How and why did the CIA create Google?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

We offer you a translation of the report published in January 2015, carried out by the participants of the Insurge Intelligence project - it brings together enthusiasts who fund it from their own means and carry out investigative journalism.

Actually, now the report itself (publication with large abbreviations due to its large volume, source at the end of the article):

The Insurge Intelligence project may now reveal the immense degree of involvement of the US intelligence community in nurturing the web platforms that are known today, with the clear goal of using information technology as a means of waging a global "information war" - a war to legitimize the power of the few over others. At the center of this process is a corporation that in many ways embodies the 21st century with its imperceptible omnipresent presence - Google.

The hidden part of Google's ascent, first described in this article, reveals a cabinet of skeletal secrets far beyond Google, unexpectedly shedding light on the existence of a parasitic network that spins the growth of the US national security apparatus and shamelessly benefits from the company's activities.

Over the past twenty years, the US foreign and intelligence strategy has boiled down to a global "war on terror" consisting of prolonged military incursions into the Muslim world and comprehensive surveillance of the civilian population. This strategy was developed, if not imposed, by a secret network inside and outside the Pentagon.

Created under the Clinton administration, entrenched during the Bush administration and firmly entrenched under Obama, this largely neo-conservative bipartisan network cemented its dominance within the US Department of Defense by early 2015 through an implicit corporate structure outside the Pentagon but run by the Pentagon itself.

In 1999, the CIA founded its own investment venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, to fund promising startups that could create technologies useful for intelligence services. However, the idea of directing the work of In-Q-Tel came even earlier, when the Pentagon created its own private sector structure.

Known as the Highlands Forum, this closed network has served as a link between the Pentagon and influential American elites outside the Pentagon since the mid-1990s. Despite the change in civil administrations, the network formed around the Mountain Forum has increasingly successfully dominated US defense policy.

Major defense contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and Science Applications International Corporation are sometimes referred to as the “shadow intelligence community” because of the revolving door policy between them and the government and their ability to influence defense policy and at the same time benefit from it. Although these contractors compete for influence and money, they partner with each other when it suits them. For 20 years, The Mountain Forum has provided an implicit platform for some of the most visible members of the shadow intelligence community to exchange views with leading US government officials along with leaders in their respective industries.

This story was based on a little-known Pentagon-funded "white paper" published two months earlier by the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, a leading US military-run agency that, among other things, conducts research on US defense policy at the highest levels. This white paper clarified the thoughts behind the initiative and the revolutionary scientific and technological advances it hoped to capitalize on.

The NSU report is co-authored by Linton Wells, 51, a veteran US defense official who served as Director of Information Security in the Bush Administration, overseeing the NSA and other espionage agencies. He still retains the highest levels of access to state secrets and, according to the Government Gazette, in 2006 he was chairman of the Mountain Forum, created in 1994 by the Pentagon.

New Scientist magazine has compared the Mountain Forum to elite events “like Davos,” but which are “significantly less well-known, although perhaps just as influential. At regular meetings of the forum, "innovative-minded people discuss the relationship between politics and IT." The forum's highest success has been the development of high-tech, web-based weapons.

Given Mr. Wells' role in this forum, it may come as no surprise that his work on rebuilding the defense could have such a profound impact on the actual policy of the Pentagon.

Despite the fact that the Mountain Forum was sponsored by the Pentagon, I did not find any official forum page on the Department of Defense website. Current and former US military and intelligence sources have never heard of him, and even national security journalists did not know anything about it. I was taken aback.

• An informal interdisciplinary network structure created to study the problems of the information revolution; conflict in the information age

• Does not publish reports and recommendations • Sponsor - Office under the Minister of Defense

• First Co-Chairs: Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Information; Director of the Network Evaluation Office; Director of DARPA

• First meeting held in Carmel, Highlands in February 1995.

During its existence, 16 general and 7 special (narrow) meetings of the organization were held. According to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Information, “The 16 meetings of the forum had a direct and valuable impact on the DOD's policy formulation and research agenda. The Forum constantly predicts changes in information and other technologies and predicts their impact in the post-Defense Program environment for the coming years and security policy."

