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The Secrets of Silicon Valley: What Big Tech Doesn’t Want You to Know
The arrival of intelligence agency investment money created a new relationship between the government and the researchers in the Valley. 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 only at the militaries of foreign countries, but at the population of the world as a whole.
Now cloaked in a shroud of national security, the government’s role in the development of Big Tech has been largely obscured. But, if you know where to look, the fingerprints of the intelligence agencies are still visible on nearly every major company and technology to emerge from Silicon Valley.
Take Oracle Corporation, for instance. The third-largest software corporation in the world, Oracle is famed for its eponymous database software. What many do not know is that the “Oracle” name itself comes from the firm’s first customer: the CIA. “Project Oracle” was the CIA codename for a giant relational database that was being constructed on contract by Ampex, a Silicon Valley firm. Assigned to the project were Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates. Although Project Oracle “was something of a disaster” it did lead Ellison and his partners to spin off Oracle Corporation, which to this day gets 25% of its business from government contracts.
Or take Sun Microsystems. Founded in 1982, the Silicon Valley software and hardware giant’s flagship Unix workstation, the “Sun-1”, as ComputerWorld explains, “owes its origins rather directly to a half-dozen major technologies developed at multiple universities and companies, all funded by ARPA.” Sun was acquired by Oracle in 2010 for $7.4 billion.
But to an entire generation growing up today, this is ancient history. Sure, the intelligence agencies and the Defense Department were involved in the founding of these Silicon Valley stalwarts. But what about the Silicon Valley of today? What does this have to do with Google or Facebook or PayPal or the Big Tech giants that have become synonymous with computing in the age of the internet?
The modern era of Silicon Valley began in the 1990s, when the advent of the World Wide Web brought the full potential of the computing revolution into homes across America and around the globe. This was the era of the dotcom bubble, when small start-ups with no business plan and no revenue could become million-dollar companies overnight. And behind it all, steering the revolution from the shadows, were the intelligence agencies, who helped fund the core technologies and platforms of the modern internet.
One of the first problems confronting early users of the web was how to search through the dizzying array of personal web sites, corporate web pages, government sites and other content that was coming online every day. In order for the web to turn from a playground for tech geeks and hobbyists into a ubiquitous communication tool, there would need to be a way to quickly sort through the vast amount of information available and return a relevant list of websites to lead users to useful information. Early iterations of online search, including personally curated lists of interesting sites and primitive search engines that relied on simple keyword matching, failed to live up to the task.
By happy coincidence, the problem of cataloguing, indexing, sorting and querying vast troves of information was one that the intelligence agencies were also working on. As the masses of data flowing through the internet gave rise to the era of Big Data, the NSA, the CIA and other members of the US intelligence community recruited the best and the brightest young minds in the country to help them store, search and analyze this information . . . and those searching for it. And, as usual, they turned to Stanford University and the Silicon Valley whiz kids for help.
Google—as the now familiar story goes—started out as a research project of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two graduate students at Stanford University. Unsurprisingly, one does not have to dig very deep to find the connection to the Defense Department. DARPA—the current name of the oft-rebranded ARPA—was one of the seven military, civilian and law enforcement sponsors of the “Stanford Digital Libraries Project,” which helped fund Page and Brin’s research. DARPA was even thanked by name in the white paper where the idea for Google was first laid out: “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.”
Less well-known is the “Massive Digital Data Systems” project spearheaded by the US intelligence community and funded through unclassified agencies like the National Science Foundation. As an email introducing the project to researchers at major US universities in 1993 explains, it was designed to help the intelligence agencies take “a proactive role in stimulating research in the efficient management of massive databases and ensuring that I[ntelligence] C[ommunity] requirements can be incorporated or adapted into commercial products.”
As Jeff Nesbit—former director of legislative and public affairs for the National Science Foundation—detailed in a revealing 2017 article for qz.com on Google’s true origin:
From its very founding and continuing right through to the present day, Google has maintained close ties to America’s intelligence, military and law enforcement apparatuses. As with all matters of so-called “national security,” however, we only get a window into that relationship from the public and declassified record of contracts and agreements that the tech giant has left in its wake.
