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How Google and the Big Tech Companies Are Helping Maintain America’s Empire
August 19, 2014 |
Silicon Valley has been in the media spotlight for its role in gentrifying and raising rents in San Francisco, helping the NSA spy on
American citizens, and lack of racial and gender diversity. Despite
that, Silicon Valley still has a reputation for benevolence, innocence
and progressivism. Hence Google’s phrase, “Don’t be evil.” A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that, even after the Snowden leaks, 53% of those surveyed had high confidence in the tech industry. The tech industry is not seen as evil as, say, Wall Street or Big Oil.
One aspect of Silicon Valley that would damage this reputation has
not been scrutinized enough—its involvement in American militarism.
Silicon Valley’s ties to the National Security State extend beyond the
NSA’s PRISM program. Through numerous partnerships and contracts with
the U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies, Silicon
Valley is part of the American military-industrial complex. Google sells
its technologies to the U.S. military, FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA, NGA, and
other intelligence and law enforcement agencies, has managers with
backgrounds in military and intelligence work, and partners with defense
contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Amazon designed a
cloud computing system that will be used by the CIA and every other
intelligence agency. The CIA-funded tech company Palantir sells its
data-mining and analysis software to the U.S. military, CIA, LAPD, NYPD,
and other security agencies. These technologies have several war-zone
and intelligence-gathering applications.
First, a little background to explain how the military has been
involved with Silicon Valley since its conception as a technology
center. Silicon Valley’s roots date back to World War II, according to a presentation
by researcher and entrepreneur Steve Blank. During the war, the U.S.
government funded a secret lab at Harvard University to research how to
disrupt Germany’s radar-guided electronic air defense system. The
solution — drop aluminum foil in front of German radars to jam them.
This birthed modern electronic warfare and signals intelligence. The
head of that lab was Stanford engineering professor Fred Terman who,
after World War II, took 11 staffers from that lab to create Stanford’s
Electronic Research Lab (ERL), which received funding from the military.
Stanford also had an Applied Electronics Lab(AEL) that did classified
research in jammers and electronic intelligence for the military.
In fact, much of AEL’s research aided the U.S. war in Vietnam. This
made the lab a target for student antiwar protesters who nonviolently
occupied the lab in April 1969 and demanded an end to classified
research at Stanford. After nearly a year of teach-ins, protests, and
violent clashes with the police, Stanford effectively eliminated war-related classified research at the university.
The ERL did research in and designed microwave tubes and electronic
receivers and jammers. This helped the U.S. military and intelligence
agencies spy on the Soviet Union and jam their air defense systems.
Local tube companies and contractors developed the technologies based on
that research. Some researchers from ERL also founded microwave
companies in the area. This created a boon of microwave and electronic
startups that ultimately formed the Silicon Valley known today.
Don’t be evil, Google
Last year, the first Snowden documents revealed that
Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and other major tech companies provided the
NSA access to their users’ data through the PRISM program.
All the major tech companies denied knowledge of PRISM and put up an
adversarial public front to government surveillance. However, Al Jazeera
America’s Jason Leopold obtained, via FOIA request, two sets of email communications
between former NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives
Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt. The communications, according to Leopold,
suggest “a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and
the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass” and that
“not all cooperation was under pressure.” In the emails, Alexander and
the Google executives discussed information sharing related to national
security purposes.
But PRISM is the tip of the iceberg. Several tech companies are Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and other major tech companies provided the
NSA access to their users’ data through the PRISM program.
All the major tech companies denied knowledge of PRISM and put up an
adversarial public front to government surveillance. However, Al Jazeera
America’s Jason Leopold obtained, via FOIA request, two sets of email communications
between former NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives
Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt. The communications, according to Leopold,
suggest “a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and
the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass” and that
“not all cooperation was under pressure.” In the emails, Alexander and
the Google executives discussed information sharing related to national
security purposes.
deeply in bed with the U.S. military, intelligence agencies, and defense
contractors. One very notable example is Google. Google markets and sells
its technology to the U.S. military and several intelligence and law
enforcement agencies, such as the FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA, and NGA.
Google has a contract with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) that allows the agency to use Google Earth Builder. The NGA provides
geospatial intelligence, such as satellite imagery and mapping, to the
military and other intelligence agencies like the NSA. In fact, NGA
geospatial intelligence helped the military and CIA locate and kill Osama bin Laden.