From a presentation by Richard O'Neill at Harvard University in 2001

The influence of the Mountain Forum on US defense policy was thus provided through three main channels: through direct sponsorship of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (in the middle of the last decade, it was specially transformed into the Office of Intelligence under the Deputy Secretary of Defense, which directs the main intelligence services); through direct liaison with Andy "Yoda" Marshall's Network Evaluation Office; and through direct liaison with DARPA.

According to Klipenzher (taken from his book "The Lonely Crowd"), "… what happens at informal meetings like the" Mountain Forum "over time and through unknown paths of influence has a huge impact not only within the Ministry of Defense, but throughout the world." He further notes that “… the ideas of the forum, which were considered heretical, became generally accepted. Ideas that were anathematized in 1999 became the current political course in just three years.”

While the forum does not develop consensus recommendations, its impact is much deeper than that of a conventional government advisory committee. According to O'Neill, “ideas that pop up at meetings are made available for use by decision-makers and think tank staff. And further: “Our meetings are attended by people from Booz Allen Hamilton (technology consulting), SAIC, RAND (research company) and other organizations. We welcome this type of interaction because they have an attraction. They came with far-reaching goals and are able to influence government policy through real scientific work. We give ideas, interaction and connections to these people so that they can take it all and use it as they need it."

My repeated appeals to Mr. O'Neill with requests for information about his work at the Gorny Forum were ignored. The Defense Ministry also did not respond to numerous requests for information and comments about the forum.

Google: nurtured by the Pentagon

In 1994, when the Mountain Forum was created under the auspices of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Network Assessment Office and DARPA, two young graduate students at Stanford University - Sergey Brin and Larry Page - made their breakthrough development in the field of the first Internet search (this is a mistake - Google was far from the first search engine on the web, it was preceded by Altavista, Yahoo and others - ed.) and the ranking of web pages. This application became the core of what ultimately formed the Google search service. Brin and Page did their work with funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), an inter-agency program of the National Science Foundation, NASA, and DARPA.

But this is only one part of the story.

Throughout the development of the search engine, Brin reported regularly and directly on the work to two individuals who were not professors at Stanford University at all - Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser. Both were representatives of a dual-use information security and data analysis research program conducted by the US intelligence community.

Today Thuraisingham is Distinguished Professor of the Louis A. Beecherl Foundation and Executive Director of the Cybersecurity Research Institute at the University of Texas at Dallas, a recognized expert in data analysis and information security. But in the 90s of the last century, she worked for MITER Corp. - a leading US defense contractor, where she led the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) initiative, a project sponsored by the NSA and the CIA to promote innovative IT research.

“We funded Stanford University through computer scientist Jeffrey Ullman, who has several promising graduate students working on many exciting topics,” Prof. Thuraisingham. “Brin, the founder of Google, was one of those students. The intelligence community's MDDS program essentially provided seed funding for Brin, which was supplemented by many other sources, including from the private sector."

This type of funding is not unusual, and the fact that Brin was able to get it as a graduate student at Stanford seems to be a coincidence. At the time, the Pentagon was everywhere in the field of computer science. However, it underscores how deeply ingrained the culture of Silicon Valley is in the values of the US intelligence community.

In a startling document posted on the University of Texas website, Thuraisingham recalls that between 1993 and 1999, "the intelligence community launched the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) program, which I ran on behalf of the intelligence community when I worked for the MITER Corporation." … This program funded 15 research projects at various universities, including Stanford. The goal of the program was to develop technologies for sifting data in volumes from several terabytes to petabytes, including for "managing requests, transactions, storage and data integration."

Thuraisingham was once the Chief Scientific Officer of Data and Information Management at MITER, where she led joint research projects for the NSA, the CIA, the US Air Force Research Laboratory, and the US Army's Space and Marine Combat Systems Command (SPAWAR) and the Command of Communications and Electronics Systems (CECOM). She went on to pursue a career teaching counter-terrorism data analysis training for US government officials and defense contractors.