In 2003, Google signed a $2.1 million contract with the National Security Agency, the US intelligence community’s shadowy surveillance arm that is responsible for collecting, storing and analyzing signals intelligence in foreign intelligence and counterintelligence operations. Google built the agency a customized search tool “capable of searching 15 million documents in twenty-four languages.” So important was this relationship to Google that when the contract expired in April 2004, they extended it for another year at no cost to the government.
In 2005, it was revealed that In-Q-Tel—the CIA’s venture capital arm and itself the perfect encapsulation of the intelligence agencies’ relationship with Silicon Valley—had 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 reconnaissance satellites that the US intelligence agencies have been using for decades to commit 3D imaging and mapping analysis. Keyhole, Inc. worked closely with the US intelligence community and even bragged that its technology was being used by the Pentagon to support the invasion of Iraq. To this day, the CIA itself describes Google Earth as “CIA-assisted technology” on its own page dedicated to “CIA’s Impact on Technology.”
In 2010, details of a formal NSA-Google relationship began to emerge, but both parties refused to divulge any further information about the relationship. Subsequent reporting suggested that Google had “agreed to provide information about traffic on its networks in exchange for intelligence from the NSA about what it knew of foreign hackers.” More details emerged from a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014, which revealed that Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt were not only on a first name basis with then-NSA chief General Keith Alexander, but that Google was part of a “secretive government initiative known as the Enduring Security Framework,” and that this initiative involved Silicon Valley partnering with the Pentagon and the US intelligence community to share information “at network speed.”
The Enduring Security Freedom initiative is just one window into how Big Tech can reap big dollars from their relationship with the NSA. In 2013, it emerged that the participants in the PRISM program—the illegal surveillance program which allowed the NSA backdoor access to all information and user data of all of the Big Tech companies—were reimbursed for the program’s expenses by a shadowy arm of the agency known as “Special Source Operations.”
In June 2003, the Information Processing Techniques Office—the information technology wing of DARPA that had overseen the original ARPANET project in the 1960s—quietly posted a “Broad Agency Announcement” to its website to request proposals for an ambitious new project. Labeled “BAA # 03-30,” this “proposer information pamphlet” requested proposals from developers to build an “an ontology-based (sub)system” called LifeLog that “captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person’s experience in and interactions with the world.”
The idea, which seemed somewhat fantastic in 2003, was that users of LifeLog would wear a device that would capture and record all of their transactions and interactions, physical movements, email and phone calls, and a variety of other information. The LifeLog would be presented to users “as a stand-alone system to serve as a powerful automated multimedia diary and scrapbook,” but, as the announcement goes on to reveal, the data collected would be used to help DARPA create a new class of truly ‘cognitive’ systems that can reason in a variety of ways.”
If it had gone ahead, LifeLog would have been a virtual diary of everywhere that its users went, everything they did, everyone they talked to, what they talked about, what they bought, what they saw and listened to, and what they planned to do in the future. It immediately drew criticism as an obvious attempt by the government to create a tool for profiling enemies of the state, and even supporters of the plan were forced to admit that LifeLog “could raise eyebrows if [DARPA] didn’t make it clear how privacy concerns would be met.”
But then, without explanation, the announcement was withdrawn and the project was dropped. DARPA spokesman Jan Walker chalked the cancellation up to “A change in priorities” at the agency, but researchers close to the project admitted that they were baffled by the sudden stopping of the program. “I am sure that such research will continue to be funded under some other title,” wrote one MIT researcher whose colleague had spent weeks working on the proposal. “I can’t imagine DARPA ‘dropping out’ of such a key research area.”
The cancellation of LifeLog was reported by Wired.com on February 4, 2004. That very same day, a Harvard undergrad named Mark Zuckerberg officially launched “TheFacebook.com,” the first incarnation of Facebook, which collects vast amounts of data on its users, offering them the promise of “a powerful automated multimedia diary and scrapbook,” but, as has become more and more evident in recent years, using and selling that data for ulterior motives.
But it is not just this interesting coincidence that connects Facebook to DARPA. Once again, the money that helped “TheFacebook” go from a Harvard “student project” to a multi-billion user internet giant involved a relocation to Silicon Valley and copious injections of venture capital from intelligence-connected insiders. Facebook moved to Palo Alto, California, in 2004 and received its first investment of $500,000 from Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. But the real money, and the real interest in Facebook, arrived in 2005, in the form of a $12.7 million investment from Accel Partners and an additional $1 million from Accel’s Jim Breyer. Breyer, it turns out, had some interesting connections of his own.
