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Silicon Spies: The US government and the tech revolutionCorbett • 06/13/2012
Video Player Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed by James Corbett BoilingFrogsPost.com 12 June, 2012 Earlier this week Wired Magazine released a background check of Steve Jobs conducted by the Department of Defense in 1988. The background check highlights Jobs’ use of LSD in the 1970s and his fears of blackmail or kidnapping due to his substantial wealth. The check was part of a security clearance investigation conducted by the DoD during Jobs’ tenure at Pixar, an investigation that was first revealed earlier this year. Precisely what Steve Jobs needed security clearance for has not yet been revealed, but that Jobs did have some relationship with the Department of Defence will come as no surprise to those who know the long and intimate history between the US military, the US intelligence apparatus, and Silicon Valley. The Valley was born in the post-World War II era when then-provost of Stanford College, Frederick Terman, proposed the creation of Stanford Industrial Park, now known as the Stanford Research Park. The land was to be leased out to high-tech firms created by Stanford’s graduate students and alumni. Terman himself had an interesting history as a radio engineer and researcher who was called upon by the US government to direct the top secret Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University during World War II. While there, Terman and his researchers developed some of the earliest signals intelligence and electronic intelligence equipment, including radar detectors, radar jammers and aluminum chaff to be used as countermeasures against German anti-air defenses. Upon his return to Stanford after the war, Terman brought his experience, and his military contacts, with him, and began transforming the San Francisco Bay Area into a high-tech research hotspot dubbed “Microwave Valley.” In 1951, William Shockley, one of the co-inventors of the transistor, set up the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California, current day home of Google Inc. Although unsuccessful as a businessman himself, defectors from his company would go on to found the core of the Silicon Valley enterprises, including Intel Corporation, National Semiconductor, and Advanced Micro Devices. As the Microwave Valley of Terman began to gave way to the Silicon Valley of Shockley, an avowed eugenicist who argued for the sterilization of the less intelligent, so too did the nature of US government involvement in the technology industry itself. Rather than directly hiring the technology companies to produce the technology, consumer electronics would increasingly be regulated, directed, overseen and infiltrated by government workers, who could then use that technology as the basis for a worldwide signals intelligence operation, directed not at the militaries of foreign countries, but at the population of the world as a whole. Although many are by now familiar with the roots of the Internet in the ARPANET, the world’s first interconnected packet switching network, with funding from the DoD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, few are aware of just how much modern technology was originally funded by or created for government, military and intelligence agency customers. In 1958 Mitre Corporation was founded with workers from a US Air Force anti-air defense project and continues to this day to support numerous government agencies with systems engineering and IT development, including the DoD, DHS, FAA and IRS. It is currently chaired by ex-Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger. In 1977 Software Development Laboratories created the first Oracle database on contract for their customer, the CIA. Within 25 years, virtually every Fortune 100 company in the world would rely on Oracle databases to manage their information. The Global Positioning System program, which is now an integral part of everything from car navigation systems to smartphone apps, was created by the Department of Defense. After the KAL 007 disaster, the system was committed to civilian uses including air traffic monitoring. More important than these open interventions in the IT sector, however, are the ways that the hand of the US government in the development of modern hardware and software has been hidden behind a smokescreen of venture capital companies. Effectively, this modern system of funding for key tech startups has hidden the intimate relations that continue to exist between Silicon Valley and the heart of America’s intelligence apparatus. As we reported last year, In-Q-Tel was set up in 1999 as the CIA’s venture capital firm to identify and acquire emerging technologies for the use of the intelligence community. Since then, they have gone on to invest in an array of companies touting various Orwellian, privacy-invading technologies that would be of significant interest to a government increasingly bent on becoming a 21st century Big Brother. A mere degree of separation from In-Q-Tel itself, however, are the venture capitalists who funded, amongst other ventures, PayPal, Facebook and Google. Former In-Q-Tel CEO Gilman Louie sat on the board of the National Venture Capital Association with Jim Breyer, head of Accel Partners, who provided 12 million dollars of seed money for Facebook. Another early investor in Facebook was Peter Thiel, former co-founder and CEO of PayPal, and Bilderberg Group steering committee member. In 2000, an article in the Independent announced that the CIA was looking to invest in a search engine for managing, sorting and analyzing the ever-expanding information on the world wide web. Around the same time, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, two Silicon Valley VCs, invested $25 million in the brand new startup Google Inc. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins are literally neighbors of In-Q-Tel in Menlo Park, and co-invested in numerous projects. In 2006, ex-CIA officer Robert Steele told Homeland Security Today that Google “has been taking money and direction for elements of the US Intelligence Community, including the Office of Research and Development at the Central Intelligence Agency, In-Q-Tel, and in all probability, both the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command.” In 2005, In-Q-Tel sold over 5,000 shares of Google stock. It is not exactly clear how the CIA’s venture capital firm ended up with 5,000 shares of Google stock, but it is believed to have come when Google bought out Keyhole Inc., the developer of the software that later become Google Earth. The company’s name, “Keyhole,” is a none-too-subtle reference to the Keyhole class of reconaissance satellites that the US intelligence agencies have been using for decades to commit 3D imaging and mapping analysis. In 2010, details of an NSA-Google relationship began to emerge, but to this present day details are being blocked from public consumption. In 2011, Apple introduced “Siri,” an intelligent personal assistant, with the latest iteration of its iPhone smartphone series. Even at the time, many analysts noted eerie similarities between Siri and other such intelligent personal assistants developed by the Department of Defense in the past. That all of these connections, stockholdings, regulations and infiltrations add up to something quite disturbing is beyond dispute. After all, we now live in an age where almost every household in the Western world has multiple internet-enabled devices, where much of the rest of the world is getting online via cell phones and mobile technologies, and where the vast majority of the public are content to use Google, Facebook and other “mainstream” services to search, email, connect to friends and share intimate details of their personal lives. This is the type of information that a dictator of any other age could only have dreamt of, the type of information that compiles what people are doing, what they are thinking, who they are spending there lives with and what they are spending their money on, all in real time. And now, these latest revelations about Steve Jobs’ security clearance with the Department of Defence have passed over the heads of a general population that has been taught to unthinkingly venerate these high-tech gurus as the 21st century example of the American dream: unassuming geeks who stumbled their way into mind-boggling fortunes using nothing but their brain power. Always left out of this narrative are the machinations taking place behind the scenes, with the Department of Defence, the NSA, the Department of Homeland Security, In-Q-Tel and other agencies quietly opening doors and writing cheques for the industry’s chosen few. It remains to be seen whether the public can be roused to take an interest in this issue, or whether they will continue sharing the details of their life on Facebook and sharing their privatest thoughts with the Google search bar. Filed in: Videos Tagged with: cia • facebook • google • internet • nsa • spying Meet In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s Venture Capital Firm (Preview)Corbett • 10/09/2011 • 0 Comments
Video Player Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed CLICK HERE to watch the full report on Boiling Frogs Post. TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES: Gainspan Corporation manufactures low power Wi-Fi semiconductors that form the heart of modern remote sensing, monitoring and control technologies. Recorded Future Inc. is a Massachusetts web startup that monitors the web in real time and claims its media analytics search engine can be used to predict the future. Keyhole Corp. created the 3D earth visualization technology that became the core of Google Earth. The common denominator? All of these companies, and hundreds more cutting edge technology and software startups, have received seed money and investment funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s own venture capital firm. Welcome, this is James Corbett of The Corbett Report with your Eyeopener Report forBoilingFrogsPost.com For decades, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has been the American governmental body tasked with conducting high-risk, high-payoff research into cutting edge science and technology. Responsible most famously for developing the world’s first operational packet switching network that eventually became the core of the Internet, DARPA tends togarner headlines these days for some of its more outlandish research proposals and is generally looked upon a a blue-sky research agency whose endeavours only occasionally bear fruit. In the post-9/11 consolidation of the American intelligence community, IARPA, or the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, was created to serve as the spymaster’s equivalent of DARPA’s defense research. In contrast to this, In-Q-Tel was formed by the