How Google and the Big Tech Companies Are Helping Maintain America's Empire

Silicon Valley has been in the media spotlight for its role in gentrifying and raising rents in San Francisco, helping the NSA spy on American citizens, and lack of racial and gender diversity. Despite that, Silicon Valley still has a reputation for benevolence, innocence and progressivism. Hence Google's phrase, "Don't be evil." A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that, even after the Snowden leaks, 53% of those surveyed had high confidence in the tech industry. The tech industry is not seen as evil as, say, Wall Street or Big Oil.

One aspect of Silicon Valley that would damage this reputation has not been scrutinized enough—its involvement in American militarism. Silicon Valley's ties to the National Security State extend beyond the NSA's PRISM program. Through numerous partnerships and contracts with the U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies, Silicon Valley is part of the American military-industrial complex. Google sells its technologies to the U.S. military, FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA, NGA, and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies, has managers with backgrounds in military and intelligence work, and partners with defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Amazon designed a cloud computing system that will be used by the CIA and every other intelligence agency. The CIA-funded tech company Palantir sells its data-mining and analysis software to the U.S. military, CIA, LAPD, NYPD, and other security agencies. These technologies have several war-zone and intelligence-gathering applications.

First, a little background to explain how the military has been involved with Silicon Valley since its conception as a technology center. Silicon Valley's roots date back to World War II, according to a presentation by researcher and entrepreneur Steve Blank. During the war, the U.S. government funded a secret lab at Harvard University to research how to disrupt Germany's radar-guided electronic air defense system. The solution -- drop aluminum foil in front of German radars to jam them. This birthed modern electronic warfare and signals intelligence. The head of that lab was Stanford engineering professor Fred Terman who, after World War II, took 11 staffers from that lab to create Stanford's Electronic Research Lab (ERL), which received funding from the military. Stanford also had an Applied Electronics Lab(AEL) that did classified research in jammers and electronic intelligence for the military. 

In fact, much of AEL's research aided the U.S. war in Vietnam. This made the lab a target for student antiwar protesters who nonviolently occupied the lab in April 1969 and demanded an end to classified research at Stanford. After nearly a year of teach-ins, protests, and violent clashes with the police, Stanford effectively eliminated war-related classified research at the university.

The ERL did research in and designed microwave tubes and electronic receivers and jammers. This helped the U.S. military and intelligence agencies spy on the Soviet Union and jam their air defense systems. Local tube companies and contractors developed the technologies based on that research. Some researchers from ERL also founded microwave companies in the area. This created a boon of microwave and electronic startups that ultimately formed the Silicon Valley known today.  

Don't be evil, Google  

Last year, the first Snowden documents revealed that Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and other major tech companies provided the NSA access to their users' data through the PRISM program. All the major tech companies denied knowledge of PRISM and put up an adversarial public front to government surveillance. However, Al Jazeera America's Jason Leopold obtained, via FOIA request, two sets of email communications between former NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt. The communications, according to Leopold, suggest "a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass" and that "not all cooperation was under pressure." In the emails, Alexander and the Google executives discussed information sharing related to national security purposes. 

But PRISM is the tip of the iceberg. Several tech companies are deeply in bed with the U.S. military, intelligence agencies, and defense contractors. One very notable example is Google. Google markets and sells its technology to the U.S. military and several intelligence and law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA, and NGA.  

Google has a contract with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) that allows the agency to use Google Earth Builder. The NGA provides geospatial intelligence, such as satellite imagery and mapping, to the military and other intelligence agencies like the NSA. In fact, NGA geospatial intelligence helped the military and CIA locate and kill Osama bin Laden. This contract allows the NGA to utilize Google's mapping technology for geospatial intelligence purposes. Google's Official Enterprise Blog announced that "Google’s work with NGA marks one of the first major government geospatial cloud initiatives, which will enable NGA to use Google Earth Builder to host its geospatial data and information. This allows NGA to customize Google Earth & Maps to provide maps and globes to support U.S. government activities, including: U.S. national security; homeland security; environmental impact and monitoring; and humanitarian assistance, disaster response and preparedness efforts."  

