https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo68B3UG9VU
Anne
Wojcicki is 23andMe co-founder, and ex-wife of Sergey Brin, the co- founder of
Google.
A) tech startups/boom early 1990s
B) -personal- data being created
C) U.S. gov wanna access it for
frictionless fingerprinting, listing, cataloguing, and arresting (a.k.a
precrime) → called Birds-of-a-feather (BoF) approach.
D) U.S. gov (mainly NSA, CIA, and
DARPA) couldn't just tell a tech company to do it for them because:
(i)
it's against U.S constitution & companies won't easily fold
(ii)
looking for a company implies contracting it, thus the data will be publicly
available, which is bad for opsec
(iii)
You want free markets to sort out for you the best product.
E) a think tank called The
Highlands Forum (a.k.a The Highlands Group) was created in 1994 with the
goal of bridging tech companies and the pentagon.
It's
a private organization with no clear oversight, auditing, or FOIA regulations;
it's even called "[...]an informal, cross-disciplinary group sponsored by
the Assistant Secretary of Defense" [1].
It's
invitation only, and includes people from the Industry (like GOOGLE),
Foundations, Institutes, Think Tanks, Laboratories, Universities, Journalism,
and the Government [2].
The
discussions going on there happen under the Chatham House Rule, making
them off-record and private (see [3] for
an insider e.g.).
F) After establishing a secretive
nonaccountable legal entity affiliated w/ the gov to identify, connect, and use
these data capturers, it was time for secretly funding them.
G) The last point was enabled
through the creation of the MDDS (Massive Digital Data Systems)[4] initiative
by US. government in that same year, and whose money was funneled through the
unclassified National Science Foundation (NSF) to avoid back-tracking it to the
intelligence agencies agencies.
H) Thanks to this Manhattan
Project -like, secretive, and compartimentalized operation that was running in
parallel to the tech boom happening in the 1990s, Google was able to emerge as
a main victor : they even said n the "acknowledgements" section of
their famous 1998 paper that their research was supported by the National
Science Foundation, and that funding was from DARPA [5].
No
I'm not saying that the gov gave them the tech & put a façade w/ puppet
CEOs to do their bidding, what I'm saying is that the gov had an intent that's
very old [6], and they looked for bright minds who are interested in subjects
who look unrelated microcosmically (& left as so w/ the gov's
compartimentalized approach), but that are macrocosmically linked to a unique
project.
And
in this process, Google happened to be the brightest kid in the hood, and
perhaps the U.S. government is giving it a tap o the hand -if not a grounding-
for being lazy & a bully by declaring it a monopoly on the same year where
it did a collab with SoftBank, OpenAI, and Oracle.
Speaking
of Oracle, here are some fun facts to conclude this; Oracle:
•
got its name from a 1970s CIA project [7]
•
CIA was its first customer
•
One of the members of its Board of Directors is Leon Panetta (ex-CIA director
and U.S.'s Secretary of Defense)
==================
[1]:
https://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/event/dick-o%E2%80%99neill-highlands-forum
[2]:
https://highlands.forum/Participants
[3]:
http://www.pirp.harvard.edu/pubs_pdf/o%27neill/o%27neill-i01-3.pdf
[4]:
The first thing that pops-up when you google "Massive Digital Data Systems
MDDS" is a Wikipedia page called "History of Google"; the AI
overview also is pretty much honest on what it says.
[5]:
https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/Brin98Anatomy.pdf
[6]:
That's too much of a rabbithole for me to mention now.
[7]:
https://gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-project-1636592238
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP83T00573R000500080009-3.pdf
==================
This
technically isn’t a unique thing for the U.S. to do, nor will it stop with them;
if anything it was successful for them because of their technological advancement
and intellectual acuities, otherwise other nations would’ve had a better
success rate due to their behind-the-door structures..
Let’s
for example go to Asia to see their structures:
• Zaibatsu
(pre-1945): Family elites-owned Japanese conglomerates in Industry and Finance.
• Keiretsu
(post-1950): Decentralized Japanese alliances.
• Chaebol (1960s-prsent): Centralized, family
founder-owned Korean conglomerates in Industry (but prohibited from banking).
And
here is a R&D consortium example from Japan:
•
Japan’s Electronic Industry Development Association suggested in April
1974 to create a cooperative R&D project for VLSI* development, which Japan
did create it, and did so in the form of a structure inspired by U.K.’s RA (Research
Association) structure; they called it ERA (Engineering Research
Association), and it continued working for almost 20 years.
The
name VLSI comes from Very Large Scale Integrated systems
and it’s a data point that Japan had through acquiring some IBM court documents
in 1975 about the latter’s 1971 FS Plan (FS stands for Future Systems) that
made Japan look to counter it (as Japan didn’t even knew that IBM killed off
that plan). That data point is part of IBM’s memory chips classification,
which goes as follows:
→ First
generation: a vacuum tube
→ Second
Generation: a transistor
→ Third
Generation: an
integrated circuit
→ 3.5
Generation:
Large Scale Integrated system (LSI), e.g. The IBM- 360
→ Fourth
Generation
(next generation): Very Large Scale Integrated system (VLSI), and would have
over 100,000 devices on them,
i.e. anything that starts with a 64k DRAM generation
Th
VLSI project had the goal of making computers that would fit the new VLSI more
than making the VLSI themselves.
•
Japan had other consortiums before this one, e;g. Dr. Masao Sugimoto’s* Ras
such as the 1955’s one with radiator companies; there were more in other fields
of manufacturing like polymers, bearings, lenses, pistons, etc
•
USA’s SEMATECH (Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology).
(*):
Director of MITI’s (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) Mechanical
Engineering lab
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