March 8, 2015

The CIAs IQT mission

The IQT Mission

We identify, adapt, and deliver innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the Central Intelligence Agency and broader U.S. Intelligence Community.

https://www.iqt.org/

https://www.iqt.org/portfolio/


https://www.iqt.org/google-acquires-last-software/



GOOGLE ACQUIRES @LAST SOFTWARE

In-Q-Tel portfolio company, @Last Software, the developer of the award-winning 3-D design product (SketchUp), today announced its acquisition by Google, Inc.


GOOGLE ACQUIRES KEYHOLE CORPORATION

Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) today announced it acquired Keyhole Corp., a Mountain View, Calif.-based digital mapping company.


In-Q-Tel and Basis Technology Sign Strategic Investment and Development Agreement for Linguistics Software

Agreement Accelerates Development of Key Multilingual Information Retrieval Technologies for Defense and Intelligence Communities

In-Q-Tel, a private not-for-profit venture group funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, and Basis Technology (www.basistech.com), a leading provider of software solutions for multilingual text mining and information retrieval applications, today announced they signed a strategic investment and development agreement, including licensing... Basis Technology and In-Q-Tel will work together to provide key multilingual information management solutions to the Intelligence Community...

Top-tier software vendors, content providers, multinational enterprises, and government agencies rely on Basis Technology’s solutions for Unicode compliance, language identification, multilingual search, normalization, transliteration, and entity extraction. Clients include industry leaders Amazon.com, America Online, Blueshoe Technologies, Convera, Endeca, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Inktomi, L.L Bean, Northrop Grumman, PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, and Verity...


SpotterRF Secures Investment Deal with IQT to Support U.S. Intelligence Community

SpotterRF LLC, the industry leader in a new class of radar called Micro Surveillance Radar (MSR), today announced a strategic investment and development agreement with In-Q-Tel (IQT), the independent, strategic investment firm that identifies innovative technologies to support the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

SpotterRF is bringing radar from the age of the mainframe into the age of personal computers by applying commercial wireless RF components and digital signal processing to achieve a revolutionary decrease in size, weight, and power consumption for a wide area Ground Surveillance Radar (GSR) unit. The product also incorporates a miniature web server directly in the radar unit itself to make the product as simple as opening a web page for security personnel.

.... “IQT’s strategic investment in SpotterRF reflects the opportunities we see for this ready-soon innovation to make a difference in both the government and commercial sectors. We were particularly impressed to see the company integrate its product with Google Earth (formerly IQT portfolio company Keyhole) for real-time display of radar targets.”


Cloudera Secures Investment and Technology Development Agreement From IQT to Support U.S. Intelligence Community

Cloudera, the leading provider of Apache Hadoop-based data management software and services, today announced a strategic investment and development agreement from In-Q-Tel (IQT), the strategic investment firm that identifies innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the U.S. Intelligence Community...

Cloudera Enterprise is the most cost-effective way to perform large-scale data storage and analysis ... Cloudera provides professional services, technical support and training to help any business use the software created by Google, Facebook and Yahoo! Founded by pioneers in large-scale data and home of the original Apache Hadoop creator, Cloudera is a private company backed by venture investors Accel Partners, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners with headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.

https://www.iqt.org/cloudera-secures-investment-and-technology-development-agreement-from-iqt-to-support-u-s-intelligence-community/

March 7, 2015

How the CIA made Google

INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project, breaks the exclusive story of how the United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google ...Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’

The origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a secret Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two decades has functioned as a bridge between the US government and elites across the business, industry, finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has allowed some of the most powerful special interests in corporate America to systematically circumvent democratic accountability and the rule of law to influence government policies, as well as public opinion in the US and around the world. The results have been catastrophic: NSA mass surveillance, a permanent state of global war, and a new initiative to transform the US military into Skynet.

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, western governments are moving fast to legitimize expanded powers of mass surveillance and controls on the internet, all in the name of fighting terrorism.

US and European politicians have called to protect NSA-style snooping, and to advance the capacity to intrude on internet privacy by outlawing encryption. One idea is to establish a telecoms partnership that would unilaterally delete content deemed to “fuel hatred and violence” in situations considered “appropriate.” Heated discussions are going on at government and parliamentary level to explore cracking down on lawyer-client confidentiality.

What any of this would have done to prevent the Charlie Hebdo attacks remains a mystery, especially given that we already know the terrorists were on the radar of French intelligence for up to a decade.

