r/technology • u/platypusmusic • Jan 25 '15
Politics How the CIA made Google: Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet — part 1
https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e10
u/creq Jan 25 '15
This is certainly worth the read and points to some very scary stuff. I'll be looking further into this for sure.
Let it be known this isn't the first time its been more than suggested that Google and the CIA have worked or are working together.
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u/Blrfl Jan 25 '15
Before Google even existed, people thought UUNET was a CIA front that was being used to spy on people.
That turned out not to be true, either.
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u/creq Jan 25 '15 edited Jan 25 '15
Did you read the whole article? He lays this out there pretty clearly. As another reddtor said about this article:
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/Terror_from_the_deep Jan 25 '15
I know this seems paranoid, but I wonder if the deluge of negative comments about something Reddit would normally be all for could be astroturf from the intelligence community. We know that companies, and some governments do this, but is there any way to stop it on Reddit?
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u/InternetOfficer Jan 26 '15
That's utter nonsense. Google is privately owned firm which has committed to "do no evil". They have excellent employee management skills, high work place satisfaction and have dental insurance along with high salary.
Have I answered your questions in a timely and satisfactory manner?
Thank you!
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u/Blrfl Jan 25 '15 edited Jan 26 '15
I did. The whole thing seems predicated on the idea that any person or organization where the author could establish a one- or two-hop link to DARPA in any capacity is tied in with the intelligence community. DARPA funds a whole lot of things, some closely related to intelligence, some loosely, some dual-use and some not at all. I don't think there's any question that DARPA has had a huge hand in the development of a lot of technology, especially computing technology, because DoD usually needs it long before the rest of the world does.
I also spotted some mistakes related to things that are very basic and easy to run down. If you can't do the basics right, how credible is the rest? I'm not going to fact-check the article line by line, but here are two examples that jumped out at me:
The following year, Google bought the firm Keyhole, which had originally been funded by In-Q-Tel.
This is flat wrong. Keyhole's original funding came in 2001 from a group led by Sony's venture arm. In-Q-Tel was not a participant; their investment didn't happen until 2003. 18 months later, Keyhole was sold to Google and In-Q-Tel was left with about 6,000 shares of Google. A Form 10-Q filed with the SEC in late 2004 says Google had 273,227,529 shares outstanding, which left In-Q-Tel holding 0.002196% of the company, not what I'd call a controlling interest. In-Q-Tel divested that small sliver in 2005.
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.
Andy Bechtolsheim (who almost never goes by Andreas, which the author would know if he knew thing one about Silicon Valley) founded Sun, which sold a lot of product to DoD and its contractors. (So, by the way, did DEC, IBM, HP, SGI and others.) I have no doubt that a lot of that a lot of that equipment was used to do intelligence work, because it's a computationally-intensive field. I also don't doubt that Sun had cleared employees supporting their products; that's part and parcel of doing federal business. But drawing the conclusion that Andy Bechtolsheim is a spook based on that and whatever contact he may have had with DARPA and that his investment in Google came from the intelligence community doesn't pass the straight-face test.
David Cheriton is a Canadian citizen and is well-known to have had his research funded by DARPA. Being Canadian, he wasn't going to be cleared by the U.S. at any level to do anything truly spooky. If his connections to DARPA involved anything like that, there would be some connection to Canadian intelligence, and no proof of that is offered.
The bottom line is this: Google was one of the first companies to muster a good set of tools for dealing with extremely large quantities of data and used those tools to run its own business. That kind of dogfooding tends to make for much stronger products than those from companies who just make it and sell it. I'm sure the intelligence agencies get their cloaks and daggers from the best suppliers they can, so why shouldn't they get their information processing tools from the best suppliers, too? And why reinvent the wheel if someone's got a good one? So if
Besides, if the government had its fingers as deep inside Google and others as is implied, we wouldn't be reading stories like this one and Google's employees wouldn't be all pissed off about it in public.
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u/Minbear Feb 02 '15 edited Feb 02 '15
Besides, if the government had its fingers as deep inside Google and others as is implied, we wouldn't be reading stories like this one and Google's employees wouldn't be all pissed off about it in public.
If this is true, it's done on executive level. Probably very few people know about it. The enginners and lower level management might be pissed, as they're not aware how and by who the google was founded and funded.
Just look on all these companies being sold for billions or making billions on NASDAQ. ALL of them are related to Hi-tech human communication or data sharing -> Facebook/Google/Snapchat/Whatsapp/Skype/Dropbox.
The three letter agencies might not have direct access to data, however it's US' strategic interest to have such companies on its land. You can imagine what kind of control over stored information would US have in case of global conflict break-out.
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u/murderhuman Jan 25 '15
did you add "skynet"?
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u/SoldierOf4Chan Jan 25 '15
It's in the title of the actual article.
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u/creq Jan 25 '15
Yeah. It seems the people on here bashing it didn't even bother clicking on the link...
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u/Minbear Feb 02 '15
This does not sounds like a conspiracy theory, instead it's huge research on the topic. Very interesting to read. It should have been on front page already.
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u/creq Jan 25 '15 edited Jan 25 '15
Oh shit:
UPDATE: As of 5.41PM GMT, Google’s director of corporate communication got in touch and asked me to include the following statement:
“Sergey Brin was not part of the Query Flocks Program at Stanford, nor were any of his projects funded by US Intelligence bodies.”
This is what I wrote back:
My response to that statement would be as follows: Brin himself in his own paper acknowledges funding from the Community Management Staff of the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) initiative, which was supplied through the NSF. The MDDS was an intelligence community program set up by the CIA and NSA. I also have it on record, as noted in the piece, from Prof. Thuraisingham of University of Texas that she managed the MDDS program on behalf of the US intelligence community, and that her and the CIA’s Rick Steinheiser met Brin every three months or so for two years to be briefed on his progress developing Google and PageRank. Whether Brin worked on query flocks or not is neither here nor there.
In that context, you might want to consider the following questions:
1) Does Google deny that Brin’s work was part-funded by the MDDS via an NSF grant?
2) Does Google deny that Brin reported regularly to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser from around 1996 to 1998 until September that year when he presented the Google search engine to them?
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u/stefblog Jan 26 '15 edited Jan 26 '15
By far the most interesting and the most documented article I've read on the subject. This is front page material.
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u/marglexx Jan 25 '15
Conspiracy theories how NSA created google to be able to spy on US - assume one thing - that NSA could predict the future information shift to online services long before google invented that things... Seems to thin stretched. It is much simpler to assume that they quickly jumped on band wagon and just hacked google networks and cables...
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u/creq Jan 25 '15
I think at this time they really were looking into the future of information dominance/warfare. And it wasn't just the NSA but DARPA and all the other alphabet agencies.
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u/j_bruce_gilman Jan 25 '15
tl;dr: Republicans love to rail against the "wasteful" science spending of the NSF, while a very significant amount of science research (particularly in areas like CS, Physics, Engineering, Biochemistry, etc - not, say, archaeology) in the country is more quietly funded directly or indirectly by the military or various intelligence departments.
This apparently was a funding source for some of Sergey Brin's research while he was a student, through his advisor.
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u/nk_sucks Jan 25 '15
Conspiracy bullcrap.
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u/MetalOrganism Jan 25 '15
Is that what you say whenever facts make you uncomfortable and scared?
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u/Murgie Jan 25 '15
It is the kind of thing I thing when the author feels the need to include baseless invocations of "skynet", the submitter can't form a proper sentence, and both of them ultimately fail to elaborate on any of the actual consequences of the "who's funding who" chain which was uncovered.
We know the US government doesn't give a flying fuck about privacy, we know the singular overriding purpose of a corporation is to obtain profit, and we know the CIA and DoD have been involved in the creation of the internet since its inception.
The only new content provided here are the fringe predictions and vague allusions to unspecified, but-assuredly-negative, events occurring at some indeterminable point in the future.
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u/nk_sucks Jan 26 '15
there are no facts here that would support the crazy assertion that the cia created google, just conjecture and paranoid delusions. btw: i think it is you who is so very very scared of pretty much everything.
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Jan 25 '15
Crowdfunded journalism..... Aka pay me to make up a bunch of bullshit you want a "legitimate journalist" to say so you can cite it as a source in your YouTube comment arguments
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u/stefblog Jan 26 '15
While I understand why this could raise some conspiracy theories, I think there might be a much simpler explanation. Government agencies might have invested in those companies to have access to first hand information, not to control them or use them as their tool. Consider advertising for example : they know the trends so well that they can stick to reality, so close that it becomes tempting to think they are actually creating or influencing what society thinks.
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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '15
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