CIA in 1999 as a private, not-for-profit venture capital firm with the specific task of delivering technology to America’s intelligence community. Publicly, In-Q-Tel markets itself as an innovative way to leverage the power of the private sector by identifying key emerging technologies and providing companies with the funding to bring those technologies to market. In reality, however, what In-Q-Tel represents is a dangerous blurring of the lines between the public and private sectors in a way that makes it difficult to tell where the American intelligence community ends and the IT sector begins. In-Q-Tel has generated a number of stories since its inception based on what can only be described as the “creepiness” factor of its investments in overtly Orwellian technologies. In 2004, KMWorld published an interview with Greg Pepus, then In-Q-Tel’s senior director of federal and intelligence community strategy, about some of their investments. Pepus was especially proud of the CIA’s investment in Inxight, a company that offered software for data mining unstructured data sources like blogs and websites with analytical processing. In 2006 it was revealed that AT&T had provided NSA eavesdroppers full access to its customer’s internet traffic, and that the American intelligence community was illegally scooping up reams of internet data wholesale. The data mining equipment installed in the NSA back door, a Narus STA 6400, was developed by a company whose partners were funded by In-Q-Tel. Also in 2006, News21 reported on an In-Q-Tel investment in CallMiner, a company developing technology for turning recorded telephone conversations into searchable databases. In late 2005 it was revealed that the NSA had been engaged in an illegal warrantless wiretapping program since at least the time of the 9/11 attacks, monitoring the private domestic phone calls of American citizens in breach of their fourth amendment rights. In 2009, the Telegraph reported on In-Q-Tel’s investment in Visible Technologies, a companyspecializing in software that monitors what people are saying on social media websites like YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and Amazon. The software is capable of real-time communications tracking, trend monitoring, and even sentiment analysis that categorizes blog posts and comments as positive, negative or neutral. Just last month, the Federal Reserve tendered aRequest For Proposal for just this type of software so the privately owned central bank could monitor what people are saying about it online. Two of the names that come up most often in connection with In-Q-Tel, however, need no introduction: Google and Facebook. The publicly available record on the Facebook/In-Q-Tel connection is tenuous. Facebookreceived $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel, whose manager, James Breyer, now sits on their board. He was formerly the chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, whose board included Gilman Louie, then the CEO of In-Q-Tel. The connection is indirect, but the suggestion of CIA involvement with Facebook, however tangential, is disturbing in the light of Facebook’s history of violating the privacy of its users. Google’s connection to In-Q-Tel is more straightforward, if officially denied. In 2006, ex-CIA officer Robert David Steele told Homeland Security Today that Google “has been taking money and direction for elements of the US Intelligence Community, including the Office of Research and Development at the Central Intelligence Agency, In-Q-Tel, and in all probability, both the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command.” Later that year, a blogger claimed that an official Google spokesman had denied the claims, but no official press statement was released. Steele’s accusation is not the only suggestion of American intelligence involvement with Google, however. In 2005, In-Q-Tel sold over 5,000 shares of Google stock. The shares are widely presumed to have come from In-Q-Tel’s investment in Keyhole Inc., which was subsequently bought out by Google, but this is uncertain. In 2010, it was announced that Google was working directly with the National Security Agency to secure its electronic assets. Also in 2010, Wired reported that In-Q-Tel and Google had jointly provided venture capital funding to Recorded Future Inc., a temporal analytics search engine company that analyzes tens of thousands of web sources to predict trends and events. But as potentially alarming as In-Q-Tel’s connections to internet giants like Facebook and Google are, and as disturbing as its interest in data mining technologies may be, the CIA’s venture capital arm is interested in more than just web traffic monitoring. The In-Q-Tel website currently lists two “practice areas,” “Information and Communication Technologies” and “Physical and Biological Technologies.” The latter field consists of “capabilities of interest” such as “The on-site determination of individual human traits for IC purposes” and “Tracking and/or authentication of both individuals and objects.” In-Q-Tel also lists two areas that are “on its radar” when it comes to biotech: Nano-bio Convergence andPhysiological Intelligence. Detailed breakdowns of each area explain that the intelligence community is interested in, amongst other things, self-assembling batteries, single molecule detectors, targeted drug delivery platforms, and sensors that can tell where a person has been and what substances he has been