The CIA’s Venture-Capital Firm, Like Its Sponsor, Operates in the Shadows

This is a pretty good look at the spook shop vehicle.
As a side note, back in the early years of this century, especially immediately after the mass murders of 9/11, it was thought that investing alongside In-Q-Tel was the cool thing to do.
It took a while for the realization to sink in that they weren't necessarily in it for the money return to the VC's.

From the Wall Street Journal:

In-Q-Tel provides only limited information about its investments, and some of its trustees have ties to funded companies

Forterra Systems Inc., a California startup focused on virtual reality, was in need of money and its products didn’t have much commercial appeal. Then funds came in from a source based far from Silicon Valley: In-Q-Tel Inc., a venture-capital firm in Virginia funded by the Central Intelligence Agency.

One catalyst for the 2007 infusion, according to a former Forterra executive and others familiar with it, was a recommendation by a man who sat on the board of the venture-capital firm—and also on the board of Forterra.

In-Q-Tel pumped in cash, Forterra developed some tools useful to the military, and government contracts started coming in.

Like the agency that founded it, the CIA-funded venture-capital firm operates largely in the shadows. In-Q-Tel officials regard the firm as independent, yet it has extremely close ties to the CIA and runs almost all investment decisions by the spy agency. The firm discloses little about how it picks companies to invest in, never says how much, and sometimes doesn’t reveal the investments at all.

Even less well-known are potential conflicts of interest the arrangement entails, as seen in this Forterra example and others continuing to the present. Nearly half of In-Q-Tel’s trustees have a financial connection of one kind or another with a company In-Q-Tel has funded, a Wall Street Journal examination of its investments found.

In-Q-Tel’s hunt for promising technology has led the firm, on at least 17 occasions, to fund businesses that had a financial link of some sort to an In-Q-Tel trustee. In three instances a trustee sat on the board of a company that had an In-Q-Tel investment, as in the Forterra case, according to the Journal’s examination, which was based on a review of investment records and interviews with venture-capital and In-Q-Tel officials, past and present.

In-Q-Tel differs from other venture-capital firms in an important way: It is a nonprofit. Instead of trying to make money, it seeks to spur the development of technology useful to the CIA mission of intelligence gathering.

Tangled connections are endemic in the venture-capital business, where intimate industry knowledge is essential to success. Other venture-capital firms, however, are playing with their own money, or that of private investors.

In-Q-Tel uses public money, to which strict conflict-of-interest rules apply—at least $120 million a year, say people familiar with the firm’s financials. It sometimes deploys this capital in ways that, even if not by intent, have the potential to benefit the firm’s own trustees by virtue of other roles they have in the tech industry.

In-Q-Tel investments often attract other funding. Each dollar In-Q-Tel invests in a small business typically is matched by $15 from elsewhere, the firm has found. That makes the small business likelier to succeed and makes its stock options more valuable for whoever has some.

In-Q-Tel said it needs to work with people who have industry connections if it hopes to find promising technology. Some of its trustees, it said, are so enmeshed in the tech world it would be hard to avoid any ties that might be interpreted as conflicting. Besides technology, trustees come from a variety of backgrounds including academia, national security and venture capital.

“In-Q-Tel put in place rigorous policies to safeguard taxpayer funds, prevent possible conflicts-of-interest and stay focused on developing technology to meet mission requirements,” said a CIA spokesman, Ryan Trapani. “We are pleased that both the In-Q-Tel model and the safeguards put in place have worked so well.”

The firm permits its trustees to recommend investing in businesses to which they have ties, so long as they disclose these internally and to the CIA. Trustees are required to recuse themselves from reviews and votes after such recommendations.

To succeed, “you want a board who knows what the hell they are doing,” said Jeffrey Smith, who helped design In-Q-Tel when he was CIA general counsel and is now its outside counsel, as well as a senior counsel at law firm Arnold & Porter. “This is to some extent a balance, and we know that,” he said.

In the Forterra case, Charles Boyd, a retired Air Force four-star general, joined the boards of both Forterra and In-Q-Tel in 2006. The following year, In-Q-Tel sank money into Forterra, according to an In-Q-Tel news release at the time. The amount couldn’t be determined.

Gen. Boyd said he made an initial recommendation for In-Q-Tel to invest but didn’t take part in its decision to do so. He said he received no compensation from Forterra for recommending to In-Q-Tel that it invest in the startup.

“It definitely was a win-win from our perspective to have Charles on the board and open those doors for us,” said Chris Badger, who was Forterra’s vice president of marketing. He said there was discussion within Forterra about whether “In-Q-Tel’s funding model was really generating a good benefit for the taxpayer.”

The money from In-Q-Tel and subsequent federal contracts proved insufficient. Forterra failed to attract commercial interest and closed in 2010 after selling off pieces of itself.

The purchaser was another company where an In-Q-Tel trustee served on the board of directors.

Investors in Forterra, including In-Q-Tel, took heavy losses, according to people involved in the unwinding. Gen. Boyd had no personal investment in Forterra, In-Q-Tel said.

