[News] Vicious Cycle: The Pentagon Creates Tech Giants and Then Buys their Services

Wed May 22 10:23:13 EDT 2019

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/22/vicious-cycle-the-pentagon-creates-tech-giants-and-then-buys-their-services/ 

  Vicious Cycle: The Pentagon Creates Tech Giants and Then Buys their
  Services

by T.J. Coles <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/t-j-coles/> - May 22, 
2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The US Department of Defense’s bloated budget, along with CIA venture 
capital, helped to create tech giants, including Amazon, Apple, 
Facebook, Google and PayPal. The government then contracts those 
companies to help its military and intelligence operations. In doing so, 
it makes the tech giants even bigger.

In recent years, the traditional banking, energy and industrial Fortune 
500 <http://fortune.com/fortune500> companies have been losing ground to 
tech giants like Apple and Facebook. But the technology on which they 
rely emerged from the taxpayer-funded 
<https://marianamazzucato.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/MOFI-2014-PB-01-Mazzucato.pdf> 
research and development of bygone decades. The internet started as 
ARPANET, an invention 
<https://www.raytheon.com/sites/default/files/rtnwcm/groups/gallery/documents/digitalasset/rtn_224614.pdf> 
of Honeywell-Raytheon working under a Department of Defense (DoD) 
contract. The same satellites that enable modern internet communications 
also enable US jets to bomb their enemies, as does the GPS 
<https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/(2O10)%20Global%20Nav%20-%20About%20Us%20-%20History%20-%20Resources%20-%2050th%20-%20GPS%20(Approved).pdf> 
that enables online retailers to deliver products with pinpoint 
accuracy. Apple’s touchscreen technology originated 
<https://www.ft.com/content/00347008-88af-11e7-afd2-74b8ecd34d3b> as a 
US Air Force tool. The same drones that record breath-taking video are 
modified versions of Reapers and Predators.

Tax-funded DoD research is the backbone of the modern, hi-tech economy. 
But these technologies are dual-use. The companies that many of us take 
for granted–including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and 
PayPal–are connected indirectly and sometimes very directly to the US 
military-intelligence complex.

A recent report 
<https://www.openthegovernment.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/CDW-Report_FINAL-_Government-Inc.-Amazon-Government-Security-Secrecy-1.pdf> 
by Open the Government, a bipartisan advocate of transparency, reveals 
the extent of Amazon’s contracts with the Pentagon. Founded in 1994 by 
Jeff Bezos, the company is now valued 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/technology/amazon-stock-price-1-trillion-value.html> 
at $1 trillion, giving Bezos a personal fortune 
<https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/#571d76e6251c> of $131 billion. 
Open the Government’s report notes that much of the US government “now 
runs on Amazon,” so much so that the tech giant is opening a branch near 
Washington, DC. Services provided by Amazon include cloud contracts, 
machine learning and biometric data systems. But more than this, Amazon 
is set to enjoy a lucrative Pentagon IT contract under the $10bn, Joint 
Enterprise Defense Infrastructure program, or JEDI. The Pentagon says 
that it hopes Amazon technology will “support lethality and enhanced 
operational efficiency.”

The report 
<https://www.openthegovernment.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/CDW-Report_FINAL-_Government-Inc.-Amazon-Government-Security-Secrecy-1.pdf> 
reveals what it can, but much is protected from public scrutiny under 
the twin veils of national security and corporate secrecy. For instance, 
all prospective host cities for Amazon’s second headquarters were asked 
to sign non-disclosure agreements.

But it doesn’t end there. According to the report, 
<https://www.openthegovernment.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/CDW-Report_FINAL-_Government-Inc.-Amazon-Government-Security-Secrecy-1.pdf> 
Amazon supplied surveillance and facial Rekognition software to the 
police and FBI, and it has pitched the reportedly inaccurate and 
race/gender-biased 
<https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/28/18201204/amazon-facial-recognition-dark-skinned-women-mit-study> 
technology to the Department of Homeland Security for its 
counter-immigration operations. Ten percent of the subsidiary Amazon Web 
Services’ profits come from government contracts. Departments include 
the State Department, NASA, Food and Drug Administration and the Centers 
for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2013, Amazon won a $600m 
Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) contract with the CIA. C2S will enable 
deep learning and data fingerprinting. Amazon’s second headquarters will 
be built in Virginia, the CIA’s home-state. Despite repeated requests, 
the company refuses to disclose how its personal devices, like Amazon 
Echo, connect with the CIA.

