{"id":19710,"date":"2015-08-11T00:13:37","date_gmt":"2015-08-11T00:13:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=19710"},"modified":"2015-08-12T15:49:22","modified_gmt":"2015-08-12T15:49:22","slug":"google-conceived-funded-and-directed-by-the-cia-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=19710","title":{"rendered":"GOOGLE: Conceived, Funded and Directed By The CIA — Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

GOOGLE:
\nConceived, Funded and Directed By The CIA<\/h1>\n

\"5346829113_22015fd16d_z-640x5581\"<\/a><\/h1>\n

How the CIA made Google<\/h2>\n

Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet\u2014<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Part 1<\/h3>\n

By Nafeez Ahmed<\/p>\n

______________________________________________________________<\/p>\n

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 \u2018information superiority.\u2019<\/em>
\n______________________________________________________________<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This exclusive is being released for free in the public interest, and was enabled by crowdfunding. I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cfuel hatred and violence\u201d in situations considered \u201cappropriate.\u201d Heated discussions are going on at government and parliamentary level to explore cracking down on lawyer-client confidentiality.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018information war\u2019\u200a\u2014\u200aa 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The inside story of Google\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The shadow network<\/strong><\/h3>\n

For the last two decades, US foreign and intelligence strategies have resulted in a global \u2018war on terror\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Known as the \u2018Highlands Forum,\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Giant defense contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton and Science Applications International Corporation are sometimes referred to as the \u2018shadow intelligence community\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

I first stumbled upon the existence of this network in November 2014, when I reported for VICE\u2019s Motherboard that US defense secretary Chuck Hagel\u2019s newly announced \u2018Defense Innovation Initiative\u2019 was really about building Skynet\u200a\u2014\u200aor something like it, essentially to dominate an emerging era of automated robotic warfare.<\/p>\n

That story was based on a little-known Pentagon-funded \u2018white paper\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

The Highlands Forum<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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\u2019s 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 \u2018Highlands Forum\u2019, founded by the Pentagon in 1994.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a>
\nNew Scientist magazine (paywall) has compared the Highlands Forum to elite meetings like \u201cDavos, Ditchley and Aspen,\u201d describing it as \u201cfar less well known, yet\u2026 arguably just as influential a talking shop.\u201d Regular Forum meetings bring together \u201cinnovative people to consider interactions between policy and technology. Its biggest successes have been in the development of high-tech network-based warfare.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given Wells\u2019 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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The Pentagon\u2019s intellectual capital venture firm<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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 \u201cHighlands Forum\u201d gathering, an \u201cinvitation-only meeting funded by the Department of Defense and chaired by the assistant for networks and information integration.\u201d This was a senior DoD post overseeing operations and policies for the Pentagon\u2019s 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\u2019Neill. Delegates include senior US military officials across numerous agencies and divisions\u200a\u2014\u200a\u201ccaptains, rear admirals, generals, colonels, majors and commanders\u201d as well as \u201cmembers of the DoD leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n

What at first appeared to be the Forum\u2019s main website describes Highlands as \u201can informal cross-disciplinary network sponsored by Federal Government,\u201d focusing on \u201cinformation, science and technology.\u201d Explanation is sparse, beyond a single \u2018Department of Defense\u2019 logo.<\/p>\n

But Highlands also has another website describing itself as an \u201cintellectual capital venture firm\u201d with \u201cextensive experience assisting corporations, organizations, and government leaders.\u201d The firm provides a \u201cwide range of services, including: strategic planning, scenario creation and gaming for expanding global markets,\u201d as well as \u201cworking with clients to build strategies for execution.\u201d \u2018The Highlands Group Inc.,\u2019 the website says, organizes a whole range of Forums on these issue.<\/p>\n

For instance, in addition to the Highlands Forum, since 9\/11 the Group runs the \u2018Island Forum,\u2019 an international event held in association with Singapore\u2019s Ministry of Defense, which O\u2019Neill oversees as \u201clead consultant.\u201d The Singapore Ministry of Defense website describes the Island Forum as \u201cpatterned after the Highlands Forum organized for the US Department of Defense.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The Highlands Group website also reveals that Highlands is partnered with one of the most powerful defense contractors in the United States. Highlands is \u201csupported by a network of companies and independent researchers,\u201d including \u201cour Highlands Forum partners for the past ten years at SAIC; and the vast Highlands network of participants in the Highlands Forum.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201csymbiotic relationship with the NSA: the agency is the company\u2019s largest single customer and SAIC is the NSA\u2019s largest contractor.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a>
\nThe full name of Captain \u201cDick\u201d O\u2019Neill, the founding president of the Highlands Forum, is Richard Patrick O\u2019Neill, 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.<\/p>\n

The Club of Yoda<\/strong><\/h3>\n

But Clippinger also referred to another mysterious individual revered by Forum attendees:<\/p>\n

