How the CIA made Google
Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and
Skynet — By Nafeez Ahmed
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INSURGE_INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism
project, breaks the exclusive story of how the United States
intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part
of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-
funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a
plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to
retain 'information superiority.'
The origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a secret
Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two decades has functioned
as a bridge between the US government and elites across the business,
industry, finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has allowed
some of the most powerful special interests in corporate America to
systematically circumvent democratic accountability and the rule of
law to influence government policies, as well as public opinion in the
US and around the world. The results have been catastrophic: NSA mass
surveillance, a permanent state of global war, and a new initiative to
transform the US military into Skynet.
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This exclusive is being released for free in the public interest, and
was enabled by crowdfunding. I'd like to thank my amazing community of
patrons for their support, which gave me the opportunity to work on
this in-depth investigation. Pleasesupport_independent,_investigative
journalism_for_the_global_commons.
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In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, western governments
are moving fast to legitimize expanded powers of mass surveillance and
controls on the internet, all in the name of fighting terrorism.
US and European politicians have called to protect NSA-style snooping,
and to advance the capacity to intrude on internet privacy by
outlawing encryption. One idea is to establish a telecoms partnership
that would unilaterally delete content deemed to “fuel hatred and
violence” in situations considered “appropriate.” Heated discussions
are going on at government and parliamentary level to explore cracking
down on lawyer-client confidentiality.
What any of this would have done to prevent the Charlie Hebdo attacks
remains a mystery, especially given that we already know the
terrorists were on the radar of French intelligence for up to a
decade.
There is little new in this story. The 9/11 atrocity was the first of
many terrorist attacks, each succeeded by the dramatic extension of
draconian state powers at the expense of civil liberties, backed up
with the projection of military force in regions identified as
hotspots harbouring terrorists. Yet there is little indication that
this tried and tested formula has done anything to reduce the danger.
If anything, we appear to be locked into a deepening cycle of violence
with no clear end in sight.
As our governments push to increase their powers, INSURGE
INTELLIGENCE can now reveal the vast extent to which the US
intelligence community is implicated in nurturing the web platforms we
know today, for the precise purpose of utilizing the technology as a
mechanism to fight global 'information war' — a war to legitimize the
power of the few over the rest of us. The lynchpin of this story is
the corporation that in many ways defines the 21st century with its
unobtrusive omnipresence: Google.
Google styles itself as a friendly, funky, user-friendly tech firm
that rose to prominence through a combination of skill, luck, and
genuine innovation. This is true. But it is a mere fragment of the
story. In reality, Google is a smokescreen behind which lurks the US
military-industrial complex.
The inside story of Google's rise, revealed here for the first time,
opens a can of worms that goes far beyond Google, unexpectedly shining
a light on the existence of a parasitical network driving the
evolution of the US national security apparatus, and profiting
obscenely from its operation.
The shadow network
For the last two decades, US foreign and intelligence strategies have
resulted in a global 'war on terror' consisting of prolonged military
invasions in the Muslim world and comprehensive surveillance of
civilian populations. These strategies have been incubated, if not
dictated, by a secret network inside and beyond the Pentagon.
Established under the Clinton administration, consolidated under Bush,
and firmly entrenched under Obama, this bipartisan network of mostly
neoconservative ideologues sealed its dominion inside the US
Department of Defense (DoD) by the dawn of 2015, through the operation
of an obscure corporate entity outside the Pentagon, but run by the
Pentagon.
In 1999, the CIA created its own venture capital investment firm, In-
Q-Tel, to fund promising start-ups that might create technologies
useful for intelligence agencies. But the inspiration for In-Q-Tel
came earlier, when the Pentagon set up its own private sector outfit.
Known as the 'Highlands Forum,' this private network has operated as a
bridge between the Pentagon and powerful American elites outside the
military since the mid-1990s. Despite changes in civilian
administrations, the network around the Highlands Forum has become
increasingly successful in dominating US defense policy.
Giant defense contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton and Science
Applications International Corporation are sometimes referred to as
the 'shadow intelligence community' due to the revolving doors between
them and government, and their capacity to simultaneously influence
and profit from defense policy. But while these contractors compete
for power and money, they also collaborate where it counts. The
Highlands Forum has for 20 years provided an off the record space for
some of the most prominent members of the shadow intelligence
community to convene with senior US government officials, alongside
other leaders in relevant industries.
I first stumbled upon the existence of this network in November 2014,
when I reported for VICE's Motherboardthat US defense secretary Chuck
Hagel's newly announced 'Defense Innovation Initiative' was really
about building_Skynet — or something like it, essentially to dominate
an emerging era of automated robotic warfare.
That story was based on a little-known Pentagon-funded 'white paper'
published two months earlier by the National Defense University (NDU)
in Washington DC, a leading US military-run institution that, among
other things, generates research to develop US defense policy at the
highest levels. The white paper clarified the thinking behind the new
initiative, and the revolutionary scientific and technological
developments it hoped to capitalize on.
The Highlands Forum
The co-author of that NDU white paper is Linton Wells, a 51-year
veteran US defense official who served in the Bush administration as
the Pentagon's chief information officer, overseeing the National
Security Agency (NSA) and other spy agencies. He still_holds active
top-secret security clearances, and according to a report by
Government Executivemagazine in 2006 he chaired_the_'Highlands_Forum',
founded by the Pentagon in 1994.
Linton Wells II former Pentagon chief information officer and
assistant secretary of defense for networks, at a recent Pentagon
Highlands Forum session. Rosemary Wenchel, a senior official in the US
Department of Homeland Security, is sitting next to him
New_Scientistmagazine (paywall) has compared the Highlands Forum to
elite meetings like “Davos, Ditchley and Aspen,” describing it as “far
less well known, yet… arguably just as influential a talking shop.”
Regular Forum meetings bring together “innovative people to consider
interactions between policy and technology. Its biggest successes have
been in the development of high-tech network-based warfare.”
Given Wells' role in such a Forum, perhaps it was not surprising that
his defense transformation white paper was able to have such a
profound impact on actual Pentagon policy. But if that was the case,
why had no one noticed?
Despite being sponsored by the Pentagon, I could find no official page
on the DoD website about the Forum. Active and former US military and
intelligence sources had never heard of it, and neither did national
security journalists. I was baffled.
The Pentagon's intellectual capital venture firm
In the prologue to his 2007 book, A Crowd of One: The Future of
Individual Identity, John Clippinger, an MIT scientist of the Media
Lab Human Dynamics Group, described how he participated in a
“Highlands Forum” gathering, an “invitation-only meeting funded by the
Department of Defense and chaired by the assistant for networks and
information integration.” This was a senior DoD post overseeing
operations and policies for the Pentagon's most powerful spy agencies
including the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), among
others. Starting from 2003, the position was transitioned into what is
now the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. The Highlands
Forum, Clippinger wrote, was founded by a retired US Navy captain
named Dick O'Neill. Delegates include senior US military officials
across numerous agencies and divisions — “captains, rear admirals,
generals, colonels, majors and commanders” as well as “members of the
DoD leadership.”
What at first appeared to be the Forum's main website describes
Highlands as “an informal cross-disciplinary network sponsored by
Federal Government,” focusing on “information, science and
technology.” Explanation is sparse, beyond a single 'Department of
Defense' logo.
But Highlands also has another website describing itself as an
“intellectual capital venture firm” with “extensive experience
assisting corporations, organizations, and government leaders.” The
firm provides a “wide range of services, including: strategic
planning, scenario creation and gaming for expanding global markets,”
as well as “working with clients to build strategies for execution.”
'The Highlands Group Inc.,' the website says, organizes a whole range
of Forums on these issue.
For instance, in addition to the Highlands Forum, since 9/11 the Group
runs the 'Island Forum,' an international event held in association
with Singapore's Ministry of Defense, which O'Neill oversees as “lead
consultant.” The Singapore Ministry of Defense website describes the
Island Forum as “patterned_after the Highlands Forum organized for the
US Department of Defense.” Documents leaked by NSA whistleblower
Edward Snowden confirmed that Singapore played a key role in
permitting the US and Australia to tap undersea_cables to spy on Asian
powers like Indonesia and Malaysia.
