The CIA Has A Venture-Capital Arm?

[porno jew]

http://www.iqt.org/technology-portfo...habetical.html

[epitome]

Yeah and if you studies those listed companies and what they invest in, you can apparently discover they had a hand in Facebook or something.

Googled CIA and Facebook. Who knows if it's true though.

[porno jew]

Launched in 1999 as an independent, not-for-profit organization, IQT was created to bridge the gap between the technology needs of the Intelligence Community (IC) and new advances in commercial technology. With limited insight into fast-moving private sector innovation, the IC needed a way to find emerging companies, and, more importantly, to work with them. As a private company with deep ties to the commercial world, we attract and build relationships with technology startups outside the reach of the Intelligence Community. In fact, more than 70 percent of the companies that IQT partners with have never before done business with the government.

[AsianDivaGirlsWebDude]

In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 Google shares in 2005. The stocks were a result of Google?s acquisition of Keyhole, the CIA funded satellite mapping software that we now know as Google Earth.

Earlier this year it was reported that In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures are buying Recorded Future, a web analytics and spying outfit whose software ?scours tens of thousands of Web sites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents?. See: http://gcn.com/articles/2010/07/29/i...ysis-firm.aspx

See the Washington Post on Google?s partnership with NSA: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...020304057.html

So we?ve established that Google is in bed with the major US intelligence networks.

Now for the interesting part. A man named Ben Laurie is an Advisory Board member of Wikileaks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Laurie

He used to be a security boss at Google, and he is currently working for them in London.

See the references to his work at Google on his blog: http://www.links.org/

See his page on Google: http://www.google.com/research/pubs/author9639.html

So here we have a Wikileaks advisory board member working for a corporation that has partnered with the CIA to buy a firm specialising in software perfectly suited to spying, infiltration and COINTELPRO. Not to mention Google?s partnership with the NSA which is ostensibly in the name of cyber security after cyber attacks it says ?originated in China?. The recently-leaked cables even suggested that China was behind the attacks (convenient huh?)

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time ? and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents ? both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine ?goes beyond search? by ?looking at the ?invisible links? between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.?

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online ?momentum? for any given event.

?The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,? says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant?s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.

It?s not the very first time Google has done business with America?s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 ? and then became the backbone for Google Earth.

This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its ?don?t be evil? mantra.

America?s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining ?open source intelligence? ? information that?s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.

?Secret information isn?t always the brass ring in our profession,? then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. ?In fact, there?s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.?

U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called ?unstructured text? of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units.

Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (?spatial and temporal analysis?) and the tone of the document (?sentiment analysis?). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.

?We?re right there as it happens,? Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. ?We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.?

Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollah?s long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah?s past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres? accusations.

That?s one of several hypothetical cases Recorded Future runs in its blog devoted to intelligence analysis. But it?s safe to assume that the company already has at least one spy agency?s attention. In-Q-Tel doesn?t make investments in firms without an ?end customer? ready to test out that company?s products.

Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel made their investments in 2009, shortly after the company was founded. The exact amounts weren?t disclosed, but were under $10 million each. Google?s investment came to light earlier this year online. In-Q-Tel, which often announces its new holdings in press releases, quietly uploaded a brief mention of its investment a few weeks ago.

Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Future?s board. Ahlberg says those board members have been ?very helpful,? providing business and technology advice, as well as introducing him to potential customers. Both organizations, it?s safe to say, will profit handsomely if Recorded Future is ever sold or taken public. Ahlberg?s last company, the corporate intelligence firm Spotfire, was acquired in 2007 for $195 million in cash.

Google Ventures did not return requests to comment for this article. In-Q-Tel Chief of Staff Lisbeth Poulos e-mailed a one-line statement: ?We are pleased that Recorded Future is now part of IQT?s portfolio of innovative startup companies who support the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community.?

