Slashdot Mirror
Clandestine Operations at Google
eldavojohn writes "The San Francisco Chronicle is running an interesting story about Google's involvement with the CIA, NSA, NOAA and several other agencies. This has been speculated before although now Google seems to have several contracts open with several agencies. From the article, "When the nation's intelligence agencies wanted a computer network to better share information about everything from al Qaeda to North Korea, they turned to a big name in the technology industry to supply some of the equipment: Google Inc. The Mountain View company sold the agencies servers for searching documents, marking a small victory for the company and its little-known effort to do business with the government. '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.""
The NSA has always kept a close relationship with corporations. See Bamford's Body of Secrets for plenty of examples. They aren't even limited to wooing American companies, as they had a long hold on a Swiss crypto equipment manufacturer. Whatever enticements they offer, they seem to work.
I've oft heard the conspiracy theory that Google was set up just to develop better resources for government privacy violations. Has any elaborated version of this ever been formally published?
I don't see anything clandestine about a software/hardware company providing software/hardware solutions to the Federal government, especially when said information is printed in a nationally recognized newspaper and linked on a major news aggregator.
It seems more like an opportunity to get the Google haters and rumor mongers fired up.
Oh no! Google is working with the CIA, the NSA, and the NOAA... wait what?
Almost had the evil government owns Google effect there, unless we are suggesting that Google now controls the weather as well.
Never, ever, in my wildest dreams would I have thought that Google, the company that through their "free" services of e-mail, realtime chat, calendars, spreadsheets, economy, planning, blogging etc. hoards immense amounts of personal data about an enormous group of people would ever deal with agencies with a grande interest in that very same data.
*ring ring*... *ring ring*... oh, there's someone on the FU**ING CLUEPHONE FOR YOU.
but anything in every article has the citation needed tag.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
"interesting story" = "warmed over press release"? Zzzzz.....
Hell, I remember years ago when my father, who works for the IRS, mentioned that Google had given the IRS a trial run of a new search system they designed for their internal network. He said that the old system they had been using was so horrible and inefficient that the difference was like night and day. Of course, the management eventually decided that Google's solution was too expensive and so to this day they are still using some horrible, antiquated search system.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
The word "Clandestine" being associated with NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) seems a bit ... weird. I can't seem them spying on or killing someone for .. well anything.
"Not Evil" my ass -- what do *you* call a weather machine!
I guess it depends on what the definition of "evil" is. If the NSA can get to Google, I'm sure they can get to Merriam-Webster. Have they redefined "treason" as well?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Jesus, get a grip.
What part of:
"The Mountain View company sold the agencies servers for searching documents"
didn't you understand?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
so the Google wetworks division isn't about water fountains?
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
Google is the best in search (currently). They provide appliances that can be used on closed networks (for example classified). There are MANY applications for these devices. The US Government is a BIG customer and can be a good partner. Despite what you may read here, not all the US Government does is evil....
Google sells an enterprise search appliance. It's not cheap. "Starts at $30,000 for searching up to 500,000 documents", for a 2U server. That's probably what this is about.
What a waste of tax dollars. All they have to do is post all their intelligence documents on the public internet, and they can get google search for free!
How about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
Was the sale of those punchcard machines evil?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Breaking News! (Bah-deep beep... bah-deep beep beep...) Google has sold computers to the NSA. These computers are good for searching databases, something Google has a little experience doing. The NSA could be using these servers to SPY ON YOU! Film at 11.
Staples has also been caught selling pens to the NSA, pens that may have been used to WRITE YOUR NAME ON THE TAB AT THE TOP OF A FOLDER!!!!!
And bring it down to the local level, Jim Stevens, of "Jim's Roach Coach," was seen parking his Yuck Truck outside the caf door of the NSA, selling food at break time to NSA employees, who MAY BE USING THOSE CALORIES RIGHT NOW TO SPY ON YOU!!!!
