The Pentagon must also increase its capacity for "behavioral modeling and simulation" to "better understand and anticipate the actions of a population" based on "foundation data on populations, human networks, geography, and other economic and social characteristics." Such "population-centric operations" will also "increasingly" be needed in "nascent resource conflicts, whether based on water-crises, agricultural stress, environmental stress, or rents" from mineral resources. This must include monitoring "population demographics as an organic part of the natural resource framework."
Other areas for augmentation are "overhead video surveillance," "high resolution terrain data," "cloud computing capability," "data fusion" for all forms of intelligence in a "consistent spatio-temporal framework for organizing and indexing the data," developing "social science frameworks" that can "support spatio-temporal encoding and analysis," "distributing multi-form biometric authentication technologies ["such as fingerprints, retina scans and DNA samples"] to the point of service of the most basic administrative processes" in order to "tie identity to all an individual's transactions." In addition, the academy must be brought in to help the Pentagon develop "anthropological, socio-cultural, historical, human geographical, educational, public health, and many other types of social and behavioral science data and information" to develop "a deep understanding of populations."
A few months after joining Google, Quaid represented the company in August 2011 at the Pentagon's Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Customer and Industry Forum. The forum would provide "the Services, Combatant Commands, Agencies, coalition forces" the "opportunity to directly engage with industry on innovative technologies to enable and ensure capabilities in support of our Warfighters." Participants in the event have been integral to efforts to create a "defense enterprise information environment," defined as "an integrated platform which includes the network, computing, environment, services, information assurance, and NetOps capabilities," enabling warfighters to "connect, identify themselves, discover and share information, and collaborate across the full spectrum of military operations." Most of the forum panelists were DoD officials, except for just four industry panelists including Google's Quaid.
DISA officials have attended the Highlands Forum, too"--"such as Paul Friedrichs, a technical director and chief engineer of DISA's Office of the Chief Information Assurance Executive.
Given all this it is hardly surprising that in 2012, a few months after Highlands Forum co-chair Regina Dugan left DARPA to join Google as a senior executive, then NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander was emailing Google's founding executive Sergey Brin to discuss information sharing for national security. In those emails, obtained under Freedom of Information by investigative journalist Jason Leopold, Gen. Alexander described Google as a "key member of [the US military's] Defense Industrial Base," a position Michele Quaid was apparently consolidating. Brin's jovial relationship with the former NSA chief now makes perfect sense given that Brin had been in contact with representatives of the CIA and NSA, who partly funded and oversaw his creation of the Google search engine, since the mid-1990s.
In July 2014, Quaid spoke at a US Army panel on the creation of a "rapid acquisition cell" to advance the US Army's "cyber capabilities" as part of the Force 2025 transformation initiative. She told Pentagon officials that "many of the Army's 2025 technology goals can be realized with commercial technology available or in development today," re-affirming that "industry is ready to partner with the Army in supporting the new paradigm." Around the same time, most of the media was trumpeting the idea that Google was trying to distance itself from Pentagon funding, but in reality, Google has switched tactics to independently develop commercial technologies which would have military applications the Pentagon's transformation goals.
Yet Quaid is hardly the only point-person in Google's relationship with the US military intelligence community.
One year after Google bought the satellite mapping software Keyhole from CIA venture capital firm In-Q-Tel in 2004, In-Q-Tel's director of technical assessment Rob Painter"--"who played a key role in In-Q-Tel's Keyhole investment in the first place"--"moved to Google. At In-Q-Tel, Painter's work focused on identifying, researching and evaluating "new start-up technology firms that were believed to offer tremendous value to the CIA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency." Indeed, the NGA had confirmed that its intelligence obtained via Keyhole was used by the NSA to support US operations in Iraq from 2003 onwards.
A former US Army special operations intelligence officer, Painter's new job at Google as of July 2005 was federal manager of what Keyhole was to become: Google Earth Enterprise. By 2007, Painter had become Google's federal chief technologist.
That year, Painter told the Washington Post that Google was "in the beginning stages" of selling advanced secret versions of its products to the US government. "Google has ramped up its sales force in the Washington area in the past year to adapt its technology products to the needs of the military, civilian agencies and the intelligence community," the Postreported. The Pentagon was already using a version of Google Earth developed in partnership with Lockheed Martin to "display information for the military on the ground in Iraq," including "mapping out displays of key regions of the country" and outlining "Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, as well as US and Iraqi military bases in the city. Neither Lockheed nor Google would say how the geospatial agency uses the data." Google aimed to sell the government new "enhanced versions of Google Earth" and "search engines that can be used internally by agencies."
White House records leaked in 2010 showed that Google executives had held several meetings with senior US National Security Council officials. Alan Davidson, Google's government affairs director, had at least three meetings with officials of the National Security Council in 2009, including White House senior director for Russian affairs Mike McFaul and Middle East advisor Daniel Shapiro. It also emerged from a Google patent application that the company had deliberately been collecting 'payload' data from private wifi networks that would enable the identification of "geolocations." In the same year, we now know, Google had signed an agreement with the NSA giving the agency open-ended access to the personal information of its users, and its hardware and software, in the name of cyber security"--"agreements that Gen. Alexander was busy replicating with hundreds of telecoms CEOs around the country.
Thus, it is not just Google that is a key contributor and foundation of the US military-industrial complex: it is the entire Internet, and the wide range of private sector companies"--"many nurtured and funded under the mantle of the US intelligence community (or powerful financiers embedded in that community)"--"which sustain the Internet and the telecoms infrastructure; it is also the myriad of start-ups selling cutting edge technologies to the CIA's venture firm In-Q-Tel, where they can then be adapted and advanced for applications across the military intelligence community. Ultimately, the global surveillance apparatus and the classified tools used by agencies like the NSA to administer it, have been almost entirely made by external researchers and private contractors like Google, which operate outside the Pentagon.
This structure, mirrored in the workings of the Pentagon's Highlands Forum, allows the Pentagon to rapidly capitalize on technological innovations it would otherwise miss, while also keeping the private sector at arms length, at least ostensibly, to avoid uncomfortable questions about what such technology is actually being used for.
But isn't it obvious, really? The Pentagon is about war, whether overt or covert. By helping build the technological surveillance infrastructure of the NSA, firms like Google are complicit in what the military-industrial complex does best: kill for cash.
As the nature of mass surveillance suggests, its target is not merely terrorists, but by extension, 'terrorism suspects' and 'potential terrorists,' the upshot being that entire populations"--"especially political activists"--"must be targeted by US intelligence surveillance to identify active and future threats, and to be vigilant against hypothetical populist insurgencies both at home and abroad. Predictive analytics and behavioural profiles play a pivotal role here.
Mass surveillance and data-mining also now has a distinctive operational purpose in assisting with the lethal execution of special operations, selecting targets for the CIA's drone strike kill lists via dubious algorithms, for instance, along with providing geospatial and other information for combatant commanders on land, air and sea, among many other functions. A single social media post on Twitter or Facebook is enough to trigger being placed on secret terrorism watch-lists solely due to a vaguely defined hunch or suspicion; and can potentially even land a suspect on a kill list.
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