Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring

[Ed Jewett]

Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring

• By Noah Shachtman
  
• July 28, 2010 |
  
• 7:30 pm |
  
• Categories: Spies, Secrecy and Surveillance
  

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.
“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.
Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.
It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.
This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.

America’s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining “open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.
“Secret information isn’t always the brass ring in our profession,” then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. “In fact, there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.”
U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called “unstructured text” of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units.
Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.
“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”
Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres’ accusations.
That’s one of several hypothetical cases Recorded Future runs in its blog devoted to intelligence analysis. But it’s safe to assume that the company already has at least one spy agency’s attention. In-Q-Tel doesn’t make investments in firms without an “end customer” ready to test out that company’s products.
Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel made their investments in 2009, shortly after the company was founded. The exact amounts weren’t disclosed, but were under $10 million each. Google’s investment came to light earlier this year online. In-Q-Tel, which often announces its new holdings in press releases, quietly uploaded a brief mention of its investment a few weeks ago.
Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Future’s board. Ahlberg says those board members have been “very helpful,” providing business and technology advice, as well as introducing him to potential customers. Both organizations, it’s safe to say, will profit handsomely if Recorded Future is ever sold or taken public. Ahlberg’s last company, the corporate intelligence firm Spotfire, was acquired in 2007 for $195 million in cash.
Google Ventures did not return requests to comment for this article. In-Q-Tel Chief of Staff Lisbeth Poulos e-mailed a one-line statement: “We are pleased that Recorded Future is now part of IQT’s portfolio of innovative startup companies who support the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community.”
Just because Google and In-Q-Tel have both invested in Recorded Future doesn’t mean Google is suddenly in bed with the government. Of course, to Google’s critics — including conservative legal groups, and Republican congressmen — the Obama Administration and the Mountain View, California, company slipped between the sheets a long time ago.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt hosted a town hall at company headquarters in the early days of Obama’s presidential campaign. Senior White House officials like economic chief Larry Summers give speeches at the New America Foundation, the left-of-center think tank chaired by Schmidt. Former Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin is now the White House’s deputy CTO, and was publicly (if mildly) reprimanded by the administration for continuing to hash out issues with his former colleagues.
In some corners, the scrutiny of the company’s political ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of their products, and because of Google’s pledges not to misuse the information still ring true to many.
But unease has been growing. Thirty seven state Attorneys General are demanding answers from the company after Google hoovered up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks as it snapped pictures for its Street View project. (The company swears the incident was an accident.)
“Assurances from the likes of Google that the company can be trusted to respect consumers’ privacy because its corporate motto is ‘don’t be evil’ have been shown by recent events such as the ‘Wi-Spy’ debacle to be unwarranted,” long-time corporate gadfly John M. Simpson told a Congressional hearing in a prepared statement. Any business dealings with the CIA’s investment arm are unlikely to make critics like him more comfortable.
But Steven Aftergood, a critical observer of the intelligence community from his perch at the Federation of American Scientists, isn’t worried about the Recorded Future deal. Yet.
“To me, whether this is troublesome or not depends on the degree of transparency involved. If everything is aboveboard — from contracts to deliverables — I don’t see a problem with it,” he told Danger Room by e-mail. “But if there are blank spots in the record, then they will be filled with public skepticism or worse, both here and abroad, and not without reason.”
Photo: AP/Charles Dharapak


Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/...z0v6pbAg9n

Related video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImhVpC-G_jg&feature=player_embedded#!

Isn't it cute how the sound track features indigenous music? :pcguru:

[Keith Millea]

Can I just give a BIG HELLO to the spookies who are watching us?

What Up Dudes and Dudettes!!!!

:hello:

[Jan Klimkowski]

This sounds like a deep black project, probably in covert development and use for a decade or two, which some of those spooky and infinitely greedy private contractors now want to make a profit on.

The visible, commercial, version will probably be a junior and truncated variant of the secret Ba‘al Zebûb incarnation.

