Clandestine Operations at Google

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.""

The NSA has always done this

[CRCulver (715279)]

The NSA has always kept a close relationship with corporations. See Bamford's Body of Secrets [amazon.com] for plenty of examples. They aren't even limited to wooing American companies, as they had a long hold on a Swiss crypto equipment manufacturer. Whatever enticements they offer, they seem to work.

I've oft heard the conspiracy theory that Google was set up just to develop better resources for government privacy violations. Has any elaborated version of this ever been formally published?

Re:The NSA has always done this

[PrescriptionWarning (932687)]

I've oft heard the conspiracy theory that Google was set up just to develop better resources for government privacy violations. Has any elaborated version of this ever been formally published?

They're probably too busy smokin pot to finish it up...

that's right, REEFER!

Re:The NSA has always done this

[by Anonymous Coward]

"I've oft heard the conspiracy theory that Google was set up just to develop better resources for government privacy violations. Has any elaborated version of this ever been formally published?"

I did a search for that on Google, and nothing turned up.

Re:

[beav007 (746004)]

Contrary to the beliefs of most American citizens, the USA is not the world. It is in fact April 1 here, and has been for 8 and a half hours. It had been for 5 and a half hours when you posted:

by chunk08 (1229574) on Tuesday April 01, @05:30AM (#22925160)

Due to an invention called "timezones", virtually everyone around the world gets to experience midday when the sun is highest in the sky. In fact, traveling across these "timezones" allows people, objects, and data, to travel through time, both forwards a

Clandestine?

[kevin_conaway (585204)]

I don't see anything clandestine about a software/hardware company providing software/hardware solutions to the Federal government, especially when said information is printed in a nationally recognized newspaper and linked on a major news aggregator.

It seems more like an opportunity to get the Google haters and rumor mongers fired up.

Re:Clandestine?

[Enderandrew (866215)]

I agree. Is IKEA evil if they provide the NSA with desks?

Re:Clandestine?

[techpawn (969834)]

Is IKEA evil if they provide the NSA with desks?

No, but the NSA does have to build the desk themselves... and they'll have all these parts left...

Re:

[UnknowingFool (672806)]

No, but the NSA does have to build the desk themselves... and they'll have all these parts left...

So what you are saying is that IKEA is EVIL then. :P

Re:Clandestine?

[Thanshin (1188877)]

I agree. Is IKEA evil if they provide the NSA with desks?

It depends, do they provide special waterboarding boards?

MOD Parent up

[notnAP (846325)]

Mod up either as funny or insightful.

Breaking News! (Bah-deep beep... bah-deep beep beep...) Google has sold computers to the NSA. These computers are good for searching databases, something Google has a little experience doing. The NSA could be using these servers to SPY ON YOU! Film at 11.

Staples has also been caught selling pens to the NSA, pens that may have been used to WRITE YOUR NAME ON THE TAB AT THE TOP OF A FOLDER!!!!!

And bring it down to the local level, Jim Stevens, of "Jim's Roach Coach," was seen parking his Yuck Truck outside the caf door of the NSA, selling food at break time to NSA employees, who MAY BE USING THOSE CALORIES RIGHT NOW TO SPY ON YOU!!!!

Re:Clandestine?

[linumax (910946)]

I agree. Is IKEA evil if they provide the NSA with desks?

No, but they are evil if they provide Microsoft with chairs.

Re:

[Enlarged to Show Tex (911413)]

Personally, I think IKEA is evil regardless of whether or not they supply desks for the NSA, but that's just me...

Re:Needs to be said

[Oktober Sunset (838224)]

of course not, the Nazis could have had a perfectly benign use for the Jew-Tracker 5000 for all they knew.

Re:Needs to be said

[demachina (71715)]

During the 1930's Nazi Germany was one of the few economies that was booming while most of the rest of the world was grappling with depression. Germany's depression was in the 20's thanks to losing World War I and war reparations. As a result pretty much every American company was doing business with them because they were buying stuff when no one else was. The American upper class and big business was also pretty right leaning at the time because the Soviet Union and labor unions were the big threat to them. Nazi Germany and big business were natural allies in the 30's. It was German industrialists who put Hitler in power because they were more afraid of Communism and labor unions than they were the Nazi's. Fritz Thyssen in particular was the rich German industrialist who facilitated Hitlers rise. His banker/broker in the U.S. happened to be George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush [wikipedia.org]. Prescott's Union Banking Corporation was shut down after Pearl Harbor under the trading with the enemy act.