Nor is it a surprise that Facebook seed money investor Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, developed Palantir—a data-mining and analysis tool used by the NSA, FBI, CIA and other intelligence, counterterrorism and military agencies—from PayPal’s own fraud-detection algorithm. Or that In-Q-Tel was one of the first outside investors in the Palantir technology, which has gained notoriety in recent years for “using War on Terror tools to track American citizens.”
Nor is it a surprise to learn that Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and current technical advisor to Google parent company Alphabet, is now the chairman of the Pentagon’s “Defense Innovation Board,” which seeks to bring the efficiency and vision of Silicon Valley to the Defense Department’s high-tech innovation initiatives.
Nor is it surprising that Schmidt, in addition to being a member of the elitist Trilateral Commission, is on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group, a cabal of financiers, industrialists, high-ranking public officials, military brass and royalty that has been meeting annually in nearly total secrecy since 1954. Nor is it surprising that the Bilderberg Group now counts a number of Silicon Valley stalwarts among its ranks, from Schmidt and Thiel to Palantir CEO Alex Karp and former Electronic Frontiers Foundation chair Esther Dyson.
In fact, it would be more surprising to find a major Silicon Valley company that was not connected to the US military or to the US intelligence agencies one way or another. This is not an accident of history or a mere coincidence. The very origins of the internet were in shadowy Pentagon programs for developing the perfect command and control technologies. From the earliest attempts to form electronic databases of information on counterinsurgents in Vietnam right through to today, this technology—as Yasha Levine, author of Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, explains—was intended to be used as a tool of warfare against target populations.
More at: https://www.corbettreport.com/siliconvalley/
The arrival of intelligence agency investment money created a new relationship between the government and the researchers in the Valley. 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 only at the militaries of foreign countries, but at the population of the world as a whole.
Now cloaked in a shroud of national security, the government’s role in the development of Big Tech has been largely obscured. But, if you know where to look, the fingerprints of the intelligence agencies are still visible on nearly every major company and technology to emerge from Silicon Valley.
Take Oracle Corporation, for instance. The third-largest software corporation in the world, Oracle is famed for its eponymous database software. What many do not know is that the “Oracle” name itself comes from the firm’s first customer: the CIA. “Project Oracle” was the CIA codename for a giant relational database that was being constructed on contract by Ampex, a Silicon Valley firm. Assigned to the project were Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates. Although Project Oracle “was something of a disaster” it did lead Ellison and his partners to spin off Oracle Corporation, which to this day gets 25% of its business from government contracts.
Or take Sun Microsystems. Founded in 1982, the Silicon Valley software and hardware giant’s flagship Unix workstation, the “Sun-1”, as ComputerWorld explains, “owes its origins rather directly to a half-dozen major technologies developed at multiple universities and companies, all funded by ARPA.” Sun was acquired by Oracle in 2010 for $7.4 billion.
But to an entire generation growing up today, this is ancient history. Sure, the intelligence agencies and the Defense Department were involved in the founding of these Silicon Valley stalwarts. But what about the Silicon Valley of today? What does this have to do with Google or Facebook or PayPal or the Big Tech giants that have become synonymous with computing in the age of the internet?
The modern era of Silicon Valley began in the 1990s, when the advent of the World Wide Web brought the full potential of the computing revolution into homes across America and around the globe. This was the era of the dotcom bubble, when small start-ups with no business plan and no revenue could become million-dollar companies overnight. And behind it all, steering the revolution from the shadows, were the intelligence agencies, who helped fund the core technologies and platforms of the modern internet.
One of the first problems confronting early users of the web was how to search through the dizzying array of personal web sites, corporate web pages, government sites and other content that was coming online every day. In order for the web to turn from a playground for tech geeks and hobbyists into a ubiquitous communication tool, there would need to be a way to quickly sort through the vast amount of information available and return a relevant list of websites to lead users to useful information. Early iterations of online search, including personally curated lists of interesting sites and primitive search engines that relied on simple keyword matching, failed to live up to the task.
