CIA Venturing Funding Startups – Are You Using CIA Software?

From Conspiracy HQ

For many years now the CIA has been quietly funding high tech and biotech startups to allow those startups as a Venture Capitalist.  I know it’s a shocking idea, but the CIA, yes the CIA, has a venture funding division called In-Q-Tel.

For over a decade the In-Q-Tel or Peleus as it was formerly known has been quietly investing in startups both large and small with the objective of providing the CIA and NSA with new technologies and no doubt backdoors into some of those most widely used software out there.

In-Q-Tel was started in 1999 under the direction of Gilman Louie, and its mission was to identify and invest in technology companies developing cutting edge software and services that serve their needs.  Since 1999 In-Q-Tel has grown to fund some of the most widely used and interesting software out there.

Former CIA director George Tenet:

“We [the CIA] decided to use our limited dollars to leverage technology developed elsewhere. In 1999 we chartered … In-Q-Tel. … While we pay the bills, In-Q-Tel is independent of CIA. CIA identifies pressing problems, and In-Q-Tel provides the technology to address them. The In-Q-Tel alliance has put the Agency back at the leading edge of technology … This … collaboration … enabled CIA to take advantage of the technology that Las Vegas uses to identify corrupt card players and apply it to link analysis for terrorists [cf. the parallel data-mining effort by the SOCOM-DIA operation Able Danger ], and to adapt the technology that online booksellers use and convert it to scour millions of pages of documents looking for unexpected results.”

So why is this a problem?

Well as we saw with the Skype vs. the NSA the government is seeking to not only fund these startups but as an investor they can also have a say in the development roadmaps.  The problem was this – when Skype was developed the engineers encrypted the communication between Skype nodes.  They used a level of encryption significant enough that estimates say it would take the entire computational power of the NSA 6 months to break the key, the government didn’t like that. So they offered Skype money, which was refused.  Eventually the backdoor was granted by Microsoft.  Which makes me wonder how secure Outlook.com is? It is known that Windows has a NSA key dating back to the Windows 2000 OS but is probably still there – http://cryptome.org/nsakey-ms-dc.htm

Windows was the only operating system to provide Government backdoors.  In a 2012 posting on Slashdot it was reported the Apple, Nokia, and Rim had provided the Indian Government, and by proxy the US government, a significant backdoor  into their systems. – http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/01/08/069204/leaked-memo-says-apple-provides-backdoor-to-governments

It’s also believed that Facebook is being datamined, which is consistent with In-Q-Tel’s ongoing investment in operations such as Cloudera who host and perform Big Data analysis.  Mining Facebook would not be trivial and would require significant resources to carry out such an ongoing operation.

Even venerable and supposedly secure OpenBSD was the target of a FBI backdoor.  In a CNet article dating back to 2010 Gregory Perry, former Chief Technologist for NETSEC stated

“I cashed out of the company shortly after the FBI project,” Perry told CNET today. “At that time there were significant legal barriers between domestic law enforcement and [the Department of Defense], and [this project] was in clear violation of that.” He said the project was a “circa 1999 joint research and development project between the FBI and the NSA,” which is part of the Defense Department.”

But In-Q-Tel has also made other interesting investments such as FireEye which is a sophisticated security tool.  Fireye is designed to protect you from BotNet attacks as well as hacking, but as with Skype I suspect that security is only as good as its source attack – meaning I suspect Fireye will not protect you from government incursion.

In-Q-Tel had also invested in Keyhole which was a CIA funded mapping application acquired by Google and now serves as Google Map/Google Earth.  No doubt somewhere in that code the CIA is getting a telemetry back on what is being looked for which it can use, via other In-Q-Tel software investments, to correlate.

In the case of Google they are known to provide data and actually have a page @ http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/government/ where you can monitor the types of requests and what was requested.  Much of it seems to be centered around defamation but there is a small percentage attributed to “National Security.”  What that entails we do not know but it is there.

There are even rumors TOR, the largest public anonymous proxy system was backdoored by the German Intelligence Service.

The most shocking to me was PGP, Pretty Good  Privacy, which has had reports of a government backdoor as early at 1997.  I guess the privacy is pretty good unless the government wants access.  You can read that report here – http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/100397pgp.html

So what does this really all mean?  Is your computer compromised?  Absolutely it is.  Backdoors have been detected, and in some cases removed but in most commercial operating systems it has not.  So if “they” want to access your system “they” can.  Does it mean “they” will?  I don’t know but as is with all things, if there is something you want to protect use a different computer on the net or just accept it.  If you want to hide use a library computer but no doubt they can be tracked as well.

This is just more evidence we live in a surveillance state, or rather world. But does that mean you should go offline?  No because even that does not protect you.  What this information does show is that you need to be knowledgeable of the situation so you can make choices.  It also shows the level to which the surveillance state has progressed and if we look at In-Q-Tel we can see concretely where it is headed and that is Big Data analysis, the correlation and analysis of truly vast amounts of data quickly.  It makes sense, if you are getting data from all these sources you need an efficient system to process it and that is fundamentally the Big Data idea.

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