This contract allows the NGA to utilize Google’s mapping technology for
geospatial intelligence purposes. Google’s Official Enterprise Blog announced
that “Google’s work with NGA marks one of the first major government
geospatial cloud initiatives, which will enable NGA to use Google Earth
Builder to host its geospatial data and information. This allows NGA to
customize Google Earth & Maps to provide maps and globes to support
U.S. government activities, including: U.S. national security; homeland
security; environmental impact and monitoring; and humanitarian
assistance, disaster response and preparedness efforts.”
Google Earth’s technology “got its start in the intelligence
community, in a CIA-backed firm called Keyhole,” which Google purchased
in 2004, according to the Washington Post. PandoDaily reporter Yasha Levine, who has extensively reported on Google’s ties to the military and intelligence community, points out
that Keyhole’s “main product was an application called EarthViewer,
which allowed users to fly and move around a virtual globe as if they
were in a video game.”
In 2003, a year before Google bought Keyhole, the company was on the
verge of bankruptcy, until it was saved by In-Q-Tel, a CIA-funded
venture capital firm. The CIA worked with other intelligence agencies to
fit Keyhole’s systems to its needs. According to the CIA Museum page,
“The finished product transformed the way intelligence officers
interacted with geographic information and earth imagery. Users could
now easily combine complicated sets of data and imagery into clear,
realistic visual representations. Users could ‘fly’ from space to street
level seamlessly while interactively exploring layers of information
including roads, schools, businesses, and demographics.”
How much In-Q-Tel invested into Keyhole is classified. However,
Levine writes that “the bulk of the funds didn’t come from the CIA’s
intelligence budget — as they normally do with In-Q-Tel — but from the
NGA, which provided the money on behalf of the entire ‘Intelligence
Community.’ As a result, equity in Keyhole was held by two major
intelligence agencies.” Shortly after In-Q-Tel bought Keyhole, the NGA
(then known as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency or NIMA) announced
it immediately used Keyhole’s technology to support U.S. troops in Iraq
at the 2003-2011 war. The next year, Google purchased Keyhole and used
its technology to develop Google Earth.
Four years after Google purchased Keyhole, in 2008, Google and the
NGA purchased GeoEye-1, the world’s highest-resolution satellite, from
the company GeoEye. The NGA paid
for half of the satellite’s $502 million development and committed to
purchasing its imagery. Because of a government restriction, Google gets
lower-resolution images but still retains exclusive access to the
satellite’s photos. GeoEye later merged into DigitalGlobe in 2013.
Google’s relationship to the National Security State extends beyond
contracts with the military and intelligence agencies. Many managers in
Google’s public sector division come from the U.S. military and
intelligence community, according to one of Levine’s reports.
Michele R. Weslander-Quaid is one example. She became Google’s
Innovation Evangelist and Chief Technology Officer of the company’s
public sector division in 2011. Before joining Google, since 9/11,
Weslander-Quaid worked
throughout the military and intelligence world in positions at the
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Office of the Director of
National Intelligence, National Reconnaissance Office, and later, the
Office of the Secretary of Defense. Levine noted that Weslander-Quaid
also “toured combat zones in both Iraq and Afghanistan in order to see the tech needs of the military first-hand.”
Throughout her years working in the intelligence community,
Weslander-Quaid “shook things up by dropping archaic software and
hardware and convincing teams to collaborate via web tools” and “treated
each agency like a startup,” according to a 2014 Entrepreneur Magazine profile.
She was a major advocate for web tools and cloud-based software and was
responsible for implementing them at the agencies she worked at. At
Google, Weslander-Quaid’s job is to meet “with agency directors to map
technological paths they want to follow, and helps Google employees
understand what’s needed to work with public-sector clients.”
Weslander-Quaid told Entrepreneur, “A big part of my job is to translate
between Silicon Valley speak and government dialect” and “act as a
bridge between the two cultures.”
Another is Shannon Sullivan,
head of defense and intelligence at Google. Before working at Google,
Sullivan served in the U.S. Air Force working at various intelligence
positions. First as senior military advisor and then in the Air Force’s
C4ISR Acquisition and Test; Space Operations, Foreign Military Sales
unit. C4ISR stands for “Command, Control, Communications, Computers,
Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance.” Sullivan left his Air
Force positions to work as Defense Director for BAE Systems, a
British-based arms and defense company, and then Army and Air Force
COCOMs Director at Oracle. His last project at Google was “setting up a Google Apps ‘transformational’ test program to supply 50,000 soldiers in the US Army and DoD with a customized Google App Universe”, according to Levine.
Google not only has a revolving door with the Pentagon and
intelligence community, it also partners with defense and intelligence
contractors. Levine writes
that “in recent years, Google has increasingly taken the role of
subcontractor: selling its wares to military and intelligence agencies
by partnering with established military contractors.”