There are some distinct parallels between American business and Nazi Germany in '30's and American business and China in the 21st century. China has transformed in to a Fascist regime with a cheap, repressed, work force just like Nazi Germany. While the economies in the U.S. and Europe are floundering, China is a very profitable place to do business. If a place is profitable business men almost never pass it up on the grounds the government is brutal or repressive. In fact big business really likes repressive regimes as long as they are anti communist and they respect private ownership of capital. That's why the U.S. has propped up so many dictators over the last 100 years. That why when China abandoned communism for capitalism western business rushed there and embraced them with open arms, though their repressive one party state hadn't change at all, it just transformed overnight from Communism to Fascism and truth be told big business just LOVES Fascism. Fascim is pretty close to the ideal system for big business as long as you are on the good side of the party in power.

Re:Clandestine?

[jandrese (485)]

I also don't see why it's so evil to have Google sell its appliance to Government customers. As for needing a special "government guy", anybody who works in the industry will tell you that no matter what it is, the Government does it differently. Hiring a guy (or team of people) who know how to handle the Government is practically a necessity if you want to make sales like this.

Re:Clandestine?

[houghi (78078)]

Hiring a guy (or team of people) who know how to handle the Government is practically a necessity if you want to make sales like this.

I agree. Where I used to work we had a person who did all the contracts with the governements (we have several in Belgium), cities and other official customers.
he als had a different target, Profit was not his main goal. The largest amount of equipment was. That way we could advertise that we we largest in the country for our product.
There was at least one person in each of the European countries.

Re:Clandestine?

[joggle (594025)]

You're absolutely correct. I have a friend that is in charge of overseeing contracts to a major defense contractor for the Feds and it's a mind-boggling complex process. On her end she has had to go to at least a dozen courses to get to where she's at now and I have every reason to believe that it is as complicated on the client-side. The contractor has 6-12 full-time employees to handle contracts on their side while the Federal government has a corresponding group that works full-time with them (for contracts ranging from $50 million to about $250 million, roughly).

Google Thunderstorm

[Malk-a-mite (134774)]

Oh no! Google is working with the CIA, the NSA, and the NOAA... wait what?
Almost had the evil government owns Google effect there, unless we are suggesting that Google now controls the weather as well.

Re:Google Thunderstorm

[Van Cutter Romney (973766)]

Well, on the bright side you can now search for next week's weather!

Re:

[andphi (899406)]

No, only the Communist Chinese can control the weather.

Open Source Intelligence

[CustomDesigned (250089)]

What a waste of tax dollars. All they have to do is post all their intelligence documents on the public internet, and they can get google search for free!

Orly?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Never, ever, in my wildest dreams would I have thought that Google, the company that through their "free" services of e-mail, realtime chat, calendars, spreadsheets, economy, planning, blogging etc. hoards immense amounts of personal data about an enormous group of people would ever deal with agencies with a grande interest in that very same data.

*ring ring*... *ring ring*... oh, there's someone on the FU**ING CLUEPHONE FOR YOU.

it's like wikipedia

[esocid (946821)]

but anything in every article has the citation needed tag.

"interesting story" = "warmed over press release"?

[xxxJonBoyxxx (565205)]

(some newspaper) is running an interesting story about (some company)'s involvement with (government)... From the (original press release), "When the (government) wanted a (product with extensive capabilities), they turned to (company) because (pitch). '...a lot of people in the (target market) don't know that we exist,' said (sales exec), who leads (some company's) government sales team...""

"interesting story" = "warmed over press release"? Zzzzz.....

Google and the IRS

[Uroborus42 (1262304)]

Hell, I remember years ago when my father, who works for the IRS, mentioned that Google had given the IRS a trial run of a new search system they designed for their internal network. He said that the old system they had been using was so horrible and inefficient that the difference was like night and day. Of course, the management eventually decided that Google's solution was too expensive and so to this day they are still using some horrible, antiquated search system.