\u201cHe sat at the back of the room, expressionless behind thick, black-rimmed glasses. I never heard him utter a word\u2026 Andrew (Andy) Marshall is an icon within DoD. Some call him Yoda, indicative of his mythical inscrutable status\u2026 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since 1973, Marshall has headed up one of the Pentagon\u2019s most powerful agencies, the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), the US defense secretary\u2019s internal \u2018think tank\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a>In a rare 2002 profile in Wired, reporter Douglas McGray described Andrew Marshall, now 93 years old, as \u201cthe DoD\u2019s most elusive\u201d but \u201cone of its most influential\u201d officials. McGray added that \u201cVice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200awidely considered the hawks of the neoconservative movement in American politics\u200a\u2014\u200awere among Marshall\u2019s \u201cstar prot\u00e9g\u00e9s.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking at a low-key Harvard University seminar a few months after 9\/11, Highlands Forum founding president Richard O\u2019Neill said that Marshall was much more than a \u201cregular fixture\u201d at the Forum. \u201cAndy Marshall is our co-chair, so indirectly everything that we do goes back into Andy\u2019s system,\u201d he told the audience. \u201cDirectly, 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.\u201d 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\u2019s Advanced Technology Sector.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a>
\nThe Highlands Forum\u2019s 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 \u2018Yoda\u2019 Marshall\u2019s ONA; and its direct link to DARPA.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

According to Clippinger in A Crowd of One, \u201cwhat 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.\u201d He wrote that the Forum\u2019s ideas have \u201cmoved from being heretical to mainstream. Ideas that were anathema in 1999 had been adopted as policy just three years later.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although the Forum does not produce \u201cconsensus recommendations,\u201d its impact is deeper than a traditional government advisory committee. \u201cThe ideas that emerge from meetings are available for use by decision-makers as well as by people from the think tanks,\u201d according to O\u2019Neill:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll include people from Booz, SAIC, RAND, or others at our meetings\u2026 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\u2026 We produce ideas and interaction and networks for these people to take and use as they need them.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My repeated requests to O\u2019Neill 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.<\/p>\n

Information warfare<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The Highlands Forum has served as a two-way \u2018influence bridge\u2019: 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.<\/p>\n

In 1989, Richard O\u2019Neill, then a US Navy cryptologist, wrote a paper for the US Naval War College, \u2018Toward a methodology for perception management.\u2019 In his book, Future Wars, Col. John Alexander, then a senior officer in the US Army\u2019s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), records that O\u2019Neill\u2019s paper for the first time outlined a strategy for \u201cperception management\u201d as part of information warfare (IW). O\u2019Neill\u2019s proposed strategy identified three categories of targets for IW: adversaries, so they believe they are vulnerable; potential partners, \u201cso they perceive the cause [of war] as just\u201d; and finally, civilian populations and the political leadership so they \u201cperceive the cost as worth the effort.\u201d A secret briefing based on O\u2019Neill\u2019s work \u201cmade its way to the top leadership\u201d at DoD. \u201cThey acknowledged that O\u2019Neill was right and told him to bury it.<\/p>\n

Except the DoD didn\u2019t bury it. Around 1994, the Highlands Group was founded by O\u2019Neill as an official Pentagon project at the appointment of Bill Clinton\u2019s then defense secretary William Perry\u200a\u2014\u200awho went on to join SAIC\u2019s board of directors after retiring from government in 2003.<\/p>\n

In O\u2019Neill\u2019s own words, the group would function as the Pentagon\u2019s \u2018ideas lab\u2019. According to Government Executive, military and information technology experts gathered at the first Forum meeting \u201cto 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?\u201d The meeting helped plant the idea of \u201cnetwork-centric warfare\u201d in the minds of \u201cthe nation\u2019s top military thinkers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Excluding the public<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Official Pentagon records confirm that the Highlands Forum\u2019s primary goal was to support DoD policies on O\u2019Neill\u2019s specialism: information warfare. According to the Pentagon\u2019s 1997 Annual Report to the President and the Congress under a section titled \u2018Information Operations,\u2019 (IO) the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) had authorized the \u201cestablishment of the Highlands Group of key DoD, industry, and academic IO experts\u201d to coordinate IO across federal military intelligence agencies.<\/p>\n

The following year\u2019s DoD annual report reiterated the Forum\u2019s centrality to information operations: \u201cTo examine IO issues, DoD sponsors the Highlands Forum, which brings together government, industry, and academic professionals from various fields.\u201d<\/p>\n

Notice that in 1998, the Highlands \u2018Group\u2019 became a \u2018Forum.\u2019 According to O\u2019Neill, this was to avoid subjecting Highlands Forums meetings to \u201cbureaucratic restrictions.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Known as the \u2018open government\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

But Government Executive reported that \u201cO\u2019Neill and others believed\u201d such regulatory issues \u201cwould quell the free flow of ideas and no-holds-barred discussions they sought.\u201d Pentagon lawyers had warned that the word \u2018group\u2019 might necessitate certain obligations and advised running the whole thing privately: \u201cSo O\u2019Neill renamed it the Highlands Forum and moved into the private sector to manage it as a consultant to the Pentagon.\u201d The Pentagon Highlands Forum thus runs under the mantle of O\u2019Neill\u2019s \u2018intellectual capital venture firm,\u2019 \u2018Highlands Group Inc.\u2019<\/p>\n

