Google partners with NSA, CIA on intelligence database

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By Eric Mayes

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 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: Top secret, secret and sensitive but unclassified. 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."