He did have nonqualified stock options, according to In-Q-Tel, which said holders of such options didn’t receive anything for them when Forterra stopped operating. Gen. Boyd said the only compensation he received from the small business was $5,000 as it was closing down. He left In-Q-Tel’s board of trustees in 2013.

For the CIA, a captive venture-capital firm is a way to encourage and shape technology development without getting bogged down in bureaucracy.

In-Q-Tel’s beginnings trace to a plan hatched in the late 1990s by George Tenet, then the CIA director, who expressed frustration that access to pioneering technology was held back by byzantine government procurement rules.

Congress approved the creation of In-Q-Tel by agreeing to direct money to the organization, and its funding levels increased markedly in later years....MORE

HT: naked capitalism who should also have gotten the tip of the old chapeau for the Ambrose Evans-Pritchard piece below.

"These are the AI companies that the CIA is investing in"

A very deep dive from Sherwood News, September 20:

You can’t spell CIA without AI

A brave anonymous source has leaked a top-secret list of AI companies that the CIA has been pouring millions of investment dollars into. Just kidding… it’s all publicly available on their website. 

In-Q-Tel is the non-secret, non-profit investment arm of the CIA, which was established in 1999. A 501(c)3, the firm is not officially part of the US government (though it is largely controlled by it), and has received over $1.2 billion from US taxpayers since 2011, which it has used to make over 750 investments. In-Q-Tel’s mission is to "Be the premier partner trusted to identify, evaluate, and leverage emerging commercial technologies for the US national security community and America’s allies.”

Rather than seeking financial reward for backing winning companies, In-Q-Tel’s investments are strategic — it surveys the marketplace for technologies and businesses that could solve problems for the US intelligence and national security community.

A most unusual venture capital firm
While it does not disclose all of its investments, a look through its publicly disclosed portfolio shows that In-Q-Tel made some smart, early bets. Some high-profile companies In-Q-Tel invested in include Keyhole, the satellite mapping app which GoogleGOOGL $174.60 (1.26%) later acquired and turned into Earth, and Palantir TechnologiesPLTR $77.50 (6.19%), the data analytics firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, currently valued at roughly $80 billion. The firm has since exited those positions.

In-Q-Tel is a huge player among venture capital firms investing in national security companies. The Silicon Valley Defense Group’s NATSEC100 index is a ranked list of the top-performing, venture-backed private companies working in the national security sector. This year’s list ranks In-Q-Tel as the number one venture capital firm in the space, having backed 35 companies on this year’s NATSEC100 list. 

In a 2020 interview, George Hoyem, Executive Vice President for investments at In-Q-Tel said the company makes 50-60 investments per year.

“95% of the companies we back have never done business with the federal government, so we’re taking commercial startups and showing them a dual use into the government,” said Hoyem.

Hoyem said the typical investments are in the $1-4 million dollar range, with smaller equity-only seed investments of around $1 million or less, while “work program” deals where the company’s technology can be developed and tested by partner defense and intelligence agencies see a larger investment. According to Hoyem, 70% of their investments make it to the pilot stage, and about half are adopted for actual agency use. 

Hoyem said that they look for new technologies that their national security and intelligence partners may not be aware of. “So we’ll go back to them and say, ‘Hey I know you’re looking at this problem this way, but there’s this new capability’ whether it be, you know, an accelerated GPU engine, or artificial intelligence being applied to a particular problem,” Hoyem said. 

Some of the companies that In-Q-Tel has invested in build technology that could have come straight out of the labs of “Q,” James Bond’s spy gadget wizard, which was an inspiration for the company’s name. The company has backed mouth radios, a Brooklyn hologram studio, and skin-care products that could be used to extract your DNA.

Unlike the CIA’s financials, which are classified, In-Q-Tel is a non-profit, which means we get a peek into how it invests its funds through its public tax returns. Looking back over the past decade or so, In-Q-Tel’s net assets grew substantially year-over-year.

***

In 2011, In-Q-Tel reported around $100 million in net assets, growing to $930 million by the end of 2023. Even though it is a non-profit, In-Q-Tel still pulls in substantial revenue from investment returns in its portfolio, which it is free to use to re-invest in more companies.

In the past five years for which tax returns are available, the US government has granted In-Q-Tel around $100 million per year. While the company’s assets have grown, it is hardly self-sustaining and requires substantial cash infusions from US taxpayers to stay afloat. If you remove government grants from In-Q-Tel’s revenue numbers, after expenses they would have had a loss for the past 12 out of 13 years....

....MUCH MORE

Previously on In-Q-Tel:

We have a couple dozen posts on In-Q-Tel, most have some version of this homely little observation:
The CIA’s Venture-Capital Firm, Like Its Sponsor, Operates in the Shadows

This is a pretty good look at the spook shop vehicle.
As a side note, back in the early years of this century, especially immediately after the mass murders of 9/11, it was thought that investing alongside In-Q-Tel was the cool thing to do.
It took a while for the realization to sink in that they weren't necessarily in it for the money return to the VC's.

