Through In-Q-Tel, the CIA invested in a LOT of companies who were aiming to solve the problems they had. Google was another very early investment by In-Q-Tel on behalf of the NSA because Google's stated goal -- to collect, organize, and make sense of all of the world's data -- overlaps with what the NSA's goal is (and it's possible that Google might come up with better ideas and tech for doing it than the NSA's brain trust).
If these agencies were NOT investing in potential technical solutions that would be a cause for concern.
Note the "problems they had" aren't necessarily "they needed a better database technology". Oracle's mission is to have all bits of data in the world processed or stored on an Oracle system (source: I worked for Oracle, this was the internal mission statement).
Oracle collects:
1. Who is staying in which hotels and in which rooms
2. Who is eating at which restaurants and going to which entertainment facilities
3. Who is getting what health services
4. Who is travelling where across travel industry
5. Who is working for which companies in what roles and how much are they paid
This is incredibly powerful intelligence the CIA could not NOT want. Replace "who" in any of the above with a politician in a country of interest, or other person of interest/intelligence target.
<strike> It's sort of like Facebook getting CIA funding. CIA definitely has interest to know intimate details of everyone's lives, who is sharing what information with who, and how social fabric in different countries are organized. They/we would be crazy not to. Taking the converse: The CIA wasn't funding Facebook because they really needed to socialize more with friends and family. </strike> Please see thread below. CIA investment in Facebook has not been established.
That is a pretty far cry from Oracle having the data, especially pre-cloud. I think you are conflating "an Oracle system" with a system that Oracle actually controls rather than and end user that using the software. This is like saying a hard drive manufacturer has all the data that are on their hard drives.
I think 'createdapril24 is referring to Oracle's broader data brokerage/marketplace business rather than strictly their on-premise database system business.
Your data is in a piece of software controlled by Oracle. They can easily create a backdoor designed for NSA use. Whether they "have" your data on their hardware or not doesn't make much of a difference in this case.
There was a time when Oracle sort of worked that way. On-prem Oracle has mostly migrated to an appliance type model where phone-home is standard and almost mandatory. "Exadata".
Are you suggesting the CIA has ways to exfiltrate data from Oracle databases assisted by Oracle but without knowledge or consent of the user? That would be a pretty big deal.
Have you ever looked at the history of Oracle security flaws, as well as their reluctance to improve it? A public resource for this is David Litchfield.
No actually, the problems they had are just that the US intelligence community needed relational databases. Keep in mind that this preceded the internet and online hotel bookings.
Honestly I had not fact checked this. A quick internet search found lots of articles making different claims (CBS News says yes, Reddit says yes, IQT website does not list, Quora says no.) Overall there doesn't appear to be a very strong argument and this Quora article (https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-substance-of-the-claim-tha...) makes a compelling case that the connection is too tenuous.
Not just investment. "Highlands Forum", DLI (NSF, NASA and DARPA), MDDS. Sergey Brin was literally funded by NSA and CIA under MDDS. Google was the result of his research under this grant.
From the above link, In-Q-Tel was involved in Keyhole, which was acquired by Google. Can you show a source that In-Q-Tel directly invested in Google earlier?
> In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google, worth over $2.2 million, on November 15, 2005.[10] The shares were a result of Google's acquisition of Keyhole, Inc, the CIA-funded satellite mapping software now known as Google Earth.[11]
IIRC Google began with a DARPA grant but they were not directly funded by In-Q-Tel. However, In-Q-Tel invested in a different company that Google acquired which was the basis for Google Earth and through that acquisition In-Q-Tel gained shares in Google.
You imply a lot, but apparently the investment to Google, according to wikipedia is because Google bought a company they invested (Keyhole, later become Google earth) and apparently they sold the stocks after the acquisition. Or do you have more info?
The US military spends a lot of its treasure managing data, so it's not surprising that they would fund database companies to do it better. I got my start in databases while serving in the US Air Force in the early 1980s. Oracle would have been quite interesting for us, had we known about it.
It's not much different from how military funding drove advancement of aircraft or integrated circuits.
This is both a a very US-centric and trust in authority figures take.
For the rest of the world however, and people who understand that power should have limits, and that a distrust in authority figures should be the default state the idea that companies like Oracle and Google are mere extensions of the CIA/NSA is terrifying.
Who said anything about trusting In-Q-Tel, the companies they invest in (ahem, GOOGLE!), or what the agencies are doing with the fruits of their investment? I personally think the CIA should be abolished and the NSA put on a very short leash with lots of oversight. But in terms of doing what they do wisely it cannot be argued that In-Q-Tel gives numerous US Government entities access to IP and tech they otherwise wouldn't have gotten.
You keep saying InQ-Tel invested in Google but apparently it is Bullshit (look at the answers above). How about sticking to truth instead of conspiracy theories?
Your reference is mainly about Chinese nationals returning. 300,000 refugees and 200,000 Africans. Out of over 1 billion.
