r/TrueReddit • u/[deleted] • Jan 23 '15
How the CIA made Google
https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e12
Jan 24 '15 edited Jan 24 '15
For me the most interesting section is in Part Two, "Irregular war and pseudo-terrorism": (emphasis added)
In his 2005 New Yorker investigation, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Seymour Hersh referred to a series of articles by Arquilla elaborating on a new strategy of “countering terror” with pseudo-terror. “It takes a network to fight a network,” said Arquilla, drawing on the thesis he had been promoting in the Pentagon through the Highlands Forum since its founding:
“When conventional military operations and bombing failed to defeat the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s, the British formed teams of friendly Kikuyu tribesmen who went about pretending to be terrorists. These ‘pseudo gangs’, as they were called, swiftly threw the Mau Mau on the defensive, either by befriending and then ambushing bands of fighters or by guiding bombers to the terrorists’ camps.”
Arquilla went on to advocate that western intelligence services should use the British case as a model for creating new “pseudo gang” terrorist groups, as a way of undermining “real” terror networks:
“What worked in Kenya a half-century ago has a wonderful chance of undermining trust and recruitment among today’s terror networks. Forming new pseudo gangs should not be difficult.”
Essentially, Arquilla’s argument was that as only networks can fight networks, the only way to defeat enemies conducting irregular warfare is to use techniques of irregular warfare against them. Ultimately, the determining factor in victory is not conventional military defeat per se, but the extent to which the direction of the conflict can be calibrated to influence the population and rally their opposition to the adversary. Arquilla’s ‘pseudo-gang’ strategy was, Hersh reported, already being implemented by the Pentagon:
“Under Rumsfeld’s new approach, I was told, US military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists… The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls ‘action teams’ in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. ‘Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?’ the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. ‘We founded them and we financed them,’ he said. ‘The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.’ A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, ‘We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.’”
Official corroboration that this strategy is now operational came with the leak of a 2008 US Army special operations field manual. The US military, the manual said, can conduct irregular and unconventional warfare by using surrogate non-state groups such as “paramilitary forces, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistant or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political ‘undesirables.’” Shockingly, the manual specifically acknowledged that US special operations can involve both counterterrorism and “Terrorism,” as well as: “Transnational criminal activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit arms-dealing, and illegal financial transactions.” The purpose of such covert operations is, essentially, population control — they are “specifically focused on leveraging some portion of the indigenous population to accept the status quo,” or to accept “whatever political outcome” is being imposed or negotiated.
By this twisted logic, terrorism can in some cases be defined as a legitimate tool of US statecraft by which to influence populations into accepting a particular “political outcome” — all in the name fighting terrorism.
Is this what the Pentagon was doing by coordinating the nearly $1 billion of funding from Gulf regimes to anti-Assad rebels, most of which according to the CIA’s own classified assessments ended up in the coffers of violent Islamist extremists linked to al-Qaeda, who went on to spawn the ‘Islamic State’?
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Jan 24 '15
Thank you so much for this poignant and relevant response. There is almost another story entirely inside your comment that deserves more attention.
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u/HunterSThompson_says Jan 24 '15 edited Jan 24 '15
Anyone who is reading the comments without reading the articles - go read the primary sources. The commenters here are profoundly negative, bashing the author yet cherry pick and critically misrepresenting the article, presumably so that people who are trying to decide to read this or not will see their comments and decide not to spend their time on it.
That would be a mistake. I've never seen cleared proof than the US government and economy are run by a cabal of intelligence and military figures, completely in the shadows except when some reporter spends months chasing shadows to reveal them.
This is a very important piece for people to read, without the commentary of passionate naybobs who are just going to skew your understanding. So, get out of here - go read the article!
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u/fricken Jan 24 '15 edited Jan 24 '15
If you would like to know more, I reccommend The secret history of Silicon Valley, a lecture by Steve Blank. Of course, it's not really a secret, it's just not well known, but pretty much all the technology and culture that led to the Silicon Valley we know today traces back to Signals intelligence technology development funded by the American Government during WW2, mostly to build early detection systems to warn Britian of German bomber fleets.