In 1995, a year after William Perry appointed O\u2019Neill to head up the Highlands Forum, SAIC\u200a\u2014\u200athe Forum\u2019s \u201cpartner\u201d organization\u200a\u2014\u200alaunched a new Center for Information Strategy and Policy under the direction of \u201cJeffrey Cooper, a member of the Highlands Group who advises senior Defense Department officials on information warfare issues.\u201d The Center had precisely the same objective as the Forum, to function as \u201ca 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.\u201d The aim was to \u201cenable 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Neill\u2019s 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\u200a\u2014\u200ain a way that is patently intended to circumvent democratic accountability and the rule of law.<\/p>\n

The Highlands Forum doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Total participants in the DoD\u2019s Highlands Forum number over a thousand, although sessions largely consist of small closed workshop style gatherings of maximum 25\u201330 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Due to its current sponsorship by the OSD\u2019s 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\u2019s policy research task forces.<\/p>\n

Google: seeded by the Pentagon<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In 1994\u200a\u2014\u200athe same year the Highlands Forum was founded under the stewardship of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the ONA, and DARPA\u200a\u2014\u200atwo 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s just one side of the story.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe funded Stanford University through the computer scientist Jeffrey Ullman, who had several promising graduate students working on many exciting areas,\u201d Prof. Thuraisingham told me. \u201cOne of them was Sergey Brin, the founder of Google. The intelligence community\u2019s MDDS program essentially provided Brin seed-funding, which was supplemented by many other sources, including the private sector.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This sort of funding is certainly not unusual, and Sergey Brin\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In an extraordinary document hosted by the website of the University of Texas, Thuraisingham recounts that from 1993 to 1999, \u201cthe 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.\u201d The program funded 15 research efforts at various universities, including Stanford. Its goal was developing \u201cdata management technologies to manage several terabytes to petabytes of data,\u201d including for \u201cquery processing, transaction management, metadata management, storage management, and data integration.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In her University of Texas article, she attaches the copy of an abstract of the US intelligence community\u2019s MDDS program that had been presented to the \u201cAnnual Intelligence Community Symposium\u201d in 1995. The abstract reveals that the primary sponsors of the MDDS programme were three agencies: the NSA, the CIA\u2019s Office of Research & Development, and the intelligence community\u2019s Community Management Staff (CMS) which operates under the Director of Central Intelligence. Administrators of the program, which provided funding of around 3\u20134 million dollars per year for 3\u20134 years, were identified as Hal Curran (NSA), Robert Kluttz (CMS), Dr. Claudia Pierce (NSA), Dr. Rick Steinheiser (ORD\u200a\u2014\u200astanding for the CIA\u2019s Office of Research and Devepment), and Dr. Thuraisingham herself.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s supervisor Prof. Jeffrey D. Ullman:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Brin and Page officially incorporated Google as a company in September 1998, the very month they last reported to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser. \u2018Query Flocks\u2019 was also part of Google\u2019s patented \u2018PageRank\u2019 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\u2019s Dr. Chris Clifton, who worked under Thuraisingham to develop the \u2018Query Flocks\u2019 system, co-authored a paper with Brin\u2019s superviser, Prof. Ullman, and the CIA\u2019s Rick Steinheiser. Titled \u2018Knowledge Discovery in Text,\u2019 the paper was presented at an academic conference.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe MDDS funding that supported Brin was significant as far as seed-funding goes, but it was probably outweighed by the other funding streams,\u201d said Thuraisingham. \u201cThe duration of Brin\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brin thus reported to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser regularly about his work developing Google.<\/p>\n

==<\/p>\n

UPDATE 2.05PM GMT [2nd Feb 2015]:<\/p>\n

Since publication of this article, Prof. Thuraisingham has amended her article referenced above. The amended version includes a new modified statement, followed by a copy of the original version of her account of the MDDS. In this amended version, Thuraisingham rejects the idea that CIA funded Google, and says instead:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn fact Prof. Jeffrey Ullman (at Stanford) and my colleague at MITRE Dr. Chris Clifton together with some others developed the Query Flocks System, as part of MDDS, which produced solutions for mining large amounts of data stored in databases. Also, Mr. Sergey Brin, the cofounder of Google, was part of Prof. Ullman\u2019s research group at that time. I remember visiting Stanford with Dr. Rick Steinheiser from the Intelligence Community periodically and Mr. Brin would rush in on roller blades, give his presentation and rush out. During our last visit to Stanford in September 1998, Mr. Brin demonstrated to us his search engine which I believe became Google soon after\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are also several inaccuracies in Dr. Ahmed\u2019s article (dated January 22, 2015). For example, the MDDS program was not a \u2018sensitive\u2019 program as stated by Dr. Ahmed; it was an Unclassified program that funded universities in the US. Furthermore, Sergey Brin never reported to me or to Dr. Rick Steinheiser; he only gave presentations to us during our visits to the Department of Computer Science at Stanford during the 1990s. Also, MDDS never funded Google; it funded Stanford University.\u201d
\nHere, there is no substantive factual difference in Thuraisingham\u2019s accounts, other than to assert that her statement associating Sergey Brin with the development of \u2018query flocks\u2019 is mistaken. Notably, this acknowledgement is derived not from her own knowledge, but from this very article quoting a comment from a Google spokesperson.<\/p>\n

