Shadowy Groups and the Revival of Total Informational Awareness
MITRE CORP:
All of these groups are involved with each other and MITRE Corporation is intimately involved with all of these groups. Throughout its history, MITRE Corp has managed federally funded research and development centers for U.S. government agencies in the healthcare, homeland security, and cybersecurity fields.
Approximately half of MITRE’s employees work under the MITRE Labs unit, which seeks to ‘further extend the parent organization’s impact across federally-funded research-and-development centers and with partners in academia and industry.‘
According to Forbes, MITRE Corp also ‘runs some of the U.S. government’s most hush-hush science and tech labs.’
“Among the government’s wilder MITRE orders: a prototype tool that can hack into smartwatches, fitness trackers and home thermometers for the purposes of homeland security; software to collect human fingerprints from social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for the FBI; and support in building what the FBI calls the biggest database of human anatomy and criminal history in the world.”
MITRE Corp also runs the COVID-19 Healthcare coalition with Palantir, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, and In-Q-Tel, and is a major consultant for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the effort to craft ‘sweeping plans for curtailing the Covid-19 pandemic.’
The Forbes report goes into detail about the company’s extensive history of surveillance including a project the government partnered with MITRE Corp on to capture fingerprints from photos posted to social media.
“Emails and details of a Mitre contract obtained by Forbes outline a $500,000 “social media image fingerprinting project” for the FBI, which started in 2015. It was run by an FBI hacking unit in Quantico, the Operational Technology Division, and funded by a previously unreported research funding body called Triad,” reports Forbes.
ORACLE:
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin Texas and the second-biggest software development company in the US based on revenue.
Just like many of the other companies listed on the websites of these ‘private-public alliances,’ Oracle is a major player involved in the data gathering and software development necessary for future digital IDs.
Just like MITRE, Palantir, and Google — according to Gizmodo — Oracle also started as a CIA Project and takes its name from a 1977 CIA operation with the same codename. Similar to In-Q-Tel and Palantir — two groups closely involved with every aforementioned private-public alliance — Oracle’s very first customer was the CIA.
According to Gizmodo, VOX wrote an extensive exposé in 2014 detailing the birth of Oracle, without ever mentioning the company would have never existed without the help and initial funding of the CIA.
“Recognizing the potential demand for a commercial database product, [Ellison] founded the company that became Oracle in 1977,” Vox writes, conspicuously omitting the whole “because CIA wanted a relational database” part of the history.
PALANTIR:
Palantir Technologies — an American software company that specializes in big data mining and analytics — is also a member of the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, Palantir was founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp in 2003 following the invasion of Iraq.
Sometimes credited with developing the software responsible for finding Osama Bin Laden and birthed by funding from In-Q-Tel, Palantir’s only client up until 2008 was the CIA.
According to a Forbes article from 2013, Palantir has become the go-to company for mining massive data for intelligence agencies in the last five years.
“Palantir lives the realities of its customers: the NSA, the FBI, and the CIA–an early investor through its In-Q-Tel venture fund–along with an alphabet soup of other U.S. counterterrorism and military agencies…” Forbes writes. “Palantir’s advisors include Condoleezza Rice and former CIA director George Tenet, who says in an interview that “I wish we had a tool of its power” before 9/11.”
Condoleeza Rice is also on the board of Michael Bloomberg’s ‘New Economy Forum,’ led by Bill Gates.
ACLU analyst Jay Stanley has written that Palantir’s software could enable a “true totalitarian nightmare, monitoring the activities of innocent Americans on a mass scale.”
During the beginning of Operation Warpspeed — Palantir, using its Gotham software — developed a program called Tiberius which is run by the federal government and used to collect data from US government agencies, pharmaceutical firms, and vaccine manufacturers. According to Benzinga, the Tiberius platforms was also involved in the clinical trials of the development of the current COVID-19 vaccines.
According to Tech Crunch, Palantir also built the CDC’s web app for monitoring the spread of COVID-19.
Palantir’s Gotham software is also being used by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to collect all necessary data related to COVID-19, and to ‘predict outbreaks weeks in advance.’ Palantir’s software powers the department’s HHS Protect operation and according to Science Magazine, Palantir was aggregating and managing any and all related data in regards to the spread of the coronavirus on behalf of the HHS.
