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Hmm... so when did search become a political tool anyway? Was it really 2021? lol. Or was it a political tool from the beginning? When In-Q-Tel helped creat

Hmm... so when did search become a political tool anyway? Was it really 2021? lol. Or was it a political tool from the beginning? When In-Q-Tel helped create it? "In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google, worth over $2.2 million, on November 15, 2005.[10] The shares were a result of Google's acquisition of Keyhole, Inc, the CIA-funded satellite mapping software now known as Google Earth." from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

ren_engineer 5y ago
Larry and Sergey's initial funding for backrub when at Stanford was also from the NSA. Google doesn't exist without the military and intel community, who knew that one day they'd be able to seize information from these companies >The research arms of the CIA and NSA hoped that the best computer-science minds in academia could identify what they called “birds of a feather:” Just as geese fly together in large V shapes, or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in harmony, they predicted that like-minded groups of humans would move together online. The intelligence community named their first unclassified briefing for scientists the “birds of a feather” briefing, and the “Birds of a Feather Session on the Intelligence Community Initiative in Massive Digital Data Systems” took place at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose in the spring of 1995.
cromwellian 5y ago
The CIA didn't invent search engines or the idea of crawling and indexing, and these conspiracy theories are rather pointless. Completely open source, public, search engines would have existed. It's like saying, if the CIA funded a college department that invented USENET/UUCP, they then therefore had planned all along to create great online chat communities just so that they could easily mine it, a kind of uber honey-pot hypothesis. It could also be that the CIA just in general, funds lots of stuff, just like DARPA, just like the DOE, they hand out tons of grants because they are flooded with proposals, and they don't always have a master plan on what they think the outcome or use will be. Just like ARPA's work on the internet was motivated by nuclear war, but the outcome was not at all what the original envisioned use is. Sometimes, the government agencies are just conducting a kind of VC investing in academia and hoping something useful pops out. Maybe we can leave the Dr Joe Rogan MD conspiracies in the moon landing hoax bin in favor of simpler hypotheses.
- gerash 5y ago
  All conspiracy theories ascribe some super natural competence to some three letter agencies when it comes to shaping and predicting the far future whereas with the Afghanistan fiasco we did see that sometimes government folks have no idea what they are doing.

ren_engineer 5y ago

Larry and Sergey's initial funding for backrub when at Stanford was also from the NSA. Google doesn't exist without the military and intel community, who knew that one day they'd be able to seize information from these companies >The research arms of the CIA and NSA hoped that the best computer-science minds in academia could identify what they called “birds of a feather:” Just as geese fly together in large V shapes, or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in harmony, they predicted that like-minded groups of humans would move together online. The intelligence community named their first unclassified briefing for scientists the “birds of a feather” briefing, and the “Birds of a Feather Session on the Intelligence Community Initiative in Massive Digital Data Systems” took place at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose in the spring of 1995.

cromwellian 5y ago

The CIA didn't invent search engines or the idea of crawling and indexing, and these conspiracy theories are rather pointless. Completely open source, public, search engines would have existed. It's like saying, if the CIA funded a college department that invented USENET/UUCP, they then therefore had planned all along to create great online chat communities just so that they could easily mine it, a kind of uber honey-pot hypothesis. It could also be that the CIA just in general, funds lots of stuff, just like DARPA, just like the DOE, they hand out tons of grants because they are flooded with proposals, and they don't always have a master plan on what they think the outcome or use will be. Just like ARPA's work on the internet was motivated by nuclear war, but the outcome was not at all what the original envisioned use is. Sometimes, the government agencies are just conducting a kind of VC investing in academia and hoping something useful pops out. Maybe we can leave the Dr Joe Rogan MD conspiracies in the moon landing hoax bin in favor of simpler hypotheses.

gerash 5y ago
All conspiracy theories ascribe some super natural competence to some three letter agencies when it comes to shaping and predicting the far future whereas with the Afghanistan fiasco we did see that sometimes government folks have no idea what they are doing.