However, the bizarre attempt to disassociate Google from the MDDS program misses the mark. Firstly, the MDDS never funded Google, because during the development of the core components of the Google search engine, there was no company incorporated with that name. The grant was instead provided to Stanford University through Prof. Ullman, through whom some MDDS funding was used to support Brin who was co-developing Google at the time. Secondly, Thuraisingham then adds that Brin never \u201creported\u201d to her or the CIA\u2019s Steinheiser, but admits he \u201cgave presentations to us during our visits to the Department of Computer Science at Stanford during the 1990s.\u201d It is unclear, though, what the distinction is here between reporting, and delivering a detailed presentation\u200a\u2014\u200aeither way, Thuraisingham confirms that she and the CIA had taken a keen interest in Brin\u2019s development of Google. Thirdly, Thuraisingham describes the MDDS program as \u201cunclassified,\u201d but this does not contradict its \u201csensitive\u201d nature. As someone who has worked for decades as an intelligence contractor and advisor, Thuraisingham is surely aware that there are many ways of categorizing intelligence, including \u2018sensitive but unclassified.\u2019 A number of former US intelligence officials I spoke to said that the almost total lack of public information on the CIA and NSA\u2019s MDDS initiative suggests that although the progam was not classified, it is likely instead that its contents was considered sensitive, which would explain efforts to minimise transparency about the program and the way it fed back into developing tools for the US intelligence community. Fourthly, and finally, it is important to point out that the MDDS abstract which Thuraisingham includes in her University of Texas document states clearly not only that the Director of Central Intelligence\u2019s CMS, CIA and NSA were the overseers of the MDDS initiative, but that the intended customers of the project were \u201cDoD, IC, and other government organizations\u201d: the Pentagon, the US intelligence community, and other relevant US government agencies.<\/p>\n

In other words, the provision of MDDS funding to Brin through Ullman, under the oversight of Thuraisingham and Steinheiser, was fundamentally because they recognized the potential utility of Brin\u2019s work developing Google to the Pentagon, intelligence community, and the federal government at large.<\/p>\n

==<\/p>\n

The MDDS programme is actually referenced in several papers co-authored by Brin and Page while at Stanford, specifically highlighting its role in financially sponsoring Brin in the development of Google. 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 \u201cDual Iterative Pattern Relation Extraction,\u201d the development of \u201ca global ranking of Web pages called PageRank,\u201d and the use of PageRank \u201cto develop a novel search engine called Google.\u201d Through an opening footnote, Sergey Brin confirms he was \u201cPartially supported by the Community Management Staff\u2019s Massive Digital Data Systems Program, NSF grant IRI-96\u201331952\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aconfirming that Brin\u2019s work developing Google was indeed partly-funded by the CIA-NSA-MDDS program.<\/p>\n

This NSF grant identified alongside the MDDS, 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\u2019s supervisor Prof. Ullman, goes on to say under the section \u2018Indications of Success\u2019 that \u201cthere are some new stories of startups based on NSF-supported research.\u201d Under \u2018Project Impact,\u2019 the report remarks: \u201cFinally, the google project has also gone commercial as Google.com.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thuraisingham\u2019s account, including her new amended version, therefore demonstrates that the CIA-NSA-MDDS program was not only partly 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 \u201csignificant\u201d amount of seed-funding and oversight from the Pentagon: namely, the CIA, NSA, and DARPA.<\/p>\n

The DoD could not be reached for comment.<\/p>\n

When I asked Prof. Ullman to confirm whether or not Brin was partly funded under the intelligence community\u2019s MDDS program, and whether Ullman was aware that Brin was regularly briefing the CIA\u2019s Rick Steinheiser on his progress in developing the Google search engine, Ullman\u2019s responses were evasive: \u201cMay I know whom you represent and why you are interested in these issues? Who are your \u2018sources\u2019?\u201d He also denied that Brin played a significant role in developing the \u2018query flocks\u2019 system, although it is clear from Brin\u2019s papers that he did draw on that work in co-developing the PageRank system with Page.<\/p>\n

When I asked Ullman whether he was denying the US intelligence community\u2019s role in supporting Brin during the development of Google, he said: \u201cI am not going to dignify this nonsense with a denial. If you won\u2019t explain what your theory is, and what point you are trying to make, I am not going to help you in the slightest.\u201d<\/p>\n

The MDDS abstract published online at the University of Texas confirms that the rationale for the CIA-NSA project was to \u201cprovide seed money to develop data management technologies which are of high-risk and high-pay-off,\u201d including techniques for \u201cquerying, browsing, and filtering; transaction processing; accesses methods and indexing; metadata management and data modelling; and integrating heterogeneous databases; as well as developing appropriate architectures.\u201d The ultimate vision of the program was to \u201cprovide for the seamless access and fusion of massive amounts of data, information and knowledge in a heterogeneous, real-time environment\u201d for use by the Pentagon, intelligence community and potentially across government.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s assertions:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe statements related to Google are completely untrue.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This time round, despite multiple requests and conversations, a Google spokesperson declined to comment.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: As of 5.41PM GMT [22nd Jan 2015], Google\u2019s director of corporate communication got in touch and asked me to include the following statement:<\/p>\n

\u201cSergey Brin was not part of the Query Flocks Program at Stanford, nor were any of his projects funded by US Intelligence bodies.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is what I wrote back:<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In that context, you might want to consider the following questions:<\/p>\n

1) Does Google deny that Brin\u2019s work was part-funded by the MDDS via an NSF grant?<\/p>\n

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?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Total Information Awareness<\/strong>
\nA 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\u2019s 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: \u201cCrypto relevance? Makes you think whether you should protect your data.\u201d 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\u2019s Office of Research and Development via a SAIC email address.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cDr. Rick Steinheiser of the CIA, began discussions with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on applying data-mining for counter-terrorism,\u201d an idea that resulted directly from the MDDS program which partly funded Google. \u201cThese discussions eventually developed into the current EELD (Evidence Extraction and Link Detection) program at DARPA.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u200a\u2014\u200aa MITRE trustee\u200a\u2014\u200alanded 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\u2019s board of directors. As the new head of DARPA from 1993 to 1997, she also co-chaired the Pentagon\u2019s Highlands Forum during the period of Google\u2019s pre-launch development at Stanford under the MDSS.<\/p>\n

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 : \u201cShe brought the technology and operational military communities together to design detailed plans to sustain US dominance on the battlefield into the next century.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a>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\u2019s research), on a panel sponsored by Stanford and the National Research Council discussing the need for scientists to show how their work \u201cties to national needs.\u201d The panel brought together scientists and policymakers, including \u201cWashington insiders.\u201d<\/p>\n

DARPA\u2019s EELD program, inspired by the work of Thuraisingham and Steinheiser under Jones\u2019 watch, was rapidly adapted and integrated with a suite of tools to conduct comprehensive surveillance under the Bush administration.<\/p>\n

According to DARPA official Ted Senator, who led the EELD program for the agency\u2019s short-lived Information Awareness Office, EELD was among a range of \u201cpromising techniques\u201d being prepared for integration \u201cinto the prototype TIA system.\u201d 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\u2019s new Information Awareness Office.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cbehaviour-based profiling,\u201d \u201cautomated detection, identification and tracking\u201d of terrorist activity, among other data-analyzing projects. At this time, PARC\u2019s director and chief scientist was John Seely Brown. Both Brown and Poindexter were Pentagon Highlands Forum participants\u200a\u2014\u200aBrown on a regular basis until recently.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Google, DARPA and the money trail<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Long before the appearance of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Stanford University\u2019s 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\u2019s Heuristic Programming Project, addressing Steinheiser as a member of the \u201cAI Steering Committee.\u201d A list of attendees at a contractor conference around that time, sponsored by the Pentagon\u2019s Office of Naval Research (ONR), includes Steinheiser as a delegate under the designation \u201cOPNAV Op-115\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200awhich refers to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations\u2019 program on operational readiness, which played a major role in advancing digital systems for the military.<\/p>\n

From the 1970s, Prof. Feigenbaum and his colleagues had been running Stanford\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Brin\u2019s supervisor at Stanford, Prof. Jeffrey Ullman, was in 1996 part of a joint funding project of DARPA\u2019s Intelligent Integration of Information program. That year, Ullman co-chaired DARPA-sponsored meetings on data exchange between multiple systems.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

As a Stanford PhD student in electrical engineering in the 1980s, Bechtolsheim\u2019s pioneering SUN workstation project had been funded by DARPA and the Stanford computer science department\u200a\u2014\u200athis research was the foundation of Bechtolsheim\u2019s establishment of Sun Microsystems, which he co-founded with William Joy.<\/p>\n

As for Bechtolsheim\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cresearch has received the support of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for over 20 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019Neill, 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\u2019s partner and Sun Microsystems co-founder, William Joy\u200a\u2014\u200awho was then chief scientist and corporate executive officer there\u200a\u2014\u200ahad attended the Forum to discuss nanotechnology and molecular computing.<\/p>\n

In 1999, Joy had also co-chaired the President\u2019s Information Technology Advisory Committee, overseeing a report acknowledging that DARPA had:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026 revised its priorities in the 90\u2019s so that all information technology funding was judged in terms of its benefit to the warfighter.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Throughout the 1990s, then, DARPA\u2019s funding to Stanford, including Google, was explicitly about developing technologies that could augment the Pentagon\u2019s military intelligence operations in war theatres.<\/p>\n

The Joy report recommended more federal government funding from the Pentagon, NASA, and other agencies to the IT sector. Greg Papadopoulos, another of Bechtolsheim\u2019s colleagues as then Sun Microsystems chief technology officer, also attended a Pentagon Highlands\u2019 Forum meeting in September 2000.<\/p>\n

In November, the Pentagon Highlands Forum hosted Sue Bostrom, who was vice president for the internet at Cisco, sitting on the company\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s output during his SAIC tenure was a paper titled \u2018Understanding Information War\u2019, delivered at a SAIC-sponsored US Army Roundtable on the Revolution in Military Affairs.<\/p>\n