As for "millions of random people for being poor" I think you'll find they were imprisoned for committing crimes, and imprisoned after a jury trial or a plea bargain.
As opposed to, I don't know, publishing a newspaper in Hong Kong. Or being Uyghur.
It does show a bias that at this point should be obvious even to you: you are conditioned to believe US prison victims - I’m guessing including those forced into slavery - deserve it, and to believe those imprisoned for all kinds of felonies in China don’t.
What garbage. "Obvious even to you" should be that poor people commit more crimes against other people and against property, the very thing that police are looking for. That's why more of them are locked up.
Just for due diligence, I looked at your "references":
1) the first two are from the same person, and are unattributed. So I kind of doubt they're even true.
But let's pretend they are: "irrelevant formality" -- going to your probation appointment is pretty important. It's not "nothing." Probation is what they gave you instead of prison. I thought you were in favor of keeping people out of prison.
"Dirty urine" probably means they were using drugs. They were let out of prison on the promise that they'd stay off drugs. You think people should use drugs after pledging not to?
2) your third one: One extremely biased side of a case which I assume has other sides, from an extremely biased source. Try to do better.
as for the "felonious" people in China: what did the Uyghurs do to deserve it?
If you talk to almost any defense attorney (as I've done), they'll freely admit that the vast majority of their clients are guilty.
There are stats there, anyone who’s not indoctrinated can see them. One point:
>as for the "felonious" people in China: what did the Uyghurs do to deserve it?
Terrorism. The difference between Uighurs and the victims of American invasion on Middle East is that Chinese aren’t mass executing them from safe distance like Americans do.
Could you please specify to which part of "the West" is US more hostile than China? Being in/from EU, I think mostly everyone - going by recent public polls - is very happy about our partnership with the US given recent events, and a lot of people are already talking about the Chinese threat too. People here hoped China would take a pro-Ukrainian stance (with the TV presenter dressed in UA colors one time, etc), but that didn't materialize and instead China seems to be cooperating with Russia and people here dislike that a lot.
I haven't seen any serious claims (except from the remains of the pro-Putin nutcases, and the amount of these went to like 1/10000 the state before the war) about US hostility for a very long time - most people here think that giving up Afghanistan was a huge mistake. Most of my friends who didn't like the US acting as world police have said they were mistaken.
Lots of people in EU, not to mention worlds two main technology hubs: China and India. Yes, US is the good guys this time, let’s hope it stays like this, but we can’t forget Middle East, same way we can’t forget Trump and resulting deterioration of human rights.
China did take anti-Russian stance. Their strategic investments were redirected to other countries. They are complying with embargoes, differently from Germany (https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1563534129534500874 for a somewhat related story) and some other western countries. Of course you won’t find it mentioned in mainstream western media.
Invading Afghanistan was a mistake, but most of all it was a crime against humanity. And the worldview that got US into that - same as worldview of Putin, essentially the belief that their country has god-given right to invade others - is still there. There are more similarities, like protecting their war criminals from justice. Or ideologically-motivated oppression: https://twitter.com/erininthemorn/status/1563223736681381888.
My local mainstream media is reporting about Germany correctly and in full, btw. But yeah, we like to shit on Germans, other nations might not be alike in that.
> but we can’t forget Middle East, same way we can’t forget Trump and resulting deterioration of human rights.
Agreed.
> same as worldview of Putin, essentially the belief that their country has god-given right to invade others
Crimes against humanity are happening in Afghanistan now in much greater number than when the US Army was there.
I think that coming to resolve problems such as were/are in Afghanistan is the correct thing to do (not saying the practice worked out perfectly and that there weren't problems). That's absolutely incomparable to Putin who's there to take children, gas/oil fields and access to Black Sea, not to help.
"invading Afghanistan and killing two hundred thousand random people"
there's that word "random" again. You disqualify yourself from any serious discussions when you keep using that. You're throwing around crazy numbers like someone on The View.
So you are saying all those droned kids were combatants, not random victims?
>You're throwing around crazy numbers like someone on The View.
Those are official statistics, you’ll find them quoted on Wikipedia. Let me guess: they look weird to you, because your media only reports loses on the invading side.
What Russians/Putin said doesn't really matter to me, there are no (significant amount of) fascists in Ukraine and no persecution of Russians was happening. Meanwhile, Taliban is very much real and their crimes against humanity are real too.
US startups seem to have it so easy compared to companies in other parts of the world. It seems they may have been getting a little extra help from government agencies.
I'm starting to realize how difficult it is to compete in the tech sector without government assistance. I thought it was a free market, but it's looking increasingly like a giant clusterfuck of government intervention. It looks nothing like a free market, it looks more like a battlefield and everyone is competing for who can get the most free weapons and ammo from their respective governments (in the form of grants, contracts and beneficial regulations). That would explain why smaller companies cannot compete against the big ones in many sectors; the big players are flush with free government money; how can any small startup compete against that.
US federal government putting the thumb on the scale is not new. It has been happening ever since the officers who survived being under-supplied in valley forge got access to power.