The Highlands Group website also reveals that Highlands is partnered
with one of the most powerful defense contractors in the United
States. Highlands is “supported by a network of companies and
independent researchers,” including “our Highlands Forum partners for
the past ten years at SAIC; and the vast Highlands network of
participants in the Highlands Forum.”
SAIC stands for the US defense firm, Science Applications
International Corporation, which changed its name to Leidos in 2013,
operating SAIC as a subsidiary. SAIC/Leidos is among the top_10
largest defense contractors in the US, and works closely with the US
intelligence community, especially the NSA. According to investigative
journalist Tim Shorrock, the first to disclose the vast extent of the
privatization of US intelligence with his seminal book Spies for Hire,
SAIC has a “symbiotic relationship with the NSA: the agency is the
company's largest single customer and SAIC is the NSA's largest
contractor.”
Richard 'Dick' Patrick O'Neill, founding president of the Pentagon's
Highlands Forum
The full name of Captain “Dick” O'Neill, the founding president of the
Highlands Forum, is Richard Patrick O'Neill, who after his work in the
Navy joined the DoD. He served his last post as deputy for strategy
and policy in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Defense for
Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence, before setting up
Highlands.
The Club of Yoda
But Clippinger also referred to another mysterious individual revered
by Forum attendees:
“He sat at the back of the room, expressionless behind
thick, black-rimmed glasses. I never heard him utter a word…
Andrew (Andy) Marshall is an icon within DoD. Some call him
Yoda, indicative of his mythical inscrutable status… He had
served many administrations and was widely regarded as above
partisan politics. He was a supporter of the Highlands Forum
and a regular fixture from its beginning.”
Since 1973, Marshall has headed up one of the Pentagon's most powerful
agencies, the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), the US defense
secretary's internal 'think tank' which conducts highly classified
research on future planning for defense policy across the US military
and intelligence community. The ONA has played a key role in major
Pentagon strategy initiatives, including Maritime Strategy, the
Strategic Defense Initiative, the Competitive Strategies Initiative,
and the Revolution in Military Affairs.
Andrew 'Yoda' Marshall, head of the Pentagon's Office of Net
Assessment (ONA) and co-chair of the Highlands Forum, at an early
Highlands event in 1996 at the Santa Fe Institute. Marshall is
retiring as of January 2015
In a rare 2002 profile in Wired, reporter Douglas McGray described
Andrew Marshall, now 93 years old, as “the DoD's most elusive” but
“one of its most influential” officials. McGray added that “Vice
President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz” — widely considered the hawks of the
neoconservative movement in American politics — were among Marshall's
“star protégés.”
Speaking at a low-key Harvard_University_seminar a few months after 9/
11, Highlands Forum founding president Richard O'Neill said that
Marshall was much more than a “regular fixture” at the Forum. “Andy
Marshall is our co-chair, so indirectly everything that we do goes
back into Andy's system,” he told the audience. “Directly, people who
are in the Forum meetings may be going back to give briefings to Andy
on a variety of topics and to synthesize things.” He also said that
the Forum had a third co-chair: the director_of_the_Defense_Advanced
Research_and_Projects_Agency_(DARPA), which at that time was a
Rumsfeld appointee, Anthony J. Tether. Before joining DARPA, Tether
was vice president of SAIC's Advanced Technology Sector.
Anthony J. Tether, director of DARPA and co-chair of the Pentagon's
Highlands Forum from June 2001 to February 2009
The Highlands Forum's influence on US defense policy has thus operated
through three main channels: its sponsorship by the Office of the
Secretary of Defense (around the middle of last decade this was
transitioned specifically to the Office_of_the_Undersecretary_of
Defense_for_Intelligence, which is in charge of the main surveillance
agencies); its direct link to Andrew 'Yoda' Marshall's ONA; and its
direct link to DARPA.
According to Clippinger in A Crowd of One, “what happens at informal
gatherings such as the Highlands Forum could, over time and through
unforeseen curious paths of influence, have enormous impact, not just
within the DoD but throughout the world.” He wrote that the Forum's
ideas have “moved from being heretical to mainstream. Ideas that were
anathema in 1999 had been adopted as policy just three years later.”
Although the Forum does not produce “consensus recommendations,” its
impact is deeper than a traditional government advisory committee.
“The ideas that emerge from meetings are available for use by
decision-makers as well as by people from the think tanks,” according
to O'Neill:
“We'll include people from Booz, SAIC, RAND, or others at
our meetings… We welcome that kind of cooperation, because,
truthfully, they have the gravitas. They are there for the
long haul and are able to influence government policies with
real scholarly work… We produce ideas and interaction and
networks for these people to take and use as they need
them.”
My repeated requests to O'Neill for information on his work at the
Highlands Forum were ignored. The Department of Defense also did not
respond to multiple requests for information and comment on the Forum.
Information warfare
The Highlands Forum has served as a two-way 'influence bridge': on the
one hand, for the shadow network of private contractors to influence
the formulation of information operations policy across US military
intelligence; and on the other, for the Pentagon to influence what is
going on in the private sector. There is no clearer evidence of this
than the truly instrumental role of the Forum in incubating the idea
of mass surveillance as a mechanism to dominate information on a
global scale.
In 1989, Richard O'Neill, then a US Navy cryptologist, wrote a paper
for the US Naval War College, 'Toward a methodology for perception
management.'In his book, Future Wars, Col. John Alexander, then a
senior officer in the US Army's Intelligence and Security Command
(INSCOM), records that O'Neill's paper for the first time outlined a
strategy for “perception management” as part of information warfare
(IW). O'Neill's proposed strategy identified three categories of
targets for IW: adversaries, so they believe they are vulnerable;
potential partners, “so they perceive the cause [of war] as just”; and
finally, civilian populations and the political leadership so they
“perceive the cost as worth the effort.” A secret briefing based on
O'Neill's work “made its way to the top leadership” at DoD. “They
acknowledged that O'Neill was right and told him to bury it.
Except the DoD didn't bury it. Around_1994, the Highlands Group was
founded by O'Neill as an official Pentagon project at the appointment
of Bill Clinton's then defense secretary William_Perry — who went on
to join SAIC's board of directors after retiring from government in
2003.
In O'Neill's own words, the group would function as the Pentagon's
'ideas_lab'. According to Government_Executive, military and
information technology experts gathered at the first Forum meeting “to
consider the impacts of IT and globalization on the United States and
on warfare. How would the Internet and other emerging technologies
change the world?” The meeting helped plant the idea of “network-
centric warfare” in the minds of “the nation's top military thinkers.”
Excluding the public
Official Pentagon records confirm that the Highlands Forum's primary
goal was to support DoD policies on O'Neill's specialism: information
warfare. According to the Pentagon's 1997 Annual_Report_to_the
President_and_the_Congressunder a section titled 'Information
Operations,' (IO) the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) had
authorized the “establishment of the Highlands Group of key DoD,
industry, and academic IO experts” to coordinate IO across federal
military intelligence agencies.
The following year's DoD_annual_report reiterated the Forum's
centrality to information operations: “To examine IO issues, DoD
sponsors the Highlands Forum, which brings together government,
industry, and academic professionals from various fields.”
Notice that in 1998, the Highlands 'Group' became a 'Forum.' According
to O'Neill, this was to avoid subjecting Highlands Forums meetings to
“bureaucratic restrictions.” What he was alluding to was the Federal
Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which regulates the way the US
government can formally solicit the advice of special interests.
Known as the 'open government' law, FACA requires that US government
officials cannot hold closed-door or secret consultations with people
outside government to develop policy. All such consultations should
take place via federal advisory committees that permit public
scrutiny. FACA requires that meetings be held in public, announced via
the Federal Register, that advisory groups are registered with an
office at the General Services Administration, among other
requirements intended to maintain accountability to the public
interest.