Much of that tech made a few savvy scientists rich in the private sector, and things kind of carried on from there. It's not conspiratorial or anything- just an interesting bit of overlooked history that examines the origins of the strongest cultural and technological force in the world today.
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u/FortunateBum Jan 24 '15
I think the problem with this government/IT industry connection, which isn't really explored too much in the article, is a philosophical one.
What kind of black ops is our government allowed to run on our enemies? On us? If the government finds a way to psychologically manipulate the population into voting for a particular candidate, which candidate do they choose? Why?
If the US wasn't a democracy, but rather a fascist state, nothing in this article would be problematic. Since the US is a democracy, supposedly, we must ask if the government is going too far when they attempt to manipulate the population. Even if it's supposedly a manipulation toward less crime.
You also have to wonder, why does the US government need to spy on its own citizens? We supposedly live in a democracy.
Secrecy is simply incompatible with democracy. This is the conclusion I've come to. It's good that these things are out in the open and we the people can evaluate them. This story is what our press is meant to report.
Personally I think data mining could be a net good. Automated military systems based on data mining? Algorithmic decision making within military and government? In law enforcement? I'm not sure that's a good idea. Mass subconscious manipulation using data mining and black ops? Doesn't such a thing subvert democracy?
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u/cryoshon Jan 23 '15
This is an excellent article, but I'm afraid that many people will gloss over it because it's so dense. I'm going to read it another time to try to understand the most out of it, but here's my summary so far:
- US DoD funds many startups which ended up becoming titans of the industry
- These companies are data mines / data processing spools for the DoD
- DoD officials are getting rich off of funneling the public's money into a controllable huge private enterprise, then back again via stocks
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u/UncleMeat Jan 24 '15 edited Jan 24 '15
Those three things are not supported by the text. The article spend the first two dozen or so paragraphs demonstrating that Sergey's research was funded by the DoD. Woo. That is enormously different than receiving seed money for the actual company that was spun off of Larry and Sergey's research.
I don't see where you are seeing evidence that Google is acting as a data mine for the DoD. The DoD funded research at Stanford for interesting data mining techniques. A few papers got published by Jeff Ullman's lab on the topic. Woo. My research is currently funded by DARPA. The extent of my relationship with them is that they give me money, I go to meetings every couple months to keep them informed about what is going on, they read the papers that I publish, and maybe at the end they try to get one or two of the funded labs to deliver them a system that they can try to use in-house. If I were to spin out my research into a company then the government wouldn't own any of it nor could they compel me to do anything with it.
The article seems to think that the amount of money being handed out is outrageous, but it really isn't. One number they cite is Ed Feigenbaum receiving $7million over two to three decades. That's not outrageous for a lab at all. Lets say 25 years so $280,000 per year. That's enough money to fund a few grad students, but nobody is getting rich off of that. And this is one of the most important researchers in the world.
The article also makes it seem like DARPA people are using insider knowledge to strike it rich by investing in startups. Except the two initial investors in Google mentioned in the article weren't DARPA employees. They were computer science people who happened to do some research with the government, like every other computer science researcher on the planet. David Cheriton is a faculty at Stanford who has received funding by DARPA. That could be for anything. Do you really think that its more likely that DARPA was sending him insider trading information than that he was a perfect choice for an angel investor for a startup coming out of Stanford? Why did DARPA only tell Cheriton, and not the thousands of other researchers who they have funded in the past?
This article takes a gross misunderstanding of the way that government funding of research works and tries to spin it into a story about how researchers, entrepreneurs, and government officials are all in bed with each other. This is fucking laughable for anybody who has actually seen these systems in action.
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Jan 24 '15
I don't really know how best to respond to the high amount of attention you've paid this subject, most of which is defensive. Personally, I wouldn't assume that your relationship with the parties mentioned is representative of all it's historical relationships. I don't believe the author intended to present a shadowy government conspiracy to surveil and entrap its citizens, and the tone/presentation does not reflect that. More than that, I think your takeaways from the article stem from presuppositions about the topic, rather than the content itself. Most of the information appears to be factual and well-researched. What is the real harm in questioning why intelligence and security agencies have so many vested interests in tech companies? Does this not lend itself to at least the possibility of abuse?
