For the second time in three months, the shadowy Campaign for Accountability has attacked Google. First, at the end of April, the group launched “The Google Transparency Project” with a report on the revolving door between Google and the federal government. On Tuesday, Campaign for Accountability put out a new report suggesting Google-funded academics were influencing federal policymaking on the sly.
SiliconBeat called up Campaign for Accountability with regard to both reports, and both times asked who funded it – certainly a reasonable question of an organization purportedly dedicated to accountability. The answer was essentially the same Tuesday as it was in April.
“This is something that we have not disclosed in the past and we do not disclose it,” deputy director Daniel Stevens said Tuesday. Donors wouldn’t donate without anonymity, he suggested. Stevens declined to answer when asked whether any funding comes from companies competing with Google.
Secrecy, for this group, goes deeper than its funding. It markets itself online as a “project that uses research, litigation and aggressive communications to expose misconduct and malfeasance in public life.” Nowhere does it reveal that it’s part of an extremely deep-pocketed public-interest group, New Venture Fund, that took in $178 million in donations in 2014, the most recent year for which data was available. (Full disclosure: to find out who was behind the Campaign for Accountability, SiliconBeat became a donor; for our $1 gift, we received a tax-deduction receipt from New Venture Fund.)
New Venture Fund is heavily supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Between 2014 and the present, the Gates Foundation has given the group $94 million and the Hewlett Foundation has given it $17 million. The Ford Foundation has given NVF $12 million since the start of last year.
The funding from the Gates and Hewlett charities went to types of projects – education and global development, in particular – that fall within the usual range of their philanthropy. And those types of projects had also been the focus for New Venture Fund – creation of the Campaign for Accountability last year appears to be a departure from its existing model.
In February, NVF posted a job listing seeking researchers for “a new project . . . that aims to bring transparency to organizations and entities that are playing an outsized role in the making of public policy.”
It appears the NVF found its researchers. The report released Tuesday, based on a study of three conferences, concluded that “Google-funded academics are playing an outsized role in the debate over the U.S. government’s policy on internet privacy.”
There’s nothing to suggest either the Gates or Hewlett foundations had any knowledge that their beneficiary was attacking Google. Because the links between NVF and the Campaign for Accountability’s Google Transparency Project have been concealed, foundation officials may not be aware of the connection. Calls requesting comment from the Hewlett Foundation and the NVF were not immediately returned. A Gates Foundation spokeswoman responded late in the day asking for further details; any response from the charity will be added to this post. Google declined to comment.
NVF is tightly linked to Arabella Advisors, a “philanthropic investment” consultancy with offices in Washington, D.C., New York City, Chicago and San Francisco. In 2014, NVF paid more than $8 million to Arabella for consulting services, according to an NVF tax filing. David Kessler, founder and a senior managing director of Arabella, is president of NVF. Another Arabella senior managing director, Bruce Boyd, is an advisor to NVF.
According to a number of expired job postings, one apparently from March, Arabella’s clients include the Gates Foundation and Microsoft. SiliconBeat contacted Arabella late in the day Tuesday, and did not receive an immediate response; any comment from the firm will be added after it’s received.
When the Campaign for Accountability first went after Google, with the April report, Fortune magazine speculated about who might be funding the group, and noted that Fortune had reported earlier that month that Microsoft and Google had pledged to “play nice” with each other, and to “no longer issue regulatory complaints against each other both in the U.S. and abroad.”
Photo: A man walks past a building on the Google campus in Mountain View (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
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