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

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

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

"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.

Clandestine?

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?

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

Re:Clandestine?

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:Clandestine?

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

It depends, do they provide special waterboarding boards?

Re:Clandestine?

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

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

Re:Needs to be said

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

Re:Clandestine?

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?

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?

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

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

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

Open Source Intelligence

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?

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.

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

(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

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.

sneaky weather men

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.

Slashdot post is flamebait

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"?

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

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.

Kudos to the Government

"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:In soviet amerika, google searches YOU

Jesus, get a grip.
What part of:

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

didn't you understand?

Re:Do no evil?

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?