If your startup's mission is at all related to data science, data collection, et al. then the presence of larger companies in the space will not be a barrier to finding a government sponsor. There is so much going on in the space, empires being built and bridges burned that there will always be opportunity for new entrants.
Monopolies are pretty effective at rigging regulations in their favor and creating funding sources that directly flow into their pockets. This sector just happens to be heavily monopolized.
> US startups seem to have it so easy compared to companies in other parts of the world. It seems they may have been getting a little extra help from government agencies.
That's called industrial policy, and the US does less of it than other countries. A model example for industrial policy is South Korea.
I sometimes wondered if the whole 'big data' craze was a symptom of too much government intervention... A projection of the needs of governments (not the needs of people). How valuable is people's data, really? I understand why people who work for the CIA are thirsty for data and believe that data is the most valuable resource in the universe... But why is the industry interested in it to that extent?
It's difficult to dispute the value of people's attention and trust, but their data... Common. Data seems more like a bonus; a way to monetize people's attention more efficiently (e.g. targeted ads). The main thing of value here (from a free market perspective) seems to be capturing people's attention in the first place.
Google didn't collect that much 'data' (outside of strictly required website data for finding things via their search engine) before they saw the profit implications of a B2B targeted ads solution, which was realized with their purchase of doubleclick.
All the infrastructure is in place to convert the United States to an East German STASI system. Most of the individual personal data that an outfit like STASI would use to control popular opinion (media job opportunities), academic and governmental job opportunities, 'social credit' scores, etc. is already stored the data archives of Google, Facebook, Oracle, ISPs, Apple, the NSA / FBI / CIA files, etc.
The only real fix is data privacy laws, which would force the private and public outfits to discard most of their stored data (and enforceable criminal and civil penalites for not doing so).
Laws can be changed, and so can their interpretation. It seems the real fix is nothing short of a clearly-written constitutional amendment. Even then, compare the search and seizure amendment to civil forfeiture...
Keep in mind the article was written in 2014. I was at Amazon until near the end of 2013 and we were actively migrating off of oracle at that time, but it was no where near ready when I left.
Amazon still runs on Oracle ERP. Even though they removed Oracle databases from AWS and other internal orgs, their own financials are still run in Oracle EBS. Thus the data for all the books bought by a person might still be in Oracle
Any Oracle implementation at Amazon certainly could not scale to do this real-time.
Black Friday, and Oracle's inability to scale up to meet it without explosive licensing costs, is a major factor in Amazon's decision to remove Oracle from their sales systems.
The VOIP telco I worked at literally named our CALEA [1] database "CIA". Ironically we couldn't afford another Oracle license for it so it ran on MySQL.
So did Google Earth. The Internet itself was funded by ARPA, a DoD agency. I think it is a good thing: the military will always be doing military research, but at least in the US its fruits often become available to the public.
APRAnet was a project to build a communications network without a centralized node to determine routing so that if large chunks of the physical network were destroyed (nuclear attack is the typical scenario envisioned) then the network would dynamically figure out how to route around the broken/missing network segments and traffic would get through. Rumor is that the first real-world test of this ability was the first Gulf War when the allied coalition physically destroyed upwards of 80% of Iraqi telecoms... but messages on the Iraqi network still got through, albeit delayed after bouncing around alternative routes outside of Iraq before reentering near the destination node.
Yes, it does: “Keyhole was soon contacted by the Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel,[11] and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency,[12] for use with defense mapping databases, which gave Keyhole a much-needed cash infusion.[9]”
I have thought that this fact is a common knowledge.
> I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Vox didn't highlight Oracle's CIA origins or its never-ending relationship with governments at all levels.
The reason is missing: There's a high likelihood that it was a sponsored article, at least inofficially. Some journalists love to write nice stories about companies - pre-dictated by those companies.
I don't have any specific insight here, but Vox aiming to be a "modern" media company seems to be an especially good candidate for such marketing.
Perhaps we should discuss the origins of web search?
And just to give a random data point: I saw the equivalent of Google Earth/Maps demonstrated at a government contractor (to which my company was a supplier of high performance hardware), in 1989.
It probably would not be all that surprising to learn just how many companies are like this. Especially tech companies. It goes a lot deeper due to regulatory capture. Then companies that exist for long periods of time, like the many ones started during and after WW2 have largely merged with the Government just naturally over time. Then consider all the companies that are either too big to fail or exist just because of quanitative easing free money. Many companies are just wholly controlled front companies by the FBI, CIA and other agencies.
Then all of the rest are at the mercy of all these other agencies to even operate independently.
Admittedly, your point, which I'm assuming is a jokey quip, is somewhat lost on me.
Not for nothing, the entire concept of "welfare queen" is both unsupportable and provably false right wing propaganda, and, strictly speaking, fundamentally racist. I have to assume you were unaware.
If these agencies were NOT investing in potential technical solutions that would be a cause for concern.
Read more about In-Q-Tel and their investments here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel