How the CIA made Google
Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet—
part 1
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.
THIS IS PART ONE. READ PART TWO HERE.
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exclusive is being released for free in the public interest, and was
enabled by crowdfunding. I’d like to thank my amazing community of
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in-depth investigation. Please support independent, investigative journalism for the global commons.
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 Motherboard that 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 Executive magazine in 2006 he chaired the ‘Highlands Forum’, founded by the Pentagon in 1994.
New Scientist magazine
(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.”
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.
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.
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 Congress under
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 Executive reported
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 Post and at the time the executive editor of the International Herald Tribune; Thomas Friedman, long-time New York Times columnist; Arnaud de Borchgrave, an editor at Washington Times and United Press International; Steven Levy, a former Newsweek editor, senior writer for Wired and 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 Guardian last 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, Wired founder 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.”
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 below 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.
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.
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’s Shane 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 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.
READ PART TWO
Dr Nafeez Ahmed
is 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 of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), and the scifi thriller novel ZERO 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.
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