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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.""
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.