How the CIA made Google

"The MDDS funding that supported Brin was significant as far as seed-funding goes, but it was probably outweighed by the other funding streams," said Thuraisingham. "The duration of Brin's funding was around two years or so. In that period, I and my colleagues from the MDDS would visit Stanford to see Brin and monitor his progress every three months or so. We didn't supervise exactly, but we did want to check progress, point out potential problems and suggest ideas. In those briefings, Brin did present to us on the query flocks research, and also demonstrated to us versions of the Google search engine."

Brin thus reported to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser regularly about his work developing Google. The MDDS programme is actually referenced in several papers co-authored by Brin and Page while at Stanford. In their 1998 paper published in the Bulletin of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committeee on Data Engineering, they describe the automation of methods to extract information from the web via "Dual Iterative Pattern Relation Extraction," the development of "a global ranking of Web pages called PageRank," and the use of PageRank "to develop a novel search engine called Google." Through an opening footnote, Sergey Brin confirms he was "Partially supported by the Community Management Staff's Massive Digital Data Systems Program," through an NSF grant"--"confirming that the CIA-NSA-MDDS program provided its funding through the NSF.

This grant, whose project report lists Brin among the students supported (without mentioning the MDDS), was different to the NSF grant to Larry Page that included funding from DARPA and NASA. The project report, authored by Brin's supervisor Prof. Ullman, goes on to say under the section 'Indications of Success' that "there are some new stories of startups based on NSF-supported research." Under 'Project Impact,' the report remarks: "Finally, the google project has also gone commercial as Google.com."

Thuraisingham's account therefore demonstrates that the CIA-NSA-MDDS program was not only funding Brin throughout his work with Larry Page developing Google, but that senior US intelligence representatives including a CIA official oversaw the evolution of Google in this pre-launch phase, all the way until the company was ready to be officially founded. Google, then, had been enabled with a "significant" amount of seed-funding and oversight from the Pentagon: namely, the CIA, NSA, and DARPA.

The DoD could not be reached for comment.

When I asked Prof. Ullman to confirm whether or not Brin was partly funded under the intelligence community's MDDS program, and whether Ullman was aware that Brin was regularly briefing the CIA's Rick Steinheiser on his progress in developing the Google search engine, Ullman's responses were evasive: "May I know whom you represent and why you are interested in these issues? Who are your 'sources'?" He also denied that Brin played a significant role in developing the 'query flocks' system, although it is clear from Brin's papers that he did draw on that work in co-developing the PageRank system with Page.

When I asked Ullman whether he was denying the US intelligence community's role in supporting Brin during the development of Google, he said: "I am not going to dignify this nonsense with a denial. If you won't explain what your theory is, and what point you are trying to make, I am not going to help you in the slightest."

The MDDS abstract published online at the University of Texas confirms that the rationale for the CIA-NSA project was to "provide seed money to develop data management technologies which are of high-risk and high-pay-off," including techniques for "querying, browsing, and filtering; transaction processing; accesses methods and indexing; metadata management and data modelling; and integrating heterogeneous databases; as well as developing appropriate architectures." The ultimate vision of the program was to "provide for the seamless access and fusion of massive amounts of data, information and knowledge in a heterogeneous, real-time environment" for use by the Pentagon, intelligence community and potentially across government.

These revelations corroborate the claims of Robert Steele, former senior CIA officer and a founding civilian deputy director of the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, whom I interviewed for The Guardian last year on open source intelligence. Citing sources at the CIA, Steele had said in 2006 that Steinheiser, an old colleague of his, was the CIA's main liaison at Google and had arranged early funding for the pioneering IT firm. At the time, Wiredfounder John Batelle managed to get this official denial from a Google spokesperson in response to Steele's assertions:

"The statements related to Google are completely untrue."

This time round, despite multiple requests and conversations, a Google spokesperson declined to comment.

UPDATE: As of 5.41PM GMT, Google's director of corporate communication got in touch and asked me to include the following statement:

"Sergey Brin was not part of the Query Flocks Program at Stanford, nor were any of his projects funded by US Intelligence bodies."

This is what I wrote back:

My response to that statement would be as follows: Brin himself in his own paper acknowledges funding from the Community Management Staff of the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) initiative, which was supplied through the NSF. The MDDS was an intelligence community program set up by the CIA and NSA. I also have it on record, as noted in the piece, from Prof. Thuraisingham of University of Texas that she managed the MDDS program on behalf of the US intelligence community, and that her and the CIA's Rick Steinheiser met Brin every three months or so for two years to be briefed on his progress developing Google and PageRank. Whether Brin worked on query flocks or not is neither here nor there.

In that context, you might want to consider the following questions:

1) Does Google deny that Brin's work was part-funded by the MDDS via an NSF grant?

2) Does Google deny that Brin reported regularly to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser from around 1996 to 1998 until September that year when he presented the Google search engine to them?

A call for papers for the MDDS was sent out via email list on November 3rd 1993 from senior US intelligence official David Charvonia, director of the research and development coordination office of the intelligence community's CMS. The reaction from Tatu Ylonen (celebrated inventor of the widely used secure shell [SSH] data protection protocol) to his colleagues on the email list is telling: "Crypto relevance? Makes you think whether you should protect your data." The email also confirms that defense contractor and Highlands Forum partner, SAIC, was managing the MDDS submission process, with abstracts to be sent to Jackie Booth of the CIA's Office of Research and Development via a SAIC email address.

By 1997, Thuraisingham reveals, shortly before Google became incorporated and while she was still overseeing the development of its search engine software at Stanford, her thoughts turned to the national security applications of the MDDS program. In the acknowledgements to her book,Web Data Mining and Applications in Business Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism (2003), Thuraisingham writes that she and "Dr. Rick Steinheiser of the CIA, began discussions with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on applying data-mining for counter-terrorism," an idea that resulted directly from the MDDS program which partly funded Google. "These discussions eventually developed into the current EELD (Evidence Extraction and Link Detection) program at DARPA."

So the very same senior CIA official and CIA-NSA contractor involved in providing the seed-funding for Google were simultaneously contemplating the role of data-mining for counter-terrorism purposes, and were developing ideas for tools actually advanced by DARPA.

Today, as illustrated by her recent oped in the New York Times, Thuraisingham remains a staunch advocate of data-mining for counter-terrorism purposes, but also insists that these methods must be developed by government in cooperation with civil liberties lawyers and privacy advocates to ensure that robust procedures are in place to prevent potential abuse. She points out, damningly, that with the quantity of information being collected, there is a high risk of false positives.

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