HHS Protect came under fire last year after the HHS threatened US hospitals with loss of federal funding if they did not report all case and patient data exclusively to their system. HHS protect is a platform Palantir developed that would be run by another company called TeleTracking.
Yahoo News reported in October that the National Institute of Health (NIH) was also working directly with Palantir to ‘Support COVID-19 Research.’ The NIH awarded the data-mining firm with a $59.5 million contract to ‘support the National COVID-19 Cohort Collaborative.’
While the HHS teams up with various CIA-backed data mining firms, the agency is also forming partnerships with DARPA according to the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response.
“That spirit of interagency collaboration is reflected in a new partnership forged between ASPR and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – DARPA – to strengthen the capabilities needed to protect the nation from 21st-century health security threats…
The partnership agreement, signed just days before the National Biodefense Strategy was released, will focus on research, development, and deployment of medical countermeasures and advanced technologies that advance U.S. readiness to respond to health security threats. Through the new partnership, ASPR and DARPA will share data and collaborate to maximize both agencies’ impacts and investments.”
In addition to all data from HHS Protect, Palantir also has access to all UK health records following its more than £46 million in contracts with the UK government and The National Health Service of England.
In June of last year, CNBC reported that Britain gave Palantir access to sensitive medical records including patients’ names, ages, addresses, health conditions, treatments, medicines, allergies, tests, scans, and X-Ray results.
The company’s data enclave has become one of the largest collections of global health records in the world, with more than 8 million records provided by over 60 partner organizations.
According to Forbes, Palantir founder Alex Karp, is a lifelong bachelor who says that the notion of settling down and raising a family gives him “hives.”
Karp also reportedly addresses his staff using an internal video channel called KarpTube, where he speaks on a wide range of subjects like greed, integrity, and Marxism.
According to the New York Times, Karp says a lot of the decisions he makes at Palantir are driven by his experiences as a Jew.
“He told me that his parents were “hippies” and that he spent a lot of time as a kid at political protests. He intuited from a young age that his background made him vulnerable, he said. “You’re a racially amorphous, far-left Jewish kid who’s also dyslexic — would you not come up with the idea that you’re [expletive]?”…
If the far-right came to power, he said, he would certainly be among its victims. “Who’s the first person who is going to get hung? You make a list, and I will show you who they get first. It’s me. There’s not a box I don’t check.” His fear, he said, propels a lot of the decisions for this company.”
Karp’s Palantir went public following the initial onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In-Q-Tel:
In-Q-Tel was the first government-sponsored venture capital firm, chartered by the CIA, in February 1999. According to research into In-Q-Tel’s beginnings, the organization serves as a platform to expand the research and development (R&D) efforts of the CIA into the private sector. The CIA uses the firm to make strategic investments in startup companies that are of interest to the CIA and greater intelligence community.
In-Q-Tel funded the creation of Palantir and runs the COVID-19 Healthcare coalition with Palantir, MITRE Corp, Microsoft, and others. The inspiration for the firm came well before its creation in 1999 from the Pentagon’s ‘Highlands Forum.’
The Highlands Forum for decades has provided a completely ‘off the record space for the most powerful members of the ‘shadow intelligence community’ to meet with senior US government officials, alongside other leaders in relevant private industries. This private network has operated as a bridge between the Pentagon and powerful private American elites since at least the mid-1990s.
New Scientist magazine compares the Highlands Forum to elite meetings like Davos but far more influential. John Clippinger, an MIT scientist, once documented his participation in a “Highlands Forum” gathering and described it as an invitation-only meeting funded by the Department of Defense and chaired by a senior DoD post overseeing all operations and policies for the Pentagon’s most powerful spy agencies.
Google:
Few people are aware that Google was one of many projects backed by DARPA and the NSA in the early 1990s. According to reports, the early work of Google’s founders was overseen by Department of Defense officials as well as officials of other US Government agencies.
Google was a part of a series of projects consolidated into DARPA’s Information Awareness Office in the early 2000s. The Total Information Awareness Program, planned to use predictive modeling and data mining ‘to identify potential terrorists’ while Google uses similar techniques to identify products that may interest particular people based on their online footprint.
Shortly after its initiation, the IAO was later defunded right around the time Facebook became popular.
Similarly, another Pentagon project called ‘Project Lifelog‘ — which Wired Magazine describes as an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person’s entire existence —was allegedly ‘killed’ by the Pentagon the same year Facebook was founded. Run by Darpa, the Defense Department’s research arm, LifeLog “aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, and the magazines read.”
Other projects consolidated into the Total Informational Awareness Office by DARPA are programs such as Stellarwind, Topsail, and PRISM. Around the same time of this consolidation of operations, Google used surveillance equipment onboard vehicles meant for Street View and Google Maps to tap and collect data from unsecured WiFi networks in 30 countries.
Google claimed that this data was ‘collected by mistake,’ but an investigation and subsequent lawsuit revealed otherwise.
According to journalist Whitney Webb, Google’s extensive ties to DNA testing companies makes them a highly qualified candidate for their established position as a leader in the healthcare data collection and digital identity scene:
“Google also has close ties with the best-known DNA testing companies in the United States, such as Ancestry.com. Ancestry, recently purchased by private-equity behemoth Blackstone, shares data with a secretive Google subsidiary that uses genomic data to develop lifespan-extending therapies. In addition, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, is the co-founder and CEO of DNA testing company 23andMe. Wojcicki is also the sister of the CEO of Google-owned YouTube, Susan Wojcicki.”
Google with the help of Verily also created ‘Project Baseline,’ which has been collecting genetic information from participants since 2017.
Project Stellar Wind was a warrantless surveillance program that began under the George W. Bush administration and was called the President’s Surveillance Program, (PSP) This program involved data mining of a large database of the communications of American citizens, including e-mail communications, telephone conversations, financial transactions, and Internet activity.
Project Topsail, or otherwise known as Project Genoa II, primarily focused on intelligence analyses with a goal to ‘develop and deploy cognitive aids that allow humans and machines to “think together” in real-time about complicated problems.’ The project is strikingly similar to technology recently patented by Microsoft.
In 2002, Tom Armour, a veteran of the Genoa project, was selected by John Poindexter to be the director of the new Genoa II program, a component of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) effort.
According to the Intelligencer, Poindexter in collaboration with Iraq War architect Richard Perle, played an essential role in the formation of Palantir.
Project PRISM was a program under which the NSA collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies. PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which forces companies to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms.
PRISM is one of many programs that are definitely not defunct. Forbes revealed in October that an accidentally unsealed court document showed that the U.S. government is secretly ordering Google to provide data on anyone typing in certain search terms.
This process is similar to geofence warrants, where investigators ask Google to provide information on anyone within the location of a crime scene at any given time.
PRISM’s existence was leaked in 2013 by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who warned that the extent of mass data collection was far greater than the public knew, and included what he characterized as “dangerous” and “criminal” activities
Google Chromebooks, Data Collection, and Virtual Learning
According to a national poll, for months the majority of America’s public school students were learning exclusively online, due to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the poll, which surveyed more thousands of public school parents in late September 2020, 58% of students overall were learning entirely online, while another 18% were receiving a combination of remote and in-person instruction. Less than a quarter of students were learning fully in-person at the time.
But even now that students are back in school and learning in person, the majority are still using Google Chromebooks, submitting all of their work through Google classroom.
During the height of the pandemic, if a school or a student could not afford a Chromebook, Google would sometimes give them out for free via their ‘Google for Education Distance Learning Support Program.’
Many argue that the now wide use of Google Chromebooks via the platform Google Classroom is just yet another ‘front’ for the surveillance state.
Recently, the World Economic Forum called for ‘connecting every school to the internet,’ and last month America’s largest teacher’s union — which has a long history of working with IBM to drive the evolution of automated “teaching machines” — advocated for universal digitally verifiable vaccine mandates.
In early 2020, Google was sued by the attorney general of New Mexico for collecting student data through their Chromebooks.
New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas alleged the company violated the privacy of students who use free Chromebooks provided to schools through the company’s G Suite for Education platform.
“Student safety should be the number one priority of any company providing services to our children, particularly in schools,” said Balderas. “Tracking student data without parental consent is not only illegal, it is dangerous, and my office will hold any company accountable who compromises the safety of New Mexican children.”
Since then another class-action lawsuit was filed against Google for the same reason.
The suit, filed by an Illinois father, alleges the tech company has illegally ‘collected, stored and used the personally identifiable biometric information of children under 13 years old who use the “G Suite for Education” platform on ChromeBook laptops issued to certain schools nationwide.’
Read More: Daily Veracity Staff