By happy coincidence, the problem of cataloguing, indexing, sorting and querying vast troves of information was one that the intelligence agencies were also working on. As the masses of data flowing through the internet gave rise to the era of Big Data, the NSA, the CIA and other members of the US intelligence community recruited the best and the brightest young minds in the country to help them store, search and analyze this information . . . and those searching for it. And, as usual, they turned to Stanford University and the Silicon Valley whiz kids for help.
Google—as the now familiar story goes—started out as a research project of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two graduate students at Stanford University. Unsurprisingly, one does not have to dig very deep to find the connection to the Defense Department. DARPA—the current name of the oft-rebranded ARPA—was one of the seven military, civilian and law enforcement sponsors of the “Stanford Digital Libraries Project,” which helped fund Page and Brin’s research. DARPA was even thanked by name in the white paper where the idea for Google was first laid out: “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.”
Less well-known is the “Massive Digital Data Systems” project spearheaded by the US intelligence community and funded through unclassified agencies like the National Science Foundation. As an email introducing the project to researchers at major US universities in 1993 explains, it was designed to help the intelligence agencies take “a proactive role in stimulating research in the efficient management of massive databases and ensuring that I[ntelligence] C[ommunity] requirements can be incorporated or adapted into commercial products.”
As Jeff Nesbit—former director of legislative and public affairs for the National Science Foundation—detailed in a revealing 2017 article for qz.com on Google’s true origin:
“The research arms of the CIA and NSA hoped that the best computer-science minds in academia could identify what they called ‘birds of a feather:'[sic] Just as geese fly together in large V shapes, or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in harmony, they predicted that like-minded groups of humans would move together online.[. . .]
“Their research aim was to track digital fingerprints inside the rapidly expanding global information network, which was then known as the World Wide Web. Could an entire world of digital information be organized so that the requests humans made inside such a network be tracked and sorted? Could their queries be linked and ranked in order of importance? Could ‘birds of a feather’ be identified inside this sea of information so that communities and groups could be tracked in an organized way?”
The project dispersed more than a dozen grants of several million dollars each to help realize this goal of tracking, sorting and mining online behavior in order to identify and categorize communities and track groups in real life. And one of the first recipients of this grant money? Sergey Brin’s team at Stanford and their research into search query optimization.“Their research aim was to track digital fingerprints inside the rapidly expanding global information network, which was then known as the World Wide Web. Could an entire world of digital information be organized so that the requests humans made inside such a network be tracked and sorted? Could their queries be linked and ranked in order of importance? Could ‘birds of a feather’ be identified inside this sea of information so that communities and groups could be tracked in an organized way?”
From its very founding and continuing right through to the present day, Google has maintained close ties to America’s intelligence, military and law enforcement apparatuses. As with all matters of so-called “national security,” however, we only get a window into that relationship from the public and declassified record of contracts and agreements that the tech giant has left in its wake.
In 2003, Google signed a $2.1 million contract with the National Security Agency, the US intelligence community’s shadowy surveillance arm that is responsible for collecting, storing and analyzing signals intelligence in foreign intelligence and counterintelligence operations. Google built the agency a customized search tool “capable of searching 15 million documents in twenty-four languages.” So important was this relationship to Google that when the contract expired in April 2004, they extended it for another year at no cost to the government.
In 2005, it was revealed that In-Q-Tel—the CIA’s venture capital arm and itself the perfect encapsulation of the intelligence agencies’ relationship with Silicon Valley—had 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 reconnaissance satellites that the US intelligence agencies have been using for decades to commit 3D imaging and mapping analysis. Keyhole, Inc. worked closely with the US intelligence community and even bragged that its technology was being used by the Pentagon to support the invasion of Iraq. To this day, the CIA itself describes Google Earth as “CIA-assisted technology” on its own page dedicated to “CIA’s Impact on Technology.”
In 2010, details of a formal NSA-Google relationship began to emerge, but both parties refused to divulge any further information about the relationship. Subsequent reporting suggested that Google had “agreed to provide information about traffic on its networks in exchange for intelligence from the NSA about what it knew of foreign hackers.” More details emerged from a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014, which revealed that Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt were not only on a first name basis with then-NSA chief General Keith Alexander, but that Google was part of a “secretive government initiative known as the Enduring Security Framework,” and that this initiative involved Silicon Valley partnering with the Pentagon and the US intelligence community to share information “at network speed.”
