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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.""
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.
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.
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
If the NSA can get to Google
... treason!
You mean... with a purchase order? To buy search appliances? Just like they also buy air conditioning equipment, sandwiches, and carpeting?
Have they redefined "treason" as well?
Right, because being a vendor to federal IT users is
How do you even function, day to day, behind all of that tinfoil? I mean, doesn't it get hot and itchy after a while?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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!
of course not, the Nazis could have had a perfectly benign use for the Jew-Tracker 5000 for all they knew.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
"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'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 did a search for that on Google, and nothing turned up.