But Government_Executivereported that “O'Neill and others believed”
such regulatory issues “would quell the free flow of ideas and no-
holds-barred discussions they sought.” Pentagon lawyers had warned
that the word 'group' might necessitate certain obligations and
advised running the whole thing privately: “So O'Neill renamed it the
Highlands Forum and moved into the private sector to manage it as a
consultant to the Pentagon.” The Pentagon Highlands Forum thus runs
under the mantle of O'Neill's 'intellectual capital venture firm,'
'Highlands Group Inc.'
In 1995, a year after William Perry appointed O'Neill to head up the
Highlands Forum, SAIC — the Forum's “partner” organization — launched
a new Center for Information Strategy and Policy under the direction
of “Jeffrey Cooper, a member of the Highlands Group who advises senior
Defense Department officials on information warfare issues.” The
Center had precisely the same objective as the Forum, to function as
“a clearinghouse to bring together the best and brightest minds in
information warfare by sponsoring a continuing series of seminars,
papers and symposia which explore the implications of information
warfare in depth.” The aim was to “enable leaders and policymakers
from government, industry, and academia to address key issues
surrounding information warfare to ensure that the United States
retains its edge over any and all potential enemies.”
Despite FACA regulations, federal advisory committees are already
heavily influenced, if not captured,_by_corporate_power. So in
bypassing FACA, the Pentagon overrode even the loose restrictions of
FACA, by permanently excluding any possibility of public engagement.
O'Neill's claim that there are no reports or recommendations is
disingenuous. By his own admission, the secret Pentagon consultations
with industry that have taken place through the Highlands Forum since
1994 have been accompanied by regular presentations of academic and
policy papers, recordings and notes of meetings, and other forms of
documentation that are locked behind a login only accessible by Forum
delegates. This violates the spirit, if not the letter, of FACA — in a
way that is patently intended to circumvent democratic accountability
and the rule of law.
The Highlands Forum doesn't need to produce consensus recommendations.
Its purpose is to provide the Pentagon a shadow social networking
mechanism to cement lasting relationships with corporate power, and to
identify new talent, that can be used to fine-tune information warfare
strategies in absolute secrecy.
Total participants in the DoD's Highlands Forum number over a
thousand, although sessions largely consist of small closed workshop
style gatherings of maximum 25–30 people, bringing together experts
and officials depending on the subject. Delegates have included senior
personnel from SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton, RAND Corp., Cisco, Human
Genome Sciences, eBay, PayPal, IBM, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, the
BBC, Disney, General Electric, Enron, among innumerable others;
Democrat and Republican members of Congress and the Senate; senior
executives from the US energy industry such as Daniel Yergin of IHS
Cambridge Energy Research Associates; and key people involved in both
sides of presidential campaigns.
Other participants have included senior media professionals: David
Ignatius, associate editor of the Washington Postand at the time the
executive editor of the International Herald Tribune; Thomas Friedman,
long-time New York Timescolumnist; Arnaud de Borchgrave, an editor at
Washington Timesand United Press International; Steven Levy, a former
Newsweekeditor, senior writer for Wiredand now chief tech editor at
Medium; Lawrence Wright, staff writer at the New Yorker; Noah
Shachtmann, executive editor at the Daily Beast; Rebecca McKinnon, co-
founder of Global Voices Online; Nik Gowing of the BBC; and John
Markoff of the New York Times.
Due to its current sponsorship by the OSD's undersecretary of defense
for intelligence, the Forum has inside access to the chiefs of the
main US surveillance and reconnaissance agencies, as well as the
directors and their assistants at DoD research agencies, from DARPA,
to the ONA. This also means that the Forum is deeply plugged into the
Pentagon's policy research task forces.
Google: seeded by the Pentagon
In 1994 — the same year the Highlands Forum was founded under the
stewardship of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the ONA, and
DARPA — two young PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and
Larry Page, made their breakthrough on the first automated web
crawling and page ranking application. That application remains the
core component of what eventually became Google's search service. Brin
and Page had performed their work with funding from the Digital
Library_Initiative (DLI), a multi-agency programme of the National
Science Foundation (NSF), NASA and DARPA.
But that's just one side of the story.
Throughout the development of the search engine, Sergey Brin reported
regularly and directly to two people who were not Stanford faculty at
all: Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser. Both were
representatives of a sensitive US intelligence community research
programme on information security and data-mining.
Thuraisingham is currently the Louis A. Beecherl distinguished
professor and executive director of the Cyber Security Research
Institute at the University of Texas, Dallas, and a sought-after
expert on data-mining, data management and information security
issues. But in the 1990s, she worked for the MITRE Corp., a leading US
defense contractor, where she managed the Massive Digital Data Systems
initiative, a project sponsored by the NSA, CIA, and the Director of
Central Intelligence, to foster innovative research in information
technology.
“We funded Stanford University through the computer scientist Jeffrey
Ullman, who had several promising graduate students working on many
exciting areas,” Prof. Thuraisingham told me. “One of them was Sergey
Brin, the founder of Google. The intelligence community's MDDS program
essentially provided Brin seed-funding, which was supplemented by many
other sources, including the private sector.”
This sort of funding is certainly not unusual, and Sergey Brin's being
able to receive it by being a graduate student at Stanford appears to
have been incidental. The Pentagon was all over computer science
research at this time. But it illustrates how deeply entrenched the
culture of Silicon Valley is in the values of the US intelligence
community.
In an extraordinary document hosted by the website of the University
of Texas, Thuraisingham recounts that from 1993 to 1999, “the
Intelligence Community [IC] started a program called Massive Digital
Data Systems (MDDS) that I was managing for the Intelligence Community
when I was at the MITRE Corporation.” The program funded 15 research
efforts at various universities, including Stanford. Its goal was
developing “data management technologies to manage several terabytes
to petabytes of data,” including for “query processing, transaction
management, metadata management, storage management, and data
integration.”
At the time, Thuraisingham was chief scientist for data and
information management at MITRE, where she led team research and
development efforts for the NSA, CIA, US Air Force Research
Laboratory, as well as the US Army's Space and Naval Warfare Systems
Command (SPAWAR) and Communications and Electronic Command (CECOM).
She went on to teach courses for US government officials and defense
contractors on data-mining in counter-terrorism.
In her University of Texas article, she attaches the copy of an
abstract of the US intelligence community's MDDS program that had been
presented to the “Annual Intelligence Community Symposium” in 1995.
The abstract reveals that the primary sponsors of the MDDS programme
were three agencies: the NSA, the CIA's Office of Research &
Development, and the intelligence community's Community Management
Staff (CMS) which operates under the Director of Central Intelligence.
Administrators of the program, which provided funding of around 3–4
million dollars per year for 3–4 years, were identified as Hal Curran
(NSA), Robert Kluttz (CMS), Dr. Claudia Pierce (NSA), Dr. Rick
Steinheiser (ORD — standing for the CIA's Office of Research and
Devepment), and Dr. Thuraisingham herself.
Thuraisingham goes on in her article to reiterate that this joint CIA-
NSA program partly funded Sergey Brin to develop the core of Google,
through a grant to Stanford managed by Brin's supervisor Prof. Jeffrey
D. Ullman:
“In fact, the Google founder Mr. Sergey Brin was partly
funded by this program while he was a PhD student at
Stanford. He together with his advisor Prof. Jeffrey Ullman
and my colleague at MITRE, Dr. Chris Clifton [Mitre's chief
scientist in IT], developed the Query Flocks System which
produced solutions for mining large amounts of data stored
in databases. I remember visiting Stanford with Dr. Rick
Steinheiser from the Intelligence Community and Mr. Brin
would rush in on roller blades, give his presentation and
rush out. In fact the last time we met in September 1998,
Mr. Brin demonstrated to us his search engine which became
Google soon after.”