There is little new in this story. The 9/11 atrocity was the first of many terrorist attacks, each succeeded by the dramatic extension of draconian state powers at the expense of civil liberties, backed up with the projection of military force in regions identified as hotspots harbouring terrorists. Yet there is little indication that this tried and tested formula has done anything to reduce the danger. If anything, we appear to be locked into a deepening cycle of violence with no clear end in sight.

As our governments push to increase their powers, INSURGE INTELLIGENCE can now reveal the vast extent to which the US intelligence community is implicated in nurturing the web platforms we know today, for the precise purpose of utilizing the technology as a mechanism to fight global ‘information war’ — a war to legitimize the power of the few over the rest of us. The lynchpin of this story is the corporation that in many ways defines the 21st century with its unobtrusive omnipresence: Google.


https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e

March 7, 2015

What Was Won in Selma 50 Years Ago Being Lost Today

First, they sang God Will Take Care of You. Then they walked out of Brown Chapel to a playground where they organized themselves into 24 groups of 25 each and set out marching. Their route out of Selma took them onto Highway 80, which is carried over the Alabama River by a bridge named in honor of Confederate general and Alabama Ku Klux Klan leader Edmund W. Pettus.

It was about 2:30 on the afternoon of Sunday, March 7, 1965...

By rights, this 50th anniversary of those events should be an unalloyed celebration. After all, the marchers, fortified by men and women of good will from all over the country, eventually crossed that bridge under federal protection, marched for four days up Highway 80 and made it to, as the song says, glory. They stood at the state capital in Montgomery and heard Martin Luther King exhort them to hold on and be strong. “Truth crushed to earth,” he thundered, “will rise again!”

The Voting Rights Act was signed into law. And African Americans, who had been excluded from the ballot box for generations, went on to help elevate scores of citizens who looked like them to the mayor’s office, the governor’s mansion, the White House.

So yes, this should be a time of celebration. But the celebration is shadowed by a sobering reality.

In 2013, the Voting Rights Act was castrated by the Supreme Court under the dubious reasoning that its success proved it no longer was needed. And states, responding to a nonexistent surge of election fraud, have rushed to impose onerous new photo-ID laws for voters. When it is observed that the laws will have their heaviest impact on young people, poor people and African Americans — those least likely to have photo ID — defenders of the laws point to that imaginary surge of fraud and assure us voter suppression is the furthest thing from their minds. How can it be about race, they cluck piously, when the laws apply to everyone?

Of course, so did grandfather clauses, poll taxes, literacy tests and other means by which African-American voting rights were stolen for decades. It is disheartening that we find ourselves forced to fight again a battle already won. But the events of half a century past whisper to us a demand for our toughness and faith in the face of that hard truth. They remind us that injustice is resilient.

But truth crushed to earth is, too.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/03/07/what-was-won-selma-50-years-ago-being-lost-today

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March 7, 2015

After a Bounce, Wage Growth Slumps to 0.1%

The economy is adding jobs at a rapid pace, the Labor Department reported on Friday, but there’s still one major holdout to the recovery: wages.

Employers increased their payrolls by 295,000 workers in February, exceeding expectations, and the unemployment rate fell to 5.5 percent, its lowest point since the spring of 2008. But wage gains continued to lag, rising only 0.1 percent in February for private-sector workers after a reported 0.5 increase in January.

That resulted in a mere 2 percent advance over a year earlier, washing away the encouraging jump in January.

Despite the disappointing wage numbers, the report prompted a new round of optimism about the economy’s comeback from the recession along with fresh talk on Wall Street that the Federal Reserve might raise interest rates at its June meeting rather than wait until September.

Job growth last month was heavily concentrated in the service sector, with leisure and hospitality adding 66,000 jobs, as well as an expansion of 54,000 jobs in education and health. Construction added 29,000 jobs in February, while manufacturing increased by a modest 8,000. Gains were also made in professional services and the trade and transport sectors.

Still, one consistently dark patch in the recovery has been the sluggish growth of wages. It suggests that the economy is still far from returning to its potential and is a big factor behind the sense among many Americans that the recovery has largely left them behind.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/07/business/economy/jobs-report-unemployment-february.html?_r=0

March 7, 2015

First black reporter to attend a US Presidential news conference: February 1944

Harry S. McAlpin (1906-1985) was the first African-American reporter to attend a U.S. Presidential news conference in 1944.[1]



Born on July 21, 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri, Harry McAlpin studied journalism and advertising at the University of Wisconsin. After graduating in 1926, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a reporter, editor, and office manager for the Washington Tribune, an African American weekly paper, from 1926 to 1929. He then handled publicity and advertising for the National Benefit Life Insurance Company from 1929 to 1933.[2]

When the New Deal got underway in 1933, McAlpin joined the New Negro Alliance to “protect employment of Negroes under the NRA [National Recovery Administration] program.” [3] He served in the Federal Security Agency and the U.S. Employment Service while attending the Robert H. Terrell Law School at night. He passed the D.C. bar examination in 1937. McAlpin became an assistant to Mary McLeod Bethune, Director of Negro Affairs at the National Youth Administration. On the side, he worked as a part-time Washington correspondent for the Chicago Defender.[4]

In 1943 the National Negro Publishers Association (NNPA) petitioned the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) for press credentials... The WHCA agreed but it took several more months before the NNPA could afford to open its own Washington bureau and hire McAlpin as its full-time Washington correspondent.

In February 1944 he attended his first presidential press conference and was greeted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who shook his hand and said, “I’m glad to see you, McAlpin, and very happy to have you here...”

He was posthumously honored by the White House Correspondents Association at their May 3, 2014 dinner. The WHCA created a scholarship in his memory, and President Barack Obama noted his pioneering journalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_McAlpin

March 7, 2015

Lighter Skin Reduces Prison Time Among Black Women

A recent study, “The Impact of Light Skin on Prison Time for Black Female Offenders,” by Jill Viglione, Lance Hannon, and Robert DeFina of Villanova University assesses how perceived skin tone is related to the maximum prison sentence and time served for a sample of over 12,158 black women imprisoned in North Carolina between 1995 and 2009.

The authors controlled for factors such as prior record, conviction date, prison misconduct, and being thin, as well as whether the woman was convicted of homicide or robbery since these crimes usually carry lengthy prison sentences.

With regard to prison sentences, their results indicated that women deemed to have light skin are sentenced to approximately 12% less time behind bars than their darker skinned counterparts. The results also show that having light skin reduces the actual time served by approximately 11%.

The authors conclude by urging people to understand that it is not sufficient to understand racial discrimination in terms of relative advantages of whites compared to non-whites. Among blacks, characteristics associated with whiteness appear to also have a significant impact on important life outcomes.

Viglione, Jill, Lance Hannon, and Robert DeFina. 2011. “The Impact of Light Skin on Prison Time for Black Female Offenders.” The Social Science Journal, 48:250-258.

http://www.sentencingproject.org/detail/news.cfm?news_id=1136

March 6, 2015

Ted Cruz: Hired gun for Google

When the Texas attorney general opened an investigation into Google’s alleged anticompetitive practices in 2010, the Web behemoth turned to an unlikely ally for help: tea party hero Ted Cruz.

Back then, Cruz wasn’t the Republican senator from Texas and likely presidential candidate that he is today. He was a lawyer in private practice, having stepped down as solicitor general for the Lone Star State in 2008. During the five years he had previously spent in the attorney general’s office, however, he made important friends. He established a close relationship with Greg Abbott, the then attorney general who has since ascended to the Texas governor’s mansion. “I was his mentor,” Abbott said of Cruz in a 2014 interview.

Facing the threat of an antitrust lawsuit from the state attorney general, Google hired Cruz to represent its interests before the agency where Cruz himself had worked just over two years earlier and where his mentor, Abbott, still called the shots. The future political star met with a top Abbott deputy on Google’s behalf in August 2010, and Cruz then accompanied a team of antitrust lawyers from Google and a Palo Alto, Calif.-based law firm to three additional meetings at the agency, according to a Cruz spokesman and visitors’ logs for the Texas attorney general’s office.

Texas’ investigation into Google was subsequently closed without action... Rick Tyler, a Cruz spokesman, said there was nothing inappropriate about Cruz bringing this business before his old colleagues. Tyler insisted that while Cruz was a member of Google’s litigation team during the investigation, he did not lobby his ex-employer to quash the probe. “Cruz was acting in his private practice, as being retained by Google for his expertise in antitrust law,” Tyler said. “It’s completely appropriate that he was engaged to do that.”

But Texas government watchdog groups view things differently...“What we’re seeing is a guy who’s selling his influence, selling his access,” said Craig McDonald, the director of the liberal nonprofit organization Texans for Public Justice...

http://news.yahoo.com/when-google-hired-ted-cruz--was-it-lawyering-or-lobbying-224937497.html

March 5, 2015

Philip Levine, Who Found Poetry On Detroit's Assembly Lines, Dies At 87

The U.S. poet laureate from 2011 to 2012, he composed poems that were, as Margalit Fox writes in the New York Times, “vibrantly, angrily, and often painfully alive with the sound, smell, and sinew of heavy manual labor.”