[Ed Jewett]

These cats are experts at predicting the future. All the data is dumped into an underground city of Cray supercomputers, tumbled at low heat for a minute or too, sprayed with repeated mistings of focus group surveys and small "exercises", given over to some Team B wanna-bes to fool around with for a while, fed through the industrial capacity steam iron of repeated simulations, and studied at length with some kind of automated orient-observe-decide-act software. With the ability to re-cycle repetitively at extremely high speed, they get to the point where they know just where to "press", just how to tweak, and what anyone else is gonna do in any set of circumstances.

Knowing that, they not only predict the future: they invent it to their liking.

:wavey:

[Ed Jewett]

One of the Fastest-Growing Businesses on the Internet: Spying on Internet Users

July 31st, 2010 The piece provides an interactive graphic to explain what you can do to counter this advertiser surveillance stuff, but nowhere does the word AdBlockPlus appear. Woops. *chuckle* This will block most ads from loading in the first place. (Yes, AdBlockPlus blocks ads on Cryptogon.)
I like Ghostery because it’s easy to use, but NoScript is much more powerful/cumbersome.
I mainly use this stuff to conserve bandwidth. Getting into a lather about this, in terms of privacy, is somewhat silly because none of this does anything to protect you from the surveillance that’s occurring on the wire by ISPs and governments. Go ahead and block this stuff if it makes you feel better, or helps you conserve bandwidth, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that you are hiding anything from your ISP or your government, where the genuinely terrifying surveillance occurs, by using these methods. You would have to take much more extreme measures to actually maintain your privacy online if the enemy is a government, or a corporation that is colluding with a government.
A quick note on Flash:
Flash is a bandwidth hog (my main concern) and it’s pretty insidious from a privacy perspective. I use Flashblock to block all Flash by default. If there’s a Flash element on a page that I want to see, I only allow that element to load. It’s very simple and fast to use.
Via: Wall Street Journal:
One of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found, is the business of spying on Internet users.
The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.
The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none.
Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them.
These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.
The new technologies are transforming the Internet economy. Advertisers once primarily bought ads on specific Web pages—a car ad on a car site. Now, advertisers are paying a premium to follow people around the Internet, wherever they go, with highly specific marketing messages.
It’s rarely a coincidence when you see Web ads for products that match your interests. WSJ’s Christina Tsuei explains how advertisers use cookies to track your online habits.
In between the Internet user and the advertiser, the Journal identified more than 100 middlemen—tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks—competing to meet the growing demand for data on individual behavior and interests.

[Peter Lemkin]

JUAN GONZALEZ: Investors at the CIA and Google are both backing a company that claims to represent the next phase of intelligence gathering, according to a report from Wired. It’s called Recorded Future, and it monitors tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts in real time in order to find patterns, events and relationships that may predict the future. Google has done business with America’s spy agencies before, but this seems to be the first time the CIA and Google have funded the same startup at the same time.

The report comes on the heels of a new opinion poll released by the nonpartisan group Consumer Watchdog that shows nearly two-thirds of Americans are troubled by what’s being called Google’s "Wi-Spy" scandal. Wi-Spy refers to revelations that Google’s Street View cars operating in some thirty countries snooped on private Wi-Fi networks over the last three years. Google has admitted that its cars recorded communications from unencrypted home Wi-Fi networks as they photographed people’s homes for Google’s Street View.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more, we’re joined now by two guests. Here in New York, Noah Shachtman’s with us. He’s contributing editor at Wired magazine and editor of its national security blog, ""http://www.wired.com/dangerroom">Danger Room," where he broke the story about Google and the CIA both investing in Recorded Future. And we’re joined in Los Angeles by John Simpson, director of Consumer Watchdog’s Inside Google project. He’s calling for congressional hearings into the Google Wi-Spy scandal.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Noah, let’s start with you. Just lay out what this relationship is. There may be people who don’t even know that Street View of Google, that you can go down the streets of New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and see people’s houses. And what else did they record?

NOAH SCHACHTMAN: Right, so, you know, Google—we sort of make an implicit bargain with Google, right? Google reads our email to deliver advertisements. They look at how we’re traveling from point A to point B as they—as we use Google Maps. They look at our searches as we use Google Search. So we make—they read all that information, but we make a bargain with them that they’re not going to do anything too bad with it, that they’re going to observe their “don’t be evil” mantra. And that’s why this latest business arrangement is kind of troubling.