But Amazon is just the tip of the iceberg.

According to one thorough research article: 
<https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e> 
In the mid-90s, future Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin used 
indirect Pentagon and other government funding to develop web crawlers 
and page ranking applications. Around the same time, the CIA, 
Directorate of Intelligence and National Security Agency–under the 
auspices of the National Science Foundation–funded the Massive Data 
Digital Systems (MDDS) program. A publication by Sergey Brin 
acknowledges that he received funding from the MDDS program. According 
to Professor Bhavani Thuraisingham, who worked on the project, “The 
intelligence community … essentially provided Brin seed-funding, which 
was supplemented by many other sources, including the private sector.” 
The Query Flocks part of Google’s patented PageRank system was developed 
as part of the MDDS program. Two entrepreneurs, Andreas Bechtolsheim 
(who set up Sun Microsystems) and David Cheriton, both of whom had 
previously received Pentagon money, were early investors in Google.

Like Bezos, Brin and Page became billionaires.

The Pentagon’s Project Maven (or Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Function 
Team) was launched in 2017 
<https://gizmodo.com/google-is-helping-the-pentagon-build-ai-for-drones-1823464533> 
as a machine-learning application to help drones differentiate humans 
from objects. Technology and staff were provided by Google, many of whom 
quit in protest 
<https://gizmodo.com/google-employees-resign-in-protest-against-pentagon-con-1825729300> 
after it was revealed that the project had targeted Iraqis and Syrians 
for death.

In 1999, the CIA established a venture capital firm, Peleus; later 
In-Q-Tel. One of In-Q-Tel’s companies was the mapping firm Keyhole, 
bought <https://www.wired.com/2012/03/pentagon-google/> by Google in the 
mid-2000s and developed into Google Earth. Within a few years, military 
personnel were using Google Earth to target sites in Afghanistan. In 
2005, In-Q-Tel invested 
<https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e> 
$2.2m in Google. In 2010, the CIA and Google both invested 
<https://www.wired.com/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia/> in Recorded 
Futures, a social media tracking company.

Another billionaire, Peter Thiel, created both PayPal and Palantir. With 
$2m of In-Q-Tel investment, Palantir was launched in 2004 and provided 
data analysis for the CIA in Afghanistan and Iraq. Recently, it was 
tested 
<https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive-policing-tool-new-orleans-nopd> 
in New Orleans as part of local law enforcement’s “predictive policing” 
program. Palantir creates digital webs of citizens whose personal data 
are gleaned from various sources. Palantir’s webs 
<https://web.archive.org/web/20190101192221/https:/www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/> 
show police images of alleged, potential, future suspects along with 
captions such as, “Colleague of…,” “Lives with…,” “Owner of…,” “Sibling 
of…,” and “Lover of…”. Palantir is also used 
<https://www.openthegovernment.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/CDW-Report_FINAL-_Government-Inc.-Amazon-Government-Security-Secrecy-1.pdf> 
by US immigration authorities. For all the accusations of Russian 
meddling in both the US elections and Brexit referendum in the UK, 
mainstream Western media have underplayed Palantir employees’ role 
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy> 
in working with Facebook to create psychographic profiles of potential 
voters.

These and other examples show that in addition to trying to shape the 
world in the interests of American elites, the Pentagon’s ulterior 
motive is to fund hi-tech industry to stimulate new economies. That same 
hi-technology, which exists in a so-called system of “free enterprise,” 
not only creates monopolies, it does so with taxpayer money. Spied on 
and manipulated by the technologies they fund, the public, as consumers, 
then pay for services provided by those tech giants. Talk about a 
vicious cycle…

-- 
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