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

The NSA has always done this

[CRCulver]

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?

Google and the IRS

[Uroborus42]

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.

sneaky weather men

[zehaeva]

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.

Needs to be said

[megaditto]

How about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
Was the sale of those punchcard machines evil?

Re:Clandestine?

[houghi]

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.

I agree. Where I used to work we had a person who did all the contracts with the governements (we have several in Belgium), cities and other official customers.
he als had a different target, Profit was not his main goal. The largest amount of equipment was. That way we could advertise that we we largest in the country for our product.
There was at least one person in each of the European countries.

Re:Clandestine?

[joggle]

You're absolutely correct. I have a friend that is in charge of overseeing contracts to a major defense contractor for the Feds and it's a mind-boggling complex process. On her end she has had to go to at least a dozen courses to get to where she's at now and I have every reason to believe that it is as complicated on the client-side. The contractor has 6-12 full-time employees to handle contracts on their side while the Federal government has a corresponding group that works full-time with them (for contracts ranging from $50 million to about $250 million, roughly).

Re:In soviet amerika, google searches YOU

[Elsapotk421]

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.

Re:Trickledown

[pragma_x]

Thanks for the quarterbuck link. I had no idea people were reporting on this stuff.

Therefore, be it resolved, that shareholders request that management institute policies to help protect freedom of access to the Internet which would include the following minimum standards:

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Recommendation
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Unless it's a typeo, or Google is simply trying to avoid having to move a mountain of red tape every time it does something, that does look a little fishy.

The Dept of State Does This

[Mayday]

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.

I bet that.....

[failedlogic]

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!