CIA, Google to monitor the web in real time, predicting the future

CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

WIRED

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.

It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.

This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.

America’s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining “open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.

“Secret information isn’t always the brass ring in our profession,” then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. “In fact, there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.”

U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called “unstructured text” of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units.

Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.

“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres’ accusations.

That’s one of several hypothetical cases Recorded Future runs in its blog devoted to intelligence analysis. But it’s safe to assume that the company already has at least one spy agency’s attention. In-Q-Tel doesn’t make investments in firms without an “end customer” ready to test out that company’s products.

Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel made their investments in 2009, shortly after the company was founded. The exact amounts weren’t disclosed, but were under $10 million each. Google’s investment came to light earlier this year online. In-Q-Tel, which often announces its new holdings in press releases, quietly uploaded a brief mention of its investment a few weeks ago.

Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Future’s board. Ahlberg says those board members have been “very helpful,” providing business and technology advice, as well as introducing him to potential customers. Both organizations, it’s safe to say, will profit handsomely if Recorded Future is ever sold or taken public. Ahlberg’s last company, the corporate intelligence firm Spotfire, was acquired in 2007 for $195 million in cash.

Google Ventures did not return requests to comment for this article. In-Q-Tel Chief of Staff Lisbeth Poulos e-mailed a one-line statement: “We are pleased that Recorded Future is now part of IQT’s portfolio of innovative startup companies who support the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community.”

Just because Google and In-Q-Tel have both invested in Recorded Future doesn’t mean Google is suddenly in bed with the government. Of course, to Google’s critics — including conservative legal groups, and Republican congressmen — the Obama Administration and the Mountain View, California, company slipped between the sheets a long time ago.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt hosted a town hall at company headquarters in the early days of Obama’s presidential campaign. Senior White House officials like economic chief Larry Summers give speeches at the New America Foundation, the left-of-center think tank chaired by Schmidt. Former Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin is now the White House’s deputy CTO, and was publicly (if mildly) reprimanded by the administration for continuing to hash out issues with his former colleagues.

In some corners, the scrutiny of the company’s political ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of their products, and because of Google’s pledges not to misuse the information still ring true to many.

But unease has been growing. Thirty seven state Attorneys General are demanding answers from the company after Google hoovered up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks as it snapped pictures for its Street View project. (The company swears the incident was an accident.)

“Assurances from the likes of Google that the company can be trusted to respect consumers’ privacy because its corporate motto is ‘don’t be evil’ have been shown by recent events such as the ‘Wi-Spy’ debacle to be unwarranted,” long-time corporate gadfly John M. Simpson told a Congressional hearing in a prepared statement. Any business dealings with the CIA’s investment arm are unlikely to make critics like him more comfortable.

But Steven Aftergood, a critical observer of the intelligence community from his perch at the Federation of American Scientists, isn’t worried about the Recorded Future deal. Yet.

“To me, whether this is troublesome or not depends on the degree of transparency involved. If everything is aboveboard — from contracts to deliverables — I don’t see a problem with it,” he told Danger Room by e-mail. “But if there are blank spots in the record, then they will be filled with public skepticism or worse, both here and abroad, and not without reason.”

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Top Secret America: A hidden world, growing beyond control

Washington Post

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

 These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine. 

The investigation’s other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year – a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

These are not academic issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources, was at the heart of the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 dead, as well as the Christmas Day bomb attempt thwarted not by the thousands of analysts employed to find lone terrorists but by an alert airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.

They are also issues that greatly concern some of the people in charge of the nation’s security.

“There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that – not just for the DNI [Director of National Intelligence], but for any individual, for the director of the CIA, for the secretary of defense – is a challenge,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview with The Post last week.

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials – called Super Users – have the ability to even know about all the department’s activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation’s most sensitive work.

“I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything” was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn’t take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ”Stop!” in frustration.

“I wasn’t remembering any of it,” he said.

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department’s most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.  Read the complete details…

Rockefeller Study: Future Dictatorship Controlled by Elite

Paul Joseph Watson

Global pandemics that kill millions, mandatory quarantines, checkpoints, biometric ID cards, and a world of top-down government control. These things are not lifted from the latest sci-fi blockbuster movie, they’re part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s vision for what the globe might be like in 15-20 years’ time under a new world order tightly controlled by the elite.

