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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

:
: http://russia-insider.com/en/media-criticism/google-morphing-sinister-orwellian-truth-ministry/ri10567

: 5 hours ago

: This article originally appeared at Natural News

: Gone are the days when you could search Google and pull up
: neutral, relevant content appropriate to your search query.
: The search engine giant is reportedly pioneering a new
: search algorithm that will tailor search results not based
: on popularity or accuracy, but rather on what Google itself
: deems to be truthful or untruthful.

: The world's new 'Ministry of Truth, Google believes that
: screening and censoring information requested by its users
: will help avoid 'websites full of misinformation' from
: showing up at the top of the search list. Known as the
: 'Knowledge Vault,' the novel algorithm is described by The
: New American as 'an automated and super-charged version of
: Google's manually compiled fact database called Knowledge
: Graph.'

: Google's Knowledge Graph, in case you didn't know, was the
: search engine's first attempt at becoming a purveyor of
: knowledge rather than just information – a “smart” search
: tool, if you will, designed to enhance the relevancy of
: search results by analyzing various facts, figures, and
: other data appropriate to a user's intended query.

: The Knowledge Vault builds upon this concept, but takes it
: another step further. By sorting through the actual content
: of websites to determine whether or not they fit the
: official narrative for the particular idea or concept
: presented, the Knowledge Vault will act as a type of
: knowledge gatekeeper in censoring out information and
: content deemed to be 'false.'

: '[The Knowledge Vault] promises to let Google answer questions
: like an oracle rather than a search engine, and even to
: turn a new lens on human history,' wrote Hal Hodson for
: NewScientist about the project.
: What you're actually searching for is irrelevant: Google will
: tell you what it wants you to know

: It is this latter statement that's deeply concerning, as
: Google now has the power to literally rewrite history by
: snubbing search content of which the powers that be
: disapprove, while approving only propaganda and other
: misinformation dubbed 'accurate.' This evolution from
: information provider to knowledge developer changes the
: entire nature of Google's purpose as a company.

: Concerning natural health and alternative medicine, Google has
: already written code into its search algorithm that censors
: out 'anti-vaccine' websites, for instance, as well as other
: resources categorized as purveying “misinformation. Using
: the new Knowledge Vault protocol, Google is likely to begin
: censoring other topics as well.

: 'That eerily disconcerting statement becomes ominous when you
: consider that Google has already implemented its new truth
: algorithm for medical searches, with disturbing
: consequences,' writes Rebecca Terrell for The New American.

: 'Truth-according-to-Google means that anti-vaccination
: websites no longer make the cut, despite the fact that
: recently released federal statistics reveal the risk to
: children's health posed by vaccines is overwhelmingly
: greater than that posed by the diseases these medications
: are formulated to combat.'
: Censorship brings scientific progress to a grinding halt

: What this all means for sites like NaturalNews, InfoWars, and
: the many other independent news outlets that regularly
: challenge the status quo is that our content may soon be
: declared 'inaccurate' by Google and forced down to a lower
: ranking as a result. Even though our collective readership
: is exploding because people are tired of the lies from the
: mainstream media, Google's new algorithm threatens to
: stifle this growth by hiding the truth from search results.

: 'It could make it more difficult for bright young people to
: bring about the next revolution in science,' says
: University of Maryland professor Jim Purtillo about the
: plan. 'After all, most of today's established science came
: about because someone challenged the herd mentality of
: yesterday.'

: ---

: IZAKOVIC