As far as I can tell, there's no reason to label this as "clandestine". It looks to me like GOOG is just doing what publicly held businesses do: make money and court the biggest customers they can.
The upshot to this is that this is one place where the Federal government at large actually provides something for the public good, even if it is a few steps removed from joe sixpack. Since the NSA has some of the most stringent security requirements outside of most casinos, they're likely to push Google to improve their products in ways the rest of us can't. Take Net BSD for example. Anyway, that's likely to trickle down to the rest of us in the form of a more robust line of Google appliances and more. Another possibility is that Google may also have to learn how to become more nimble as a company in order to meet tougher requirements for Government-contract volume, reliability and ease-of-handling-red-tape. Again, that can work out for everyone.
The downside is that throwing Google style power at large, parallelizable computing tasks, might send us rocketing down a rather slippery slope if it were used for less-than-legal *coughATTcough* purposes. Yea, we're all tempted to file that one under "-1 No Duh", but I think it bears mentioning all the same.
This is the real issue. Google online apps or even any US based cloud services will be suspect (see Amazon.)
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I used to work for a company that has supplied TLA's (and other companies) with search products for years, and this doesn't look like much of a story.
This is a fairly generic search product, and with that little revenue, it can't be getting much penetration. Most of the value in these sales is in system integration with other document processing, email, multimedia, and so on, and not the core search engine. It's a battle to close each deal, but usually there's good money in customizing the product to meet each situation.
Google wanted to buy us at one point, but Larry and Sergei were too put off by having to do sales and customer engineering (services model), and went back to their hammocks. Still, I think they could do OK in this market, since their main competitor can't do engineering management to save its life.
Coming soon from EA...
Best Slashdot Co
well maybe our tax dollars will finally buy a system that works for a change. there's no more PROMIS's out there to steal, so gotta pay for new development I guess.
"Clandestine Operations at Google", puhleeeze. This story is so much FUD I can't take it. Google sells search appliances to the government. The appliances are 2U Dell servers running a locked down, customized version of RedHat. These appliances contain a crawler, a ton of storage, and a customized application to create a very good search index and interface with the data. They can also be clustered to offer even more capacity... but they don't report any of their findings to Google, the run on their own in their own network.
If you need to have Google service the appliance, you can instruct the device to SSH to a Google server where the tech will access it remotely and make changes or troubleshoot. Or you can plug a modem into the serial port and the tech can dial in.
Either way - you control access.
We have two of these appliances at work churning through wikis, sharepoint sites, NFS stores, and company intranet pages. SharePoint search sucks - so that was the first to get axed. Everything else was added, just because we could.
I, for one, am glad the government is using modern technology to improve efficiency. Someone actually gets it.
I like how people think we can just buy what we want in the government....when I was in the service I had to go to three different people if I wanted to buy so little as a a box of pencils. I actually ended up buying some of my supplies out of my own money because it was much more convenient to me.
We came,we saw, we kicked it's ass!
Don't be [REDACTED].
Read my blog.
Somehow it just doesn't sound as good.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
And what is the internet but a series of linked documents?
What is an identity theft but a stolen set of identity documents?
What is a government spying policy but access to individuals' documents?
Read between the lines - The only part of this article that is NEWS
is the part where they have a business division that markets to the govt.
That part was probably not widely known. The cooperation was known.
"Servers for searching documents."
We went to war over aluminum tubes. Don't trivialize based upon vague quotes.
Google sells a GSA to a large agency that happens to be government. Is it news that they've sold identical hardware to other corporations? OH NOES, THE WORLD IS ENDING!
Google has been trying random things to become a real company with real products outside of ads. Google Appliances aren't that customizable or handle large document amounts compared to the competition. They are toys and are so far sold on name alone and not well marketed. There still seems to be an unwilling academic-ness to the way Google exploits its technology. I guess it 'is' good that they finally landed some gov't contracts, maybe with real usage the product will get better.