Just because Google and In-Q-Tel have both invested in Recorded Future doesn?t mean Google is suddenly in bed with the government. Of course, to Google?s critics ? including conservative legal groups, and Republican congressmen ? the Obama Administration and the Mountain View, California, company slipped between the sheets a long time ago.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt hosted a town hall at company headquarters in the early days of Obama?s presidential campaign. Senior White House officials like economic chief Larry Summers give speeches at the New America Foundation, the left-of-center think tank chaired by Schmidt. Former Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin is now the White House?s deputy CTO, and was publicly (if mildly) reprimanded by the administration for continuing to hash out issues with his former colleagues.

In some corners, the scrutiny of the company?s political ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of their products, and because of Google?s pledges not to misuse the information still ring true to many.

But unease has been growing. Thirty seven state Attorneys General are demanding answers from the company after Google hoovered up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks as it snapped pictures for its Street View project. (The company swears the incident was an accident.)

?Assurances from the likes of Google that the company can be trusted to respect consumers? privacy because its corporate motto is ?don?t be evil? have been shown by recent events such as the ?Wi-Spy? debacle to be unwarranted,? long-time corporate gadfly John M. Simpson told a Congressional hearing in a prepared statement. Any business dealings with the CIA?s investment arm are unlikely to make critics like him more comfortable.

But Steven Aftergood, a critical observer of the intelligence community from his perch at the Federation of American Scientists, isn?t worried about the Recorded Future deal. Yet.

?To me, whether this is troublesome or not depends on the degree of transparency involved. If everything is aboveboard ? from contracts to deliverables ? I don?t see a problem with it,? he told Danger Room by e-mail. ?But if there are blank spots in the record, then they will be filled with public skepticism or worse, both here and abroad, and not without reason.?

ADG

[Operator]

They make intelligence look evil

[BIGTYMER]

The US gov is out of control.

[oscer]

Well they would never be able to control and pacify a population like ours without googles and facebooks .. Being able to distract us from whats really happening is the goal of the government!

[raymor]

It's a very delicate balance, how much cooperation there should be between NSA security experts and the businesses you trust with your data. When the NSA was looking for the most secure OS for their own systems, they chose Linux. They then released certain security improvements they made for their own use, so that companies, including yours, could have this advanced security.

Only after the improvements were fully vetted so that we in the private sector know that the NSA didn't include anything sneaky, we are now able to include this NSA level security in our own systems. That's great - your Linux web server can now have the same security that the NSA has. We at RMEE were contracted to develop a similar security layer and I'm glad we didn't have to take it quite to that level because NSA did it for us all. Ours could just be a comparatively simple preload based system to control file access by different programs.

On the other hand, when working with security groups which include government employees, how much information to give is always a question. I tend not to worry too much about the NSA because they are so focused on the really big fish. They are watching Ahmadinejad and don't give a crap what's on your web site, so long as you're not selling nuclear weapons.

[Due]

Sounds like a new matrix movie!

[marlboroack]

http://www.iqt.org/technology-portfo...ilt_power.html was interesting to me, only clicked a few though.

[edgeprod]

Haha, it's not like it's a secret. I read about this in Wired sometime around 2000.

[Rochard]

Duh.

[Stephen]

Originally Posted by epitome

Who knows if it's true though.

It's true.

Several recent terrorist pops are a direct result of snapper heads posting to Facebook.

Go ahead and mouseover the pics that are posted. You'll see names matched to faces.

That same technology is applicable to riot videos where you want to ID the college kids who flipped the police car, to bank robbers, to you sitting in your car at the traffic light, to the video grabbed by a drone...

[zonzon]

Spooky ....

Remember Sting during the cold war? "I hope the Russian love their children too"
Nowadays, " I hope the Feds love thier porn too."

[AsianDivaGirlsWebDude]

Originally Posted by raymor

I tend not to worry too much about the NSA because they are so focused on the really big fish. They are watching Ahmadinejad and don't give a crap what's on your web site, so long as you're not selling nuclear weapons.

It could never happen here...the NSA is politically neutral:











ADG

[JFK]

Originally Posted by BIGTYMER

The US gov is out of control.

or in control, as the case maybe