The company’s partners include two of the biggest American defense contractors — Lockheed Martin, an aerospace, defense, and information security company, and Northrop Grumman, an aerospace and defense technology company. Both Lockheed and Northrop produce
aircraft, missiles and defense systems, naval and radar systems,
unmanned systems, satellites, information technology, and other
defense-related technologies. In 2011, Lockheed Martin made
$36.3 billion in arms sales, while Northrop Grumman made $21.4 billion.
Lockheed has a major office in Sunnyvale, California, right in the
middle of Silicon Valley. Moreover, Lockheed was also involved in interrogating prisoners
in Iraq and Guantanamo, through its purchase of Sytex Corporation and
the information technology unit of Affiliated Computer Services (ACS),
both of whom directly interrogated detainees.
Google worked with Lockheed to design geospatial technologies. In
2007, describing the company as “Google’s partner,” the Washington Post reported
that Lockheed “demonstrated a Google Earth product that it helped
design for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s work in Iraq.
These included displays of key regions of the country and outlined Sunni
and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, as well as U.S. and Iraqi military
bases in the city. Neither Lockheed nor Google would say how the
geospatial agency uses the data.” Meanwhile, Google has a $1-million contract with Northrop to install a Google Earth plug-in.
Both Lockheed and Northrop manufacture and sell unmanned systems, also known as drones. Lockheed’s drones include the Stalker, which can stay airborne for 48 hours; Desert Hawk III, a small reconnaissance drone used by British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the RQ-170 Sentinel,
a high-altitude stealth reconnaissance drone used by the U.S. Air Force
and CIA. RQ-170s have been used in Afghanistan and for the raidthat killed Osama bin Laden. One American RQ-170 infamously crashed in Iran while on a surveillance mission over the country in late 2011.
Northrop Grumman built the RQ-4 Global Hawk, a high-altitude surveillance drone used by the Air Force and Navy. Northrop is also building a new stealth drone for the Air Force called the RQ-180, which may be operational by 2015. In 2012, Northrop sold $1.2 billion worth of drones to South Korea.
Google is also cashing in on the drone market. It recently purchased
drone manufacturer Titan Aerospace, which makes high-altitude,
solar-powered drones that can “stay in the air for years without needing
to land,” reported the Wire. Facebook entered into talks to buy the company a month before Google made the purchase.
Last December, Google purchased Boston Dynamics, a major engineering
and robotics company that receives funding from the military for its
projects. According to
the Guardian, “Funding for the majority of the most advanced Boston
Dynamics robots comes from military sources, including the US Defence
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the US army, navy and
marine corps.” Some of these DARPA-funded projects include BigDog, Legged Squad Support System (LS3), Cheetah, WildCat, and Atlas, all
of which are autonomous, walking robots. Altas is humanoid, while
BigDog, LS3, Cheetah, WildCat are animal-like quadrupeds. In addition to
Boston Dynamics, Google purchased
eight robotics companies in 2013—Industrial Perception, Redwood
Robotics, Meka, Schaft, Holomni, Bot & Dolly, and Autofuss. Google
has been tight-lipped about the specifics of its plans for the robotics
companies. But some sources told the
New York Times that Google’s robotics efforts are not aimed at
consumers but rather manufacturing, such as automating supply chains.
Google’s “Enterprise Government” page also lists military/intelligence contractors Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and Blackbird Technologies
among the companies it partners with. In particularly, Blackbird is a
military contractor that supplies locators for “the covert ‘tagging,
tracking and locating’ of suspected enemies,” according to
Wired. Its customers include the U.S. Navy and U.S. Special Operations
Command. SOCOM oversees the U.S. military’s special operations forces
units, such as the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, Army Rangers, and Green
Berets. Blackbird even sent some employees as armed operatives on secret
missions with special operations forces. The company’s vice president
is Cofer Black, a former CIA operative who ran the agency’s
Counterterrorist Center before 9/11.
Palantir and the military
Many others tech companies are working with military and intelligence agencies. Amazon recently developed
a $600 million cloud computing system for the CIA that will also
service all 17 intelligence agencies. Both Amazon and the CIA have said
little to nothing about the system’s capabilities.
Palantir, which is based in Palo Alto, California produces and sells data-mining and analysis software. Its customers include
the U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Special Operations Command, CIA, NSA, FBI,
Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Homeland Security, National
Counterterrorism Center, LAPD, and NYPD. In California, the Northern
California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), one of 72 federally run
fusion centers built across the nation since 9/11, uses Palantir software to collect and analyze license plate photos.