And what is paranoia but a shortage of dopamine and serotonin?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
That explains a bunch. I was wondering why my new Gmail account started getting spammed with stuff that was nothing more than words from within emails I sent out and received. This would be the email account I keep for simple communication with friends only. Not my email for accounts like the one here or other webspaces. So it is apparent they are monitoring my email.
NOAA is the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Weather service, National Hurricane Center, etc.. are part of NOAA.
Either their activities are not very clandestine or they are really, really good at hiding them, Dirk Pitt notwithstanding.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Imagine the ads they show within their search results! Some agent searches for "The Base" and gets margin ads for Kevin Costner flicks.
Isn't it just a little early for the annual Google April Fool's day prank? Let me know if I'm wrong, and I'll happily recant.
I thought it was going to be about Google being evil, not about Google selling computers to the spooks.
Is it just me or does this smell like a possible GPL violation?
Google is notoriously known for not releasing some of their enhancements to open source projects, including the linux kernel. If now they sold servers running these modified open source projects out to a customer, they're also required to provide the source code changes to them. Since that customer is the US government... it should be possible for the people to get a copy of it.
Now before google was just keeping their modifications inside Google Corp, so the good old gplv2 didn't prevent them from not publishing their changes, but if they physically sold (distributed) these binaries to non-google people, then the GPL starts to act.
could be a riot
Well, of course this story is not about spies infiltrating Google, per se. It's about Google infiltrating the spies. The deals (AFAWCT) don't send any of Google's private operational data (eg. your searches, your GMail.com ID, etc) over to the spooks. The spooks are just using the same platforms as Google developed for itself.
But these are spooks. I doubt they'll let their agencies become dependent on Google without having some "leverage", like spies planted inside to be sure "business is operating according to plan". Or without being tempted by the fat intel score living inside Google's separate servers, regardless of how separate the immediate deal is.
But these deals (on their surface) don't mean Google (and, therefore, your privacy) is any more vulnerable. The spooks can plant people inside Google without these vendor contracts, and certainly already have.
What we need to hope, and really should be able to know, is whether Google's internal security is strong enough to protect our privacy from attacks by these spooks, whether or not they're "friendly" with Google's platform vendor business. And when we find out that Google is not secure enough, we have to figure out what to do about it, so we can use powerful services like Google without being at their mercy. Especially if Google goes through a period of "be evil" for a while.
--
make install -not war
Well, that is what you agreed to, when you signed up. Every email you ever sent or received is stored forever, and scanned to work out what ads to display. This is what you wanted: you exchanged your privacy for free email.
Gmail Terms of Use: You understand and agree that the Service may include content-targeted ads or other related information, as further described below and in the Gmail Privacy Policy... [you] agree that Google may monitor, edit or disclose your personal information, including the content of your emails, if required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process... or as otherwise provided in these Terms of Use and the Gmail Privacy Policy.
TBH I'm surprised that anyone has a Gmail account. Don't worry, they have a privacy policy.
Since when is involvement with the NOAA is "clandestine"?
Wow. It's a sad day when dealing with one's own government can be considered "clandestine" behaviour.
Is it the Slashdot crowd? Or have you Americans reached a stage where you geniunely consider your own government to be the enemy? DON'T VOTE FOR THEM.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Last I heard the IRS still had football-field-sized warehouses stacked floor to ceiling with reel to reel 1/2" tapes.
I can just see a Google appliance in use there - a tiny box spidering a hectare of moldering IBM 360s, with 60 operators standing in line waiting to mount tapes.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
"I don't see anything clandestine about a software/hardware company providing software/hardware solutions to the Federal government, especially when said information is printed in a nationally recognized newspaper and linked on a major news aggregator."
BSOD jokes aside, I think if it were Microsoft providing NSA (or the military, or any security agency) software for the purposes of intelligence gathering, you'd see quite the different reaction here, and I think most of the threads would be about how evil both Microsoft and NSA are for collaborating for "spying on us". I don't think the problem is Google hating here. On the contrary, I think there would be a double standard in this situation.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Yeah, except you're only considered paranoid IF YOU ARE WRONG.