Brin and Page officially incorporated Google as a company in September
1998, the very month they last reported to Thuraisingham and
Steinheiser. 'Query Flocks' was also part of Google's patented
'PageRank' search system, which Brin developed at Stanford under the
CIA-NSA-MDDS programme, as well as with funding from the NSF, IBM and
Hitachi. That year, MITRE's Dr. Chris Clifton, who worked under
Thuraisingham to develop the 'Query Flocks' system, co-authored a
paper with Brin's superviser, Prof. Ullman, and the CIA's Rick
Steinheiser. Titled 'Knowledge Discovery in Text,' the paper was
presented at an academic conference.
“The MDDS funding that supported Brin was significant as far as seed-
funding goes, but it was probably outweighed by the other funding
streams,” said Thuraisingham. “The duration of Brin's funding was
around two years or so. In that period, I and my colleagues from the
MDDS would visit Stanford to see Brin and monitor his progress every
three months or so. We didn't supervise exactly, but we did want to
check progress, point out potential problems and suggest ideas. In
those briefings, Brin did present to us on the query flocks research,
and also demonstrated to us versions of the Google search engine.”
Brin thus reported to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser regularly about
his work developing Google. The MDDS programme is actually referenced
in several papers co-authored by Brin and Page while at Stanford. In
their 1998 paper published in the Bulletin of the IEEE Computer
Society Technical Committeee on Data Engineering, they describe the
automation of methods to extract information from the web via “Dual
Iterative Pattern Relation Extraction,” the development of “a global
ranking of Web pages called PageRank,” and the use of PageRank “to
develop a novel search engine called Google.” Through an opening
footnote, Sergey Brin confirms he was “Partially supported by the
Community Management Staff's Massive Digital Data Systems Program,”
through an NSF grant — confirming that the CIA-NSA-MDDS program
provided its funding through the NSF.
This grant, whose project report lists_Brin among the students
supported (without mentioning the MDDS), was different to the NSF
grant to Larry Page that included funding from DARPA and NASA. The
project report, authored by Brin's supervisor Prof. Ullman, goes on to
say under the section 'Indications of Success' that “there are some
new stories of startups based on NSF-supported research.” Under
'Project Impact,' the report remarks: “Finally, the google project has
also gone commercial as Google.com.”
Thuraisingham's account therefore demonstrates that the CIA-NSA-MDDS
program was not only funding Brin throughout his work with Larry Page
developing Google, but that senior US intelligence representatives
including a CIA official oversaw the evolution of Google in this pre-
launch phase, all the way until the company was ready to be officially
founded. Google, then, had been enabled with a “significant” amount of
seed-funding and oversight from the Pentagon: namely, the CIA, NSA,
and DARPA.
The DoD could not be reached for comment.
When I asked Prof. Ullman to confirm whether or not Brin was partly
funded under the intelligence community's MDDS program, and whether
Ullman was aware that Brin was regularly briefing the CIA's Rick
Steinheiser on his progress in developing the Google search engine,
Ullman's responses were evasive: “May I know whom you represent and
why you are interested in these issues? Who are your 'sources'?” He
also denied that Brin played a significant role in developing the
'query flocks' system, although it is clear from Brin's papers that he
did draw on that work in co-developing the PageRank system with Page.
When I asked Ullman whether he was denying the US intelligence
community's role in supporting Brin during the development of Google,
he said: “I am not going to dignify this nonsense with a denial. If
you won't explain what your theory is, and what point you are trying
to make, I am not going to help you in the slightest.”
The MDDS_abstract published online at the University of Texas confirms
that the rationale for the CIA-NSA project was to “provide seed money
to develop data management technologies which are of high-risk and
high-pay-off,” including techniques for “querying, browsing, and
filtering; transaction processing; accesses methods and indexing;
metadata management and data modelling; and integrating heterogeneous
databases; as well as developing appropriate architectures.” The
ultimate vision of the program was to “provide for the seamless access
and fusion of massive amounts of data, information and knowledge in a
heterogeneous, real-time environment” for use by the Pentagon,
intelligence community and potentially across government.
These revelations corroborate the claims of Robert Steele, former
senior CIA officer and a founding civilian deputy director of the
Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, whom I interviewed for The
Guardianlast year on open source intelligence. Citing sources at the
CIA, Steele had said in 2006 that Steinheiser, an old colleague of
his, was the CIA's main liaison at Google and had arranged early
funding for the pioneering IT firm. At the time, Wiredfounder John
Batelle managed to get this official denial from a Google spokesperson
in response to Steele's assertions:
“The statements related to Google are completely untrue.”
This time round, despite multiple requests and conversations, a Google
spokesperson declined to comment.
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?
Total Information Awareness
A call for papers for the MDDS was sent out via email_list on November
3rd 1993 from senior US intelligence official David Charvonia,
director of the research and development coordination office of the
intelligence community's CMS. The reaction from Tatu Ylonen
(celebrated inventor of the widely used secure shell [SSH] data
protection protocol) to his colleagues on the email list is telling:
“Crypto relevance? Makes you think whether you should protect your
data.” The email also confirms that defense contractor and Highlands
Forum partner, SAIC, was managing the MDDS submission process, with
abstracts to be sent to Jackie Booth of the CIA's Office of Research
and Development via a SAIC email address.
By 1997, Thuraisingham reveals, shortly before Google became
incorporated and while she was still overseeing the development of its
search engine software at Stanford, her thoughts turned to the
national security applications of the MDDS program. In the
acknowledgements to her book, Web Data Mining and Applications in
Business Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism (2003), Thuraisingham
writes that she and “Dr. Rick Steinheiser of the CIA, began
discussions with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on applying
data-mining for counter-terrorism,” an idea that resulted directly
from the MDDS program which partly funded Google. “These discussions
eventually developed into the current EELD (Evidence Extraction and
Link Detection) program at DARPA.”
So the very same senior CIA official and CIA-NSA contractor involved
in providing the seed-funding for Google were simultaneously
contemplating the role of data-mining for counter-terrorism purposes,
and were developing ideas for tools actually advanced by DARPA.
Today, as illustrated by her recent oped in the New_York_Times,
Thuraisingham remains a staunch advocate of data-mining for counter-
terrorism purposes, but also insists that these methods must be
developed by government in cooperation with civil liberties lawyers
and privacy advocates to ensure that robust procedures are in place to
prevent potential abuse. She points out, damningly, that with the
quantity of information being collected, there is a high risk of false
positives.
In 1993, when the MDDS program was launched and managed by MITRE Corp.
on behalf of the US intelligence community, University of Virginia
computer scientist Dr. Anita K. Jones — a MITRE trustee — landed the
job of DARPA director and head of research and engineering across the
Pentagon. She had been on the board of MITRE since 1988. From 1987 to
1993, Jones simultaneously served on SAIC's board of directors. As the
new head of DARPA from 1993 to 1997, she also co-chaired the
Pentagon's Highlands Forum during the period of Google's pre-launch
development at Stanford under the MDSS.
Thus, when Thuraisingham and Steinheiser were talking to DARPA about
the counter-terrorism applications of MDDS research, Jones was DARPA
director and Highlands Forum co-chair. That year, Jones left DARPA to
return to her post at the University of Virgina. The following year,
she joined the board of the National Science Foundation, which of
course had also just funded Brin and Page, and also returned to the
board of SAIC. When she left DoD, Senator Chuck Robb paid Jones the
following tribute : “She brought the technology and operational
military communities together to design detailed plans to sustain US
dominance on the battlefield into the next century.”
Dr. Anita Jones, head of DARPA from 1993–1997, and co-chair of the
Pentagon Highlands Forum from 1995–1997, during which officials in
charge of the CIA-NSA-MDSS program were funding Google, and in
communication with DARPA about data-mining for counterterrorism
On the board of the National Science Foundation from 1992 to 1998
(including a stint as chairman from 1996) was Richard N. Zare. This
was the period in which the NSF sponsored Sergey Brin and Larry Page
in association with DARPA. In June 1994, Prof. Zare, a chemist at
Stanford, participated with Prof. Jeffrey Ullman (who supervised
Sergey Brin's research), on a panel sponsored by Stanford and the
National Research Council discussing the need for scientists to show
how their work “ties to national needs.” The panel brought together
scientists and policymakers, including “Washington insiders.”
DARPA's EELD program, inspired by the work of Thuraisingham and
Steinheiser under Jones' watch, was rapidly adapted and integrated
with a suite of tools to conduct comprehensive surveillance under the
Bush administration.
According to DARPA official Ted_Senator, who led the EELD program for
the agency's short-lived Information Awareness Office, EELD was among
a range of “promising techniques” being prepared for integration “into
the prototype TIA system.” TIA stood for Total Information Awareness,
and was the main global electronic_eavesdropping_and_data-mining
program deployed by the Bush administration after 9/11. TIA had been
set up by Iran-Contra conspirator Admiral John Poindexter, who was
appointed in 2002 by Bush to lead DARPA's new Information Awareness
Office.
The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was another contractor
among 26 companies (also including SAIC) that received million dollar
contracts from DARPA (the specific quantities remained classified)
under Poindexter, to push forward the TIA surveillance program in 2002
onwards. The research included “behaviour-based profiling,” “automated
detection, identification and tracking” of terrorist activity, among
other data-analyzing projects. At this time, PARC's director and chief
scientist was John Seely Brown. Both Brown and Poindexter were
Pentagon Highlands Forum participants — Brown on a regular basis until
recently.
TIA was purportedly shut down in 2003 due to public opposition after
the program was exposed in the media, but the following year
Poindexter participated in a Pentagon Highlands Group session in
Singapore, alongside defense and security officials from around the
world. Meanwhile, Ted Senator continued to manage the EELD program
among other data-mining and analysis projects at DARPA until 2006,
when he left to become a vice president at SAIC. He is now a SAIC/
Leidos technical fellow.
Google, DARPA and the money trail
Long before the appearance of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Stanford
University's computer science department had a close working
relationship with US military intelligence. A letter dated November
5th 1984 from the office of renowned artificial intelligence (AI)
expert, Prof Edward Feigenbaum, addressed to Rick Steinheiser, gives
the latter directions to Stanford's Heuristic Programming Project,
addressing Steinheiser as a member of the “AI Steering Committee.” A
list of attendees at a contractor conference around that time,
sponsored by the Pentagon's Office of Naval Research (ONR), includes
Steinheiser as a delegate under the designation “OPNAV Op-115” — which
refers to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations' program on
operational readiness, which played a major role in advancing digital
systems for the military.
From the 1970s, Prof. Feigenbaum and his colleagues had been running
Stanford's Heuristic Programming Project under contract with DARPA,
continuing through to the 1990s. Feigenbaum alone had received around
over_$7_million in this period for his work from DARPA, along with
other funding from the NSF, NASA, and ONR.
Brin's supervisor at Stanford, Prof. Jeffrey Ullman, was in 1996 part
of a joint funding project of DARPA's Intelligent Integration of
Information program. That year, Ullman co-chaired DARPA-sponsored
meetings on data exchange between multiple systems.
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.
As a Stanford PhD student in electrical engineering in the 1980s,
Bechtolsheim's pioneering SUN workstation project had been funded by
DARPA and the Stanford computer science department — this research was
the foundation of Bechtolsheim's establishment of Sun Microsystems,
which he co-founded with William Joy.
As for Bechtolsheim's co-investor in Google, David Cheriton, the
latter is a long-time Stanford computer science professor who has an
even more entrenched relationship with DARPA. His bio at the
University of Alberta, which in November 2014 awarded him an honorary
science doctorate, says that Cheriton's “research has received the
support of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
for over 20 years.”
In the meantime, Bechtolsheim left Sun Microsystems in 1995, co-
founding Granite Systems with his fellow Google investor Cheriton as a
partner. They sold Granite to Cisco Systems in 1996, retaining
significant ownership of Granite, and becoming senior Cisco
executives.
An email obtained from the Enron Corpus (a database of 600,000 emails
acquired by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and later
released to the public) from Richard O'Neill, inviting Enron
executives to participate in the Highlands Forum, shows that Cisco and
Granite executives are intimately connected to the Pentagon. The email
reveals that in May 2000, Bechtolsheim's partner and Sun Microsystems
co-founder, William Joy — who was then chief scientist and corporate
executive officer there — had attended the Forum to discuss
nanotechnology and molecular computing.
In 1999, Joy had also co-chaired the President's Information
Technology Advisory Committee, overseeing a report acknowledging that
DARPA had:
“… revised its priorities in the 90's so that all
information technology funding was judged in terms of its
benefit to the warfighter.”
Throughout the 1990s, then, DARPA's funding to Stanford, including
Google, was explicitly about developing technologies that could
augment the Pentagon's military intelligence operations in war
theatres.
The Joy report recommended more federal government funding from the
Pentagon, NASA, and other agencies to the IT sector. Greg
Papadopoulos, another of Bechtolsheim's colleagues as then Sun
Microsystems chief technology officer, also attended a Pentagon
Highlands' Forum meeting in September 2000.
In November, the Pentagon Highlands Forum hosted Sue Bostrom, who was
vice president for the internet at Cisco, sitting on the company's
board alongside Google co-investors Bechtolsheim and Cheriton. The
Forum also hosted Lawrence Zuriff, then a managing partner of Granite,
which Bechtolsheim and Cheriton had sold to Cisco. Zuriff had
previously been an SAIC contractor from 1993 to 1994, working with the
Pentagon on national security issues, specifically for Marshall's
Office of Net Assessment. In 1994, both the SAIC and the ONA were, of
course, involved in co-establishing the Pentagon Highlands Forum.
Among Zuriff's output during his SAIC tenure was a paper titled
'Understanding Information War', delivered at a SAIC-sponsored US Army
Roundtable on the Revolution in Military Affairs.
After Google's incorporation, the company received $25 million in
equity funding in 1999 led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins
Caufield & Byers. According to Homeland_Security_Today, “A number
of Sequoia-bankrolled start-ups have contracted with the Department of
Defense, especially after 9/11 when Sequoia's Mark Kvamme met with
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to discuss the application of
emerging technologies to warfighting and intelligence collection.”
Similarly, Kleiner Perkins had developed “a close relationship” with
In-Q-Tel, the CIA venture capitalist firm that funds start-ups “to
advance 'priority' technologies of value” to the intelligence
community.
John Doerr, who led the Kleiner Perkins investment in Google obtaining
a board position, was a major early investor in Becholshtein's Sun
Microsystems at its launch. He and his wife Anne are the main funders
behind Rice University's Center for Engineering Leadership (RCEL),
which in 2009 received $16 million from DARPA for its platform-aware-
compilation-environment (PACE) ubiquitous computing R&D program.
Doerr also has a close relationship with the Obama administration,
which he advised shortly after it took power to ramp_up Pentagon
funding to the tech industry. In 2013, at the Fortune Brainstorm TECH
conference, Doerr applauded “how the DoD's DARPA funded GPS, CAD, most
of the major computer science departments, and of course, the
Internet.”
From inception, in other words, Google was incubated, nurtured and
financed by interests that were directly affiliated or closely aligned
with the US military intelligence community: many of whom were
embedded in the Pentagon Highlands Forum.
Google captures the Pentagon
In 2003, Google began customizing its search engine under special
contract with the CIA for its Intelink Management Office, “overseeing
top-secret, secret and sensitive but unclassified intranets for CIA
and other IC agencies,” according to Homeland Security Today.That
year, CIA funding was also being “quietly” funneled through the
National Science Foundation to projects that might help create “new
capabilities to combat terrorism through advanced technology.”
The following year, Google bought the firm Keyhole, which had
originally been funded by In-Q-Tel. Using Keyhole, Google began
developing the advanced satellite mapping software behind Google
Earth. Former DARPA director and Highlands Forum co-chair Anita Jones
had been on the board of In-Q-Tel at this time, and remains so today.
