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Re: How the CIA Made Google
Hello Izy, so...BOYCOTT GOOGLE
(1. To combine against in a policy of nonintercourse; to withhold social or business intercourse from, in disapproval or coercion.
2. To refrain by concerted action from using or purchasing. :
Noah Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition, 1946)
Regards, D
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: (snip)
: Google: seeded by the Pentagon
: In 1994 — the same year the Highlands Forum was
: founded under the stewardship of the Office of the
: Secretary of Defense, the ONA, and DARPA — two
: young PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and
: Larry Page, made their breakthrough on the first automated
: web crawling and page ranking application. That application
: remains the core component of what eventually became
: Google’s search service. Brin and Page had performed their
: work with funding from the Digital Library Initiative
: (DLI), a multi-agency programme of the National Science
: Foundation (NSF), NASA and DARPA.
: But that’s just one side of the story.
: Throughout the development of the search engine, Sergey Brin
: reported regularly and directly to two people who were not
: Stanford faculty at all: Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr.
: Rick Steinheiser. Both were representatives of a sensitive
: US intelligence community research programme on information
: security and data-mining.
: Thuraisingham is currently the Louis A. Beecherl distinguished
: professor and executive director of the Cyber Security
: Research Institute at the University of Texas, Dallas, and
: a sought-after expert on data-mining, data management and
: information security issues. But in the 1990s, she worked
: for the MITRE Corp., a leading US defense contractor, where
: she managed the Massive Digital Data Systems initiative, a
: project sponsored by the NSA, CIA, and the Director of
: Central Intelligence, to foster innovative research in
: information technology.
: “We funded Stanford University through the computer scientist
: Jeffrey Ullman, who had several promising graduate students
: working on many exciting areas,” Prof. Thuraisingham told
: me. “One of them was Sergey Brin, the founder of Google.
: The intelligence community’s MDDS program essentially
: provided Brin seed-funding, which was supplemented by many
: other sources, including the private sector.”
: This sort of funding is certainly not unusual, and Sergey
: Brin’s being able to receive it by being a graduate student
: at Stanford appears to have been incidental. The Pentagon
: was all over computer science research at this time. But it
: illustrates how deeply entrenched the culture of Silicon
: Valley is in the values of the US intelligence community.
: In an extraordinary document hosted by the website of the
: University of Texas, Thuraisingham recounts that from 1993
: to 1999, “the Intelligence Community [IC] started a program
: called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) that I was
: managing for the Intelligence Community when I was at the
: MITRE Corporation.” The program funded 15 research efforts
: at various universities, including Stanford. Its goal was
: developing “data management technologies to manage several
: terabytes to petabytes of data,” including for “query
: processing, transaction management, metadata management,
: storage management, and data integration.”
: At the time, Thuraisingham was chief scientist for data and
: information management at MITRE, where she led team
: research and development efforts for the NSA, CIA, US Air
: Force Research Laboratory, as well as the US Army’s Space
: and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) and
: Communications and Electronic Command (CECOM). She went on
: to teach courses for US government officials and defense
: contractors on data-mining in counter-terrorism.
: In her University of Texas article, she attaches the copy of
: an abstract of the US intelligence community’s MDDS program
: that had been presented to the “Annual Intelligence
: Community Symposium” in 1995. The abstract reveals that the
: primary sponsors of the MDDS programme were three agencies:
: the NSA, the CIA’s Office of Research & Development,
: and the intelligence community’s Community Management Staff
: (CMS) which operates under the Director of Central
: Intelligence. Administrators of the program, which provided
: funding of around 3–4 million dollars per year for 3–4
: years, were identified as Hal Curran (NSA), Robert Kluttz
: (CMS), Dr. Claudia Pierce (NSA), Dr. Rick Steinheiser
: (ORD — standing for the CIA’s Office of
: Research and Devepment), and Dr. Thuraisingham herself.
: Thuraisingham goes on in her article to reiterate that this
: joint CIA-NSA program partly funded Sergey Brin to develop
: the core of Google, through a grant to Stanford managed by
: Brin’s supervisor Prof. Jeffrey D. Ullman: “In fact, the
: Google founder Mr. Sergey Brin was partly funded by this
: program while he was a PhD student at Stanford. He together
: with his advisor Prof. Jeffrey Ullman and my colleague at
: MITRE, Dr. Chris Clifton [Mitre’s chief scientist in IT],
: developed the Query Flocks System which produced solutions
: for mining large amounts of data stored in databases. I
: remember visiting Stanford with Dr. Rick Steinheiser from
: the Intelligence Community and Mr. Brin would rush in on
: roller blades, give his presentation and rush out. In fact
: the last time we met in September 1998, Mr. Brin
: demonstrated to us his search engine which became Google
: soon after.”
: Brin and Page officially incorporated Google as a company in
: September 1998, the very month they last reported to
: Thuraisingham and Steinheiser. ‘Query Flocks’ was also part
: of Google’s patented ‘PageRank’ search system, which Brin
: developed at Stanford under the CIA-NSA-MDDS programme, as
: well as with funding from the NSF, IBM and Hitachi. That
: year, MITRE’s Dr. Chris Clifton, who worked under
: Thuraisingham to develop the ‘Query Flocks’ system,
: co-authored a paper with Brin’s superviser, Prof. Ullman,
: and the CIA’s Rick Steinheiser. Titled ‘Knowledge Discovery
: in Text,’ the paper was presented at an academic
: conference.
: “The MDDS funding that supported Brin was significant as far
: as seed-funding goes, but it was probably outweighed by the
: other funding streams,” said Thuraisingham. “The duration
: of Brin’s funding was around two years or so. In that
: period, I and my colleagues from the MDDS would visit
: Stanford to see Brin and monitor his progress every three
: months or so. We didn’t supervise exactly, but we did want
: to check progress, point out potential problems and suggest
: ideas. In those briefings, Brin did present to us on the
: query flocks research, and also demonstrated to us versions
: of the Google search engine.”
: More here: http://wp.me/p5GMtX-ls