After Google\u2019s 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, \u201cA number of Sequoia-bankrolled start-ups have contracted with the Department of Defense, especially after 9\/11 when Sequoia\u2019s Mark Kvamme met with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to discuss the application of emerging technologies to warfighting and intelligence collection.\u201d Similarly, Kleiner Perkins had developed \u201ca close relationship\u201d with In-Q-Tel, the CIA venture capitalist firm that funds start-ups \u201cto advance \u2018priority\u2019 technologies of value\u201d to the intelligence community.<\/p>\n

John Doerr, who led the Kleiner Perkins investment in Google obtaining a board position, was a major early investor in Becholshtein\u2019s Sun Microsystems at its launch. He and his wife Anne are the main funders behind Rice University\u2019s 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 \u201chow the DoD\u2019s DARPA funded GPS, CAD, most of the major computer science departments, and of course, the Internet.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Google captures the Pentagon<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In 2003, Google began customizing its search engine under special contract with the CIA for its Intelink Management Office, \u201coverseeing top-secret, secret and sensitive but unclassified intranets for CIA and other IC agencies,\u201d according to Homeland Security Today. That year, CIA funding was also being \u201cquietly\u201d funneled through the National Science Foundation to projects that might help create \u201cnew capabilities to combat terrorism through advanced technology.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Then in November 2005, In-Q-Tel issued notices to sell $2.2 million of Google stocks. Google\u2019s 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 \u201cleverage Google\u2019s [user] data monitoring\u201d capability as part of an effort to acquire data of \u201cnational security intelligence interest.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s intimate connection to the Forum as of that year is also corroborated by his role in guest editing the 2007 Forum reading list.<\/p>\n

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 \u201call new hardware\/software systems and acquisitions for the Global Defense Intelligence IT Enterprise,\u201d including \u201cbig data technologies.\u201d Shepherd now works at Microsoft. Norvig was a computer research scientist at Stanford University in 1991 before joining Bechtolsheim\u2019s Sun Microsystems as senior scientist until 1994, and going on to head up NASA\u2019s computer science division.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

Lewis Shepherd (left), then a senior technology officer at the Pentagon\u2019s 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.
\nNorvig shows up on O\u2019Neill\u2019s Google Plus profile as one of his close connections. Scoping the rest of O\u2019Neill\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Those connections include Michele Weslander Quaid, an ex-CIA contractor and former senior Pentagon intelligence official who is now Google\u2019s chief technology officer where she is developing programs to \u201cbest fit government agencies\u2019 needs\u201d; Elizabeth Churchill, Google director of user experience; James Kuffner, a humanoid robotics expert who now heads up Google\u2019s robotics division and who introduced the term \u2018cloud robotics\u2019; Mark Drapeau, director of innovation engagement for Microsoft\u2019s public sector business; Lili Cheng, general manager of Microsoft\u2019s Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs; Jon Udell, Microsoft \u2018evangelist\u2019; Cory Ondrejka, vice president of engineering at Facebook; to name just a few.<\/p>\n

In 2010, Google signed a multi-billion dollar no-bid contract with the NSA\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Then a year after, in 2011, another of O\u2019Neill\u2019s Google Plus connections, Michele Quaid\u200a\u2014\u200awho had served in executive positions at the NGA, National Reconnaissance Office and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence\u200a\u2014\u200aleft her government role to become Google \u2018innovation evangelist\u2019 and the point-person for seeking government contracts. Quaid\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s Highlands Forum is subordinate. Quaid has herself attended the Forum, though precisely when and how often I could not confirm.<\/p>\n

In March 2012, then DARPA director Regina Dugan\u200a\u2014\u200awho in that capacity was also co-chair of the Pentagon Highlands Forum\u200a\u2014\u200afollowed her colleague Quaid into Google to lead the company\u2019s 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 \u201can increasing portion\u201d of DARPA\u2019s work \u201con the investigation of offensive capabilities to address military-specific needs,\u201d securing $500 million of government funding for DARPA cyber research from 2012 to 2017.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a>
\nBy November 2014, Google\u2019s chief AI and robotics expert James Kuffner was a delegate alongside O\u2019Neill at the Highlands Island Forum 2014 in Singapore, to explore \u2018Advancement in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Society, Security and Conflict.\u2019 The event included 26 delegates from Austria, Israel, Japan, Singapore, Sweden, Britain and the US, from both industry and government. Kuffner\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Rumsfeld and persistent surveillance<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In sum, many of Google\u2019s most senior executives are affiliated with the Pentagon Highlands Forum, which throughout the period of Google\u2019s growth over the last decade, has surfaced repeatedly as a connecting and convening force. The US intelligence community\u2019s incubation of Google from inception occurred through a combination of direct sponsorship and informal networks of financial influence, themselves closely aligned with Pentagon interests.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018information superiority.\u2019<\/p>\n

In December 2001, O\u2019Neill confirmed that strategic discussions at the Highlands Forum were feeding directly into Andrew Marshall\u2019s DoD-wide strategic review ordered by President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld to upgrade the military, including the Quadrennial Defense Review\u200a\u2014\u200aand that some of the earliest Forum meetings \u201cresulted in the writing of a group of DoD policies, strategies, and doctrine for the services on information warfare.\u201d That process of \u201cwriting\u201d the Pentagon\u2019s information warfare policies \u201cwas done in conjunction with people who understood the environment differently\u200a\u2014\u200anot only US citizens, but also foreign citizens, and people who were developing corporate IT.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Pentagon\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s future in the \u2018information age.\u2019<\/p>\n

