 20 of this economic development contract I got through a public records request. Which is to say: The addresses of top American nuclear manufacturing facilities are published on run-of-the-mill economic development records. Not much of a secret.
The map had lived online for four months and made the rounds among readers. I’d shared with colleagues who remarked that it was a useful way to visualize the industry. It looked like this, and you could hover over each pinpoint for more information.
I’ve been an interloper at many of the addresses you see there. They often have gated entrances and are not very pedestrian-friendly, so I get down in ditches on the side of the road and take whatever kind of picture I can. Here are some from Huntsville’s Cummings Research Park, a sprawl of corporate offices adjacent to the Army’s Redstone Arsenal.
If you have any doubt about what’s going on at a given location, there’s often signage.
Corinne, Utah
Courtland, Alabama
Hill Air Force Base, Utah
Back to Sorensen's map: A few weeks ago, producers from an alternative media outlet called Breakthrough News found it and used it to produce a video, published March 12, called: “Here’s Every US Factory Making Bombs for Israel.”
Two days later, the map was down. Sorensen said he got an email from Google saying it had violated its “Dangerous & Illegal Activities policy.” He appealed, and heard nothing back for weeks. During that time, if you clicked the map, you saw this:
“It’s such horseshit” to allege that a map of arms plants could put them in danger, Sorensen told me, “because if one guy like me over ten months can put this thing together, you’re saying that Russia and China can’t do this with their resources?” (Sorensen wanted to make clear that he doesn’t accept Russia and China as threats to the America public to begin with. He sees US threat inflation as designed to increase military budgets and render peace-making ever difficult.) Furthermore, Sorensen said the vast majority of the addresses were already logged into Google Maps itself, and he just compiled them into one interactive page.
After hearing Sorensen’s story, I sent a basic request for comment to a Google spokeswoman, asking her why addresses I see routinely in my reporting are allegedly dangerous and illegal. Within a day, I got the following response:
“We regularly monitor for policy-violating content and take any necessary enforcement actions. In the case raised, this map was removed in error, and we have since reinstated the map.”
I asked for more information about the timing — was its removal after four months online related to the video of arms plants supplying Israel? No answer from them yet on that question.
Sorensen had been really deflated about months of work being zapped offline, telling me: “This took me forever. It was literally my project for 2023, and with one click, this public service is bye-bye.”
And with one email from a reporter, it’s now back. We reporters tend to hope that our work has real-world impact, but I usually expect to have to invest more time than writing a single email to achieve that. Anyhow, check out a map of America’s arms plants here!
What I’m reading:
This 1973 piece is from the recently digitized Southern Exposure archive, a print journal that was a predecessor to today’s online Facing South publication. The first issue of Southern Exposure delved into military contracting and recruitment in the South. Whitewash is a first-person essay from Henry Durham, a loyal Lockheed employee-turned alarmed whistleblower who frantically tried to expose waste of taxpayer money and shoddy manufacturing on the C-5 plane, which famously blew up on a runway in Marietta in 1970, killing a mechanic. “I choose to be a citizen first and an employee second,” Durham wrote. “The true citizen will decide that his primary allegiance is to his personal integrity rather than to his powerful employer.”
Thank you to Inkstick reader and Lawfare Managing Editor, Tyler McBrien, a Marietta native, for flagging it!
This is a really superb piece on the costs and benefits of nuclear weapons spending in local economies in the American West. It's published in Deseret, an outlet owned by the Mormon Church, which once took a remarkable stance against a Cold War-era nuclear weapon known as the MX missile, a rare example of a weapons program abandoned after popular mobilization.
Extra
I checked out a recent protest against Israel's assault on Gaza on Georgia Tech’s Atlanta campus, interested to see what anti-war activism at a STEM school looked like. A postdoc fellow in the physics department named Miles Wetherington denounced the school as a pipeline into the arms industry, calling it “the belly of the beast.” He quoted Indigo Olivier’s 2022 investigation at In These Times magazine, “Inside Lockheed Martin’s Sweeping Recruitment on College Campuses,” which reported that Lockheed was the university’s largest alumni employer in 2019 and 2021. Quality investigative journalism like Olivier’s has a long shelf life.
Thank you for reading!
Thoughts, comments, story suggestions? Send them my way at tbarnes@inkstickmedia.com. We may publish them in a future newsletter.
April 12, 2024: This story has been updated to better reflect Sorensen’s views on national security, China and Russia.