Levine grew up in industrial Detroit during the Depression; the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he worked factory jobs for Cadillac and for Chevrolet. “You could recite poems aloud in there...The noise was so stupendous. Some people singing, some people talking to themselves, a lot of communication going on with nothing, no one to hear...”

"I know that the government in Washington is full of terrible people with terrible plans. They will murder people here and abroad to gain more power. Those who have dominated our country most of my adult life are interested in maintaining an empire, subjugating other people, enslaving them if need be, and finally killing those who protest so that wealthy and powerful Americans can go on enjoying their advantages over others. I’m not doing a thing about it. I’m not a man of action; It finally comes down to that. I’m not so profoundly moral that I can often overcome my fears of prison or torture or exile or poverty. I’m a contemplative person who goes in the corner and writes. What can we do? I guess we can hang on and encourage each other, dig in, protest in every peaceful way possible, and hope that people are better than they seem. We can describe ourselves as horribly racist people, which we are, as imperialists, which we have been and are, but we can also see ourselves as bountiful, gracious, full of wit, courage, resourcefulness. I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry."

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/02/15/philip-levine-1928-2015/


What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it...

The sad refusal to give in to
rain, the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say ‘No,
we’re not hiring today,’ for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German...


They Feed They Lion

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.

Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,
They Lion grow...

From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.

From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.

http://ibiblio.org/ipa/poems/levine/they_feed_they_lion.php

March 4, 2015

Record 2,089 billionaires in world hold $6.7 trillion

The number of billionaires in the world grew by 222 in 2014, bringing the total to a record 2,089, according to a new report.

The three richest men in the world—Bill Gates, Carlos Slim and Warren Buffett—now have a combined $244 billion, up $52 billion over the past year, or about $100,000 a minute, said the report, which is an annual list of the world’s richest individuals. Gates is the richest with $85 billion, up 25 percent over the past year. Slim is just behind with $83 billion, up 38 percent, and Buffett is third with $76 billion, up 19 percent.

But not all billionaires were as fortunate. Of the 2,089 billionaires in the world, 869 saw their wealth decrease while 649 saw increases, said the China-based Hurun Report. In total, the world’s billionaires saw their wealth drop by 1.5 percent to $6.7 trillion. That’s still more than the combined GDP’s of Japan and South Korea.

Tech has been leading the way again for new billionaires,” said Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher at Hurun. “It’s all eyes on the new economy.”

Meanwhile, the slowdown in many emerging markets, especially Russia, has reduced the fortunes of the billionaires. Fully 60 percent of Russia’s billionaires saw their wealth drop, lead by Vladimir Yevtushenkov and Vagit Alekperov of Lukoil, whose wealth fell by 77 percent and 73 percent, respectively.

For the first time, India topped Russia to the take the number three slot in countries with the most billionaires. The U.S. had the most, with 537, followed by China with 430, India with 97 and Russia with 93. China added the most billionaires, with 72, followed by the U.S. with 56 and India with 27.

http://nbr.com/2015/02/04/record-2089-billionaires-in-world-hold-6-7-trillion/


Gates and buffett are supposedly giving away all their wealth but always come in in the top 3. and their wealth keeps increasing. How does that work, exactly?

February 27, 2015

Actor's curbside library is a smash — for most people

eter Cook used to make lots of trips to the Palms Library to donate books, but then he got a better idea. He'd seen little homemade lending libraries in yards here and there and decided to make his own..."I put in a redwood post and went to a local liquor store and got some wine crates and screwed them into the post, and I wanted them low enough so kids could look at the books," Cook said.

Cook painted "The Tenn-Mann Library" on it and he and his wife, Lili Flanders, a writer and teacher of writing, put five books on the shelves with a message advising anybody to "take one or leave one."

"It has been a smash success, the scope of which I could never have imagined," Cook said when he first emailed me. "More times than not, the library is overflowing with books. Neighbors whom I have seen and recognized over the years but never had any real conversation with now stop by to donate, chat and trade news."

You know, of course, where this story is headed. Yes, it's another chapter in the book of "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished." In mid-January, an anonymous grinch left a note on the library.

"Take it down or the city will," said the writer, claiming that police and City Hall had confirmed that the sign was on public property, and that it was illegal. The note was signed, "a neighbor who hates you and your kids." And if that wasn't hostile and creepy enough, an expletive, "[blank] America," was scrawled on the back of the note...

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-0204-lopez-library-20150204-column.html