O\u2019Neill also affirmed that to develop information warfare doctrine, the Forum had held extensive discussions on electronic surveillance and \u201cwhat constitutes an act of war in an information environment.\u201d 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 \u201cas a result of those meetings,\u201d exploring policy dilemmas on how far to take the goal of \u2018Information Superiority.\u2019 \u201cOne of the things that was shocking to the American public was that we weren\u2019t pilfering Milosevic\u2019s accounts electronically when we in fact could,\u201d commented O\u2019Neill.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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,\u201d the paper said, referencing the Rumsfeld-commissioned transformation study.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cPersistent Surveillance\u201d was a fundamental theme of the information-centric vision for defense policy across the Pentagon.<\/p>\n

We now know that just two months before O\u2019Neill\u2019s address at Harvard in 2001, under the TIA program, President Bush had secretly authorized the NSA\u2019s domestic surveillance of Americans without court-approved warrants, in what appears to have been an illegal modification of the ThinThread data-mining project\u200a\u2014\u200aas later exposed by NSA whistleblowers William Binney and Thomas Drake.<\/p>\n

The surveillance-startup nexus<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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\u2019s ELS3 Sector (focusing on IT systems for emergency responders), teamed up with John Poindexter to propose the TIA surveillance program. SAIC\u2019s Sharkey had previously been deputy director of the Information Systems Office at DARPA through the 1990s.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, around the same time, SAIC vice president for corporate development, Samuel Visner, became head of the NSA\u2019s signals-intelligence programs. SAIC was then among a consortium receiving a $280 million contract to develop one of the NSA\u2019s secret eavesdropping systems. By 2003, Visner returned to SAIC to become director of strategic planning and business development of the firm\u2019s intelligence group.<\/p>\n

That year, the NSA consolidated its TIA programme of warrantless electronic surveillance, to keep \u201ctrack of individuals\u201d and understand \u201chow they fit into models\u201d 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 \u201cvirtual, centralized grand database.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was also the year that the Bush administration drew up its notorious Information Operations Roadmap. Describing the internet as a \u201cvulnerable weapons system,\u201d Rumsfeld\u2019s IO roadmap had advocated that Pentagon strategy \u201cshould be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will \u2018fight the net\u2019 as it would an enemy weapons system.\u201d The US should seek \u201cmaximum control\u201d of the \u201cfull spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems,\u201d advocated the document.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s chief of staff; among others.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018Trailblazer.\u2019 Core components of TIA were being \u201cquietly continued\u201d under \u201cnew code names,\u201d according to Foreign Policy\u2019s Shane Harris, but had been concealed \u201cbehind the veil of the classified intelligence budget.\u201d The new surveillance program had by then been fully transitioned from DARPA\u2019s jurisdiction to the NSA.<\/p>\n

This was also the year of yet another Singapore Island Forum led by Richard O\u2019Neill 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.<\/p>\n

Gilman Louie is a former CEO of In-Q-Tel\u200a\u2014\u200athe CIA firm investing especially in start-ups developing data mining technology. In-Q-Tel was founded in 1999 by the CIA\u2019s Directorate of Science and Technology, under which the Office of Research and Development (ORD)\u200a\u2014\u200awhich was part of the Google-funding MDSS program\u200a\u2014\u200ahad 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.<\/p>\n

Louie had led In-Q-Tel from 1999 until January 2006\u200a\u2014\u200aincluding when Google bought Keyhole, the In-Q-Tel-funded satellite mapping software. Among his colleagues on In-Q-Tel\u2019s 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\u2019Neill 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s investments under Louie\u2019s watch were \u201cin companies that specialize in automatically collecting, sifting through and understanding oceans of information,\u201d according to Medill School of Journalism\u2019s News21, which also noted that Louie himself had acknowledged it was not clear \u201cwhether privacy and civil liberties will be protected\u201d by government\u2019s use of these technologies \u201cfor national security.\u201d<\/p>\n

The transcript of Richard O\u2019Neill\u2019s 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 \u201cwhat\u2019s going on with In-Q-Tel.\u201d That Forum session focused on how to \u201ctake advantage of the speed of the commercial market that wasn\u2019t present inside the science and technology community of Washington\u201d and to understand \u201cthe implications for the DoD in terms of the strategic review, the QDR, Hill action, and the stakeholders.\u201d Participants of the meeting included \u201csenior military people,\u201d combatant commanders, \u201cseveral of the senior flag officers,\u201d some \u201cdefense industry people\u201d and various US representatives including Republican Congressman William Mac Thornberry and Democrat Senator Joseph Lieberman.<\/p>\n

Both Thornberry and Lieberman are staunch supporters of NSA surveillance, and have consistently acted to rally support for pro-war, pro-surveillance legislation. O\u2019Neill\u2019s comments indicate that the Forum\u2019s role is not just to enable corporate contractors to write Pentagon policy, but to rally political support for government policies adopted through the Forum\u2019s informal brand of shadow networking.<\/p>\n

