Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring:
By Noah Shachtman
July 29, 2010 "Wired" -- The investment
arms of the 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.
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.”
Photo: AP/Charles Dharapak
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