This is one of four scenarios for the future of the planet outlined in the Rockefeller Foundation’s “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” a study produced in association with the Global Business Network.

Entitled “Lock Step,” the scenario depicts,”A world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback.”

After global H1N1 pandemic originating from geese infects 20 per cent of the global population and kills 8 million people, the economy grinds to a halt and governments impose authoritarian measures to respond to the crisis.

“During the pandemic, national leaders around the world flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and

restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets,” states the study.

Tellingly, even after the pandemic fades, these draconian measures remain in place and even intensify, as leaders take a “firmer grip on power” and citizens willingly sacrifice their sovereignty and privacy, leading to “a more controlled world” bossed by “paternalistic states” who impose biometric ID cards for all citizens. “Enforced cooperation” with global regulatory agreements forges the path towards global governance even as a backlash ensues following public displays of “virulent nationalism”.

Eco-fascism is also brought to the fore in the “lock step” scenario, which discusses how “high-emission” cars will be banned and every home will be forced to install solar panels by law.

The implementation of top-down authoritarianism causes entrepreneurial activity to wither and the economy stutters, but by 2025 people start to grow weary of “so much top-down control and letting leaders and authorities make choices for them” and an organized “pushback” against this tyranny begins to gather momentum.

“Even those who liked the greater stability and predictability of this world began to grow uncomfortable and constrained by so many tight rules and by the strictness of national boundaries. The feeling lingered that sooner or later, something would inevitably upset the neat order that the world’s governments had worked so hard to establish,” the study concludes.

The important thing to understand from the scenario outlined by the Rockefeller study is that China is praised as the model for how governments globally should respond to crises. The most draconian and dictatorial policies, including mandatory quarantines, are praised in the scenario as having “saved millions of lives, stopping the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries and enabling a swifter post pandemic recovery,” while allowing people freedom of mobility is scorned as having worsened the crisis.

Ironic therefore it is that just this week, the Associated Press reported on how the Chinese government has already virtually imposed checkpoint quarantines on its poorer citizens, by “gating and locking some of its lower-income neighborhoods overnight, with police or security checking identification papers around the clock, in a throwback to an older style of control.”

The Rockefeller study is not a warning against preventing the kind of tyranny contained in this scenario from unfolding, it’s a blueprint for how globalists want to exploit global crises like bio-terror attacks and pandemics in order to completely destroy society and rebuild it under a new world order in their image.

The Rockefeller scenario bears more than a passing resemblance to a 2007 UK Ministry of Defence study which forecast that by 2035, people would have brain chips implanted, that the middle class would become revolutionary, and that society would be gripped by chaos and civil unrest as a result of increased globalization, immigration and a more authoritarian state.

It is crystal clear from reading the “Lock Step” scenario that the oppressive society portrayed in the study is not presented as an admonishment of how governments would cynically seize upon a pandemic to set up a police state and empower themselves as dictators, it’s a ringing endorsement that this approach would be the correct thing to do.

This is the post-industrial society demanded by Bilderberg luminaries like European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso.

This is what the globalists want – pandemics, warfare, chaos and crises that they can engineer and then exploit to lock in place a dictatorial society ruled by the elite from their ivory towers, while the citizens are reduced to impoverished, squabbling, dependent peasants tightly controlled with sophisticated big brother technology, far too concerned about where their next meal is coming from to have time to overthrow their new rulers.

Secret Raytheon Military Contract Rolls out Internet Clamp Down

It would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks to spy on the Internet for “attacks” on infrastructure.  The irony is that the only people who have the power and technology to cause a massive attack of the scale it is being promoted, are the very same people who are clamping down on the Internet to establish censorship and control.  The program’s name (Perfect Citizen) could not be more deceiving.

WSJ

The federal government is launching an expansive program dubbed “Perfect Citizen” to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants, according to people familiar with the program.

The surveillance by the National Security Agency, the government’s chief eavesdropping agency, would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack, though it wouldn’t persistently monitor the whole system, these people said.