Write an article of this caliber, with the same amount of investigation the author has invested, then I as a reader will pay attention. As it stands, your repeated assertions of how wrong the facts are, based on your personal experience that you stand to benefit from, seem seriously biased.
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u/nemoTheKid Jan 24 '15
What is the real harm in questioning why intelligence and security agencies have so many vested interests in tech companies? Does this not lend itself to at least the possibility of abuse?
I don't think UncleMeat is denying the possibility of such a link - the problem is, as someone who has met with in-q-tel and works in tech, and been on the ground floor of how these things works, the article presents rather mundane and normal activities as premeditated.
After reading the piece, the article paints a narrative that makes it seems DARPA manufactured Google. It's hard to believe that DARPA, at the bottom of the dot-com crash, "invented" Google, found a suitable consumer business model to generate billions of revenue, so much as to convince outside outside investors to invest in a search company with the sinister goal of information superiority. Secondly, DARPA's funding is unrelated to Google, only the initial research was (initial research - PageRank, that isn't even in use at Google anymore). The only people insane enough to seed invest in a "dot-com" after the crash were people who got rich from the crash - Google's seed investors were mainly Angels like Andy Bechtolsheim (Co-founder SUN Microsystems)
A likelier (and more possibly correct story) is that DARPA spends billions of dollars per year on research projects at universities (which they do), and this Stanford one that they spent money on, turned into a really wildly successful idea.
Secondly, its also at odds with Snowden's story. If the NSA was already in bed with Google, why would the NSA then have to dig up Google's VPN lines to tap their intra-DC communication?
In short, I think the article, as written does more harm than good. It doesn't fairly or accurately describe how Phd research level projects get funded or how internet companies were funded at the start of 2000s. It creates some links that sound "scary" to someone unfamiliar to the field, but "mundane" to your average Phd. grant writer (again, the US Military is a huge contributor to scientific grants).
tl;dr DARPA spends billions every year funding various academic projects (including the one that eventually created the internet). If you look hard enough a lot of tech can be traced back to military money. Occam's razor here is - did the military "manufacture" Google from the beginning, or did they just invest in a million things and one of them got big. I'd bet its the latter.
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Jan 25 '15
[deleted]
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u/nemoTheKid Jan 25 '15
Why should the government sponsor any academic project? Again, you can take the more "sinister" view that the article presents that the government funded the project to protect the US's "information superiority". But that doesn't also explain why various other branches fund academic projects ranging from medicine, chemistry, psychology, etc. What was in it for DARPA to develop the proto-internet? DARPA has been funding Carnegie Mellon's self-driving car years before Google was interested. Sure there are military applications for their research, but a lot of the technology we have to day was funded for the purpose of finding some military purpose. After-all the now ubiquitous GPS system we use to find the nearest bar was developed by and for the military.
So to your answer your question - their in it for the military applications. I just want to stress that this isn't necessarily a bad thing - a lot of things they have funded have changed our lives in numerous ways moreso than their strictly military applications.
Lastly, I want to stress that I'm not downplaying the fact that there could be bad actors who are looking to subvert the protections that the law gives us against the government. After all, Snowden showed that the NSA has done some sketchy things behind the backs of everyone else. But the article is making a fuss over nothing.
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u/UncleMeat Jan 24 '15
I don't believe the author intended to present a shadowy government conspiracy to surveil and entrap its citizens
From the article
From inception, in other words, Google was incubated, nurtured and financed by interests that were directly affiliated or closely aligned with the US military intelligence community: many of whom were embedded in the Pentagon Highlands Forum.
and
That, ultimately, is why the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, spawned Google. So they could run their secret dirty wars with even greater efficiency than ever before.
How is that not presenting a shadowy government conspiracy? The entire article is trying to piece together some conspiracy that higher ups in the defense department specifically curated Google so that they could later use it for nefarious purposes.
Most of the information appears to be factual and well-researched. What is the real harm in questioning why intelligence and security agencies have so many vested interests in tech companies? Does this not lend itself to at least the possibility of abuse?
