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.""

Comments

Re:Clandestine?

[jandrese]

I also don't see why it's so evil to have Google sell its appliance to Government customers. As for needing a special "government guy", anybody who works in the industry will tell you that no matter what it is, the Government does it differently. Hiring a guy (or team of people) who know how to handle the Government is practically a necessity if you want to make sales like this.

Re:In soviet amerika, google searches YOU

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Jesus, get a grip.
What part of:

"The Mountain View company sold the agencies servers for searching documents"

didn't you understand?

Is this about Google's "search appliance"?

[Animats]

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.

Kudos to the Government

[binaryspiral]

"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.

Re:Kudos to the Government

[SirWhoopass]

Exactly.

Having worked in the military on the "high side" network, it was great when Google's search became available. There had been numerous other engines available prior to that, including an early Yahoo and Alta Vista. Anyone who has been around a while can appreciate how great it was to search using Google instead of a cira-1999 Alta Vista query.

Re:Kudos to the Government

[binaryspiral]

Too right... stand along yahoo and altavista search engines were (and still are) free for a reason. Most other enterprise search tools are too Microsoft Office centric to be useful for web based documentation.

I love the GSA we have... it *just works*.

Little Known?

[madsheep]

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

this isn't secret in any way

[ohzero]

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