AMY GOODMAN: John Simpson, go further with the Street View and what you found with Wi-Spy.

JOHN SIMPSON: Sure. What most people, I think, realized was that indeed these trucks and vans were taking photographs, but it then developed that they were recording data from open Wi-Fi networks and gathering other information about Wi-Fi networks as they went along. Initially, Google said that they were just locating the networks. And then they said, “Oh, my gosh! We made a mistake. We were actually gathering data,” which seems tremendously disingenuous when you—

AMY GOODMAN: Explain exactly what you mean when you say they’re—

JOHN SIMPSON: —learn that they in fact patented the—

AMY GOODMAN: John, explain exactly what you mean when you say there weren’t just taking pictures, but they were gathering data from the Wi-Fi networks as they passed your house.

JOHN SIMPSON: Well, sure, if you—if you have a Wi-Fi network and you’re sending email messages over it, passwords are going through it when you log on to websites, any of that sort of communications could be sucked up by their Wi-Spy snooping. And not only would it be sucked up, it was recorded on their servers. So there are parts of people’s personal communication that they have in their server network. And what they’re doing with that information is part of the problem. No one from Google has said why they were gathering it, what they intended to do with it, and what they have done with it. They’ve essentially said, “Trust us. We’re the company that believes 'don’t be evil.'”

JUAN GONZALEZ: And when you say they’re storing it in their servers, one of the amazing things to me has been, as I’ve learned more about Google, that they virtually have created these huge tank farms all around the United States where they are storing all this data, and they’re collecting basically more information on the American people and on—in the world than practically any other company right now.

Noah Shachtman, I’m particularly interested in this issue of this new company, Recorded Future. How exactly will—how exactly is Recorded Future working? What are they doing with the information they’re gathering now for both the CIA—with CIA investment and with Google investment?

NOAH SCHACHTMAN: So, Recorded Future is a company that strips out from web pages the sort of who, what, when, where, why—sort of who’s involved, you know, where are they going, what kind of events are they going to. And the idea is to find hidden links between actors that might not necessarily have visible links between them. So, for example, if I’m going to Aruba and there happens to be, I don’t know, you know, a terrorism conference in Aruba, perhaps I’m going to that terrorism conference. That’s sort of the idea.

AMY GOODMAN: And how is CIA and Google working together?

NOAH SCHACHTMAN: So, most people don’t realize that the intelligence agencies have an investment arm. It’s called In-Q-Tel. And they invest money in promising companies, both to make a little cash and also to deliver those promising technologies to the intelligence community. So, in the early part of this decade, for example, In-Q-Tel invested in a company called Keyhole. Keyhole was then bought by Google in 2004 and became the basis of Google Earth, which is now how we can look at all those satellite cameras and what eventually became the basis for the Street View project, right? And what Street View is, is it’s part of Google Maps. It’s a way of—instead of looking at how you get from point A to point B, it’s a way to actually see the streets that you’re navigating. And so, when Google was taking pictures to develop that sort of 3-D view of the streets you travel on, that’s when it got into trouble collecting this Wi-Fi information. So that’s how it kind of all ties together.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, there’s a higher-level, much larger secret intelligence agency, and it’s the National Security Agency.

NOAH SCHACHTMAN: Right. So, Google, its relationship with the NSA is unclear, as most things with the NSA are unclear. We know that they’ve done business together before. We know that Google sold them some products before, some servers. And we also know—excuse me—or we believe we know, that when Google suffered a pretty vicious hack attack earlier this year, it turned to the NSA. It turned to sort of the information security specialists of the NSA to help them out and try to figure out what was going on. Now, it gets a little bit complicated because that side of the NSA is not quite as black hat as the side that spies on us. There’s actually kind of two divisions within the NSA, one that’s relatively benign and one that’s relatively not benign. But it’s still—It’s yet another example of how Google and the country’s intelligence agencies are starting to get closer and closer together.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Have there been any attempts in other countries to begin to place limits on some of this cooperation between Google and—or their being able to use what they’re doing here in the United States, has spread to other countries?

NOAH SCHACHTMAN: You know, the answer, I’m sure, is yes, but I don’t have details, I’m sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me ask John Simpson, what are you calling on Congress to do?