• Venture Capital: "Tech Companies And Their Love Affair With NSA and CIA" (GOOG)
• Paging M. Macron: "CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA"
• "The Biorevolution: Its Implications for U.S. National Security, Economic Competitiveness, and National Power"
• What's New In CIA Venture Capital: In-Q-Tel's IQT Quarterly Recap – Winter 2023

Paging M. Macron: "CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA"

From The Intercept, April 2016:

SKINCENTIAL SCIENCES, a company with an innovative line of cosmetic products marketed as a way to erase blemishes and soften skin, has caught the attention of beauty bloggers on YouTube, Oprah’s lifestyle magazine, and celebrity skin care professionals. Documents obtained by The Intercept reveal that the firm has also attracted interest and funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The previously undisclosed relationship with the CIA might come as some surprise to a visitor to the website of Clearista, the main product line of Skincential Sciences, which boasts of a “formula so you can feel confident and beautiful in your skin’s most natural state.”

Though the public-facing side of the company touts a range of skin care products, Skincential Sciences developed a patented technology that removes a thin outer layer of the skin, revealing unique biomarkers that can be used for a variety of diagnostic tests, including DNA collection.

Skincential Science’s noninvasive procedure, described on the Clearista website as “painless,” is said to require only water, a special detergent, and a few brushes against the skin, making it a convenient option for restoring the glow of a youthful complexion — and a novel technique for gathering information about a person’s biochemistry.

In-Q-Tel, founded in 1999 by then-CIA Director George Tenet, identifies cutting-edge technology to support the mission of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, and provides venture funding to help grow tech firms to develop those solutions.

“Our company is an outlier for In-Q-Tel,” Russ Lebovitz, the chief executive of Skincential Sciences, said during an interview with The Intercept. He conceded that the relationship might make for “an unusual and interesting story,” but said, “If there’s something beneath the surface, that’s not part of our relationship and I’m not directly aware. They’re interested here in something that can get easy access to biomarkers.”

Still, Lebovitz claimed he has limited knowledge of why In-Q-Tel selected his firm.
“I can’t tell you how everyone works with In-Q-Tel, but they are very interested in doing things that are pure science,” Lebovitz said. The CIA fund approached his company, telling him the fund shares an interest in looking at DNA extraction using the method pioneered by Skincential Sciences, according to Lebovitz.

Beyond that, Lebovitz said he was unsure of the intent of the CIA’s use of the technology, but the fund was “specifically interested in the diagnostics, detecting DNA from normal skin.” He added, “There’s no better identifier than DNA, and we know we can pull out DNA.”

Perhaps law enforcement could use the biomarker extraction technique for crime scene identification or could conduct drug tests, Lebovitz suggested.

Carrie A. Sessine, the vice president for external affairs at In-Q-Tel, declined a media interview because “IQT does not participate in media interviews or opportunities.”...MUCH MORE

Previously on the In-Q-Tel channel:
The CIA’s Venture-Capital Firm, Like Its Sponsor, Operates in the Shadows

This is a pretty good look at the spook shop vehicle.
As a side note, back in the early years of this century, especially immediately after the mass murders of 9/11, it was thought that investing alongside In-Q-Tel was the cool thing to do.
It took a while for the realization to sink in that they weren't necessarily in it for the money return to the VC's....

Quantum Computing: CIA and Bezos Invest in D-Wave Systems In.
"Hedge funds, VCs and the CIA are Throwing Money at ex-Bridgewater Data Scientists’ Startup"  
Peter Thiel’s Pursuit Of Technological Progress; It’s Not About Democracy and It’s Definitely Not About Capitalism – Part 1
Inside Palantir, Silicon Valley’s Most Secretive Company
"Pokémon Go Is a Government Surveillance Psyop Conspiracy"
Amazon and the CIA Want to Teach Artificial Intelligence to Watch Us From Space (AMZN; NVDA) 
Venture Capital: "Tech Companies And Their Love Affair With NSA and CIA" (GOOG)

And perhaps most alarming of all:
Robot Writing Moves from Journalism to Wall Street

The level of alarm is of course directly related to one's perspective.

Whatever Became Of The SPAC The CIA, MI6, etc. Guys Were Betting On? (TL;dr: it's falling apart)

 First up, the background, first posted May 7, 2022:

"As the SEC Cracks Down on Shady SPACs, CIA Officials Get In on the Action"

From The Intercept, May 5:

Leaders of In-Q-Tel, a CIA-backed venture fund, and retired CIA officials are getting in on the latest stock market trend.

Top leadership for Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, have quietly launched a separate “blank check” fund that stands to fuel astronomical fortunes for former intelligence officials.

In-Q-Tel, which receives funding and directions from the CIA, was founded by the CIA in the late ’90s to spur private sector innovation with the goal of bringing the latest technology to market to fuel America’s covert national security operations. Now, its chief executive and president are taking advantage of the latest stock market fad to create financial windfall for themselves and a small set of former national security officials.

In November, a “special purpose acquisition company,” or SPAC, called Chain Bridge I filed for an initial public offering designed to raise $200 million. The fund, which had little fanfare, was formed by In-Q-Tel’s senior leadership along with a team of retired CIA leaders and technology investors.

SPACs, which have surged in popularity over the last two years, are referred to as “blank check” funds because they allow investors to pool capital in a publicly traded fund, with no underlying assets or business model, for the sole purpose of acquiring a private company. In response to the wave of inadequate disclosure and fraud in the market, the SEC has proposed new rules governing SPACs.

Chain Bridge I is still seeking to acquire a defense contractor that is, according to the firm’s annual report, “poised to benefit” from government spending on national security.

“This is a case of the revolving door on steroids — not just using connections with former government colleagues on behalf of corporate interests, but setting up an entirely new corporate entity that trades on those ties to earn them a huge potential payoff,” said William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute.

The blank check fund is clear that it hopes to raise hundreds of millions of dollars by leveraging its relationships with government decision-makers. The SPAC’s 10-K disclosure states that it will seek to acquire a national security technology company that is “poised to benefit from billions of dollars in defense spending in the near-term.”

“We intend to identify businesses with emerging technologies that will advance the DoD’s strategy as well as the broader interests of the United States in a period of increasing geopolitical instability,” the disclosure further notes, referencing the Department of Defense.

Chain Bridge I is the creation of the Chain Bridge Group, a Cayman Islands-registered investment fund led by In-Q-Tel CEO Christopher Darby, In-Q-Tel President Stephen Bowsher, and Michael Rolnick, a technology investor who previously advised billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign. Darby, while helming the CIA’s venture capital fund, serves as chair of the SPAC and its largest investor. Darby’s Chain Bridge Group, with a 16.21 percent stake, is the largest shareholder of Chain Bridge I.

The SPAC board features former intelligence officials, such as Michael Morell, the former deputy director of the CIA; Jeremy Bash, a former chief of staff to the director of the CIA; and Alex Younger, a retired career British intelligence officer. Other board members include Edward Sanderson Jr., a former chair of SAIC, a major intelligence contractor, and Nathaniel Fick, general manager of the intelligence contractor Elastic and the former head of the Center for a New American Security, the defense think tank in Washington, D.C....

....MUCH MORE

And the followup from The Messenger, September 25:

A CIA-Linked Investment Fund Is Falling Apart, Leaving a Trail of Questions
Investors demanded money back after Chain Bridge missed a deadline to complete a deal — and potential payday for the executives behind it

When Christopher Darby launched an investment fund with ties to the CIA in 2021, he aimed to acquire a company steeped in national security technology. Investors poured $230 million into the publicly-traded fund, called Chain Bridge I. 

Darby, the fund’s chairman, also ran the successful venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, which invests in startups on behalf of the U.S. intelligence community. Darby and his Chain Bridge colleagues, many with backgrounds at the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence entities, saw their new fund as a vehicle to bolster America’s security interests.

But there was another potential benefit as well. The right investment could have yielded private ownership of a lucrative company critical to U.S. interests — and a potentially rich government contract for use of its technology or services. Corporate filings suggest Chain Bridge would have carried big financial benefits for its top officers, a potential payday not available through In-Q-Tel. 

In a prospectus, Chain Bridge said that it intended to acquire “a technology company that will advance U.S. national security and intelligence interests.” Civilian technologies, it added “have become both projections of global power and the foundation of robust national security strategy.”

But nearly two years later, that grand plan is starting to look like a quagmire.

Chain Bridge was launched at the tail end of the SPAC craze, when deals involving the special purpose acquisition companies were drying up. It missed a May 15 deadline to get a deal done. Trading in its warrants — securities that allow the owner to purchase fund shares at a set price — was suspended by Nasdaq on Aug. 23 after their total value fell below the exchange’s minimum capitalization limit of $1 million. The fund failed to submit a plan to get things back on track, and the warrants were delisted earlier this month, securities filings show. (Two of the fund’s other securities continue to trade.) 

Meanwhile, early investors have been selling their stakes and taking their money back. A wave of nearly $200 million in redemptions has left the fund with little capital for a deal — and less than $40,000 in cash for operating costs, according to securities filings....

....MUCH MORE

"As the SEC Cracks Down on Shady SPACs, CIA Officials Get In on the Action"

From The Intercept, May 5:

Leaders of In-Q-Tel, a CIA-backed venture fund, and retired CIA officials are getting in on the latest stock market trend.

Top leadership for Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, have quietly launched a separate “blank check” fund that stands to fuel astronomical fortunes for former intelligence officials.

In-Q-Tel, which receives funding and directions from the CIA, was founded by the CIA in the late ’90s to spur private sector innovation with the goal of bringing the latest technology to market to fuel America’s covert national security operations. Now, its chief executive and president are taking advantage of the latest stock market fad to create financial windfall for themselves and a small set of former national security officials.

In November, a “special purpose acquisition company,” or SPAC, called Chain Bridge I filed for an initial public offering designed to raise $200 million. The fund, which had little fanfare, was formed by In-Q-Tel’s senior leadership along with a team of retired CIA leaders and technology investors.

SPACs, which have surged in popularity over the last two years, are referred to as “blank check” funds because they allow investors to pool capital in a publicly traded fund, with no underlying assets or business model, for the sole purpose of acquiring a private company. In response to the wave of inadequate disclosure and fraud in the market, the SEC has proposed new rules governing SPACs.

Chain Bridge I is still seeking to acquire a defense contractor that is, according to the firm’s annual report, “poised to benefit” from government spending on national security.