Shhhhhhh!

[britneys 9th husband (741556)]

'We are a very small group, and even a lot of people in the federal government don't know that we exist,'

If they didn't know before, they know now.

sneaky weather men

[zehaeva (1136559)]

The word "Clandestine" being associated with NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) seems a bit ... weird. I can't seem them spying on or killing someone for .. well anything.

Re:

[Digi-John (692918)]

Shows how much you know. "Heavy thunderstorms expected in the Sierra Nevadas with potential hail" is actually code for "Execute Plan Alpha; bomb Beijing immediately."

Re:

[squidfood (149212)]

Shows how much you know. "Heavy thunderstorms expected in the Sierra Nevadas with potential hail" is actually code for "Execute Plan Alpha; bomb Beijing immediately."

Hey, we at NOAA do oceanography too, and we had absolutely nothing to do with those reports of that giant-tentacled rubber-suit-looking creatures that washed up oh excuse me, my boss is trying to tell me someth

Re:

[smooth wombat (796938)]

Now if they mentioned NUMA and Mr. Pitt, well that would be a different ... story.

Not necessarily since Mr. Pitt is now almost exclusively behind a desk and Mr. Giordino is off running around with his hot wife. Mr. Austin has now picked up Mr. Pitt's duties with Mr. Zavala providing the overbearing hormones. Then again, all of Pitt's and Austin's stories are pretty much the same. Just different places and people.

Nice reference though.

Do no evil?

[jollyreaper (513215)]

I guess it depends on what the definition of "evil" is. If the NSA can get to Google, I'm sure they can get to Merriam-Webster. Have they redefined "treason" as well?

Re:Do no evil?

[ScentCone (795499)]

If the NSA can get to Google

You mean... with a purchase order? To buy search appliances? Just like they also buy air conditioning equipment, sandwiches, and carpeting?

Have they redefined "treason" as well?

Right, because being a vendor to federal IT users is ... treason!

How do you even function, day to day, behind all of that tinfoil? I mean, doesn't it get hot and itchy after a while?

Re:

[Sage Gaspar (688563)]

WHOOOOOOOSH!

Slashdot post is flamebait

[by Anonymous Coward]

For the most part, this slashdot thread is flamebait. Google, like Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, RedHat, Novell, AT&T, and most other large corporations work with and sell to the US Government. How many government databases are on Oracle? How about Oracle+RedHat or Oracle + SUSE. Does this make Oracle evil? RedHat evil? This is mostly not news.

Google is the best in search (currently). They provide appliances that can be used on closed networks (for example classified). There are MANY applications for these devices. The US Government is a BIG customer and can be a good partner. Despite what you may read here, not all the US Government does is evil....

Is this about Google's "search appliance"?

[Animats (122034)]

Google sells an enterprise search appliance [google.com]. It's not cheap. "Starts at $30,000 for searching up to 500,000 documents", for a 2U server. That's probably what this is about.

Trickledown

[pragma_x (644215)]

As far as I can tell, there's no reason to label this as "clandestine". It looks to me like GOOG is just doing what publicly held businesses do: make money and court the biggest customers they can.

The upshot to this is that this is one place where the Federal government at large actually provides something for the public good, even if it is a few steps removed from joe sixpack. Since the NSA has some of the most stringent security requirements outside of most casinos, they're likely to push Google to improve their products in ways the rest of us can't. Take Net BSD for example. Anyway, that's likely to trickle down to the rest of us in the form of a more robust line of Google appliances and more. Another possibility is that Google may also have to learn how to become more nimble as a company in order to meet tougher requirements for Government-contract volume, reliability and ease-of-handling-red-tape. Again, that can work out for everyone.

The downside is that throwing Google style power at large, parallelizable computing tasks, might send us rocketing down a rather slippery slope if it were used for less-than-legal *coughATTcough* purposes. Yea, we're all tempted to file that one under "-1 No Duh", but I think it bears mentioning all the same.

Re:Trickledown

[pragma_x (644215)]

Thanks for the quarterbuck link. I had no idea people were reporting on this stuff.

Therefore, be it resolved, that shareholders request that management institute policies to help protect freedom of access to the Internet which would include the following minimum standards:

1) Data that can identify individual users should not be hosted in Internet restricting countries, where political speech can be treated as a crime by the legal system.

2) The company will not engage in pro-active censorship.

3) The company will use all legal means to resist demands for censorship. The company will only comply with such demands if required to do so through legally binding procedures.

4) Users will be clearly informed when the company has acceded to legally binding government requests to filter or otherwise censor content that the user is trying to access.

5) Users should be informed about the company's data retention practices, and the ways in which their data is shared with third parties.

6) The company will document all cases where legally-binding censorship requests have been complied with, and that information will be publicly available.

Required Vote

Approval of the stockholder proposal requires the affirmative "FOR" vote of a majority of the votes cast on the proposal. Unless marked to the contrary, proxies received will be voted "AGAINST" the stockholder proposal.

Recommendation
Our board of directors recommends a vote AGAINST the stockholder proposal.

Unless it's a typeo, or Google is simply trying to avoid having to move a mountain of red tape every time it does something, that does look a little fishy.

Google competes with Lucene

[by Anonymous Coward]

I used to work for a company that has supplied TLA's (and other companies) with search products for years, and this doesn't look like much of a story.

This is a fairly generic search product, and with that little revenue, it can't be getting much penetration. Most of the value in these sales is in system integration with other document processing, email, multimedia, and so on, and not the core search engine. It's a battle to close each deal, but usually there's good money in customizing the product to meet each situation.

Google wanted to buy us at one point, but Larry and Sergei were too put off by having to do sales and customer engineering (services model), and went back to their hammocks. Still, I think they could do OK in this market, since their main competitor can't do engineering management to save its life.

Google Special Ops

[wiredog (43288)]

Coming soon from EA...

what they can't keep updating PROMIS?

[justdrew (706141)]

well maybe our tax dollars will finally buy a system that works for a change. there's no more PROMIS's out there to steal, so gotta pay for new development I guess.

Kudos to the Government

[binaryspiral (784263)]

"Clandestine Operations at Google", puhleeeze. This story is so much FUD I can't take it. Google sells search appliances to the government. The appliances are 2U Dell servers running a locked down, customized version of RedHat. These appliances contain a crawler, a ton of storage, and a customized application to create a very good search index and interface with the data. They can also be clustered to offer even more capacity... but they don't report any of their findings to Google, the run on their own in their own network.

If you need to have Google service the appliance, you can instruct the device to SSH to a Google server where the tech will access it remotely and make changes or troubleshoot. Or you can plug a modem into the serial port and the tech can dial in.

Either way - you control access.

We have two of these appliances at work churning through wikis, sharepoint sites, NFS stores, and company intranet pages. SharePoint search sucks - so that was the first to get axed. Everything else was added, just because we could.

I, for one, am glad the government is using modern technology to improve efficiency. Someone actually gets it.

Re:

[SirWhoopass (108232)]

Exactly.

Having worked in the military on the "high side" network, it was great when Google's search became available. There had been numerous other engines available prior to that, including an early Yahoo and Alta Vista. Anyone who has been around a while can appreciate how great it was to search using Google instead of a cira-1999 Alta Vista query.

Re:

[binaryspiral (784263)]

Too right... stand along yahoo and altavista search engines were (and still are) free for a reason. Most other enterprise search tools are too Microsoft Office centric to be useful for web based documentation.

I love the GSA we have... it *just works*.

New Google motto

[jalefkowit (101585)]

Don't be [REDACTED].

Not sure that I would call NOAA clandestine

[Tangential (266113)]

NOAA is the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Weather service, National Hurricane Center, etc.. are part of NOAA.

Either their activities are not very clandestine or they are really, really good at hiding them, Dirk Pitt notwithstanding.

Little Known?

[madsheep (984404)]

What do they mean by "little known" here? I think probably every major federal agency probably has at least one Google Search appliances and they sell several other services. I think -every- company like this wants to work with the government, it's not some secret they're a big market. Hell, Google has space on NASA property and I here's an article from Slashdot from 2006 about them entering into a partnership with NASA:

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/18/1640230 [slashdot.org]

They've also voluntarily turned over data to the feds before as made very public. Where's the the secrecy about working or wanting to work the government? Let's not forget their job posting for a Federal Sales person - http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=80784 [google.com]

I have a different take on this.