Defense contractor Raytheon Corp. recently won a classified contract for the initial phase of the surveillance effort valued at up to $100 million, said a person familiar with the project.

An NSA spokeswoman said the agency had no information to provide on the program. A Raytheon spokesman declined to comment.

Some industry and government officials familiar with the program see Perfect Citizen as an intrusion by the NSA into domestic affairs, while others say it is an important program to combat an emerging security threat that only the NSA is equipped to provide.

“The overall purpose of the [program] is our Government…feel[s] that they need to insure the Public Sector is doing all they can to secure Infrastructure critical to our National Security,” said one internal Raytheon email, the text of which was seen by The Wall Street Journal. “Perfect Citizen is Big Brother.”

Raytheon declined to comment on this email.

A U.S. military official called the program long overdue and said any intrusion into privacy is no greater than what the public already endures from traffic cameras. It’s a logical extension of the work federal agencies have done in the past to protect physical attacks on critical infrastructure that could sabotage the government or key parts of the country, the official said.

U.S. intelligence officials have grown increasingly alarmed about what they believe to be Chinese and Russian surveillance of computer systems that control the electric grid and other U.S. infrastructure. Officials are unable to describe the full scope of the problem, however, because they have had limited ability to pull together all the private data.

Perfect Citizen will look at large, typically older computer control systems that were often designed without Internet connectivity or security in mind. Many of those systems—which run everything from subway systems to air-traffic control networks—have since been linked to the Internet, making them more efficient but also exposing them to cyber attack.

The goal is to close the “big, glaring holes” in the U.S.’s understanding of the nature of the cyber threat against its infrastructure, said one industry specialist familiar with the program. “We don’t have a dedicated way to understand the problem.”

The information gathered by Perfect Citizen could also have applications beyond the critical infrastructure sector, officials said, serving as a data bank that would also help companies and agencies who call upon NSA for help with investigations of cyber attacks, as Google did when it sustained a major attack late last year.

The U.S. government has for more than a decade claimed a national-security interest in privately owned critical infrastructure that, if attacked, could cause significant damage to the government or the economy. Initially, it established relationships with utility companies so it could, for instance, request that a power company seal a manhole that provides access to a key power line for a government agency.

With the growth in concern about cyber attacks, these relationships began to extend into the electronic arena, and the only U.S. agency equipped to manage electronic assessments of critical-infrastructure vulnerabilities is the NSA, government and industry officials said.

The NSA years ago began a small-scale effort to address this problem code-named April Strawberry, the military official said. The program researched vulnerabilities in computer networks running critical infrastructure and sought ways to close security holes.

That led to initial work on Perfect Citizen, which was a piecemeal effort to forge relationships with some companies, particularly energy companies, whose infrastructure is widely used across the country.

The classified program is now being expanded with funding from the multibillion-dollar Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, which started at the end of the Bush administration and has been continued by the Obama administration, officials said. With that infusion of money, the NSA is now seeking to map out intrusions into critical infrastructure across the country.

Because the program is still in the early stages, much remains to be worked out, such as which computer control systems will be monitored and how the data will be collected. NSA would likely start with the systems that have the most important security implications if attacked, such as electric, nuclear, and air-traffic-control systems, they said.

Intelligence officials have met with utilities’ CEOs and those discussions convinced them of the gravity of the threat against U.S. infrastructure, an industry specialist said, but the CEOs concluded they needed better threat information and guidance on what to do in the event of a major cyber attack.

Some companies may agree to have the NSA put its own sensors on and others may ask for direction on what sensors to buy and come to an agreement about what data they will then share with the government, industry and government officials said.

While the government can’t force companies to work with it, it can provide incentives to urge them to cooperate, particularly if the government already buys services from that company, officials said.

Raytheon, which has built up a large cyber-security practice through acquisitions in recent years, is expected to subcontract out some of the work to smaller specialty companies, according to a person familiar with the project.

Obama: Train my Gestapo in Afghanistan. U.S. Next?

By Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda
July 1, 2010

Much of the thuggery used in the United States today was experienced tried out outside the U.S. first.  The use sound cannons is one example of those.  Monitoring large areas with drones and blowing up innocent people is another example.  But a third a most important is the U.S. president’s Gestapo armed forces.  Department of Defense Directive 1404.10, dated January 23, 2009, set up a “Civilian Expeditionary Workforce” that would “be organized, trained, cleared, equipped, and ready to deploy in support of combat operations by the military; contingencies; emergency operations; humanitarian missions; disaster relief; drug interdiction; and stability operations

Of course Obama does not identify this paramilitary force as a Gestapo. He prefers to call it a civilian military force.

His pretext to form and finance his dreamed army is that the U.S. Army is overworked due to the multiple conflicts the country is involved in. He said on Wednesday that U.S. soldiers could use the assistance of a civilian workforce to help in relief efforts in Afghanistan. Speaking in Wisconsin, the president said it was a great idea to send his Gestapo force to help soldiers to carry out tasks such as building infrastructure.

What good is a military force if it cannot be trained properly in real life scenarios? Obviously, that kind of training cannot be achieved in the US. At least for now. So, Obama finds it correct to send civilians with weapons to combat zones to aid the U.S. Military. “So what I’m trying to say is, don’t put all the burden on the military.  Make sure that we’ve got a civilian expeditionary force,” said the president. He added that the civilian force would be in charge of building schools, bridges and roads in regions labeled by the military as safe. Unless news reports are wrong, the only moderately safe area is Afghanistan’s ‘green zone’. As the news media have reported, attacks and violence in that country have increased. Not even the payoffs given by the U.S. with tax payer money have calmed down the attacks. Not even the fact that the U.S. is promoting the cultivation of opium and all the corruption that arises from it has made it easier to stabilize a country taken over by criminals; many who work with the U.S. Military.

A Department of Defense directive, Directive 1404.10, dated January 23, 2009, set up a “Civilian Expeditionary Workforce” created to, trained, cleared, equipped, and ready to deploy in support of combat operations by the military; contingencies; emergency operations; humanitarian missions; disaster relief; restoration of order; drug interdiction; and stability operations.” If the U.S. Army is unable to bring stability, relief, order or any other kind of positive results to Afghanistan, how can the president think a civilian force will be able to build homes and bridges?

Obama’ s intention is not to facilitate the work of the military in Afghanistan. He wants to extend the U.S. occupation there. He wants to get innocent American civilians killed in a country where not even the thoroughly trained, most powerful military in the world can deal with the violence and resistance. He wants to train his Gestapo force in Afghanistan so it can later come to the U.S. and treat the citizens with the same hatred and disrespect as they will have to treat Afghan rebels and criminals. Sending a civilian force to Afghanistan is a way to further desensitize armed forces to commit in the United States the same crimes they commit there. What Obama wants is not to let a crisis go to waste.

Obama first expressed his idea of forming a military force during the campaign for his presidential run. He connected it to what he called national service, which Rahm Emanuel later detailed as a mandatory recruitment of civilians. “We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set.” In other words, we will turn the country into a complete surveillance state, whereby citizens will rat on each other for the benefit of the centralized government he would head. “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.” Given the fact the military has had problems recruiting, what a better idea than to force citizens to serve in the military so they can easily be shipped abroad into combat zones? Or maybe within the United States, where they will become an unofficial Gestapo force for the Führer? It’s been a year and a half since Obama took office and I haven’t seen any news of any civilian security force aiding poor neighborhoods, hurricane or tornado victims or down in the gulf coast helping to clean the disaster caused by Obama’s close friends at BP. Why not? Is it not what such force is supposed to be doing? Is their training not finished yet? “…a Veterans Corps to assist veterans at hospitals, nursing homes and homeless shelters; and a Homeland Security Corps to help communities plan, prepare for and respond to emergencies.” Is it not the Gulf Oil Spill an Emergency?

If heavily armed civilians in power trips is not a cause of concern for anyone, I have to say they deserve the Fascism they will get. The civilian security force is not an example of “soft power” as Defense Secretary Robert Gates called them. Remember Obama’s statement? “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.” To my colleagues at the Raw Story, it is time you stopped laughing and start acting like the responsible media outlet you want to become. Centralized power has never and will never result in better living conditions. Ask history. Ask the Chinese, the Jews and the Muslims.

By the way, since when is a Republic governed with military directives?