People who trust technology companies implicitly are either:
A: working for them
B: naive
C: both
D: doomed to be screwed
So which one are you randomluser?
"sold the agencies servers for searching documents"
They sold them a Google network appliance!! So what? We're considering the purchase of one for our internal network, does that mean we're partaking in "clandestine operations" with Google? Talk about misleading hype...
What do they mean by "little known" here? I think probably every major federal agency probably has at least one Google Search appliances and they sell several other services. I think -every- company like this wants to work with the government, it's not some secret they're a big market. Hell, Google has space on NASA property and I here's an article from Slashdot from 2006 about them entering into a partnership with NASA:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/18/1640230
They've also voluntarily turned over data to the feds before as made very public. Where's the the secrecy about working or wanting to work the government? Let's not forget their job posting for a Federal Sales person - http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=80784
...supply others with the ability to do what they want.
/. install the 'ironic captcha' system?
Let their evil be on their heads, eh? Works for me. Besides, paying customers are very nice.
My captcha is 'virtuous'. So when did
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
So when the NSA searches for my personal information, will they get sidebar ads for beer and porn?
Wow! Google sells search/mapping appliances to the IC. The indignity! And Google has a Federal sales team!!!! Why, only those who read Google's job postings would know that. This is stupid. How in the heck is this news worthy?
Heck we would even had a hard time even figuring out how to do something they would even care about.
This stuff where domestic terrorist spying was used against Eliot Spitzer's bank transactions is just plain wrong. But in the end there is no point it crying about it, again most of us will also not be worth bothering with. I am more concerned with then starting to going after tax evaders or pot smokers, by wholesale automated domestic spying.
From my former hacking past. If they thought you were involved in something they'd just ransack your house, empty it and deny doing it. google "steve jackson games" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games for example. The Wiki entry doesn't do justice to the severity of what really happened.
So electronically seeing everything I am doing so they can see it's really nothing of any interest to them is better at least for me on some level.
It's been my experience with cops and other groups like this that if you walk around with black cloths and black ski mask at night this will draw far more attention if you'd planning on doing something wrong then if you wore a bright orange reflective jacket and helmet, and white overalls in the middle of the afternoon.
In black they will arrest first and ask questions later where with the bright uniform, you just look like your supposed to be there, and never get a second glance.
Same with technology, I have friends that do everything with PGP, 3DES, AES etc. It will only make them get put under more scrutiny.
I'd bet I were planning on doing something wrong that I could get away with so much more if I just keep everything in clear plain text, just for the fact that they are expecting people to act secretive and raise a red flag when doing something wrong.
On 9/11 they were looking for all kinds of secret dangerous thing, explosives, and poisons etc..
But no it was Box Cutters, We are talking about a few f**king 99 Cent box cutters that took down the 2 tallest building in the United States, and brought our economy to a stall, started 2 wars, and cost us Billions upon Billions looking for all of the wrong things and push our gas prices to $4 per gallon, and it still not over. That box cutter might even escalate with WW III. Albert Einstein quote - I don't know how man will fight World War III, but I do know how they will fight World War IV; with sticks and stones. This is more damage then what we could ever do with Billions of dollars of super secret high tech aircraft.
This an example where KISS - Keep it stupid and simple is most effective.
If you think about all of the homeland security, there is still painfully little they can do against the box cutter type of attack. Something so mind boggling trivial and stupid you'd never think about it.
But it's these things that could lead to a terrifying chain reaction.
So if all my docs are up on Google and easily readable, these numb nuts of the government are far less likely to even notice me or bother me, then if I were trying to pass around encrypted docs, then they will spend millions to decode them and then start monitoring my every action. Because If I am hiding something I must be doing something wrong?
They never believe it was just grandma's cookie recipe as you try to explain this while being water boarded.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Google has been selling their search appliance boxes for years. The fact that they've been selling them to the spooks is hardly shocking. http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/index.html
-- http://www.criticalassets.com
...but Staples? They've always been a good office supply solution.