While Google sells its wares to whomever in order to make a profit,
Palantir, as a company, isn’t solely dedicated to profit-maximizing.
Counterterrorism has been part of the company’s mission since it began.
The company
was founded in 2004 by investor Alex Karp, who is the company’s chief
executive, and billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel. In 2003, Thiel
came up with the idea to develop software to fight terrorism based on
PayPal’s fraud recognition software. The CIA’s In-Q-Tel helped jumpstart
the company by investing $2 million. The rest of the company’s $30
million start-up costs were funded by Thiel and his venture capital
fund.
Palantir’s software has “a user-friendly search tool that can scan
multiple data sources at once, something previous search tools couldn’t
do,” according to a 2009 Wall Street Journal profile.
The software fills gaps in intelligence “by using a ‘tagging’ technique
similar to that used by the search functions on most Web sites.
Palantir tags, or categorizes, every bit of data separately, whether it
be a first name, a last name or a phone number.” Analysts can quickly
categorize information as it comes in. The software’s ability to scan
and categorize multiple sources of incoming data helps analysts connect
the dots among large and different pools of information — signals
intelligence, human intelligence, geospatial intelligence, and much
more. All this data is collected and analyzed in Palantir’s system. This
makes it useful for war-related, intelligence, and law enforcement purposes. That is why so many military, police, and intelligence agencies want Palantir’s software.
U.S. troops in Afghanistan who used Palantir’s software, particularly
the Marines and SOCOM, found it very helpful for their missions.
Commanders liked Palantir’s ability to direct them at insurgents who
“build and bury homemade bombs, the biggest killer of U.S. troops in
Afghanistan,” the Washington Times reported. A Government Accountability Office report
said Palantir’s software “gained a reputation for being intuitive and
easy to use, while also providing effective tools to link and visualize
data.” Special operations forces found Palantir to be “a highly
effective system for conducting intelligence information analysis and
supporting operations” and “provided flexibility to support mobile,
disconnected users out on patrols or conducting missions.” Many within
the military establishment are pushing to have other branches, such as
the Army, adopt Palantir’s software in order to improve intelligence-sharing.
Palantir’s friends include people from the highest echelons of the
National Security State. Former CIA Director George Tenet and former
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are advisers to Palantir, while
former CIA director Gen. David Petraeus “considers himself a friend of
Palantir CEO Alex Karp”, according to
Forbes. Tenet told Forbes, “I wish I had Palantir when I was director. I
wish we had the tool of its power because it not only slice and dices
today, but it gives you an enormous knowledge management tool to make
connections for analysts that go back five, six, six, eight, 10 years.
It gives you a shot at your data that I don’t think any product that we
had at the time did.”
High-tech militarism
Silicon Valley’s technology has numerous battlefield applications,
which is something the U.S. military notices. Since the global war on
terror began, the military has had a growing need for high-tech
intelligence-gathering and other equipment. “A key challenge facing the
military services is providing users with the capabilities to analyze
the huge amount of intelligence data being collected,” the GAO report
said. The proliferation of drones, counter-insurgency operations,
sophisticated intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance (ISR) systems,
and new technologies and sensors changed how intelligence is used in
counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and counterterrorism
operations in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and other countries.
According to the report, “The need to integrate the large amount of
available intelligence data, including the ability to synthesize
information from different types of intelligence sources (e.g., HUMINT,
SIGINT, GEOINT, and open source), has become increasingly important in
addressing, for example, improvised explosive device threats and
tracking the activities of certain components of the local population.”
This is where Palantir’s software comes in handy. It does what the
military needs — data-mining and intelligence analysis. That is why it
is used by SOCOM and other arms of the National Security State.
Irregular wars against insurgents and terrorist groups present two
problems— finding the enemy and killing them. This is because such
groups know how to mix in with, and are usually part of, the local
population. Robotic weapons, such as drones, present “an asymmetric
solution to an asymmetric problem,” according to a Foster-Miller
executive quoted in P.W. Singer’s book Wired for War. Drones can hover
over a territory for long periods of time and launch a missile at a
target on command without putting American troops in harm’s way, making
them very attractive weapons.
Additionally, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies are increasingly relying on signals intelligence
to solve this problem. Signals intelligence monitors electronic
signals, such as phone calls and conversations, emails, radio or radar
signals, and electronic communications. Intelligence analysts or troops
on the ground will collect and analyze the electronic communications,
along with geospatial intelligence, of adversaries to track their
location, map human behavior, and carry out lethal operations.