Repeatedly, O\u2019Neill 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 \u2018Information Superiority\u2019\u200a\u2014\u200a\u201chow to dominate\u201d the information market\u200a\u2014\u200aand leverage this for \u201cwhat the president and the secretary of defense wanted to do with regard to transformation of the DoD and the strategic review.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u200a\u2014\u200awhich had recruited ex-DARPA chief and In-Q-Tel trustee Anita Jones.<\/p>\n

Facebook\u2019s 2008 round of funding was led by Greylock Venture Capital, which invested $27.5 million. The firm\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201ca legion of advocates from the most influential strata of government.\u201d Thiel had also met with Gilman Louie of In-Q-Tel, securing the backing of the CIA in this early phase.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

We also now know thanks to Snowden that the NSA\u2019s XKeyscore \u2018Digital Network Intelligence\u2019 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\u200a\u2014\u200aessentially the entire global telecommunications grid. Highlands Forum partner SAIC played a key role, among other contractors, in producing and administering the NSA\u2019s XKeyscore, and was recently implicated in NSA hacking of the privacy network Tor.<\/p>\n

The Pentagon Highlands Forum was therefore intimately involved in all this as a convening network\u2014but 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\u2019s roll out of \u201can impressive long-term architecture last summer that will provide increasingly sophisticated security until 2015 or so.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Goldman Sachs connection<\/strong><\/h3>\n

When I asked Wells about the Forum\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

As Wells is no longer in government, this is to be expected\u200a\u2014\u200abut 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.<\/p>\n

Sadly, this was not a form of trying to keep busy in retirement. Wells\u2019 move underscored that the Pentagon\u2019s conception of information warfare is not just about surveillance, but about the exploitation of surveillance to influence both government and public opinion.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s International Security Advisory Board. The MIIS CySec website states that the MoU signed with Richard O\u2019Neill:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Who is the financial benefactor of the new Pentagon Highlands-partnered MIIS CySec initiative? According to the MIIS CySec site, the initiative was launched \u201cthrough a generous donation of seed funding from George Lee.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the kicker. In 2011, it was Lee who engineered Facebook\u2019s $50 billion valuation, and previously handled deals for other Highlands-connected tech giants like Google, Microsoft and eBay. Lee\u2019s then boss, Stephen Friedman, a former CEO and chairman of Goldman Sachs, and later senior partner on the firm\u2019s executive board, was a also founding board member of In-Q-Tel alongside Highlands Forum overlord William Perry and Forum member John Seely Brown.<\/p>\n

In 2001, Bush appointed Stephen Friedman to the President\u2019s Intelligence Advisory Board, and then to chair that board from 2005 to 2009. Friedman previously served alongside Paul Wolfowitz and others on the 1995\u20136 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)\u200a\u2014\u200aone 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\u2019s Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems\u200a\u2014\u200awhere Thuraisingham, who managed the CIA-NSA-MDDS program that inspired DARPA counter-terrorist data-mining, was also a lead engineer.<\/p>\n

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\u200a\u2014\u200awho as chief information risk officer leads the firm\u2019s programs on information security\u200a\u2014\u200adelivered a Highlands Forum presentation in 2008 at what was called an \u2018Enrichment Session on Deterrence.\u2019 Cooper\u2019s chapter draws on Venables\u2019 presentation at Highlands \u201cwith permission.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Fighting terror with terror<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The convergence of these powerful financial and military interests around the Highlands Forum, through George Lee\u2019s sponsorship of the Forum\u2019s new partner, the MIIS Cysec initiative, is revealing in itself.<\/p>\n

MIIS Cysec\u2019s director, Dr, Itamara Lochard, has long been embedded in Highlands. She regularly \u201cpresents current research on non-state groups, governance, technology and conflict to the US Office of the Secretary of Defense Highlands Forum,\u201d according to her Tufts University bio. She also, \u201cregularly advises US combatant commanders\u201d and specializes in studying the use of information technology by \u201cviolent and non-violent sub-state groups.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

Dr Lochard maintains a comprehensive database of 1,700 non-state groups including \u201cinsurgents, militias, terrorists, complex criminal organizations, organized gangs, malicious cyber actors and strategic non-violent actors,\u201d to analyze their \u201corganizational patterns, areas of cooperation, strategies and tactics.\u201d Notice, here, the mention of \u201cstrategic non-violent actors\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200awhich perhaps covers NGOs and other groups or organizations engaged in social political activity or campaigning, judging by the focus of other DoD research programs.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018Irregular Warfare\u2019 that she designed for senior US special forces officers. She has previously taught courses on \u2018Internal War\u2019 for senior \u201cpolitical-military officers\u201d of various Gulf regimes.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Institute for National Security Studies on US strategy toward \u2018non-state armed groups.\u2019 The study on the one hand argued that non-state armed groups should be urgently recognized as a \u2018tier one security priority,\u2019 and on the other that the proliferation of armed groups \u201cprovide 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.\u201d But \u201csophisticated tools\u201d 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. \u201cArmed 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Lochard\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

READ PART TWO<\/a><\/p>\n

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