Then in November 2005, In-Q-Tel issued notices to sell $2.2 million of
Google stocks. Google's relationship with US intelligence was further
brought to light when an IT_contractor told a closed Washington DC
conference of intelligence professionals on a not-for-attribution
basis that at least one US intelligence agency was working to
“leverage Google's [user] data monitoring” capability as part of an
effort to acquire data of “national security intelligence interest.”
A photo on Flickr dated March 2007 reveals that Google research
director and AI expert Peter Norvig attended a Pentagon Highlands
Forum meeting that year in Carmel, California. Norvig's intimate
connection to the Forum as of that year is also corroborated by his
role in guest_editing the 2007 Forum reading list.
The photo shows Norvig in conversation with Lewis Shepherd, who
at that time was senior technology officer at the Defense Intelligence
Agency, responsible_for investigating, approving, and architecting
“all new hardware/software systems and acquisitions for the Global
Defense Intelligence IT Enterprise,” including “big data
technologies.” Shepherd now works at Microsoft. Norvig was a computer
research scientist at Stanford University in 1991 before joining
Bechtolsheim's Sun Microsystems as senior scientist until 1994, and
going on to head up NASA's computer science division.
Lewis Shepherd (left), then a senior technology officer at the
Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, talking to Peter Norvig
(right), renowned expert in artificial intelligence expert and
director of research at Google. This photo is from a Highlands Forum
meeting in 2007.
Norvig shows up on O'Neill's Google_Plus_profile as one of his close
connections. Scoping the rest of O'Neill's Google Plus connections
illustrates that he is directly connected not just to a wide range of
Google executives, but also to some of the biggest names in the US
tech community.
Those connections include Michele Weslander Quaid, an ex-CIA
contractor and former senior Pentagon intelligence official who is now
Google's chief technology officer where she is developing programs to
“best fit government agencies' needs”; Elizabeth Churchill, Google
director of user experience; James Kuffner, a humanoid robotics expert
who now heads up Google's robotics division and who introduced the
term 'cloud robotics'; Mark Drapeau, director of innovation engagement
for Microsoft's public sector business; Lili Cheng, general manager of
Microsoft's Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs; Jon Udell,
Microsoft 'evangelist'; Cory Ondrejka, vice president of engineering
at Facebook; to name just a few.
In 2010, Google signed a multi-billion dollar no-bid_contract with the
NSA's sister agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
(NGA). The contract was to use Google Earth for visualization services
for the NGA. Google had developed the software behind Google Earth by
purchasing Keyhole from the CIA venture firm In-Q-Tel.
Then a year after, in 2011, another of O'Neill's Google Plus
connections, Michele Quaid — who had served in executive positions at
the NGA, National Reconnaissance Office and the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence — left her government role to become Google
'innovation evangelist' and the point-person for seeking government
contracts. Quaid's last role before her move to Google was as a senior
representative of the Director of National Intelligence to the
Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Task Force, and a
senior advisor to the undersecretary of defense for intelligence's
director of Joint and Coalition Warfighter Support (J&CWS). Both
roles involved information operations at their core. Before her Google
move, in other words, Quaid worked closely with the Office of the
Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, to which the Pentagon's
Highlands Forum is subordinate. Quaid has herself attended the Forum,
though precisely when and how often I could not confirm.
In March 2012, then DARPA director Regina_Dugan — who in that capacity
was also co-chair of the Pentagon Highlands Forum — followed her
colleague Quaid into Google to lead the company's new Advanced
Technology and Projects Group. During her Pentagon tenure, Dugan led
on strategic cyber security and social media, among other initiatives.
She was responsible for focusing “an increasing portion” of DARPA's
work “on the investigation of offensive capabilities to address
military-specific needs,” securing $500 million of government funding
for DARPA cyber_research from 2012 to 2017.
Regina Dugan, former head of DARPA and Highlands Forum co-chair, now a
senior Google executive — trying her best to look the part.
By November 2014, Google's chief AI and robotics expert James Kuffner
was a delegate alongside O'Neill at the Highlands Island_Forum_2014 in
Singapore, to explore 'Advancement in Robotics and Artificial
Intelligence: Implications for Society, Security and Conflict.' The
event included 26 delegates from Austria, Israel, Japan, Singapore,
Sweden, Britain and the US, from both industry and government.
Kuffner's association with the Pentagon, however, began much earlier.
In 1997, Kuffner was a researcher during his Stanford PhD for a
Pentagon-funded project on networked autonomous mobile robots,
sponsored by DARPA and the US Navy.
Rumsfeld and persistent surveillance
In sum, many of Google's most senior executives are affiliated with
the Pentagon Highlands Forum, which throughout the period of Google's
growth over the last decade, has surfaced repeatedly as a connecting
and convening force. The US intelligence community's incubation of
Google from inception occurred through a combination of direct
sponsorship and informal networks of financial influence, themselves
closely aligned with Pentagon interests.
The Highlands Forum itself has used the informal relationship building
of such private networks to bring together defense and industry
sectors, enabling the fusion of corporate and military interests in
expanding the covert surveillance apparatus in the name of national
security. The power wielded by the shadow network represented in the
Forum can, however, be gauged most clearly from its impact during the
Bush administration, when it played a direct role in literally writing
the strategies and doctrines behind US efforts to achieve 'information
superiority.'
In December 2001, O'Neill confirmed that strategic discussions at the
Highlands Forum were feeding directly into Andrew Marshall's DoD-wide
strategic review ordered by President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld to
upgrade the military, including the Quadrennial Defense Review — and
that some of the earliest Forum meetings “resulted in the writing of a
group of DoD policies, strategies, and doctrine for the services on
information warfare.” That process of “writing” the Pentagon's
information warfare policies “was done in conjunction with people who
understood the environment differently — not only US citizens, but
also foreign citizens, and people who were developing corporate IT.”
The Pentagon's post-9/11 information warfare doctrines were, then,
written not just by national security officials from the US and
abroad: but also by powerful corporate entities in the defense and
technology sectors.
In April that year, Gen. James McCarthy had completed his defense
transformation review ordered by Rumsfeld. His report repeatedly
highlighted mass surveillance as integral to DoD transformation. As
for Marshall, his follow-up report for Rumsfeld was going to develop a
blueprint determining the Pentagon's future in the 'information age.'
O'Neill also affirmed that to develop information warfare doctrine,
the Forum had held extensive_discussions on electronic surveillance
and “what constitutes an act of war in an information environment.”
Papers feeding into US defense policy written through the late 1990s
by RAND consultants John Arquilla and David Rondfeldt, both
longstanding Highlands Forum members, were produced “as a result of
those meetings,” exploring policy dilemmas on how far to take the goal
of 'Information Superiority.' “One of the things that was shocking to
the American public was that we weren't pilfering Milosevic's accounts
electronically when we in fact could,” commented O'Neill.
Although the R&D process around the Pentagon transformation
strategy remains classified, a hint at the DoD discussions going on in
this period can be gleaned from a 2005 US Army School of Advanced
Military Studies research monograph in the DoD journal, Military
Review, authored by an active Army intelligence officer.
“The idea of Persistent Surveillance as a transformational capability
has circulated within the national Intelligence Community (IC) and the
Department of Defense (DoD) for at least three years,” the paper said,
referencing the Rumsfeld-commissioned transformation study.
The Army paper went on to review a range of high-level official
military documents, including one from the Office of the Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, showing that “Persistent Surveillance” was
a fundamental theme of the information-centric vision for defense
policy across the Pentagon.
We now know that just two months before O'Neill's address at Harvard
in 2001, under the TIA program, President Bush had secretly_authorized
the NSA's domestic surveillance of Americans without court-approved
warrants, in what appears to have been an illegal modification of the
ThinThread data-mining project — as later exposed by NSA
whistleblowers William Binney and Thomas Drake.