Google Earth's technology "got its start in the intelligence community, in a CIA-backed firm called Keyhole," which Google purchased in 2004, according to the Washington Post. PandoDaily reporter Yasha Levine, who has extensivelyreported on Google's ties to the military and intelligence community,points out that Keyhole's "main product was an application called EarthViewer, which allowed users to fly and move around a virtual globe as if they were in a video game."

In 2003, a year before Google bought Keyhole, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy, until it was saved by In-Q-Tel, a CIA-funded venture capital firm. The CIA worked with other intelligence agencies to fit Keyhole's systems to its needs. According to the CIA Museum page, "The finished product transformed the way intelligence officers interacted with geographic information and earth imagery. Users could now easily combine complicated sets of data and imagery into clear, realistic visual representations. Users could 'fly' from space to street level seamlessly while interactively exploring layers of information including roads, schools, businesses, and demographics." 

How much In-Q-Tel invested into Keyhole is classified. However, Levine writes that "the bulk of the funds didn’t come from the CIA’s intelligence budget — as they normally do with In-Q-Tel — but from the NGA, which provided the money on behalf of the entire 'Intelligence Community.' As a result, equity in Keyhole was held by two major intelligence agencies." Shortly after In-Q-Tel bought Keyhole, the NGA (then known as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency or NIMA) announced it immediately used Keyhole's technology to support U.S. troops in Iraq at the 2003-2011 war. The next year, Google purchased Keyhole and used its technology to develop Google Earth. 

Four years after Google purchased Keyhole, in 2008, Google and the NGA purchased GeoEye-1, the world's highest-resolution satellite, from the company GeoEye. The NGA paid for half of the satellite's $502 million development and committed to purchasing its imagery. Because of a government restriction, Google gets lower-resolution images but still retains exclusive access to the satellite's photos. GeoEye later merged into DigitalGlobe in 2013.  

Google's relationship to the National Security State extends beyond contracts with the military and intelligence agencies. Many managers in Google's public sector division come from the U.S. military and intelligence community, according to one of Levine's reports. 

Michele R. Weslander-Quaid is one example. She became Google's Innovation Evangelist and Chief Technology Officer of the company's public sector division in 2011. Before joining Google, since 9/11, Weslander-Quaid worked throughout the military and intelligence world in positions at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, National Reconnaissance Office, and later, the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Levine noted that Weslander-Quaid also "toured combat zonesin both Iraq and Afghanistan in order to see the tech needs of the military first-hand." 

Throughout her years working in the intelligence community, Weslander-Quaid "shook things up by dropping archaic software and hardware and convincing teams to collaborate via web tools" and "treated each agency like a startup," according to a 2014Entrepreneur Magazineprofile. She was a major advocate for web tools and cloud-based software and was responsible for implementing them at the agencies she worked at. At Google, Weslander-Quaid's job is to meet "with agency directors to map technological paths they want to follow, and helps Google employees understand what's needed to work with public-sector clients." Weslander-Quaid told Entrepreneur, "A big part of my job is to translate between Silicon Valley speak and government dialect" and "act as a bridge between the two cultures." 

Another is Shannon Sullivan, head of defense and intelligence at Google. Before working at Google, Sullivan served in the U.S. Air Force working at various intelligence positions. First as senior military advisor and then in the Air Force's C4ISR Acquisition and Test; Space Operations, Foreign Military Sales unit. C4ISR stands for "Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance." Sullivan left his Air Force positions to work as Defense Director for BAE Systems, a British-based arms and defense company, and then Army and Air Force COCOMs Director at Oracle. His last project at Google was "setting up a Google Apps 'transformational' test program to supply 50,000 soldiers in the US Army and DoD with a customized Google App Universe", according to Levine. 

Google not only has a revolving door with the Pentagon and intelligence community, it also partners with defense and intelligence contractors. Levine writes that "in recent years, Google has increasingly taken the role of subcontractor: selling its wares to military and intelligence agencies by partnering with established military contractors." 

The company's partners include two of the biggest American defense contractors -- Lockheed Martin, an aerospace, defense, and information security company, and Northrop Grumman, an aerospace and defense technology company. Both Lockheed and Northropproduce aircraft, missiles and defense systems, naval and radar systems, unmanned systems, satellites, information technology, and other defense-related technologies. In 2011, Lockheed Martin made $36.3 billion in arms sales, while Northrop Grumman made $21.4 billion. Lockheed has a major office in Sunnyvale, California, right in the middle of Silicon Valley. Moreover, Lockheed was also involved in interrogating prisoners in Iraq and Guantanamo, through its purchase of Sytex Corporation and the information technology unit of Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), both of whom directly interrogated detainees.   

Google worked with Lockheed to design geospatial technologies. In 2007, describing the company as "Google's partner," the Washington Postreported that Lockheed "demonstrated a Google Earth product that it helped design for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's work in Iraq. These included displays of key regions of the country and outlined Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, as well as U.S. and Iraqi military bases in the city. Neither Lockheed nor Google would say how the geospatial agency uses the data." Meanwhile, Google has a $1-million contract with Northrop to install a Google Earth plug-in. 

Both Lockheed and Northrop manufacture and sell unmanned systems, also known as drones. Lockheed's drones include the Stalker, which can stay airborne for 48 hours; Desert Hawk III, a small reconnaissance drone used by British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the RQ-170 Sentinel, a high-altitude stealth reconnaissance drone used by the U.S. Air Force and CIA. RQ-170s have been used in Afghanistan and for the raidthat killed Osama bin Laden. One American RQ-170 infamously crashed in Iran while on a surveillance mission over the country in late 2011. 

Northrop Grumman built the RQ-4 Global Hawk, a high-altitude surveillance drone used by the Air Force and Navy. Northrop is also building a new stealth drone for the Air Force called the RQ-180, which may be operational by 2015. In 2012, Northrop sold $1.2 billion worth of drones to South Korea. 

Google is also cashing in on the drone market. It recently purchased drone manufacturer Titan Aerospace, which makes high-altitude, solar-powered drones that can "stay in the air for years without needing to land," reported the Wire. Facebook entered into talks to buy the company a month before Google made the purchase. 

Last December, Google purchased Boston Dynamics, a major engineering and robotics company that receives funding from the military for its projects. According to the Guardian, "Funding for the majority of the most advanced Boston Dynamics robots comes from military sources, including the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the US army, navy and marine corps." Some of these DARPA-funded projects include BigDog, Legged Squad Support System (LS3), Cheetah, WildCat, and Atlas, all of which are autonomous, walking robots. Altas is humanoid, while BigDog, LS3, Cheetah, WildCat are animal-like quadrupeds. In addition to Boston Dynamics, Google purchased eight robotics companies in 2013—Industrial Perception, Redwood Robotics, Meka, Schaft, Holomni, Bot & Dolly, and Autofuss. Google has been tight-lipped about the specifics of its plans for the robotics companies. But some sources toldthe New York Times that Google's robotics efforts are not aimed at consumers but rather manufacturing, such as automating supply chains.   

Google's "Enterprise Government" page also lists military/intelligence contractors Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and Blackbird Technologies among the companies it partners with. In particularly, Blackbird is a military contractor that supplies locators for "the covert 'tagging, tracking and locating' of suspected enemies," according to Wired. Its customers include the U.S. Navy and U.S. Special Operations Command. SOCOM oversees the U.S. military's special operations forces units, such as the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, Army Rangers, and Green Berets. Blackbird even sent some employees as armed operatives on secret missions with special operations forces. The company's vice president is Cofer Black, a former CIA operative who ran the agency's Counterterrorist Center before 9/11.

Palantir and the military

Many others tech companies are working with military and intelligence agencies. Amazon recently developed a $600 million cloud computing system for the CIA that will also service all 17 intelligence agencies. Both Amazon and the CIA have said little to nothing about the system's capabilities. 

Palantir, which is based in Palo Alto, California produces and sells data-mining and analysis software. Its customers include the U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Special Operations Command, CIA, NSA, FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Homeland Security, National Counterterrorism Center, LAPD, and NYPD. In California, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), one of 72 federally run fusion centers built across the nation since 9/11, uses Palantir software to collect and analyze license plate photos. 

While Google sells its wares to whomever in order to make a profit, Palantir, as a company, isn't solely dedicated to profit-maximizing. Counterterrorism has been part of the company's mission since it began. The company was founded in 2004 by investor Alex Karp, who is the company's chief executive, and billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel. In 2003, Thiel came up with the idea to develop software to fight terrorism based on PayPal's fraud recognition software. The CIA's In-Q-Tel helped jumpstart the company by investing $2 million. The rest of the company's $30 million start-up costs were funded by Thiel and his venture capital fund.  

Palantir's software has "a user-friendly search tool that can scan multiple data sources at once, something previous search tools couldn't do," according to a 2009 Wall Street Journalprofile. The software fills gaps in intelligence "by using a 'tagging' technique similar to that used by the search functions on most Web sites. Palantir tags, or categorizes, every bit of data separately, whether it be a first name, a last name or a phone number." Analysts can quickly categorize information as it comes in. The software's ability to scan and categorize multiple sources of incoming data helps analysts connect the dots among large and different pools of information -- signals intelligence, human intelligence, geospatial intelligence, and much more. All this data is collected and analyzed in Palantir's system. This makes it useful for war-related, intelligence, and law enforcement purposes. That is why so many military, police, and intelligence agencies want Palantir's software. 

U.S. troops in Afghanistan who used Palantir's software, particularly the Marines and SOCOM, found it very helpful for their missions. Commanders liked Palantir's ability to direct them at insurgents who "build and bury homemade bombs, the biggest killer of U.S. troops in Afghanistan," the Washington Timesreported. A Government Accountability Office report said Palantir's software "gained a reputation for being intuitive and easy to use, while also providing effective tools to link and visualize data." Special operations forces found Palantir to be "a highly effective system for conducting intelligence information analysis and supporting operations" and "provided flexibility to support mobile, disconnected users out on patrols or conducting missions." Many within the military establishment are pushing to have other branches, such as the Army, adopt Palantir's software in order to improve intelligence-sharing.  

Palantir's friends include people from the highest echelons of the National Security State. Former CIA Director George Tenet and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are advisers to Palantir, while former CIA director Gen. David Petraeus "considers himself a friend of Palantir CEO Alex Karp", according toForbes. Tenet told Forbes, "I wish I had Palantir when I was director. I wish we had the tool of its power because it not only slice and dices today, but it gives you an enormous knowledge management tool to make connections for analysts that go back five, six, six, eight, 10 years. It gives you a shot at your data that I don’t think any product that we had at the time did."

High-tech militarism

Silicon Valley's technology has numerous battlefield applications, which is something the U.S. military notices. Since the global war on terror began, the military has had a growing need for high-tech intelligence-gathering and other equipment. "A key challenge facing the military services is providing users with the capabilities to analyze the huge amount of intelligence data being collected," the GAO report said. The proliferation of drones, counter-insurgency operations, sophisticated intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance (ISR) systems, and new technologies and sensors changed how intelligence is used in counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and other countries.

According to the report, "The need to integrate the large amount of available intelligence data, including the ability to synthesize information from different types of intelligence sources (e.g., HUMINT, SIGINT, GEOINT, and open source), has become increasingly important in addressing, for example, improvised explosive device threats and tracking the activities of certain components of the local population." This is where Palantir's software comes in handy. It does what the military needs -- data-mining and intelligence analysis. That is why it is used by SOCOM and other arms of the National Security State.   

Irregular wars against insurgents and terrorist groups present two problems— finding the enemy and killing them. This is because such groups know how to mix in with, and are usually part of, the local population. Robotic weapons, such as drones, present "an asymmetric solution to an asymmetric problem," according to a Foster-Miller executive quoted in P.W. Singer's book Wired for War. Drones can hover over a territory for long periods of time and launch a missile at a target on command without putting American troops in harm's way, making them very attractive weapons. 

Additionally, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies are increasingly relying on signals intelligence to solve this problem. Signals intelligence monitors electronic signals, such as phone calls and conversations, emails, radio or radar signals, and electronic communications. Intelligence analysts or troops on the ground will collect and analyze the electronic communications, along with geospatial intelligence, of adversaries to track their location, map human behavior, and carry out lethal operations.  

Robert Steele, a former Marine, CIA case officer, and current open source intelligence advocate, explained the utility of signals intelligence. "Signals intelligence has always relied primarily on seeing the dots and connecting the dots, not on knowing what the dots are saying. When combined with a history of the dots, and particularly the dots coming together in meetings, or a black (anonymous) cell phone residing next to a white (known) cellphone, such that the black acquires the white identity by extension, it becomes possible to 'map' human activity in relation to weapons caches, mosques, meetings, etcetera," he said in an email interview. Steele added the "only advantage" to signals intelligence "is that it is very very expensive and leaves a lot of money on the table for pork and overhead." 

In Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) commandos combined images from surveillance drones with the tracking of mobile phone numbers to analyze insurgent networks. Commandos then used this analysis to locate and capture or kill their intended targets during raids. Oftentimes, however, this led to getting the wrong person. Steele added that human and open source intelligence are "vastly superior to signals intelligence 95% of the time" but "are underfunded precisely because they are not expensive and require face to face contact with foreigners, something the US Government is incompetent at, and Silicon Valley could care less."  

Capt. Michael Kearns, a retired U.S. and Australian Air Force intelligence officer and former SERE instructor with experience working in Silicon Valley, explained how digital information makes it easier for intelligence agencies to collect data. In an email, he told AlterNet, "Back in the day when the world was analog, every signal was one signal. Some signals contained a broad band of information contained within, however, there were no 'data packets' embedded within the electromagnetic spectrum. Therefore, collecting a signal, or a phone conversation, was largely the task of capturing / decoding / processing some specifically targeted, singular source. Today, welcome to the digital era. Data 'packets' flow as if like water, with pieces and parts of all things 'upstream' contained within. Therefore, the task today for a digital society is largely one of collecting everything, so as to fully unwrap and exploit the totality of the captured data in an almost exploratory manner. And therein lies the apparent inherently unconstitutional-ness of wholesale collection of digital data…it's almost like 'pre-crime.'"  

One modern use of signals intelligence is in the United States' extrajudicial killing program, a major component of the global war on terror. The extrajudicial killing program began during the Bush administration as a means to kill suspected terrorists around the world without any due process. However, as Bush focused on the large-occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the extrajudicial killing program was less emphasized. 

The Obama administration continued the war on terror but largely shifted away from large-scale occupations to emphasizing CIA/JSOC drone strikes, airstrikes, cruise missile attacks,proxies, and raids by special operations forces against suspected terrorists and other groups. Obama continued and expanded Bush's assassination program, relying on drones and special operations forces to do the job. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, U.S. drone strikes and other covert operations have killed nearly 3,000 to over 4,800 people, including 500 to over 1,000 civilians, in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. During Obama's five years in office, over 2,400 people were killed by U.S. drone strikes. Most of those killed by drone strikes are civilians or low-level fighters and, in Pakistan, only 2 percent were high-level militants. Communities living under drone strikes are regularly terrorized and traumatized by them. 

Targeting for drone strikes is based on metadata analysis and geolocating the cell phone SIM card of a suspected terrorist, according to a report by the Intercept. This intelligence is provided by the NSA and given to the CIA or JSOC which will then carry out the drone strike. However, it is very common for people in countries like Yemen or Pakistan to hold multiple SIM cards, hand their cell phones to family and friends, and groups like the Taliban to randomly hand out SIM cards among their fighters to confuse trackers.

Since this methodology targets a SIM card linked to a suspect rather than an actual person, innocent civilians are regularly killed unintentionally. To ensure the assassination program will continue, the National Counterterrorism Center developed the "disposition matrix," a database that continuously adds the names, locations, and associates of suspected terrorists to kill-or-capture lists. 

The Defense Department's 2015 budget proposal requests $495.6 billion, down $0.4 billion from last year, and decreases the Army to around 440,000 to 450,000 troops from the post-9/11 peak of 570,000. But it protects money -- $5.1 billion -- for cyberwarfare and special operations forces, giving SOCOM $7.7 billion, a 10 percent increase from last year, and 69,700 personnel. Thus, these sorts of operations will likely continue.  

As the United States emphasizes cyberwarfare, special operations, drone strikes, electronic-based forms of intelligence, and other tactics of irregular warfare to wage perpetual war, sophisticated technology will be needed. Silicon Valley is the National Security State's go-to industry for this purpose.