In her article for the University of Texas, she attached a summary of the US intelligence community's MDDS program, which was presented at the 1995 annual intelligence community symposium. It indicates that the main sponsors of the MDDS program, which operated under the director of the CIA, were three agencies: the NSA, the CIA's research and development department, and the community management headquarters (CMS) of the US intelligence community. The program administrators, which provided funding of $ 3-4 million per year for 3-4 years, were Hal Curran of the NSA, R. Klutz (CMS), Dr. Claudia Pierce of the NSA, Dr. Rick Steinheiser of the CIA Research and Development Department, Dr. Thuraisingham herself.

Thuraisingham further reiterates in his article that this joint NSA-CIA program partially funded Brin to develop Google's core through a grant to Stanford, which was managed by Brin's curator, Prof. J. Ullman:

“In fact, Google founder Brin was funded in part by this program when he was a graduate student at Stanford. Together with its curator J. Ullman and my colleague at MITER Dr. Chris. Chris Clifton, Chief Scientific Officer of IT at Miter, developed the Query Flocks System, which provided solutions for sifting through large amounts of data. I remember trips to Stanford with Dr. Steinheiser from the intelligence community, when Bryn would ride up on rollerblades, give a presentation, and get out. In fact, at our last meeting in September 1998, Brin showed us his search engine, which soon became the core of Google."

Brin and Page formally founded Google as a company in September 1998, the same month they last reported to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser. The group query engine also became part of Google's proprietary PageRank search engine, which Brin developed at Stanford under the NSA-CIA MDDS program, and with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), IBM, and Hitachi. In the same year prof. MITER's Clifton, who worked with Thuraisingham on the group query system, co-authored the work with Brin's curator, Prof. Ullman and Steinheiser of the CIA under the title "Recognizing Knowledge in Text" which was presented at a scientific conference.

"The MDDS funding that Brin supported was significant to the extent that seed funding is available, but it was probably outnumbered by other funding streams," Thuraisingham says. “The funding period for Brin was two years or so. During this period, my MDDS colleagues and I would visit Brin at Stanford and track his progress every three months or so. We didn’t actually control him, but we checked how far he had progressed, pointed out possible problems, and suggested ideas. In these meetings, Brin did introduce us to group query research and show us versions of the Google search engine.”

Thus, Brin reported regularly to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser on his work to build Google. Indeed, several of Brin and Page's Stanford papers refer to the MDDS program. A 1998 paper by Brin and Page described how to automate methods of extracting data from the web through “double iterative extraction of relationship models,” developing a “global ranking of web pages called PageRank,” and using PageRank “to create a new search engine called Google . In a footnote in the introduction, Brin confirms that it was “supported in part by the Community Management HQ Massive Digital Data Program” through an NSF grant, thereby confirming that the MDDS-NSA-CIA program provided its funding through the National Science Foundation.

This grant, which listed Brin as a supported student (without mentioning the MDDS program), was different from the Pageju Science Foundation grant, which included funding from DARPA and NASA. Project report prepared by Brin's curator prof. Ullman, states in the Signs of Success section that "there are several examples of new start-ups based on NSF-supported research." The "Impact of the project" section of the report states: "Finally, the Google project also went commercial in the form of Google.com."

Thurasingham's memories thus indicate that the MDDS-NSA-CIA program not only funded Brin throughout his work with Page in Google's development, but that senior US intelligence officials, including the CIA, followed Google's development all the way until ready. companies for official registration. At the time, Google was supported by a "significant" seed funding and oversight by the Pentagon, CIA, NSA and DARPA.

The Ministry of Defense does not comment on this

When I asked prof. Ullman to confirm whether or not Brin was funded under the MDDS intelligence community program, and whether Ullman knew or not that Brin regularly informs Steicheiser of the CIA on the progress of work on the development of the Google search engine, Ullman replied evasively: “Can I find out who you represent, and why are you interested in this? Who are your sources? He also denied that Brin played a significant role in the development of the group query system, although it is clear from Brin's research that he took advantage of these developments in collaboration with Page on the development of the PageRank page ranking system.

