Intelligence Agencies Draw on Big Data
Big Tech and Big Data are the two most talked-about trends of our time. From their ever-increasing dominance to staggering market cap numbers, to anti-trust/regulatory issues to ideological conflict with the elected governments/representatives of the world, to new stunts in space, for several reasons, they make headlines more often than any other business on earth.
While discussing the Big Tech and Big Data people often tend to forget that there is an interesting history and background associated with their origin, perhaps because that is one of the least discussed matters of our time.
Computer, internet and cyber, the foundational elements of Big Data and Big Tech, have been invented as an outcome of military and intelligence R&D projects.
The person who used the term ‘cyber’ for the first time, an American philosopher and mathematician Norbert Wiener, in his book (1948) “Cybernetics – or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine,” his thesis was that “a society can only be understood through the study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.” His next book, which came two years later in 1950, was “The Human Use of Human Beings,” and the theories given in the book inspired many automation efforts that we see today.
As a Tool of Intelligence and Surveillance
Big Tech companies are often propagated as the ultimate dream of an entrepreneur. For many people, these are the ‘garage startups,’ initiated by some college dropouts and computer scientists, who accidentally, one fine day, caught the attention of some visionary venture capitalist, who decided to fund and to bet on those childish-looking ideas and later those ideas, as we know, conquered the whole world! Those stories of hard work, determination, and dedication, are indeed inspiring.
But at the same time, there is a long history of the American scientist fraternity, their businesses and intelligence communities working together as well, from the creation of atomic bombs to satellites to the famous moon landing efforts. And the internet itself is an enhanced version of ARPANET (Advanced Research Project Agency Network) of the United States’ Department of Defense.
Producing commercial entities as the joint initiatives of defense and intelligence agencies, which can bring massive mutually beneficial information, is a part of the United States’ long strategic tradition. The Silicon Valley and the consortium of tech startups that it produced, which we today refer to as Big Tech, are also not the exception.
Generally, when we say Big Tech, we refer to a few US tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, and from the last one or two years, Twitter is also seen as a part of this club. But there are dozens of other tech companies, quite big in operation and scale, that exist in Silicon Valley, like Instagram, LinkedIn, HP, Adobe, Cisco, Oracle, eBay, Uber, Tinder, Airbnb, Spotify, Foursquare, AngeryBirds, Lyft, etc. If we zoom in and observe their business models, we find that these have embedded advanced surveillance capabilities from the beginning.
Silicon Valley – the Background
The stories behind the foundation of Silicon Valley, which has been branded as the ultimate destination of innovation and entrepreneurship and projected as an aspiration for the young Indian minds too, are equally unique.
It is quite a known fact that the defence contracts of the 1950s and 60s were the lifeblood of the Valley. Frederick Emmons Terman, the leader of Allied radio-jamming efforts in World War II, is credited as the father of the Silicon Valley. It is said that after the War, Terman returned to Stanford University and was appointed the dean of the School of Engineering. And in 1951, he spearheaded the creation of Stanford Industrial Park, which is now called the Stanford Research Park and the ‘engine’ of Silicon Valley, as it is home to over 150 high-tech startups, including HP, VMware, Tesla, Steve Jobs’ NeXT computer, and Facebook, etc. It was Terman’s vision to lease the Stanford University’s land to these high-tech firms.
The entrepreneurial journey of Silicon Valley started with military contracts for microwave and vacuum-tube technologies that were used in aerospace projects, then in the 1960s, they received lucrative contracts in the government’s space and defence programmes, including the popular Minuteman missile effort. For these high-tech startups of the Valley, the CIA and US defense department were their first clients.
Later, the US intelligence community-focused venture capital fund In-Q-Tel was launched too, which intended to finance companies whose products were of interest to the CIA and other agencies. In-Q-Tel’s portfolio now includes security companies such as FireEye and data analysis firms like Palantir Technologies.
The ideas of ‘venture capital’ and venture capitalist were coined to encourage the private sector investments in businesses by returning soldiers of World War II. The father of Venture Capital, Georges Doriot, who founded the first venture capital firm ARDC (American Research and Development Corporation), had a prolific military career, too. He worked as the director of the U.S. Army’s Military Planning Division, was appointed the Quartermaster General during World War II, and later being promoted to brigadier general.
One of the most promising ventures of Silicon Valley – Google – is considered as the biggest improvisation of mass surveillance in history. Google has cooperated with the CIA many times in the past but in 2010, when Google and CIA jointly invested in a private intelligence-based cyber security company – Recorded Future, it caught the attention. It was a tool of real-time web monitoring, to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions, and incidents.
With time, as Google started dominating the consumer market, its other side of working as the contractor of their home country’s security and intelligence agencies went into the shadows!