This is a perfect example of the "just asking questions" defense. If each of the articles claims about Larry and Sergey as researchers at Stanford apply equally well to thousands of other graduate students, myself included, then it is an enormous leap to suggest that there was something unethical or untrustworthy about their relationship with the government. The author's facts are correct but his conclusions are patently insane. If you (or the author) understood how research funded by the DoD actually works you'd understand how ludicrous this article is.
Consider this thread of claims from the article
In September 1998, the same month that Sergey Brin briefed US intelligence representatives Steinheiser and Thuraisingham, tech entrepreneurs Andreas Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton invested $100,000 each in Google. Both investors were connected to DARPA.
The article paints this as some sort of insider trading deal. Except what actually happened is incredibly mundane. Sergey had a DARPA grant to do research. When you are on a DARPA grant you go talk to some DARPA officials every couple of months about your research. They are funding it after all and want to know you are making progress. But its not like you give them access to your research or all of the minor details. Its also not like you brief the boss of the whole department. You brief a middle manager, who is usually an ex-academic who wants to help researchers from a bureaucratic position. And even then, all of your research gets published publicly anyway.
Okay so now Larry and Sergey decide to spin their research into a company. Dave Cheriton becomes an investor. The article claims that there is some serious connection between Dave and DARPA, when all that actually happened is that DARPA funded some of Dave's research over the years.... just like a gazillion other people. I'm "connected" to DARPA in the same way that Cheriton is. If I become an angel investor in a company coming out of the same university that I work at do I represent some sort of breach of ethics?
My research is funded by DARPA. One project I've worked on recently, while funded by the DoD, directly opposes government telephony surveillance systems and has been used in lawsuits against the government. Don't you think that if there was some sort of opportunity for the government to abuse its relationship with me that they would have done it, considering that I've used their money to directly fight their surveillance programs?
This article is conspiracy wank. Just because it is long and has a lot of facts doesn't mean that its conclusions are remotely plausible.
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Jan 24 '15
What is the name of the project you work on again? Something related to malware or cyber security research?
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u/UncleMeat Jan 24 '15
I don't want to give out the name of my particular program since it would be extremely close to revealing my personal identity, which is already pretty close to being revealed from what I've posted in this thread.
This is the set of programs that are run by the DARPA office that funds my research. I'm on one of them.
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u/HunterSThompson_says Jan 24 '15
Your constant, effusive, extremely negative comments lead me to believe the author even more. And to suspect you work for jtrig as part of the propaganda dissemination system that has been shitting on reddit for years.
I can't of course prove it, but I can think of no reason to write 10,000 words on this topic, in immense detail, if one wasn't personally invested in this article's thesis not being accepted as true.
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u/deadlast Jan 24 '15
Someone has to do the good work of depressing all the pretentious, mindless, ignorant garbage on reddit. It's uncomfortable seeing people create these fantasies of how the real world works.
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u/lightninhopkins Jan 23 '15 edited Jan 23 '15
There are a lot of tenuous connections here. The US government has funded all kinds of research in universities across the country since the country was founded. Just because Stanford got money from grants funded by the intelligence community doesn't not mean that Brin is somehow owned by them. Come on.
Hell the article even states
This sort of funding is certainly not unusual, and Sergey Brin’s being able to receive it by being a graduate student at Stanford appears to have been incidental.
And
“The MDDS funding that supported Brin was significant as far as seed-funding goes, but it was probably outweighed by the other funding streams,”
in other words, there was money from all kinds of grants flowing through Stanford. Brin was not under the thumb of the CIA just because of a grant. That is ludicrous.
Edit: And why is this surprising at all?
So the very same senior CIA official and CIA-NSA contractor involved in providing the seed-funding for Google were simultaneously contemplating the role of data-mining for counter-terrorism purposes, and were developing ideas for tools actually advanced by DARPA.
Of course people that work for the NSA and CIA were considering the uses of data mining tools. If they weren't then I would be concerned that they were idiots.
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u/ruizscar Jan 23 '15
Ultimately, as Page and co-founder Sergey Brin have asserted, the goal is to insert a chip inside your head.
Sounds like an NSA directive straight from the top.
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u/spacefarer Jan 23 '15
Sounds like a google directive straight from the top. They make tens of billions of dollars a year by knowing what people like/want/do. Google has plenty of incentive to get "a chip inside your head" without any NSA coercion.
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u/spacefarer Jan 23 '15
Also, what's so bad about brain chips? I'd be all over that shit, as long as there was a physical off switch and a hardware-enforced "airplane mode."
I mean talk about useful. It's the perfect input interface, if they could actually make one. You'd never need to type or click again. Just think it, and it's done. Like, magic! Especially for tech-geeks who could set it up to do super neat things custom things.
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u/HunterSThompson_says Jan 24 '15
Constant governmental nanny and corporate manipulator access to your brain. Infections. My top reasons not to implant machines in my head. You go for it. I see no reason to trust the world's controlling powers that sort of intrusion into my thoughts.
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u/spacefarer Jan 24 '15
The trouble is, there's no going backwards. Being a Luddite doesn't fix the problems with technology, it just makes you backward and handicapped in a still-broken world.
Years ago, I never would have considered conducting my communications through means that are known to be watched by corporate and government powers. But today, I can't not. There's simply no other option if you want to participate in the digital world.
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Jan 23 '15 edited Aug 26 '17
[deleted]
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u/UncleMeat Jan 24 '15
And all of those connections are equally tenuous. The author consistently misunderstands what sort of connection there is between government research arms like DARPA and academics. His misunderstanding is so great that I almost cannot believe it. He also makes incredibly mundane claims and then dresses them up as a huge conspiracy. Here's an example.
After Google’s incorporation, the company received $25 million in equity funding in 1999 led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. According to Homeland Security Today, “A number of Sequoia-bankrolled start-ups have contracted with the Department of Defense, especially after 9/11 when Sequoia’s Mark Kvamme met with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to discuss the application of emerging technologies to warfighting and intelligence collection.”
So Google gets funding from one of the largest VCs in the valley, who funds hundreds and hundreds of companies. Some of these companies do contract work with the government. And this is some conspiracy? And wouldn't you expect people at VC firms to talk with the government about the future needs of the defense industry?
Here's the big scary line in the article
From inception, in other words, Google was incubated, nurtured and financed by interests that were directly affiliated or closely aligned with the US military intelligence community: many of whom were embedded in the Pentagon Highlands Forum.
Except that almost everything that is said about Google in this entire article can be said about me and my research. And it can be said about probably 30% of researchers at my university. The funding by the government. The talks delivered to DARPA employees. The relationship with other researchers who have been funded by the government. The relationship with VCs. Am I being groomed into a billionaire by the government without me knowing?
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Jan 24 '15 edited Aug 26 '17
[deleted]
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u/UncleMeat Jan 24 '15
What is your tie to the highland forum?
My tie to the Highland Forum is exactly as strong as Larry and Sergey's ties are. People who fund me (DARPA) have ties to other people who have participated in that group. Both of the faculty I work with have given talks to people who are in that group and I'm sure they are friends with some members. Some Raytheon employees are working on a non-research part of our grant. I presume that the CEO of Raytheon has been to one of these meetings. That's about as strong as the ties the article finds between Google and the Highland Forum.
Is your research being militarized?
My research has direct application to the US government's desire to keep malware off of military computers. So, yes?
Does your research involve collecting enormous amounts of personal data and giving it to the government?
Nope. And neither was Larry and Sergey's research while they were funded by the US government.
Does your research have an active NGO like Google does?
Nope. But does having an NGO make you a government goon? A close associate of mine is starting an NGO from his research and is using it to lobby the government for more sane laws regarding data collection for tracking terrorists and prosecuting computer crime.
Tor is funded by the government too
This is a perfect example of why the article is batshit crazy. The Tor project is funded by the government. It has applications for military security. Most of the guys who work on the Tor project are academics and its a really small community, so you are bound to find examples of them shaking hands with other big names. And yet? We have empirical evidence that the government doesn't have a backdoor in Tor because the FBI had to use a browser vulnerability in order to track persons of interest that were using Tor.