“This is a case of the revolving door on steroids — not just using connections with former government colleagues on behalf of corporate interests, but setting up an entirely new corporate entity that trades on those ties to earn them a huge potential payoff,” said William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute.

The blank check fund is clear that it hopes to raise hundreds of millions of dollars by leveraging its relationships with government decision-makers. The SPAC’s 10-K disclosure states that it will seek to acquire a national security technology company that is “poised to benefit from billions of dollars in defense spending in the near-term.”

“We intend to identify businesses with emerging technologies that will advance the DoD’s strategy as well as the broader interests of the United States in a period of increasing geopolitical instability,” the disclosure further notes, referencing the Department of Defense.

Chain Bridge I is the creation of the Chain Bridge Group, a Cayman Islands-registered investment fund led by In-Q-Tel CEO Christopher Darby, In-Q-Tel President Stephen Bowsher, and Michael Rolnick, a technology investor who previously advised billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign. Darby, while helming the CIA’s venture capital fund, serves as chair of the SPAC and its largest investor. Darby’s Chain Bridge Group, with a 16.21 percent stake, is the largest shareholder of Chain Bridge I.

The SPAC board features former intelligence officials, such as Michael Morell, the former deputy director of the CIA; Jeremy Bash, a former chief of staff to the director of the CIA; and Alex Younger, a retired career British intelligence officer. Other board members include Edward Sanderson Jr., a former chair of SAIC, a major intelligence contractor, and Nathaniel Fick, general manager of the intelligence contractor Elastic and the former head of the Center for a New American Security, the defense think tank in Washington, D.C....

....MUCH MORE

Previously:
August 2016
The CIA’s Venture-Capital Firm, Like Its Sponsor, Operates in the Shadows

This is a pretty good look at the spook shop vehicle.
As a side note, back in the early years of this century, especially immediately after the mass murders of 9/11, it was thought that investing alongside In-Q-Tel was the cool thing to do.
It took a while for the realization to sink in that they weren't necessarily in it for the money return to the VC's....

August 2017
Paging M. Macron: "CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA"
"Fake news 2.0: personalized, optimized, and even harder to stop"
"CIA has 137 projects going in artificial intelligence"
Quantum Computing: CIA and Bezos Invest in D-Wave Systems In.
"Hedge funds, VCs and the CIA are Throwing Money at ex-Bridgewater Data Scientists’ Startup"
Peter Thiel’s Pursuit Of Technological Progress; It’s Not About Democracy and It’s Definitely Not About Capitalism – Part 1
Inside Palantir, Silicon Valley’s Most Secretive Company
"Pokémon Go Is a Government Surveillance Psyop Conspiracy"
Amazon and the CIA Want to Teach Artificial Intelligence to Watch Us From Space (AMZN; NVDA)
Venture Capital: "Tech Companies And Their Love Affair With NSA and CIA" (GOOG)

And perhaps most alarming of all:
Robot Writing Moves from Journalism to Wall Street

The level of alarm is of course directly related to one's perspective. 

"CIA Venture Capital Arm Partners With Ex-Googler’s Startup to “Safeguard the Internet”"

 From The Intercept, December 2:

Trust Lab, founded by a former Google exec for content moderation, will identify “online harmful content, including toxicity and misinformation.”

Trust Lab was founded by a team of well-credentialed Big Tech alumni who came together in 2021 with a mission: Make online content moderation more transparent, accountable, and trustworthy. A year later, the company announced a “strategic partnership” with the CIA’s venture capital firm.

Trust Lab’s basic pitch is simple: Globe-spanning internet platforms like Facebook and YouTube so thoroughly and consistently botch their content moderation efforts that decisions about what speech to delete ought to be turned over to completely independent outside firms — firms like Trust Lab. In a June 2021 blog post, Trust Lab co-founder Tom Siegel described content moderation as “the Big Problem that Big Tech cannot solve.” The contention that Trust Lab can solve the unsolvable appears to have caught the attention of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm tasked with securing technology for the CIA’s thorniest challenges, not those of the global internet.

The quiet October 29 announcement of the partnership is light on details, stating that Trust Lab and In-Q-Tel — which invests in and collaborates with firms it believes will advance the mission of the CIA — will work on “a long-term project that will help identify harmful content and actors in order to safeguard the internet.” Key terms like “harmful” and “safeguard” are unexplained, but the press release goes on to say that the company will work toward “pinpointing many types of online harmful content, including toxicity and misinformation.”

Though Trust Lab’s stated mission is sympathetic and grounded in reality — online content moderation is genuinely broken — it’s difficult to imagine how aligning the startup with the CIA is compatible with Siegel’s goal of bringing greater transparency and integrity to internet governance. What would it mean, for instance, to incubate counter-misinformation technology for an agency with a vast history of perpetuating misinformation? Placing the company within the CIA’s tech pipeline also raises questions about Trust Lab’s view of who or what might be a “harmful” online, a nebulous concept that will no doubt mean something very different to the U.S. intelligence community than it means elsewhere in the internet-using world.

No matter how provocative an In-Q-Tel deal may be, much of what Trust Lab is peddling sounds similar to what the likes of Facebook and YouTube already attempt in-house: deploying a mix of human and unspecified “machine learning” capabilities to detect and counter whatever is determined to be “harmful” content.

“I’m suspicious of startups pitching the status quo as innovation,” Ángel Díaz, a law professor at the University of Southern California and scholar of content moderation, wrote in a message to The Intercept. “There is little separating Trust Lab’s vision of content moderation from the tech giants’. They both want to expand use of automation, better transparency reports, and expanded partnerships with the government.”....

....MUCH MORE

There's a steep and sometimes expensive learning curve when dealing with In-Q-Tel.
Here's a 2016 post:
The CIA’s Venture-Capital Firm, Like Its Sponsor, Operates in the Shadows

This is a pretty good look at the spook shop vehicle.
As a side note, back in the early years of this century, especially immediately after the mass murders of 9/11, it was thought that investing alongside In-Q-Tel was the cool thing to do.
It took a while for the realization to sink in that they weren't necessarily in it for the money return to the VC's....

And a few other posts:
"As the SEC Cracks Down on Shady SPACs, CIA Officials Get In on the Action"
"Fake news 2.0: personalized, optimized, and even harder to stop"
"CIA has 137 projects going in artificial intelligence"
Paging M. Macron: "CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA"
"China and the CIA Are Competing to Fund Silicon Valley’s AI Startups"
"Pokémon Go Is a Government Surveillance Psyop Conspiracy"
Quantum Computing: CIA and Bezos Invest in D-Wave Systems In.
"Hedge funds, VCs and the CIA are Throwing Money at ex-Bridgewater Data Scientists’ Startup"
Peter Thiel’s Pursuit Of Technological Progress; It’s Not About Democracy and It’s Definitely Not About Capitalism – Part 1
Inside Palantir, Silicon Valley’s Most Secretive Company 
Amazon and the CIA Want to Teach Artificial Intelligence to Watch Us From Space (AMZN; NVDA)
Venture Capital: "Tech Companies And Their Love Affair With NSA and CIA" (GOOG)

And perhaps most alarming of all:
Robot Writing Moves from Journalism to Wall Street

The level of alarm is of course directly related to one's perspective. 

"China and the CIA Are Competing to Fund Silicon Valley’s AI Startups"

From Defense One:

The U.S. intelligence community is upping its early-stage investments in machine-learning companies — but Beijing is pouring in far more.  

A trio of new investments in Silicon Valley machine-learning startups shows that the U.S. intelligence community is deeply interested in artificial intelligence. But China is investing even more in these kinds of U.S. companies, and that has experts and intelligence officials worried.

Founded to foster new technology for spies, the 17-year-old In-Q-Tel has also helped boost commercial products. (Its investment in a little company called Keyhole helped produce Google Maps.) Compared to a venture capitalist firm whose early-stage investments are intended to make some money and get out, the nonprofit’s angle is longer term, less venture, more strategic, according to Charlie Greenbacker, In-Q-Tel’s technical product leader in artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, analytics, and data science.

“Our model is to put a little bit of pressure at the right spot to influence a company to make sure it develops things that are useful to our customers,” said Greenbacker, who estimated that their investments in a given startup generally amount to about one of every 15 dollars the company has.

Greenbacker recently discussed In-Q-Tel investments that underline the specific areas that the CIA and other spy agencies want to use AI for: image recognition, natural language processing, and predictive analytics.

The first is Orbital Insight, a company that analyzes satellite images to discover trends and patterns on a global scale. As Orbital’s CEO James Crawford said last year, “The number of ships docked at a Malaysian port, even the color of a wheat field in western Nebraska, are actually signs…visible indicators of economic activity, not just for a local region but for an entire global industry.”

Natural language processing is another a big area of AI investment. Greenbacker highlighted a company called Primer, which sells a tool that can read and summarize text, useful for the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence (now Directorate of Analysis) and the decidedly unsexy work of combing through the world’s court cases, patent filings, and newspapers for relevant data. Primer is the work of Sean Gourley, a co-creator of the Quid analysis and visualization engine and one of the more celebrated young data scientists working at the intersection of Silicon Valley and national security.

What does a spy agency do with all of this data and analysis? Try to predict the future, of course, and the intelligence community has a big interest in AI that will help it succeed there as well. In-Q-Tel invested a company called Celect, which says its predictive analytics engine can help retailers anticipate demand for certain products — and perhaps help intel analysts anticipate national-security problems. When the researchers fed the engine a large database of published news stories, it predicted, with high confidence, a steady increase in negative news about the security situation in Ukraine in the early spring of 2014. And indeed, that happened. (The experiment was done retroactively, after the Russian invasion, when outcomes were known to the researchers — but not to the AI.)...

...MUCH MORE

What's New In CIA Venture Capital: In-Q-Tel's IQT Quarterly Recap – Winter 2023

 From In-Q-Tel, March 16, 2023:

• By IQT’s Marketing & Communications Team

• VC Insights

Last fall we posted our inaugural quarterly recap to highlight what we’ve been up to and where we’ve invested. Below is a snapshot of last quarter’s highlights!

Portfolio Company Highlights

• ClearSpace: Pioneering a new area of sustainable space exploration
• ConstellR: Pioneering the use of thermal infrared microsatellites for global land surface temperature (LST) monitoring.
• Bigeye: The data observability platform that helps teams measure, improve, and communicate data quality clearly at any scale.
• LinKinVax: Disrupting vaccine development using a unique dendritic cell-targeting vaccine platform.
• KA Imaging: specializes in developing innovative X-ray imaging technologies and systems.
• OpenFin: The OS for enterprise productivity.

IQT Blog

Exploring IQT’s insight into technology innovation and trends.

• Is your AI a “Clever Hans”?
• Harnessing the Power of the “Metaverse”
• SpaceSec: Securing Space Systems through Innovation
• IQT Labs releases audit report of RoBERTa, an open source large language model
• Cyber Investing for National Security – Key Perspectives
• IQT Labs releases audit report of RoBERTa, an open source large language model

IQT Podcast

Discussions relating to the intersection of technology and national security.
Subscribe: Apple  |  Spotify  |  Google  |  YouTube  |  iqt.org

• The Intersection: Exploring a Path Forward for America’s Technological Future

Perspectives & Accolades

• Michael G. Vickers: Adapting Net Assessment for the New Cold War
• Dr. Sarah Sewall, Tyler Vandenberg, and Kaj Malden: China’s BeiDou: New Dimensions of Great Power Competition
• Erin Dumbacher: Closing the Critical Mineral Gap
• Dr. Tara O’Toole: Needed for national security and competitiveness: a federal biodata infrastructure
• Dr. Tara O’Toole: The Biorevolution: Its Implications for U.S. National Security, Economic Competitiveness, and National Power
• Bob Gleichauf: CHIPS Needs a Check Engine Light
• IQT’s B.Next Team: Roundtable Report – Identifying, Collecting, and Analyzing Actionable Intelligence in an Outbreak Event
• Dr. Tommy Jones and Dr. Sarah Sewall: Disinformation Workshop Summary Report
• In-Q-Tel Honored with the OSS Society’s Inaugural Stanley Lovell Award

Our most recent link to IQT was to the essay above by Dr. O'Toole in March 9's "The Biorevolution: Its Implications for U.S. National Security, Economic Competitiveness, and National Power"
The author of this piece, Dr. Tara O'Toole is Senior Vice-President of the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel....

"The Biorevolution: Its Implications for U.S. National Security, Economic Competitiveness, and National Power"

The author of this piece, Dr. Tara O'Toole is Senior Vice-President of the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.

From IQT, February 2023:

Introduction 

The next industrial revolution, already underway, will be made possible by new capabilities emerging from the life sciences and biotechnologies. This “biorevolution” will bring about a new era in our ability to prevent and treat disease. It will change how we design and manufacture almost everything and expand what it is possible to make, such as materials with new properties, replacement organs, and crops that resist pests and drought. The transition to biologically based production will significantly reduce the environmental damage caused by traditional manufacturing processes. New and emerging biotechnologies will also provide new tools to restore polluted environments and recover rare materials from waste. Fully developed, the biorevolution will enable a global shift towards carbon neutrality. 

Our increasing capacity to use biology to serve human purposes stems from one of the most significant scientific insights of the past century: life is written in code. Biology is programmable. Instead of the 1s and 0s used by computers to code instructions, genetic instructions directing an organism’s inherited structure and functions are coded in the sequence of DNA’s four nucleic acids. 

Thanks to advances in our understanding of molecular biology and the computational power and analytic techniques of the digital revolution, it is now possible to “read” the DNA software which directs the thousands of “protein robots” which maintain the essential processes that constitute living organisms. That is, we can use machines to determine the sequence of nucleic acids in a sample of DNA and thus “read” the organism’s genetic code. By comparing different genomes (an organism’s entire collection of genetic information), we can determine which genes do what and how different genes interact. We can also chemically assemble DNA strands to “write” genetic code. Finally, we are also learning to edit DNA – to add, subtract, or rearrange the genetic code of cells, instructing them to change their function. In other words, we are rapidly learning how to “read, write, and edit” the code of life. 

These new scientific insights and capabilities catalyze fundamental changes across a range of industries that will profoundly impact the global economy. Although there is broad international agreement that economic activity based on biology and biotechnologies is essential and growing, there is no consensus definition of what industries or activities “the bioeconomy” encompasses. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS), based on available and inadequate data, estimated that in 2016, the U.S. bioeconomy accounted for about 5% of the U.S. GDP, approximately $959.2 billion. [1] European Union and United Nations estimates, using different definitions of the bioeconomy, estimate that the bioeconomic activities contributed 10% of Europe’s GDP for 2017-19. [2] Other independent analyses – also citing inadequate data – estimate that the U.S. bioeconomy has grown by about 10% annually for the past two decades [3], more than twice the rate of the private sector overall. [4] The authors of all these assessments state that the results are conservative and likely underestimate the scope and growth of the bioeconomy.

A more bullish and forward-looking analysis, The McKinsey Global Institute’s 2020 report, “The Bio Revolution” [5], asserts that 60% of physical inputs to the global economy could be made using biological processes, producing $2-4 trillion in direct economic potential between 2030-40, not counting downstream effects, and depending on the pace of innovation. McKinsey estimates that half of the bio revolution’s impact in the next 20 years will be in agriculture and consumer goods.