When I asked Ullman if he was denying the role of the US intelligence community in supporting Brin in the development of Google, Ullman said, “I'm not going to pay attention to this nonsense by denying it. Since you do not want to explain either your theories or what exactly you want to prove, I will not help you in the slightest."

The MDDS Program Brief, posted online on the University of Texas website, confirms that the rationale for this CIA-NSA project was “to secure seed funding for developing data management technologies that are high-risk but high-impact,” including “queries, reviewing results and filtering; processing transactions; access and indexing methods; metadata management and data modeling; integration of heterogeneous databases, as well as the development of appropriate architectures. " The ultimate goal of the program was to "provide access to and fusion of massive amounts of data, information and knowledge into a heterogeneous environment in real time" for use by the Pentagon, the intelligence community and potentially the entire government.

These findings corroborate the claims of Robert Steele, a former senior CIA officer and civilian deputy director and founder of the Marine Corps Intelligence Agency, whom I interviewed last year for the Guardian on open source intelligence. Citing CIA sources, Styles said in 2006 that Steinheiser and his old colleagues were the CIA's primary liaison with Google, and had arranged early funding for this innovative IT firm. At the same time, Wired magazine founder John Batelle was able to get the following official rebuttal from a Google spokesperson in response to Styles' claims: "Claims related to Google are completely untrue."

At this point, despite numerous inquiries and conversations, a Google spokesman declined to comment.

After the publication of the material, the director of corporate communications at Google contacted me and asked to include the following text in the study:

"Sergey Brin was not a member of the Stanford Group Inquiry System program, and none of his projects were funded by US intelligence agencies."

And here is what I wrote in response:

“My response to this statement is this: Brin personally, in his own research paper, expressed gratitude for funding from the Community Management Headquarters for the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) Initiative through the National Science Foundation (NSF). MDDS was an intelligence community program created by the CIA and NSA. I also have a written testimony, as indicated in this article, from prof. Thuraisingham of the University of Texas that she ran the MDDS program on behalf of the US intelligence community, and that she and Steinheiser of the CIA met with Brin every three months or so for two years to review Brin's progress on Google and PageRank. Whether Brin worked on a group request system is beside the point.

In this regard, you might be interested in the following questions:

1)Does Google deny that Brin's work was partially funded by the MDDS program through a grant from the NSF?

2)Does Google deny that Brin reported regularly to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser between about 1996 and 1998 until September of that year when he introduced them to the Google search engine?

Thuraisingham says that by 1997, right before the founding of Google, and while she was still overseeing the development of Google's search engine software at Stanford, she came up with the idea of using MDDS for national security. In acknowledgment of the introduction to her book Sifting Internet Data and Applications in Business Intelligence and Counter Terrorism (2003), Thuraisingham writes that she and Dr. R. Steinheiser of the CIA have begun discussions with the Advanced Research DoD projects to apply data sifting techniques to counter terrorism, with the idea stemming directly from the MDDS program, which was partially funded by Google. "These discussions eventually resulted in today's DARPA EELD (Evidence-Finding and Linking) program."

Google takes over the Pentagon

In 2003, Google began customizing its search engine with a special contract with the CIA, overseeing top secret, secret and confidential intranets for the CIA and other community agencies involved in information and communications, according to Homeland magazine. Security Today. In the same year, NSF "discreetly" funded the CIA for projects that could help create "new opportunities to fight terrorism through advanced technology."

The following year, Google acquired Keyhole, which was originally funded by In-Q-Tel. Google started developing Google Earth with the help of Keyhole. Former DARPA director and Mountain Forum co-chair Anita Jones was on the board of In-Q-Tel that year. She still holds this position today.