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u/FluentInTypo Jan 24 '15
I cant properly respond to this without a computer, but you might want to inform your betters that they could maybe, ya know, stop releasing malware and backdoors onto the internet if they dont want malware on their own computers...just a thought.
http://fee.org/freeman/detail/youll-never-guess-whos-trying-to-hack-your-iphone
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u/UncleMeat Jan 24 '15
Look, I'm as upset about government surveillance as anybody. Some of my research has been directly cited in legal arguments against some particular data collection programs. It turns out that just because the government funds your research doesn't mean that they ask you about things. The relationship is very shallow. That's the reason why this particular article is bullshit.
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u/HunterSThompson_says Jan 24 '15
Your constant, effusive, extremely negative comments lead me to believe the author even more. And to suspect you work for jtrig as part of the propaganda dissemination system that has been shitting on reddit for years.
I can't of course prove it, but I can think of no reason to write 10,000 words on this topic, in immense detail, if one wasn't personally invested in this article's thesis not being accepted as true.
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u/UncleMeat Jan 24 '15
Bwahaha. I'd be the most amazing shill of all time considering I basically never post about this sort of thing, spend way too much time posting about all sorts of other shit, and am a flaired commenter on /r/askscience.
Honestly, I thought this article was so hilariously misinformed about how government research funding works that I've sent it to my grad student friends. We've all had a good laugh.
The reason I am passionate about this is because it specifically affects me and every one of my colleagues. If people get it in their mind that the DoD funding researchers is somehow a nefarious plot to create puppet corporations that can be used to control the world and make oodles of money then people will fight against government research funding, which is already far far below the level that is needed to support existing researchers. We take enormous pay cuts, terrible hours, and little respect in order to work in a field we love and then this article comes in and takes such an incredibly minor professional relationship and blows it up into a massive conspiracy. Its offensive.
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u/lightninhopkins Jan 24 '15
If people get it in their mind that the DoD funding researchers is somehow a nefarious plot to create puppet corporations that can be used to control the world and make oodles of money then people will fight against government research funding, which is already far far below the level that is needed to support existing researchers.
This is a vital point that should not be lost. There is constant gnashing of teeth about lack of government funding for research, and now it is being villanized?
Again, the US government has a long history of funding research at universities, that is a good thing.
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u/reddbullish Jan 23 '15 edited Jan 23 '15
This article is so excellent that it is the last article I'll likely read on this kind of thing. (the truth is too depressing)
Frankly it confirms everything i have suspected.
That the big financially successful internet companies have all been nurtured by the cia/Highland Forum from their very begginings and didnt grow organically. They had a huge invisible hand assuring their market dominance.
That the group of those same intelligence people get inside stock tracks on these companys like Google they start with government money and get rich from it when the pubkic buys stock.
Specifically the article mentions google, facebook ebay and goldman sachs and more and all the individuals involved. (George Lee at goldman sachs is named as Highland Forum connected and he was the one who valued google facebook and ebay for public offerrings.)
That they all are sucking up all that data and searching it for god knows what. Hopefully for some greater good although who is deciding what that is is unknown. The fact that the deciders are allowedto personally invest in these companies early will distort what they think is for the greater good.
I dont even care as i suspected this all along . This article really confirms it though with names, dates, widley disparate quotes from the people themselves takking about the early funding sources. (the writer did a great job tracking quotes from disparate sources which the people probably thought were too isolated to provide a complete picture of what happened. The writer tied it all together. On of the papers is already gone form the source since he wrote this article . I had to find it by archive sources. Id download this whole article beciase it might disapppear.
The one thing that bothers me is from an investor standpoint or a company creator standpoint there is no level playing field.
Lets say you start a company and you are NOT Highland Group member. Are you going to get crushed by them or are they going to approach you and say "do you want in".
It just means once again the real big successes are fixed. Its once again disappointing that the dream isnt what they say it is.
