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Google and the CIA?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Nov 01, 2006 03:06 PM
from the bobbing-for-scandal dept.
from the bobbing-for-scandal dept.
snottgoblin writes "DailyTech has an article suggesting that Google might be involved in a partnership with the CIA. The article also quotes a former CIA officer that Google's refusal to comply with the DOJ over privacy issues was 'a little hypocritical [...] because they were heavily in bed with the Central Intelligence Agency.'" Because I'm sure no one would go on the air and try to drum up a scandal aimed at the biggest target they can find.
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Clandestine Operations at Google 166 comments
eldavojohn writes "The San Francisco Chronicle is running an interesting story about Google's involvement with the CIA, NSA, NOAA and several other agencies. This has been speculated before although now Google seems to have several contracts open with several agencies. From the article, "When the nation's intelligence agencies wanted a computer network to better share information about everything from al Qaeda to North Korea, they turned to a big name in the technology industry to supply some of the equipment: Google Inc. The Mountain View company sold the agencies servers for searching documents, marking a small victory for the company and its little-known effort to do business with the government. 'We are a very small group, and even a lot of people in the federal government don't know that we exist,' said Mike Bradshaw, who leads Google's federal government sales team and its 18 employees.""
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Not surprising... (Score:5, Funny)
The fact that Google is very good at their core market (search engines and relational databases) and is aggressively entering new markets in a variety of fields, should make them an attractive partner for many federal agencies that cannot seem to get their IT $#!^ together (I'm talking to you, Robert Mueller).
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"Valuable Insight" (Score:5, Insightful)
Let people RTFA and discuss it in the comments.
mod+ parent (Score:2)
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Key word: personal. The "traditional" blog is one person's record of their surfing activity, and did not have an open discussion forum. This is also the defining element of the contemporary use of "blog" - it is a personal site written mostly by one person, not a vast open forum.
Slashdot is also not a "record of surfing activity" - as stories are chos
Good luck (Score:2)
Good luck. Nobody ever really leaves The Company.
Re:Good luck (Score:4, Funny)
Agency.... It is "The Agency", and yes, you can leave the Agency. People do it all the time. The thing you have to remember is that the CIA is a huge organization with most folks being support personnel for the large numbers of analysts. There is a small group in R&D, and an even smaller group in direct operations.
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Re:Good luck (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, but you gotta live in a weird village, drive around in golf carts, and wear a big "#6"-type pin on your lapel.
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Re:Good luck (Score:5, Funny)
OK Geoff, you have stumbled into the long raging debate in some circles as to why it is referred to as The Agency or The Company. Each group has its preferences and the usage is based upon where you place your allegiances.
You're simply wrong. And dumb.
Watch who you call dumb. The face [flickr.com] you put up on your Flicker stream does not look that smart to me.
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Actually, you brought that debate here, trying to correct someone else even though you knew exactly what he meant and your bringing up of "the debate" was rather inane and really quite pointless in the current discussion.
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Funny)
Geoff, chill dude. It was a humorous verbal parry against your insult of calling me dumb. Of course I don't think that, but you should not go around calling folks dumb either, eh?
Wow, America's education system really is doomed. Or maybe it's just the inbred retards in higher education in Utah.
Ah, now you *are* showing your ignorance and insulting all the good folks of Utah as well. As to your ignorance, have you ever considered that it might be that many of the folks in Utah are actually not from Utah? I am actually a Texan that moved to Utah. As to your insult of Utahns, I've actually found it pretty nice here. The people are not as friendly as they are in Texas, but they are smart, hard working and peaceable.
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Because people in the know, *know*. And we don't need Hollywood or people shilling for book deals screwing up history for us.
Plus, y'know... the fact that you obviously took the time to go cyberstalking some random poster who called you a cock on the internet.. well... kind of suggests he might be right.
Cyberstalking nothing. He had it linked from his own page which requir
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The original point was this: if the CIA wants a relationship with Google, then they're going to have one, whether or not Google wants it. Google is hiring people by the busload, people who are young, smart, independent, perhaps idealistic, and like cool toys. How hard would it be to find a few that could be co-opted?
Besides, nobody really leaves The Company.
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If, by "co-opted," you mean, "smart enough to realize that better in-house search tech helping analysts at the agency is actually a very important thing," then no doubt, yes, they'll find some. The ones that are idealogically opposed to that agency improving its ability to render accurate intel for policy makers will avoid that sort of work - even though doing so is sort of self-destructive. If they'd rather work on better code to more accurately
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"Partnership" ? (Score:2)
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From reports, Steele did not bring evidence to light in order to back up his claims,...
This article is just rumor and speculation. It is quite likely that Google is selling technology to the CIA, and that isn't a problem. Anyone with the cash can buy a Google Search Appliance.
Judging by names (Score:2)
ScuttleMonkey writes
I'm one to talk, but do screen names like that instill confidence in readers that more than just shit disturbing is going on by the writer?
Details? (Score:2)
The article certainly seems to have it's own opinion on it, though.
=Smidge=
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Not surprised at all (Score:2, Interesting)
empty article (Score:2)
as a Google employee (Score:2, Interesting)
Note that this applies to national security level stuff, not regular ol' crime and random cases that are actually relatively unimportant despite attracting publicity, but for which it's good PR to make an ostensible public refusal.
Or, to put it in a Google-favorable lig
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Their excuse is that you "ask them" by agreeing to their obscure privacy agreement/etc that nobody ever seeks or our reads. Great point you made anyway. This contradicts "do no evil."
Where do I signup ? (Score:2)
To repeat the brilliant Illiad - where do I sign up ? [userfriendly.org]. Don't panic it is only beta [userfriendly.org].
Jokes aside, it is a company sitting on american soil, why would it be wrong if they actually had a partnership with NSA or CIA. It is their patriotic duty, No ?
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Doing something for an agency does not automatically make it patriotic.
But it makes business sense.
I know what their plan is! (Score:3, Funny)
hard to believe? not really. (Score:2)
In-con-CEIVE-able! (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course Google has contact with the CIA. And NRO, and NSA, and DIA, and the FBI, and probably most state-level agencies, as well. It would be shocking, really, if they did not.
And how does Google taking a stand on privacy in any way contradict the vested interest they have in the CIA more effectively sorting through unthinkable amounts of data and drawing better, more useful conclusions? Google is based in the US. When the economy takes a hard hit (as it did following 9/11), Google is hit hard, too. It's perfectly reasonable for them to be both "no evil(tm)" corporate citizens and also help a vital government agency better do what they're supposed to do. You know, the agency that so many people have complained about being unable to effectively sort through lots of information, communicate across agencies, and draw more workable conclusions? How can input from, and influence by Google-type people possibly be a bad thing, in the grand scheme of things?
The people at the CIA are just people. Google can afford very, very smart people that the agency can only get as consultants, or as hires that aren't worried about what they make. Farming out some high-end IT expertise to an entity that has an enormous profit incentive - in other venues - to be very good at it and competitively innovative is simply good policy.
Don't forget their records of voter affiliations (Score:3, Interesting)
___________
That's old news. But this image [waffleimages.com], discovered by a Something Awful forum user [somethingawful.com] in a time of election uncertainty, is new.
From the post: [somethingawful.com]
"I was browsing google maps today and came across something a little creepy. I moused over something on the map, and a preview page came up. (This is with a firefox extension that loads a URL you mouseover in a preview box.) It had people's legal names, familiar names, precinct, and political affilations. It seems to have had a lot more information than that, but I didn't scroll.
Thankfully I took a screenshot when it first happened, becuase I couldn't make it happen again. It's weird how codey the whole thing looks, isn't it? It obviously wasn't meant to be seen by people like me--it looks like it was meant to be parsed by a computer. What kind of database is Google hiding behind its maps? (I don't mean to sound tinfoil here, as this probably isn't some joint Google/NSA operation. I just wonder how they got this information and what they're using it for.)"
What is Google doing?
Re:Don't forget their records of voter affiliation (Score:3, Informative)
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Open a new window and past the link into that, it should work fine.
The data is extremely interesting.
Google already is evil. (Score:2)
Good! (Score:2)
This is great. I would love to see my country's intelligence agency use some great technology to filter through intelligence streams and all the data they need to mine. What's the problem here?
Don't be evil... (Score:2)
nutcase! (Score:2)
An important thank you (Score:5, Insightful)
THANKS DUDE!
I love it when people remember to put this tag on appropriate articles.
I have often been hard at work in the office some afternoon, or at home on a sunny Saturday morning, thinking to myself, "I'd really like to read some Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. And where better to do so than on Slashdot? If only there were a convient way to browse this FUD all on one easy screen. After all, there is not enough FUD on the Slashdot front page, you really have to look for it."
But thanks to the "fud" tag in the super-useful Slashdot InfoTagging SystemTM, I don't have to struggle any more to find this FUD!
What I like even better than the FUD tag is when someone tags an article notfud or "!fud". Because sometimes I want to read stuff that's just not FUD. (Thankfully, I've never seen an article with both the FUD and notfud tags at once.)
The only thing I like better than the notfud tag are the "yes" and "no" tags. Very useful, for when I need to come up with questions the answer to which is very clearly "yes" or "no."
This is not surprising (Score:2)
The CIA certainly knows how important the search engines are for
internet data mining. Back in 1998, Zapata Petroleum (the company
started by George H. Bush in 1953 which has been thought by some to be
a CIA front) tried to purchase the 'Excite' search engine website but
was turned [internetnews.com]
down.
WTF (Score:3, Insightful)
But since it's Google the claims are dismissed immediately as a publicity stunt.
Fuck you, editors.
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It was in beta. (Score:5, Funny)
Explains a few things though.
Consider the whole Iraq/WMD thing. Maybe CIA punched in a few keywords into intel.google.com/beta/search?q=WMD+iraq and ignored the fact that it was still in Beta.
Of course with this administration, we're talking about a bunch of people who wouldn't have noticed that the beta of intel.google.com was launched alongside amd.google.com...
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steve
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I enjoy riding on bandwagons too, but some schmoe making idle accusations isn't really enough to get me up onto the wagon.
In-Q-Tel (Score:5, Informative)
There needn't be anything nefarious about In-Q-Tel funding Google. Remember the explosive growth of the web a decade ago. Before google, you knew there was a ton of stuff out there, but there was no way to find it. Web searches were very hit or miss. Google improved search technology tremendously, and a decent search engine is itself a boon to the intelligence community. People in this discussion have joked about keyword searches for terrorists, but seriously, it's an invaluable tool, even if a Google Maps search for Osama bin Laden doesn't put a little pushpin on the appropriate cave. Hate groups and terrorist networks recruit using the internet. Search technologies make it easer to keep track of what's out there.
And heck, I get some benefit from decent search technology too.
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