Geospatial Data
Over the years, Google openly coordinated with US intelligence agencies to transform many small startups into useful strategic assets and one such startup was Google Earth.
The core technology behind Google Earth is originally from Keyhole Inc., which was founded in 1999. At that time, Keyhole’s flagship product – Earth Viewer – was used to sell on CDs to real estate, urban planning, defense, and intelligence groups.
In 2003, CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel invested in the Keyhole, and then it also joined hands with their National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Later in 2004, Keyhole was acquired by Google. In 2004, Google made some other acquisitions too. It acquired the Google Maps from the two Danish brothers, Lars and Jens, and in the same year, it had acquired ZipDash, a real-time traffic analysis company.
Today, Google Map is the default app for Android OS (a product of Google) that has a 95.23 percent market share in India. Although with the recent self-reliance moves of the Indian government in the geospatial domain, and with ISRO and homegrown startups like MapMyIndia coming together, things will certainly turn around in the near future.
There are plenty of such less popular insights about Big Tech and these are not conspiracy theories. The information is official and mentioned in the documents, press releases, and accounts that are available in the public domain. But they never come to notice or become a part of popular discussion and that is somewhat interesting.
One can say that the idea of Big Tech, Big Data, High Tech Startups, Venture Capital, and everything that is associated with Silicon Valley’s culture and glamour have their roots in the military and intelligence ecosystem. The products of the Valley have ventured into all those areas, which have the potential to affect strategic calculations/interest from Economy to Media to Geospatial data to public opinion/perception management, and all this cannot be called a mere coincidence.
So, while referring tech dominance, one must keep in mind that we are referring to a different kind of dominance here – which is covered under the guise of democracy, liberty, equality, global citizen, one world, and now entrepreneurship, innovation kind of flowery words.
Too much discussion on the Big Tech and Big Data often ignores a basic reality, that there are some human minds, a psychology, some philosophy, and a strategic mindset, that works behind these products.
Philosophy and Methodology of Intelligence
In the year 1989, Prof Isaac Ben Israel, who is currently the chairman of the Israeli space agency, published his research paper titled “The Philosophy and Methodology of Intelligence – The Logic of Estimate Process.” The paper is one of its kind in the intelligence research domain, for two primary reasons: one, the intelligence is a closed domain and there is a lack of meaningful discussions on it’s working philosophy/methods and second, the paper got published at a time when the modern intelligence techniques were in their maturing stage, and this was the same time when the internet was transforming into the world wide web (in 1991).
There is a natural commonality between the intelligence process and big data, both depend on the three As – Availability, Accessibility and Accuracy of information. Since the internet is primarily a tool of military and intelligence works, an understanding of the philosophy and methodology of intelligence research can solve some of the questions related to the objectives and approach of Big Data and Big Tech.
There is a belief that intelligence problems are very complex, they certainly are but the problems related to the physical world are equally complex as well, as the paper perfectly puts “is it possible to solve or predict the weather (“clouds”)? If concrete physical problems can be solved with information and approximation then they can solve intelligence problems as well.
The paper highlights some of the traditional challenges of intelligence research that are related to estimation, approximation, and inexactitude (lack of precision). It critically evaluates the traditional processes of intelligence estimation that were prevalent at that time, such as anti-scientific historicism and pro-scientific historicism, and proposes an approach (amended critical method) based on scientific methods and refutation.
The conventional approach to intelligence research (before internet technologies) was based on historicist methods that emphasize historical processes or trends, and the idea of ‘holism’ to infer large-scale predictions. Those methods were based on the idea of involving/manipulating the dynamics of a society with the social and historic forces, and activism and influencing the trends/processes to push them in a particular direction.
The paper sheds light on the different challenges into those approaches such as obstacles in obtaining relevant information and deriving insights from that, difficulties in experimenting (on a large scale) with the hypothesis/approximations and in testing/validating them, relying too much on ‘what’ part rather than on ‘how’ (the causal explanations), and the lack of a logical process/flow and dependency on the known data, etc.
Prof Isaac has advocated that the scientific approach/measures are critical for analysis or accurate prediction about a group, society, or nation, and their major trends. The paper got published in 1989 and, two years later (in 1991), the internet emerged in its new avatar and become the world wide web, and things have been transformed since then.
After three decades, it is quite visible that these computer technology products and their improvisations are using a similar kind of approach (that is mentioned in the paper) in measuring/monitoring/predicting, and deciding the trends. And the issue of inexactitude in intelligence predictions has been resolved to a great extent.
To put it more succinctly, if Google or Microsoft windows were the platforms for facilitating the initial stage of intelligence research – ‘gathering of information’ then Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp, etc, can be seen as the mediums of ‘experiments’ (through greater public engagement and dependencies).
ALSO READ: Philosophy and Methodology of Intelligence and Big Tech – Part 2