Robert Steele, a former Marine, CIA case officer, and current open source intelligence advocate,
explained the utility of signals intelligence. “Signals intelligence
has always relied primarily on seeing the dots and connecting the dots,
not on knowing what the dots are saying. When combined with a history of
the dots, and particularly the dots coming together in meetings, or a
black (anonymous) cell phone residing next to a white (known) cellphone,
such that the black acquires the white identity by extension, it
becomes possible to ‘map’ human activity in relation to weapons caches,
mosques, meetings, etcetera,” he said
in an email interview. Steele added the “only advantage” to signals
intelligence “is that it is very very expensive and leaves a lot of
money on the table for pork and overhead.”
In Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC) commandos combined images from surveillance drones with
the tracking of mobile phone numbers to analyze
insurgent networks. Commandos then used this analysis to locate and
capture or kill their intended targets during raids. Oftentimes,
however, this led to getting the wrong person. Steele added that human
and open source intelligence are “vastly superior to signals
intelligence 95% of the time” but “are underfunded precisely because
they are not expensive and require face to face contact with foreigners,
something the US Government is incompetent at, and Silicon Valley could
care less.”
Capt. Michael Kearns, a retired U.S. and Australian Air Force intelligence officer and former SERE instructor
with experience working in Silicon Valley, explained how digital
information makes it easier for intelligence agencies to collect data.
In an email, he told AlterNet, “Back in the day when the world was
analog, every signal was one signal. Some signals contained a broad band
of information contained within, however, there were no ‘data packets’
embedded within the electromagnetic spectrum. Therefore, collecting a
signal, or a phone conversation, was largely the task of capturing /
decoding / processing some specifically targeted, singular source.
Today, welcome to the digital era. Data ‘packets’ flow as if like water,
with pieces and parts of all things ‘upstream’ contained within.
Therefore, the task today for a digital society is largely one of
collecting everything, so as to fully unwrap and exploit the totality of
the captured data in an almost exploratory manner. And therein lies the
apparent inherently unconstitutional-ness of wholesale collection of
digital data…it’s almost like ‘pre-crime.'”
One modern use of signals intelligence is in the United States’ extrajudicial killing program,
a major component of the global war on terror. The extrajudicial
killing program began during the Bush administration as a means to kill
suspected terrorists around the world without any due process. However,
as Bush focused on the large-occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the
extrajudicial killing program was less emphasized.
The Obama administration continued the war on terror but largely
shifted away from large-scale occupations to emphasizing CIA/JSOC drone
strikes, airstrikes, cruise missile attacks,proxies, and raids by special operations forces
against suspected terrorists and other groups. Obama continued and
expanded Bush’s assassination program, relying on drones and special
operations forces to do the job. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism,
U.S. drone strikes and other covert operations have killed nearly 3,000
to over 4,800 people, including 500 to over 1,000 civilians, in
Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. During Obama’s five years in office, over 2,400 people were killed by U.S. drone strikes. Most of those killed by drone strikes are civilians or low-level fighters and, in Pakistan, only 2 percent were high-level militants. Communities living under drone strikes are regularly terrorized and traumatized by them.
Targeting for drone strikes is based on metadata analysis and
geolocating the cell phone SIM card of a suspected terrorist, according
to a report
by the Intercept. This intelligence is provided by the NSA and given to
the CIA or JSOC which will then carry out the drone strike. However, it
is very common for people in countries like Yemen or Pakistan to hold
multiple SIM cards, hand their cell phones to family and friends, and
groups like the Taliban to randomly hand out SIM cards among their
fighters to confuse trackers.
Since this methodology targets a SIM card linked to a suspect rather
than an actual person, innocent civilians are regularly killed
unintentionally. To ensure the assassination program will continue, the
National Counterterrorism Center developed the “disposition matrix,” a database that continuously adds the names, locations, and associates of suspected terrorists to kill-or-capture lists.
The Defense Department’s 2015 budget proposal requests $495.6 billion, down $0.4 billion from last year, and decreases the Army to around 440,000 to 450,000 troops from the post-9/11 peak of 570,000. But it protects money — $5.1 billion — for cyberwarfare
and special operations forces, giving SOCOM $7.7 billion, a 10 percent
increase from last year, and 69,700 personnel. Thus, these sorts of
operations will likely continue.
As the United States emphasizes cyberwarfare, special operations,
drone strikes, electronic-based forms of intelligence, and other tactics
of irregular warfare to wage perpetual war, sophisticated technology
will be needed. Silicon Valley is the National Security State’s go-to
industry for this purpose.
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