JOHN SIMPSON: Well, we want to know exactly what Google was trying to do when it sucked up all this personal communications when it was doing the Wi-Spying. And we’re also very concerned about precisely the nature of this growing relationship between our intelligence agencies and Google. And we think that both of those things need to be a subject of a hearing. Just like Tony Hayward came in and had to explain the Gulf oil spill, we think that Chairman Eric Schmidt needs to be called before the appropriate committee to explain what I think is the biggest information spill, if you will, in history. It’s virtually wiretapping, what they were doing with the Wi-Fi networks. And they need to be called on the carpet to account for that and why they did it. And so far there’s been no adequate explanation of what they were trying to do.

AMY GOODMAN: Who was championing this in Congress?

JOHN SIMPSON: The more troubling aspect, too—

AMY GOODMAN: John, who was championing this in Congress? And what is Google’s response, not to mention the intelligence agency, if you can gather this, to your Inside Google project at Consumer Watchdog?

JOHN SIMPSON: Well, Google has not been our best friend, you could say. In fact, early on, when we put out a press release they didn’t like, they actually tried to get our charitable funding revoked—contacted the Rose Foundation and suggested we ought not to be funded, which was not very good. In Congress, so far, we have not had any one respond to the call. We believe that the appropriate committee would be Commerce and the House Energy and Commerce Committee, possibly House Judiciary Committee, because they have jurisdiction over wiretap legislation. So, we’re still optimistic, particularly when, in the light of our poll, we had overwhelming support for some kind of a hearing from the voters that we polled. We think possibly when the Congresspeople are back in their districts, maybe they will indeed hear some of the concern from their constituents. So we’re optimistic that there will be a hearing.

AMY GOODMAN: John Simpson, I want to thank you for being with us, director of Inside Google project at Consumer Watchdog. And also thanks to Noah Shachtman, contributing editor at Wired Magazine.

White House visitor logs show that Alan Davidson, Google’s director of public policy and government affairs, has had at least three meetings with officials of the National Security Council since the beginning of last year. And John Simpson also has written that based on today’s Washington Post series, it appears Google holds classified US government contracts to supply search and geospatial information to the US government. That series, they did last week.

[Jan Klimkowski]

There are mundane and geopolitical implications:

Serial lead thief who used Google Earth to identify historic buildings is jailed
A serial thief has been jailed for stealing £100,000 worth of lead from historic buildings he pinpointed using Google Earth.

(snip)

Campaigners Privacy International launched a formal complaint with the Information Commissioner to close down Street View temporarily while a full investigation was carried out.

As a result of Berge's case, they are also focusing their attention on Google Earth, for which, unlike Street View, there is no established way for householders to opt out and have images of their property removed.

Privacy International director Simon Davies said: 'Google needs to work quickly before there is a repetition of this problem because it could very well be the first of many.'

A Google spokesman said: ' Criminals use getaway cars but you don't blame the car-maker. The benefits of this technology far outweigh the small number of people who might misuse it.'
The Information Commissioner's office declined to comment.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...z0vehf2SWJ

Anybody know how to withdraw permission for Google to make images of your home/street available on Google Earth?

[Jan Klimkowski]

See link below for opting out of Google Street View:

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/forums/index....&forumid=2

[Peter Lemkin]

The internet and telecom giants Verizon and Google have reportedly reached an agreement to impose a tiered system for accessing the internet. The deal would enable Verizon to charge for quicker access to online content over wireless devices, a violation of the concept of net neutrality that calls for equal access to all services. The deal comes amidst closed-door meetings between the Federal Communications Commission and major telecom giants on crafting new regulations. In a statement, the media reform group Free Press criticized the Google-Verizon deal, saying, "The financial interests of Google appear to have finally trumped its belief in policies to preserve the open Internet...The Federal Communications Commission cannot stand by and allow the biggest market players to create two Internets."

.....guess which tier seekers of this website would be....and which those who seek Fox [Faux] news or mud-wrestling, war movies promoting war, propaganda-friendly sites .....et al.:bebored:

[Ed Jewett]

There is always the availability of samizdat (carbon copies, or mimeographed, or photocopied, or printed matter, or audio recordings), or wandering minstrels and night watchmen.