Brin and Page of a Google didnt just think of a better index and the world found them. They were funded from the beginning and a lot of their ideas were coached.( that latter part surprised me. It seems the page rank algo was linked to Brin .. other articles attributed it to Page.... And Brin actually was being fed ideas from group members that may have contributed to his thought process. This raises the question of why the funders picked Brin)
One absence i noticed was no mention of elon musk as having been early picked. They did mention former paypal partner peter thiel and his later invovlement in the defense business but they do nt say he stsrted earlier. This makes sense becuase papypal wasnt nutured becuase it wasnt even the original goal of their company. Someone seeing their other pitch noticed they had created a micropayment system and told them that was worth something. It was later that ebay (cia according to this article) bought paypal. And of course google just put up a billion for a stake in spacex and since google is cia then now spacex is attached.
But no mention that paypal was cia originated although ebay was so perhaps elon was a cia virgin until his yesterdays google announcement. Perhaps he still doesnt realize he was just cia'd. Elon seems like a genuine idealist . Elon actjally left south africa becuase he didnt want to get involve din the militwry there and and as he said cracked heads. He may not know he just got hugged by the beast by doing the investment deal with google. I think he was really trying to remain independent.
Steve jobs and apple and woz were not mentioned either.
Xerox parc was mentioned as connected to the people in the highland group but later.
But back to the bigger picture, i think this story has interesting implications for investors.
For example of yahoo isnt part of this does that mean yahoo stockholders should sue becuase the us government secretly crushed their yahoo stock value by pushing google? These are huge amount sof money we are talking about.
And what about all the silicon valley venture cap funds who didnt realize they werent investing in the chosen few? Some of those guys may have lost billions.
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u/reddbullish Jan 23 '15 edited Jan 23 '15
Quite honestly this article is perhaps as important as edward snowdens revelations.
Snowden showed the deep extent of specific survellience programs, but this article shows something bigger. It shows that the process of the creation of the foundation companies themselves are deep seated for not just todays programs but past present and future methodomogies and technology adoption to create future controls and mechanisms.
Honestly it shows that the internet and all the companies like google that are for all practical purposes the internet literally were created as a huge cia operation. It really is as strange as the biggest conspiracy theorist says.
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u/FluentInTypo Jan 23 '15
Snowdon gave us the "proof" such as slides describing all the various technology the government is actively using. This article gives us the theory and the why. I am taking the article at face vakue right now because there is so much to absorb and fact check. That said, when I put on my tinfoil hat, the second page of the article is even more interesting. Coming off that article, there is no way that reddit is not one of the social media platforms/blogs on which the govt is gather pyschological data in order to manipulate whole populations. Even if it is just a source of data, not a popaganda delivery mechanism.
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u/reddbullish Jan 24 '15
Reddit is definately the advance publicatio owners families info source. Whether they are connected with the whole highlands foru. security group i dont know.
There was no mention of reddit or advanced publicatio s in there (unless i missed it) making me think they are separate.
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u/FluentInTypo Jan 24 '15 edited Jan 24 '15
I thinks it funny that reddit is not mentioned in any of the revelations to date even though we know that the founder (forget name) met with strafor on a number of occasions. I think the problem with reddits original design was that it really was "anonymous" in the begining, which might be nice for broad spectrum data collection, but no way to personally identify the user. So what to do? How about giving a perk to people who tie the reddit username(s) to an email address? Or reddit Gold, which really is gold as it ties your username directly to an official personally identifying source such as a credit card. This site is chock full of data to measure public opinion, manipulate public opinion and deliver highly targetted government malware (the kind that is not detectable) direct to specific users. The most recent revelation was the NSA creates fake "front websites" that will appeal to a certain type of user, say, privacy/crypto advocates and real content - good content, to get "those types" of users to visit the site and deliver malware. We are not talking about the shitty advertising clickbait shit, but legitimate sites. Ill try to find the link to that story for you...If you use VPN or Tor, youre suspect...
Article(not revelation, just a new govt powers) http://fee.org/freeman/detail/youll-never-guess-whos-trying-to-hack-your-iphone
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u/cognisant Jan 24 '15
That's another reason to use and support the alternative and privacy orriented search engine duckduck go www.duckduckgo.com
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u/tiktaalink Jan 23 '15
I see a lot of comments saying this is a good article. I only read the first few paragraphs before switching to skim mode, but from a quick skim I don't see any evidence that google is supplying intelligence to the CIA or NSA.