[John Sokol (109591)]

99% of us are really doing the most mundane of things, and little that any government agency would care about.
  Heck we would even had a hard time even figuring out how to do something they would even care about.

  This stuff where domestic terrorist spying was used against Eliot Spitzer's bank transactions is just plain wrong. But in the end there is no point it crying about it, again most of us will also not be worth bothering with. I am more concerned with then starting to going after tax evaders or pot smokers, by wholesale automated domestic spying.

  From my former hacking past. If they thought you were involved in something they'd just ransack your house, empty it and deny doing it. google "steve jackson games" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games [wikipedia.org] for example. The Wiki entry doesn't do justice to the severity of what really happened.

    So electronically seeing everything I am doing so they can see it's really nothing of any interest to them is better at least for me on some level.

  It's been my experience with cops and other groups like this that if you walk around with black cloths and black ski mask at night this will draw far more attention if you'd planning on doing something wrong then if you wore a bright orange reflective jacket and helmet, and white overalls in the middle of the afternoon.

  In black they will arrest first and ask questions later where with the bright uniform, you just look like your supposed to be there, and never get a second glance.

  Same with technology, I have friends that do everything with PGP, 3DES, AES etc. It will only make them get put under more scrutiny.

  I'd bet I were planning on doing something wrong that I could get away with so much more if I just keep everything in clear plain text, just for the fact that they are expecting people to act secretive and raise a red flag when doing something wrong.

  On 9/11 they were looking for all kinds of secret dangerous thing, explosives, and poisons etc..

  But no it was Box Cutters, We are talking about a few f**king 99 Cent box cutters that took down the 2 tallest building in the United States, and brought our economy to a stall, started 2 wars, and cost us Billions upon Billions looking for all of the wrong things and push our gas prices to $4 per gallon, and it still not over. That box cutter might even escalate with WW III.

Albert Einstein quote - I don't know how man will fight World War III, but I do know how they will fight World War IV; with sticks and stones.

This is more damage then what we could ever do with Billions of dollars of super secret high tech aircraft.

  This an example where KISS - Keep it stupid and simple is most effective.

    If you think about all of the homeland security, there is still painfully little they can do against the box cutter type of attack. Something so mind boggling trivial and stupid you'd never think about it.
  But it's these things that could lead to a terrifying chain reaction.

  So if all my docs are up on Google and easily readable, these numb nuts of the government are far less likely to even notice me or bother me, then if I were trying to pass around encrypted docs, then they will spend millions to decode them and then start monitoring my every action. Because If I am hiding something I must be doing something wrong?

They never believe it was just grandma's cookie recipe as you try to explain this while being water boarded.

The Dept of State Does This

[Mayday (17204)]

There are a lot of products out there to let you search the internet but not so many that allow you to search the intranet. The DoS needed to search 1 million documents, provide a frontend easily, and secure it with SAML. The Google Appliance does all this and for a fraction of the price that everyone else offers. We used to use Convera but the product ran in java and required a huge number of resources. It did not provide a great frontend to do translations and I lost sleep at night trying to keep the software running 24/7. With google I am sleeping normal hours and my biggest problem is with the editors and the content. They also just released a sharepoint connector to crawl and index a sharepoint server and its content. Overall, the goal of the government should be to search the million if not billions and billions of documents, provide value, and make it secure. Also, I think every man, woman, and child has used Google so it is an easy interface and no learning curve.

I bet that.....

[failedlogic (627314)]

They also use Word, Word Perfect or Open Office to type their clandestine documents, some might drink Starbucks coffee before work, eat McDonalds for lunch, drive to work in a Ford and have an AT&T cellphone. See all these companies provide services to Clandestine operatives.I guess I won't be buying any of the products I mentionned.

Where do people come up with this stuff? If they used Apache, MySQL, Oracle, Linux, Unix, a computer, a PC, a Mac or whatever would that also make the news? Perhaps there should be an article for each! Sheesh!

Re:In soviet amerika, google searches YOU

[$RANDOMLUSER (804576)]

Jesus, get a grip.
What part of:

"The Mountain View company sold the agencies servers for searching documents"

didn't you understand?