handling from “biomarkers” like trace compounds in the breath or samples of skin. In the years since its formation, many have been led to speculate about In-Q-Tel and its investments, but what requires no speculation is an understanding that a privately owned venture capital firm, created by and for the CIA, in which well-connected board members drawn from the private sector can then profit from the investments made with CIA funds that itself come from the taxpayer represent an erosion of the barrier between the public and private spheres that should give even the most credulous pause for thought. What does it mean that emerging technology companies are becoming wedded to the CIA as soon as their technology shows promise? What can be the public benefit in fostering and encouraging technologies which can be deployed for spying on all internet users, including American citizens, in direct contravention of the CIA’s own prohibitions against operating domestically? If new software and technology is being brought to market by companies with In-Q-Tel advisors on their boards, what faith can anyone purchasing American technologies have that their software and hardware is not designed with CIA backdoors to help the American intelligence community achieve its vision of “Total Information Awareness”? Rather than scrutinizing each individual investment that In-Q-Tel makes, perhaps an institutional approach is required. At this point, the American people have to ask themselves whether they want the CIA, an agency that has participated in the overthrow of foreign, democratically-elected governments, an agency that has implanted fake stories in the news media to justify American war interests, an agency that at this very moment is engaged in offensive drone strikes, killing suspected “insurgents” and civilians alike in numerous theaters around the world, should be entrusted with developing such close relationships with the IT sector, or whether In-Q-Tel should be scrapped for good. Filed in: Videos Tagged with: big brother • cia • technocracy How entrepreneurs can by-pass the VC's:
1. Start your own investment funds. Create a co-op and do what they do. Pitch your fund to the same people the VC's are trying to get money off of. 2. Use Crowdfunding sites, they are now legal. 3. Share any existing VC discussions on social media sites so other start-ups can compare notes and see who is rigging. 4. Lobby Congress to create a transparent entrepreneur-run funding system totally disconnected from "venture capitalists". 5. Tell your investment fund, pension fund or other institution that your paycheck puts money into NOT to use VC funds to re-invest your money. Tell your friends and neighbors to do the same. If you got screwed by VC's and you can prove it: Google "RICO laws", read it about, get others together who got screwed, file an action, get your justice. THE "ANGELGATE" CONSPIRACY-
VC'S RIGGING INDUSTRIES Crooked Angels: Blogger Accuses Top Tech Investors of ...Arrington says his sources told him the angels also discussed "how they can act as a group" to reduce deal valuations, exclude traditional VCs from deals, and shut new angel investors out.dailyfinance.com/2010/09/22/angelgate-arrington-top-tech-i...More results sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Angelg...More resultsLiminal states :: "Angelgate": Collusion is so hot right nowUpdate, September 7: Or maybe not! Arianna Huffington stepped in things got messy. In TechCrunch, Arrington argued that what was really at stake was "editorial independence", and demanded that AOL sell TechCrunch back to the original owners.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=1795&cpage=1More results Did Goldman Sachs rig the commodities markets? - Nov. 20, 2014 Goldman Sachs has been trying to distance itself from the "vampire squid" image it developed during the financial crisis. The findings of a Senate investigation into commodities market rigging probably won't help. According to the report, Wall Street banks may have manipulated ...money.cnn.com/2014/11/20/investing/goldman-commodity-ma...More results seekingalpha.com/article/226644-angelgateMore resultsAttend the secret super angel meetup at Bin 38 with everyone ..Attend the secret super angel meetup at Bin 38 with everyone but @Arrington ;) #angelgate. bin 38 · Wednesday, September 22, 2010 at 8:00 PMplancast.com/p/2dmj/attend-secret-super-angel-meetup-b...More results AngelGate dispute among Valley investors cracks wide open ...When TechCrunch editor Mike Arrington barged in on a secret meeting of super angels, the wealthy individuals who are taking an increasingly prominent role in startup investing, the facts were open to interpretation. Arrington alleged that he heard the meeting was about illegal collusion.venturebeat.com/2010/09/24/angelgate-cracks-wide-open-as-...More results Michael Arrington: Persona non Grata? Behold 'AngelGate Super Angels rely on positive media coverage incorporating buzz words and talking about growth opportunities, but instead we're out there talking about how they wanted to fix valuations and stunt growth for their competitors....huffingtonpost.com/pedro-l-rodriguez/michael-arrington-perso...More results 'AngelGate' disrupts TechCrunch conference but no 'Jerry ...'AngelGate' disrupts TechCrunch conference but no 'Jerry Springer' moment. September 27, ... Arrington fired off the initial bombshell blog post after he tried to crash a private meeting of prominent angel investors