The surveillance-startup nexus
From here on, Highlands Forum partner SAIC played a key role in the
NSA roll out from inception. Shortly after 9/11, Brian Sharkey, chief
technology officer of SAIC's ELS3 Sector (focusing on IT systems for
emergency responders), teamed up with John Poindexter to propose the
TIA surveillance program. SAIC's Sharkey had previously been deputy
director of the Information_Systems_Office at DARPA through the 1990s.
Meanwhile, around the same time, SAIC vice president for corporate
development, Samuel_Visner, became head of the NSA's signals-
intelligence programs. SAIC was then among a consortium receiving a
$280 million contract to develop one of the NSA's secret eavesdropping
systems. By 2003, Visner returned to SAIC to become director of
strategic planning and business development of the firm's intelligence
group.
That year, the NSA consolidated its TIA programme of warrantless
electronic surveillance, to keep “track of individuals” and understand
“how they fit into models” through risk profiles of American citizens
and foreigners. TIA was doing this by integrating databases on
finance, travel, medical, educational and other records into a
“virtual, centralized grand database.”
This was also the year that the Bush administration drew up its
notorious Information_Operations_Roadmap. Describing the internet as a
“vulnerable weapons system,” Rumsfeld's IO roadmap had advocated that
Pentagon strategy “should be based on the premise that the Department
[of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons
system.” The US should seek “maximum control” of the “full spectrum of
globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons
systems,” advocated the document.
The following year, John Poindexter, who had proposed and run the TIA
surveillance program via his post at DARPA, was in Singapore
participating in the Highlands 2004 Island_Forum. Other delegates
included then Highlands Forum co-chair and Pentagon CIO Linton Wells;
president of notorious Pentagon information warfare contractor, John
Rendon; Karl Lowe, director of the Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) Joint
Advanced Warfighting Division; Air Vice Marshall Stephen Dalton,
capability manager for information superiority at the UK Ministry of
Defense; Lt. Gen. Johan Kihl, Swedish army Supreme Commander HQ's
chief of staff; among others.
As of 2006, SAIC had been awarded a multi-million dollar NSA contract
to develop a big data-mining project called ExecuteLocus, despite the
colossal $1 billion failure of its preceding contract, known as
'Trailblazer.' Core components of TIA were being “quietly continued”
under “new code names,” according to Foreign Policy'sShane_Harris, but
had been concealed “behind the veil of the classified intelligence
budget.” The new surveillance program had by then been fully
transitioned from DARPA's jurisdiction to the NSA.
This was also the year of yet another Singapore Island Forum led by
Richard O'Neill on behalf of the Pentagon, which included senior
defense and industry officials from the US, UK, Australia, France,
India and Israel. Participants also included senior technologists from
Microsoft, IBM, as well as Gilman_Louie, partner at technology
investment firm Alsop Louie Partners.
Gilman Louie is a former CEO of In-Q-Tel — the CIA firm investing
especially in start-ups developing data mining technology. In-Q-Tel
was founded in 1999 by the CIA's Directorate of Science and
Technology, under which the Office of Research and Development
(ORD) — which was part of the Google-funding MDSS program — had
operated. The idea was to essentially replace the functions once
performed by the ORD, by mobilizing the private sector to develop
information technology solutions for the entire intelligence
community.
Louie had led In-Q-Tel from 1999 until January 2006 — including when
Google bought Keyhole, the In-Q-Tel-funded satellite mapping software.
Among his colleagues on In-Q-Tel's board in this period were former
DARPA director and Highlands Forum co-chair Anita Jones (who is still
there), as well as founding board member William_Perry: the man who
had appointed O'Neill to set-up the Highlands Forum in the first
place. Joining Perry as a founding In-Q-Tel board member was John
Seely Brown, then chief scientist at Xerox Corp and director of its
Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) from 1990 to 2002, who is also a
long-time senior Highlands Forum member since inception.
In addition to the CIA, In-Q-Tel has also been backed by the FBI, NGA,
and Defense Intelligence Agency, among other agencies. More than 60
percent of In-Q-Tel's investments under Louie's watch were “in
companies that specialize in automatically collecting, sifting through
and understanding oceans of information,” according to Medill School
of Journalism's News21, which also noted that Louie himself had
acknowledged it was not clear “whether privacy and civil liberties
will be protected” by government's use of these technologies “for
national security.”
The transcript of Richard O'Neill's late 2001 seminar at Harvard shows
that the Pentagon Highlands Forum had first engaged Gilman Louie long
before the Island Forum, in fact, shortly after 9/11 to explore
“what's going on with In-Q-Tel.” That Forum session focused on how to
“take advantage of the speed of the commercial market that wasn't
present inside the science and technology community of Washington” and
to understand “the implications for the DoD in terms of the strategic
review, the QDR, Hill action, and the stakeholders.” Participants of
the meeting included “senior military people,” combatant commanders,
“several of the senior flag officers,” some “defense industry people”
and various US representatives including Republican Congressman
William Mac Thornberry and Democrat Senator Joseph Lieberman.
Both Thornberry and Lieberman are staunch supporters of NSA
surveillance, and have consistently acted to rally support for pro-
war, pro-surveillance legislation. O'Neill's comments indicate that
the Forum's role is not just to enable corporate contractors to write
Pentagon policy, but to rally political support for government
policies adopted through the Forum's informal brand of shadow
networking.
Repeatedly, O'Neill told his Harvard audience that his job as Forum
president was to scope case studies from real companies across the
private sector, like eBay and Human Genome Sciences, to figure out the
basis of US 'Information Superiority' — “how to dominate” the
information market — and leverage this for “what the president and the
secretary of defense wanted to do with regard to transformation of the
DoD and the strategic review.”
By 2007, a year after the Island Forum meeting that included Gilman
Louie, Facebook received its second round of $12.7 million worth of
funding from Accel Partners. Accel was headed up by James Breyer,
former chair of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) where
Louie_also_served on the board while still CEO of In-Q-Tel. Both Louie
and Breyer had previously served together on the board of BBN
Technologies — which had recruited ex-DARPA chief and In-Q-Tel trustee
Anita Jones.
Facebook's 2008 round of funding was led by Greylock Venture Capital,
which invested $27.5 million. The firm's senior partners include
Howard Cox, another former NVCA chair who also sits_on_the_board of
In-Q-Tel. Apart from Breyer and Zuckerberg, Facebook's only other
board member is Peter Thiel, co-founder of defense contractor Palantir
which provides all sorts of data-mining and visualization technologies
to US government, military and intelligence agencies, including the
NSA_and_FBI, and which itself was nurtured to financial viability by
Highlands Forum members.
Palantir co-founders Thiel and Alex Karp met with John Poindexter in
2004, according to Wired, the same year Poindexter had attended the
Highlands Island Forum in Singapore. They met at the home of Richard
Perle, another Andrew Marshall acolyte. Poindexter helped Palantir
open doors, and to assemble “a legion of advocates from the most
influential strata of government.” Thiel had also met with Gilman
Louie of In-Q-Tel, securing the backing of the CIA in this early
phase.
And so we come full circle. Data-mining programs like ExecuteLocus and
projects linked to it, which were developed throughout this period,
apparently laid the groundwork for the new NSA programmes eventually
disclosed by Edward Snowden. By 2008, as Facebook received its next
funding round from Greylock Venture Capital, documents and
whistleblower testimony confirmed that the NSA was effectively
resurrecting_the_TIA_project with a focus on Internet data-mining via
comprehensive monitoring of e-mail, text messages, and Web browsing.
We also now know thanks to Snowden that the NSA's XKeyscore 'Digital
Network Intelligence' exploitation system was designed to allow
analysts to search not just Internet databases like emails, online
chats and browsing history, but also telephone services, mobile phone
audio, financial transactions and global air transport
communications — essentially the entire global telecommunications
grid. Highlands Forum partner SAIC played a key role, among other
contractors, in producing and administering the NSA's XKeyscore, and
was recently implicated in NSA_hacking of the privacy network Tor.
