CIA and Google Team Up Again For More Spying
Steve Watson
Monday, March 31, 2008
Google is supplying the software, hardware and tech support to US intelligence agencies who are in the process of creating a vast closed source database for global spy networks to share information.
Google is selling storage and data searching equipment to the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence agencies, who have come together to build a huge internal government intranet.
Google is also providing the search features for a private Wikipedia-style site, called Intellipedia.
"We are a very small group, and even a lot of people in the federal government don't know that we exist," said Mike Bradshaw, who leads Google's federal government sales team and its 18 employees, yesterday to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The government supply arm of Google has also reportedly entered into a number of other contracts, details of which it says it cannot share.
Google's partnership with the intelligence network is not new. As we reported in late 2006, An ex-CIA agent Robert David Steele has claimed sources told him that CIA seed money helped get the company off the ground
Speaking to the Alex Jones Show, Steele elaborated on previous revelations by making it known that the CIA helped bankroll Google at its very inception. Steele named Google's CIA point man as Dr. Rick Steinheiser, of the Office of Research and Development.
"I think Google took money from the CIA when it was poor and it was starting up and unfortunately our system right now floods money into spying and other illegal and largely unethical activities, and it doesn't fund what I call the open source world," said Steele, citing "trusted individuals" as his sources for the claim.
"They've been together for quite a while," added Steele.
Late last year, new programs of internet monitoring were announced by a freshly created department branch of Homeland Security called the National Applications Office
"Mr. Chertoff also plans soon to unveil a cyber-security strategy, part of an estimated $15 billion, multiyear program designed to protect the nation's Internet infrastructure. The program has been shrouded in secrecy for months and has also prompted privacy concerns on Capitol Hill because it involves government protection of domestic computer networks." The Wall Street Journal wrote.
Essentially the program allows the DHS to regulate and control access to the internet in the name of "protecting" national security.
The news came on the back of separate revelations that another military spy agency, the NSA has increasing control over SSL, now called Transport Layer Security, the cryptographic protocol that provides secure communications on the internet for web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, and other data transfers.
In other words the agency is capable of intercepting and reading your emails and instant messages in real time.
Earlier this year came the announcement that US National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is drawing up plans for cyberspace spying that would make the current debate on warrantless wiretaps look like a "walk in the park".
The plan would mean giving the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer or Web search.
Recently, the lawyer for an AT&T engineer has alleged that "within two weeks of taking office, the Bush administration was planning a comprehensive effort of spying on Americans” That is BEFORE 9/11, before the nation was embroiled in the freedom stripping exercise commonly known as the "war on terror" had even begun.
Earlier this year, CNET reported that both Google and Microsoft refused to say if they have provided users private data to the federal government under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- the warrantless wiretapping program.
We have also previously reported on a vast intelligence program, being overseen by the FBI, which is to establish a global biometric database known as "Server in the Sky" that will collate and provide an "International Information Consortium" with access to the biometric measurements and personal information of citizens of the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand in the name of fighting the "war on terror".
After 9/11 the work of 16 different intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the giant National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on international communications, as well as the Energy Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration was centralized under the office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Over decades we have witnessed the evolution of Government surveillance programs and information databases targeting citizens. We are now witnessing the centralization of this vast control grid Panopticon beyond our own borders.
www.infowars.net/articles/march2008/310308Google.htm