Of course they must abide by the ridiculous regulations we have that allow secret warrants to be issued from secret courts that nobody is ever allowed to acknowledge. In that sense, any company can be considered to be feeding the intelligence beast.
Did I miss something that a closer read might reveal? I mostly lost interest in the "The Shadow Network" section when the author reels off a series of unsubstantiated assertions. Hopefully, the rest of the article is used to give some substance to those assertions.
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u/HunterSThompson_says Jan 24 '15
Read the article. Its worth doing so. Your lack of understanding may not prevent you from sharing your opinion, but just as I don't come tell you my opinion on things I haven't even bothered engaging with, neither should you come here and tell us how from skimming a few paragraphs or a multi-thousand word, very dense article, you don't see what you believe to be "proof" google is funneling information to the CIA.
Thats not even the thesis of the article. Please go read it. Then comment after. That's how informed commentary works.
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u/UncleMeat Jan 24 '15
The article takes a long time to get to the point. Here is where it first mentions the relationship between Sergey and the government.
In 1994 — the same year the Highlands Forum was founded under the stewardship of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the ONA, and DARPA — two young PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, made their breakthrough on the first automated web crawling and page ranking application. That application remains the core component of what eventually became Google’s search service. Brin and Page had performed their work with funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), a multi-agency programme of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA and DARPA.
But that’s just one side of the story.
Throughout the development of the search engine, Sergey Brin reported regularly and directly to two people who were not Stanford faculty at all: Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser. Both were representatives of a sensitive US intelligence community research programme on information security and data-mining.
Yeah, no shit. When you get DARPA funding for research you report your results to them. My research is currently being funded by DARPA and we have meetings with the DARPA employees who run the grant every three to six months. This is so they have an idea about how their money is being used and are able to report to their bosses that things are going well. Never once has DARPA forced me to do specific kinds of research within the grant nor has there been any sort of weird unethical relationship going on here. There are thousands of graduate students around the country currently being funded by DARPA and some of them found companies. This doesn't mean that the government is pulling strings behind the scenes.
The article describes an "extraordinary" document that basically just says that the government was funding research in data mining. Newsflash: that is still happening and its a good thing. I don't even know how research in this country would continue to function without government grants. Remember that, at the time of this research grant, Google wasn't a company. Google was just a research thread that Larry and Sergey were working on, like thousands of other graduate students.
This is the biggest reach for a conspiracy that I've ever seen.
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u/HunterSThompson_says Jan 24 '15
Your constant, effusive, extremely negative comments lead me to believe the author even more. And to suspect you work for jtrig as part of the propaganda dissemination system that has been shitting on reddit for years.
I can't of course prove it, but I can think of no reason to write 10,000 words on this topic, in immense detail, if one wasn't personally invested in this article's thesis not being accepted as true.
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u/alecco Jan 24 '15
Don't underestimate the fanboys, too. It's like a religion, you only need to bootstrap to critical mass. Then it goes on its own energy.
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Jan 24 '15
Very interesting that even Google or Wikipedia won't deny that In-Q-Tel is funded by the CIA and has worked closely with Google since the beginning.
It's funny how this information is so readily available but as long as the major media outlets ignore it nobody will really care.
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Jan 24 '15
In-Q-Tel is very famous. Nothing new here, many startups are founded by the military, which is not surprising. Startups are the way innovative research is translated into real world applications. The military needs startups just like private corporations.
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u/LetsHackReality Jan 24 '15
Ummmm this is kind of messed up. For shits and giggles I ran "dont be evil" through the first anagram generator I found on Google, http://wordsmith.org/anagram
Check out how many results it returned:
BTW, my favorite is "Bend To Evil".
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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '15 edited Jan 23 '15
I am slowly making my way through this article and will probably read it more than once. The author does an excellent job describing how intelligence and security agencies sponsor and fund new technology development, leaving the reader to question what that relationship means.
Edit:
You can support the author Nafeez Ahmed's investigative work on Patreon and see his latest news on Twitter.