The Enduring Security Freedom initiative is just one window into how Big Tech can reap big dollars from their relationship with the NSA. In 2013, it emerged that the participants in the PRISM program—the illegal surveillance program which allowed the NSA backdoor access to all information and user data of all of the Big Tech companies—were reimbursed for the program’s expenses by a shadowy arm of the agency known as “Special Source Operations.”
MARINA PORTNAYA: The entire process reportedly cost PRISM participants millions of dollars to implement each successful extension, and those costs, according to US documents, were covered by an arm of the NSA known as “Special Source Operations.” According to The Guardian newspaper, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has described Special Source Operations as the “crown jewel” of the agency that handles all surveillance programs that rely on corporate partnership with telecoms and internet providers to access communication data. Now, this revelation is being considered evidence that a financial relationship between tech companies and the NSA has existed. And as The Guardian newspaper put it, the disclosure that taxpayers money was used to cover the company’s compliance costs raises new questions surrounding the relationship between Silicon Valley and the NSA.
SOURCE: NSA Paid Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo To Spy On You
The PRISM program itself proves that the military and intelligence agency ties to modern day Silicon Valley do not end with Google. In fact, every one of the Silicon Valley stalwarts that dominate the web today have similar ties to the shadowy world of spooks and spies.SOURCE: NSA Paid Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo To Spy On You
In June 2003, the Information Processing Techniques Office—the information technology wing of DARPA that had overseen the original ARPANET project in the 1960s—quietly posted a “Broad Agency Announcement” to its website to request proposals for an ambitious new project. Labeled “BAA # 03-30,” this “proposer information pamphlet” requested proposals from developers to build an “an ontology-based (sub)system” called LifeLog that “captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person’s experience in and interactions with the world.”
The idea, which seemed somewhat fantastic in 2003, was that users of LifeLog would wear a device that would capture and record all of their transactions and interactions, physical movements, email and phone calls, and a variety of other information. The LifeLog would be presented to users “as a stand-alone system to serve as a powerful automated multimedia diary and scrapbook,” but, as the announcement goes on to reveal, the data collected would be used to help DARPA create a new class of truly ‘cognitive’ systems that can reason in a variety of ways.”
If it had gone ahead, LifeLog would have been a virtual diary of everywhere that its users went, everything they did, everyone they talked to, what they talked about, what they bought, what they saw and listened to, and what they planned to do in the future. It immediately drew criticism as an obvious attempt by the government to create a tool for profiling enemies of the state, and even supporters of the plan were forced to admit that LifeLog “could raise eyebrows if [DARPA] didn’t make it clear how privacy concerns would be met.”
But then, without explanation, the announcement was withdrawn and the project was dropped. DARPA spokesman Jan Walker chalked the cancellation up to “A change in priorities” at the agency, but researchers close to the project admitted that they were baffled by the sudden stopping of the program. “I am sure that such research will continue to be funded under some other title,” wrote one MIT researcher whose colleague had spent weeks working on the proposal. “I can’t imagine DARPA ‘dropping out’ of such a key research area.”
The cancellation of LifeLog was reported by Wired.com on February 4, 2004. That very same day, a Harvard undergrad named Mark Zuckerberg officially launched “TheFacebook.com,” the first incarnation of Facebook, which collects vast amounts of data on its users, offering them the promise of “a powerful automated multimedia diary and scrapbook,” but, as has become more and more evident in recent years, using and selling that data for ulterior motives.
But it is not just this interesting coincidence that connects Facebook to DARPA. Once again, the money that helped “TheFacebook” go from a Harvard “student project” to a multi-billion user internet giant involved a relocation to Silicon Valley and copious injections of venture capital from intelligence-connected insiders. Facebook moved to Palo Alto, California, in 2004 and received its first investment of $500,000 from Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. But the real money, and the real interest in Facebook, arrived in 2005, in the form of a $12.7 million investment from Accel Partners and an additional $1 million from Accel’s Jim Breyer. Breyer, it turns out, had some interesting connections of his own.