The Pentagon Highlands Forum was therefore intimately involved in all
this as a convening network—but also quite directly. Confirming his
pivotal role in the expansion of the US-led global surveillance
apparatus, then Forum co-chair, Pentagon CIO Linton Wells, told
FedTech_magazine in 2009 that he had overseen the NSA's roll out of
“an impressive long-term architecture last summer that will provide
increasingly sophisticated security until 2015 or so.”
The Goldman Sachs connection
When I asked Wells about the Forum's role in influencing US mass
surveillance, he responded only to say he would prefer not to comment
and that he no longer leads the group.
As Wells is no longer in government, this is to be expected — but he
is still connected to Highlands. As of September 2014, after
delivering his influential white paper on Pentagon transformation, he
joined the Monterey Institute for International Studies (MIIS) Cyber
Security Initiative (CySec) as a distinguished senior fellow.
Sadly, this was not a form of trying to keep busy in retirement.
Wells' move underscored that the Pentagon's conception of information
warfare is not just about surveillance, but about the exploitation of
surveillance to influence both government and public opinion.
The MIIS CySec initiative is now formally_partnered with the Pentagon
Highlands Forum through a Memorandum_of_Understanding signed with MIIS
provost Dr_Amy_Sands, who sits on the Secretary of State's
International Security Advisory Board. The MIIS CySec website states
that the MoU signed with Richard O'Neill:
“… paves the way for future joint MIIS CySec-Highlands Group
sessions that will explore the impact of technology on
security, peace and information engagement. For nearly 20
years the Highlands Group has engaged private sector and
government leaders, including the Director of National
Intelligence, DARPA, Office of the Secretary of Defense,
Office of the Secretary of Homeland Security and the
Singaporean Minister of Defence, in creative conversations
to frame policy and technology research areas.”
Who is the financial benefactor of the new Pentagon Highlands-
partnered MIIS CySec initiative? According to the MIIS CySec site, the
initiative was launched “through a generous donation of seed funding
from George Lee.” George C. Lee is a senior partner at Goldman Sachs,
where he is chief information officer of the investment banking
division, and chairman of the Global Technology, Media and Telecom
(TMT) Group.
But here's the kicker. In 2011, it was Lee who engineered Facebook's
$50 billion valuation, and previously handled deals for other
Highlands-connected tech giants like Google, Microsoft and eBay. Lee's
then boss, Stephen Friedman, a former CEO and chairman of Goldman
Sachs, and later senior partner on the firm's executive board, was a
also founding board_member of In-Q-Tel alongside Highlands Forum
overlord William Perry and Forum member John Seely Brown.
In 2001, Bush appointed Stephen Friedman to the President's
Intelligence Advisory Board, and then to chair that board from 2005 to
2009. Friedman previously served alongside Paul Wolfowitz and others
on the 1995–6 presidential commission of inquiry into US intelligence
capabilities, and in 1996 on the Jeremiah_Panel that produced a report
to the Director of the National Reconnaisance Office (NRO) — one of
the surveillance agencies plugged into the Highlands Forum. Friedman
was on the Jeremiah Panel with Martin Faga, then senior vice president
and general manager of MITRE Corp's Center for Integrated Intelligence
Systems — where Thuraisingham, who managed the CIA-NSA-MDDS program
that inspired DARPA counter-terrorist data-mining, was also a lead
engineer.
In the footnotes to a chapter for the book, Cyberspace and National
Security (Georgetown University Press), SAIC/Leidos executive Jeff
Cooper reveals that another Goldman Sachs senior partner Philip J.
Venables — who as chief information risk officer leads the firm's
programs on information security — delivered a Highlands Forum
presentation in 2008 at what was called an 'Enrichment Session on
Deterrence.' Cooper's chapter draws on Venables' presentation at
Highlands “with permission.” In 2010, Venables participated with his
then boss Friedman at an Aspen_Institute meeting on the world economy.
For the last few years, Venables has also sat on various_NSA
cybersecurity_award review boards.
In sum, the investment firm responsible for creating the billion
dollar fortunes of the tech sensations of the 21st century, from
Google to Facebook, is intimately linked to the US military
intelligence community; with Venables, Lee and Friedman either
directly connected to the Pentagon Highlands Forum, or to senior
members of the Forum.
Fighting terror with terror
The convergence of these powerful financial and military interests
around the Highlands Forum, through George Lee's sponsorship of the
Forum's new partner, the MIIS Cysec initiative, is revealing in
itself.
MIIS Cysec's director, Dr, Itamara Lochard, has long been embedded in
Highlands. She regularly “presents current research on non-state
groups, governance, technology and conflict to the US Office of the
Secretary of Defense Highlands Forum,” according to her Tufts
University bio. She_also, “regularly advises US combatant commanders”
and specializes in studying the use of information technology by
“violent and non-violent sub-state groups.”
Dr Itamara Lochard is a senior Highlands Forum member and Pentagon
information operations expert. She directs the MIIS CyberSec
initiative that now supports the Pentagon Highlands Forum with funding
from Goldman Sachs partner George Lee, who led the valuations of
Facebook and Google.
Dr Lochard maintains a comprehensive database of 1,700 non-state
groups including “insurgents, militias, terrorists, complex criminal
organizations, organized gangs, malicious cyber actors and strategic
non-violent actors,” to analyze their “organizational patterns, areas
of cooperation, strategies and tactics.” Notice, here, the mention of
“strategic non-violent actors” — which perhaps covers NGOs and other
groups or organizations engaged in social political activity or
campaigning, judging by the focus of other DoD research programs.
As of 2008, Lochard has been an adjunct professor at the US Joint
Special Operations University where she teaches a top_secret_advanced
course in 'Irregular Warfare' that she designed for senior US special
forces officers. She has previously taught courses on 'Internal War'
for senior “political-military officers” of various Gulf regimes.
Her views thus disclose much about what the Highlands Forum has been
advocating all these years. In 2004, Lochard was co-author of a study
for the US_Air_Force's_Institute_for_National_Security_Studies on US
strategy toward 'non-state armed groups.' The study on the one hand
argued that non-state armed groups should be urgently recognized as a
'tier one security priority,' and on the other that the proliferation
of armed groups “provide strategic opportunities that can be exploited
to help achieve policy goals. There have and will be instances where
the United States may find collaborating with armed group is in its
strategic interests.” But “sophisticated tools” must be developed to
differentiate between different groups and understand their dynamics,
to determine which groups should be countered, and which could be
exploited for US interests. “Armed group profiles can likewise be
employed to identify ways in which the United States may assist
certain armed groups whose success will be advantageous to US foreign
policy objectives.”
In 2008, Wikileaks published a leaked restricted US Army Special
Operations field manual, which demonstrated that the sort of thinking
advocated by the likes of Highlands expert Lochard had been explicitly
adopted by US special forces.
Lochard's work thus demonstrates that the Highlands Forum sat at the
intersection of advanced Pentagon strategy on surveillance, covert
operations and irregular warfare: mobilizing mass surveillance to
develop detailed information on violent and non-violent groups
perceived as potentially threatening to US interests, or offering
opportunities for exploitation, thus feeding directly into US covert
operations.
That, ultimately, is why the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, spawned
Google. So they could run their secret dirty wars with even greater
efficiency than ever before.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Nafeez Ahmedis an investigative journalist, bestselling author and
international security scholar. A former Guardian writer, he writes
the 'System Shift' column for VICE's Motherboard, and is also a
columnist for Middle East Eye. He is the winner of a 2015 Project
Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his
Guardian work.
Nafeez has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald,
The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect,
New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist,
Counterpunch, Truthout, among others. He is the author ofA_User's
Guide_to_the_Crisis_of_Civilization:_And_How_to_Save_It(2010), and the
scifi thriller novelZERO_POINT, among other books. His work on the
root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism
officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner's
Inquest.
This exclusive is being released for free in the public interest, and
was enabled by crowdfunding. I'd like to thank my amazing community of
patrons for their support, which gave me the opportunity to work on
this in-depth investigation. Please support_independent,_investigative
journalism_for_the_global_commons.
Written on Jan 22 by
Nafeez Ahmed
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