at a San Francisco restaurant called Bin ... "Angelgate" saturated social media ...latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/09/angelgate-disrupts-tec...More results How Michael Arrington's School of Friendship Journalism Led ..How Arrington's insider info led him to AngelGate. I never develop friendships with people I don't actually like. For instance, I write about digital music a lot. And the music labels are notorious for working the press. They'll leak stuff and develop relationships, and it can actually be prettynymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2010/09/techcrunchs_m...More results Angelgate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Angelgate is a controversy surrounding allegations of price fixing and collusion among a group of ten angel investors in the San Francisco Bay Area.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AngelgateMore results AngelGate: Chris Sacca Responds To Ron Conway | TechCrunch Quick summary of "AngelGate" to date: A Blogger Walks Into A Bar; Dave McClure Gets Mad; Dave McClure Gets Really Mad; Ron Conway Goes Nuclear; Ron Conway Clarifiestechcrunch.com/2010/09/26/angelgate-chris-sacca-responds...More results 'AngelGate' Players Come Face To Face, But Fireworks Are ..A face-to-face meeting between angel investors who had a highly publicized public spat didn't lead to the fireworks some expected.blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/09/27/angelgate-playe...More results AngelGate Is "100 Percent Accurate," Says Michael Arrington Last night, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington reported that on Monday night, a group of high-profile Silicon Valley angels met at a San Francisco restaurant, where, Arrington said he later learned, "collusion" and "price fixing" were on the menu.pehub.com/2010/09/angelgate-is-“100-percent-accurat...More results Michael-Arrington-investor-journalistMore resultsFinger-Pointing, Emails, Deleted Tweets, Rage. AngelGate Is ...On the surface, it seemed like the situation that has come to be known as AngelGate was dying down. Since we broke the news about the secret meetings between angel investors where they supposedly agree to agree on things, a lot has been said on both sides. Mike said what he knew, and ...techcrunch.com/2010/09/23/angelgate/More results Who Conspires:
1. "Angel Investor 'clubs' " 2. Tier 1 VC groups 3. VC's and bankers 4. VC's and real estate companies 5. VC's and politicians 6. VC organizations, ie: 7. VC's and their Frat house "business club" friends F YOU HAVE A START-UP THEN WILL BE FORCED TO DEAL WITH THE VC "MOB"!
LET'S END THE ABUSE OF AMERICA'S CREATORS! Almost every bank in the U.S. has now been charged with criminal activity. Almost every investment broker has been charged with criminal activity. The VC's are connected to every one of them. Let's look deeper: The VC's always try to retort, in numerous blogs,:"Oh but if we did things like that we couldn't stay in business, so it couldn't possibly be true" But, That is what the banks said and they got caught and prosecuted and continue to get caught and prosecuted every month. That is what the mortgage companies said and they got caught and prosecuted and continue to get caught and prosecuted every month. That is what the investment bankers said and they got caught and prosecuted and continue to get caught and prosecuted every month. That is what the corrupt politicians said and they got caught and prosecuted and continue to get caught and prosecuted every month. The VC's are the tools for technology suppression. If it competes with their bigger investments, they will kill it by coordinated consensus. The BIG LIES that the VC's tell you about how they "won't share your information", "you can trust us", "we are only here to help you" and"we never conspire to rig valuations, control markets, wipe out our friends competitors and blockade funding for people who didn't go to our Frat house"... is totally false! TO THE START-UP CEO: They will lie to you. If your idea is any good they will steal it, give to their friends at another VC group and have them start a clone of your idea. You are only valuable to them when you first act all eager and enthused so they can use you to sell deals to pension funds but as soon as you realize what is really up and become aware you will be out on your ass like the actual original founders of Twitter, Tesla, Facebook, and thousands of others. If you are from India: They want you for your good education and engineering skills and low rate but they know you can't go after them after you return to India. They will use your H1B like a leash. If you do not look, and act, like a Yale Frat Boy, you will always be treated like their tool. Even in VC meetings they ask: "Who is your Indian and how long do we need him?" They are NOT honorable. They are in it for yuppie ego, escorts, cash and "good 'ole boy" power. They only care about impressing their Frat house bro's on the other side of Sandhill Road or Park Avenue. They do not care about improving anything but their bank accounts. If you are in a start-up and you encountered VC rigging or manipulation of your company or industry, Then demand a Justice Department investigation at: [email protected] and [email protected] and Your State Attorney General and Write a demand for VC reform laws and investigations in the blog of every newspaper and technical site. |
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