Then, in November 2005, In-Q-Tel advertised the sale of $ 2.2 million in Google stock. Google's relationship with the U. S. intelligence community was re-publicized after an IT contractor announced at a private intelligence conference in Washington, D. C., on condition of publishing without attribution, that at least one agency among the US intelligence community, has worked to "improve Google's [user] data monitoring system" as part of an effort to obtain information of "intelligence interest from a national security perspective."

Flickr Photoin March 2007 shows that Google's research director and artificial intelligence expert Peter Norvig attended the Mountain Forum in Carmel, California that year. Norvig's close relationship with the forum held that year is also confirmed by his role in editing the list of recommended reading materials for the 2007 forum participants.

In the photo below, Norvig is talking to Lewis Shepherd, who was then a Senior Technical Officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency and was responsible for reviewing, approving, building and acquiring “all new hardware / software for all IT departments in the military intelligence. , Including technologies for working with Big Data. Shepherd now works at Microsoft. Norvig did computer science research at Stanford University in 1991 before moving to Bechtolsheim at Sun Microsystems, where he worked until 1994, continuing to lead the IT division at NASA.

O'Neill's Google Plus profile lists Norvig as one of his closest associates. Other names on this profile indicate that he is associated not only with a large number of Google employees, but also with some of the most famous people in the US technology community.

These people include Michele Weslander Quaid, who worked for the CIA under a contract and held a responsible position in Pentagon intelligence. She is now the chief technical officer at Google, where she develops programs "best suited to the interests of government agencies"; Elizabeth Churchill, Head of User Experience Research; James Kuffner, Anthropomorphic Robot Specialist and Head of Robotics at Google, who coined the term "cloud robotics"; Mark Drapeau, Chief Innovation Officer, Public Sector, Microsft; Lili Cheng, General Manager, Microsoft's Future Public Experience Lab (FUSE); Jon Udell, Microsoft Evangelist, Cory Ondrejka, VP of Engineering at Facebook. And these are just a few of them.

In 2010, Google signed a multi-billion dollar non-competitive contract with NSA sister institution, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). The purpose of the contract was to use Google Earth for modeling services for the benefit of the NGA. Google developed the software as part of the Google Earth program by purchasing Keyhole from In-Q-Tel, a CIA-affiliated company.

Then a year later, in 2011, another O'Neill friend from Google Plus, Michele Quaid, who held senior positions at the NGA, the National Office of Military Space Intelligence and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, retired from public service and became “technology innovation evangelist”at Google and government contracting officer.

Quaid's most recent positions before joining Google were senior spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance and Senior Adviser to the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, who reports to the Director of the Joint and Coalition War Support Office. The main component of both positions was working with information. In other words, prior to joining Google, Quaid worked closely with the undersecretary of defense for intelligence office, which oversees the Pentagon's Mountain Forum. Quade herself participated in the work of the forum, although I cannot say exactly when and in what capacity.

In March 2012, then-DARPA director Regina Dugan, who in that capacity was also co-chair of the Pentagon Mountain Forum, followed her colleague Quaid to Google and led a new group of advanced technologies and projects there. During her time at the Pentagon, Dugan worked on cybersecurity and social media, among other responsibilities. She was responsible for focusing "more and more efforts" in DARPA's work "exploring offensive capabilities to meet the specific needs of the military," for which the government has allocated $ 500 million for cyber research to be conducted by DARPA between 2012 and 2017. dollars.

By November 2014, Google's chief AI and robotics specialist, James Kuffner, was, like O'Neill, a member of the Island Forum in Singapore on progress in robotics and artificial intelligence and their impact on society, security and conflict. The forum was attended by 26 delegates from Austria, Israel, Japan, Singapore, Sweden, Britain and the United States, among them were representatives of both industry and government agencies. However, Kuffner's collaboration with the Pentagon began much earlier. In 1997, while preparing to defend his dissertation at Stanford University, Kuffner, working on a project funded by the Pentagon, conducted research on autonomous robots integrated into an information network. The project was sponsored by DARPA and the US Navy.