by Eric Mayes
March 31, 2008
from
RawStory Website
recovered through
WayBackMachine Website
Google is selling storage and data searching equipment to U.S. Intelligence
agencies giving them the power to create internal searches of government
data.
The CIA, FBI and National Security Agency (NSA)
have all reportedly banded together to create an internal government
intranet - sharing data on a system called
Intellipedia.
"Each analyst, for lack of a better term,
has a shoe box with their knowledge," Sean Dennehy, chief of
Intellipedia development for the CIA, told the San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday.
"They maintained it in a shared drive or a
Word document, but we're encouraging them to move those platforms so
that everyone can benefit."
There are three levels of information available
to users:
According to numbers provided by the CIA, 37,000
accounts have been established providing access to 200,000 pages of
information. Google supplies the software, hardware and tech support.
The software and browsing giant is also
licensing its mapping data to government agencies.
"We are a very small group, and even a lot
of people in the federal government don't know that we exist," said Mike
Bradshaw, who leads Google's federal government sales team and its 18
employees, yesterday to the Chronicle.
Federal agencies are not the only government
groups lining up for the Google’s know how.
The U.S. Coast Guard, The National Oceanographic
and Atmospheric Administration, National Highway Safety Administration and
the states of Washington and Alabama have also signed up for similar Google
systems.
Google’s transactions with the intelligence community have raised privacy
concerns.
Questioned by CNET earlier this year, both Google and Microsoft declined to
say if they have provided their users private data to federal authorities
under the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -
President
Bush's warrantless wiretapping program.
In general email and Internet data are not
subject to the same privacy rules that wire, telephone and radio
transmissions are.
Google told CNET:
"As our privacy policy states, we comply
with law enforcement requests made with proper service. We do not
discuss specific law enforcement requests and generally do not share
aggregate information about them. There are also some legal restrictions
on what information we can share about law enforcement requests."