From Times Online March 31, 2008
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3652494.ece
CIA enlists Google's help for spy work
US intelligence agencies are using Google's technology to help its
agents share information about their suspects
Jonathan Richards
Google has been recruited by US intelligence agencies to help them
better process and share information they gather about suspects.
Agencies such as the National Security Agency have bought servers on
which Google-supplied search technology is used to process information
gathered by networks of spies around the world.
Google is also providing the search features for a Wikipedia-style
site, called Intellipedia, on which agents post information about
their targets that can be accessed and appended by colleagues,
according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The contracts are just a number that have been entered into by
Google's 'federal government sales team', that aims to expand the
company's reach beyond its core consumer and enterprise operations.
In the most innovative service, for which Google equipment provides
the core search technology, agents are encouraged to post intelligence
information on a secure forum, which other spies are free to read,
edit, and tag - like the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
Depending on their clearance, agents can log on to Intellipedia and
gain access to three levels of info - top secret, secret and
sensitive, and sensitive but unclassified. So far 37,000 users have
established accounts on the service, and the database now extends to
35,000 articles, according to Sean Dennehy, chief of Intellipedia
development for the CIA.
"Each analyst, for lack of a better term, has a shoe box with their
knowledge," Mr Dennehy was quoted as saying. "They maintained it in a
shared drive or Word do***ent, but we're encouraging them to move
those platforms so that everyone can benefit."
The collection of articles is hosted by the director of national
intelligence, Mike McConnell, and is available only to the CIA, the
FBI, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence agencies.
Google's search technology usually rates a website's im****tance by
measuring the number of other sites that link to it - a method that is
more problematic in a 'closed' network used by a limited numbr of
people. In the case of Intellipedia, pages become more prominent
depending on how they are tagged or added to by other contributors.
As well as working with the intelligence agencies, Google also
provides services to other US public sector organisations, including
the Coast Guard, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration,
and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
Often, the contract is for something as simple as conducting search
within an organisation's own database, but in the case of the Coast
Guard, Google also provides a more advanced version of its satellite
mapping tool Google Earth, which ****ps use to navigate more safely.
There is no dedicated team promoting sales of Google products to the
British Government, but a Google spokesperson said the company did
target public sector organisations such as councils, schools and
universities through the team that run AdWords, its internet
advertising platform.
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