NARRATOR: First venture capital money totaling $500,000 came to The Facebook from venture capitalist Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of PayPal. He also serves on the board of radical conservative group Vanguard DAC. Further funding came in the form of $12.7 million dollars from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel’s manager, James Breyer, was former chair of the National Venture Capital Association. Breyer served on the National Venture Capital Association’s board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. This firm works in various aspects of information technology and intelligence, including, most notably, nurturing data mining technologies. Breyer has also served on the board of BBN Technologies, a research and development firm known for spearheading the ARPANET, or what we know today as the internet.
In October of 2004, Dr. Anita Jones climbed on board BBN along with Gilman Louie, but what is most interesting is Dr. Jones’ experience prior to joining BBN. Jones herself served on the board of directors for In-Q-Tel and was previously the director of defense research and engineering for the US Department of Defense. Her responsibilities included serving as an advisor to the Secretary of Defense and overseeing the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
This goes farther than just the initial appearances. DARPA shot to national fme in 2002, when knowledge of the existence of the Information Awareness Office (IAO) came to light. The IAO stated its mission was to gather as much information as possible about everyone in a centralized location for easy perusal by the United States government, including but not limited to: internet activity; credit card purchase history; airline ticket purchases; car rentals; medical records; educational transcripts; driver’s licenses; utility bills; tax returns; and any other available data.
SOURCE: Facebook CIA connection
It should come as no surprise, then, that the ex-director of DARPA, Regina Dugan, was hired by Google in 2012 to head its Advanced Technology and Projects group, and that she was then hired by Facebook in 2016 to head their “Building 8” research group focusing on experimental technologies like brain sensors and artificial intelligence. Nor is it a surprise to learn that DARPA is already working to weaponize Facebook’s Oculus virtual reality technology for fighting cyberwar.In October of 2004, Dr. Anita Jones climbed on board BBN along with Gilman Louie, but what is most interesting is Dr. Jones’ experience prior to joining BBN. Jones herself served on the board of directors for In-Q-Tel and was previously the director of defense research and engineering for the US Department of Defense. Her responsibilities included serving as an advisor to the Secretary of Defense and overseeing the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
This goes farther than just the initial appearances. DARPA shot to national fme in 2002, when knowledge of the existence of the Information Awareness Office (IAO) came to light. The IAO stated its mission was to gather as much information as possible about everyone in a centralized location for easy perusal by the United States government, including but not limited to: internet activity; credit card purchase history; airline ticket purchases; car rentals; medical records; educational transcripts; driver’s licenses; utility bills; tax returns; and any other available data.
SOURCE: Facebook CIA connection
Nor is it a surprise that Facebook seed money investor Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, developed Palantir—a data-mining and analysis tool used by the NSA, FBI, CIA and other intelligence, counterterrorism and military agencies—from PayPal’s own fraud-detection algorithm. Or that In-Q-Tel was one of the first outside investors in the Palantir technology, which has gained notoriety in recent years for “using War on Terror tools to track American citizens.”
Nor is it a surprise to learn that Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and current technical advisor to Google parent company Alphabet, is now the chairman of the Pentagon’s “Defense Innovation Board,” which seeks to bring the efficiency and vision of Silicon Valley to the Defense Department’s high-tech innovation initiatives.
Nor is it surprising that Schmidt, in addition to being a member of the elitist Trilateral Commission, is on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group, a cabal of financiers, industrialists, high-ranking public officials, military brass and royalty that has been meeting annually in nearly total secrecy since 1954. Nor is it surprising that the Bilderberg Group now counts a number of Silicon Valley stalwarts among its ranks, from Schmidt and Thiel to Palantir CEO Alex Karp and former Electronic Frontiers Foundation chair Esther Dyson.
In fact, it would be more surprising to find a major Silicon Valley company that was not connected to the US military or to the US intelligence agencies one way or another. This is not an accident of history or a mere coincidence. The very origins of the internet were in shadowy Pentagon programs for developing the perfect command and control technologies. From the earliest attempts to form electronic databases of information on counterinsurgents in Vietnam right through to today, this technology—as Yasha Levine, author of Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, explains—was intended to be used as a tool of warfare against target populations.
More at: https://www.corbettreport.com/siliconvalley/