Can anyone be trusted?
has secrets and contacts you FEAR to share? Not talking about HOARDING, but let's say you're an agent which finesse and cunning and you gather bombshells of information. You upload the shit, and suddenly 15 agencies that never heard of YOU want YOU dead. Or, each wants a PIECE of you to ENSURE you won't collect anymore information.
See, the problem is that some agencies STILL want to get credit for the takedown, or don't want to compromise a sensitively placed or acquired mole. It will only be a matter of time before the Google or Visual Analytics software compromises the health of dutiful agents who share or crosslink-search too much sensitive information that IS within the scope of their duties.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
That federal agencies want to use the Google search engine is about as newsworthy as their use of toilet paper - c'mon already.
But there are other things going on that are of more significance, like the OMB "TIC-Trusted Internet Computing" mandate http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/memoranda/fy2008/m08-05.pdf
Feds must reduce their connections to the internet in order to allow the NSA scan them and keep track of everyone who accesses government websites.
SO is the NSA spying on you - absolutely, but not with Google, fer cryin out loud!
There are a lot of products out there to let you search the internet but not so many that allow you to search the intranet. The DoS needed to search 1 million documents, provide a frontend easily, and secure it with SAML. The Google Appliance does all this and for a fraction of the price that everyone else offers. We used to use Convera but the product ran in java and required a huge number of resources. It did not provide a great frontend to do translations and I lost sleep at night trying to keep the software running 24/7. With google I am sleeping normal hours and my biggest problem is with the editors and the content. They also just released a sharepoint connector to crawl and index a sharepoint server and its content. Overall, the goal of the government should be to search the million if not billions and billions of documents, provide value, and make it secure. Also, I think every man, woman, and child has used Google so it is an easy interface and no learning curve.
http://xkcd.com/250/
ring ring ring,there's that damn clue fone again, er wait a minute didnt I sign up for the no call list Phrack,been had again
carnivore uranium allah jihad plutonium drugs cocaine maryjane marijuana meth coke crack crystal meth attack facility civilian truck fertilizer rental bomb explode fissile great devil praise infidel
. . . just keeping googlebot well-fed! Maybe they'll come up with a new terror alert color. How about chartreuse? Lime green?
NOAA's clandestine black ops team can snap your neck just by looking at you!
They also use Word, Word Perfect or Open Office to type their clandestine documents, some might drink Starbucks coffee before work, eat McDonalds for lunch, drive to work in a Ford and have an AT&T cellphone. See all these companies provide services to Clandestine operatives.I guess I won't be buying any of the products I mentionned.
Where do people come up with this stuff? If they used Apache, MySQL, Oracle, Linux, Unix, a computer, a PC, a Mac or whatever would that also make the news? Perhaps there should be an article for each! Sheesh!
NOAA Headquarters.
Silver Springs, MD.
Meteorologist: "Gosh, all this Global Warming those jerks at the CIA looped us in is making me thirsty."
[Meteorologist opens the break room refridgerator to find something horrible.]
Meterologist: "AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!...."
[Cue The X-Files Intro]
[Cut back to the break room.]
Meterologist: "AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!....DAMN IT! Xanthor, get your alien ass in here!"
Xanthor [in alien language that only the Meteorologist understands]: "What's up?"
Meteorologist: "I tell you whats up! You left a bottle of Black Oil open in the fridge again. The little bastard drank all my Sunny D!"
Xanthor: "But I didn't leave it in th--"
Meteorologist: "Bulls***! You better put it back in that creeping unmarked container before the day shift gets here. And how am I going to explain to the Head of NOAA--or worse The Syndicate--why everyone else in the office acts like zombies and is radiating half of Washington, DC because somebody made a bad forcast?"
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
couldn't find a "formal" publication, but
http://youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0
close enough, right?
Our wealth breeds emptiness