The Foundational Technologies of the Biorevolution

Four technologies are essential to the biorevolution and made it possible to read, write, and edit the genetic code which governs the function of all organisms, the “code of life”:

• DNA sequencing machines – DNA sequencing, the ability to accurately determine the sequence of nucleic acids in a sample of DNA, began in the 1970s. Sequencing technologies are increasingly inexpensive, accurate, and fast. The Human Genome Project took 13 years and cost over $3 billion to sequence a single human genome. Today, the most powerful machines can sequence a human genome in less than a day for under $1000. Other, more portable sequencers can read a (much smaller) bacterial genome in less than an hour.

• DNA synthesis technologies – DNA synthesis is the construction of strands of DNA having specific nucleic acid sequences without a template. Synthesis technologies are relatively slow and costly compared to sequencing. Still, innovative companies are pursuing advances in what is already a $1.3 billion industry. [6] CRISPR-CAS9 gene editing tools – CRISPR was first recognized as a valuable gene editing tool less than ten years ago. Many versions have since been developed and enable one to add, alter or remove DNA sequences accurately, rapidly, and cheaply.

• Biological “big data” –Genomic sequencing produces large amounts of data. Multiple genomes must be sequenced and compared to understand the role of particular genes or the relationship between different species.

• Larger, more heterogenous genomic “libraries” are instrumental in identifying gene functions and interactions. In addition to extensive collections of genomic data, additional “metadata” describing individual traits and conditions is essential to probing relationships between genetics and function. Advanced computational approaches – machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc. – are integral to unraveling the dense data fields, the “big data” that code these relationships.

Integrating these four foundational biotechnologies to create living systems imbued with new functions or characteristics is the mission of engineered (aka “synthetic”) biology. Engineered biology began in the 1970s when scientists inserted a foreign gene encoding a desired product (a hormone) into bacteria, grew the bacteria cells, and harvested the product the cells had been directed to make. This effort became Genetech, arguably the first biotechnology company. This idea has since been taken to new levels....

....MUCH MORE (14 page PDF) 

Dr. O'Toole was mentioned in a 2021 post, "Bioengineering The Age of Designer Plagues" after which I did a bit of research.

She's an interesting woman.

We have a couple dozen posts on In-Q-Tel, most have some version of this homely little observation:
The CIA’s Venture-Capital Firm, Like Its Sponsor, Operates in the Shadows

This is a pretty good look at the spook shop vehicle.
As a side note, back in the early years of this century, especially immediately after the mass murders of 9/11, it was thought that investing alongside In-Q-Tel was the cool thing to do.
It took a while for the realization to sink in that they weren't necessarily in it for the money return to the VC's.

CIA Backed In-Q-Tel Invests In 3D Printed Electronics Co.

From Xconomy Boston:

CIA-Backed VC Firm Invests in Voxel8’s 3D Printer for Electronics 

Startups making 3D printers have electrified the tech industry. Just ask Voxel8, a Boston-based startup that makes what it says is the first 3D printer able to print electronic devices. Or ask In-Q-Tel, the venture capital firm with links to the Central Intelligence Agency. In-Q-Tel recently made a strategic equity investment in Voxel8 and also signed a technology development agreement with the startup. Voxel8 announced the news Thursday, although it did not disclose how much the firm invested.

Voxel8 has developed a 3D printer that allows users to add embedded electronic circuits to the plastic objects they create. The machine does so by printing with a silver ink that conducts electricity. The machine also works with the conventional thermoplastics used by other 3D printers.

Harvard University professor and material scientist Jennifer Lewis developed the technology in her lab, along with other 3D-printing technology. Voxel8 was spun out last year to focus on commercializing 3D-printed electronics. Xconomy reported in January that the company has raised about $2 million in venture capital, including an investment from Braemar Energy Ventures, and $50,000 from winning the MassChallenge business plan competition....MORE

"Is Palantir’s Crystal Ball Just Smoke and Mirrors?"

One of my favorite examples of investing in black boxes and the pitfalls therein is a little vignette I imagined while reading last year's "Lenders Raise Collateral Concerns Over WeWork CEO's $500 Million Personal Credit Line" (JPM; UBS)":

Ya think?

"Bob, we've been lending against the Emperor's personal wardrobe and it turns out there's actually nothing in the closet"

"Oh"

*****

Sure, Climateer Investing took "WeWork: 'Our valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue.'" at face value:

Roger that, energy and spirituality. Over.... 

But we didn't lend a half-billion against it for Chrissakes  

Or more recently, Izabella d'Alphaville's piece on Cambridge Analytica.

And possibly the headline query, from New York Magazine September 27:

Back in 2003, John Poindexter got a call from Richard Perle, an old friend from their days serving together in the Reagan administration. Perle, one of the architects of the Iraq War, which started that year, wanted to introduce Poindexter to a couple of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who were starting a software company. The firm, Palantir Technologies, was hoping to pull together data collected by a wide range of spy agencies — everything from human intelligence and cell-phone calls to travel records and financial transactions — to help identify and stop terrorists planning attacks on the United States.

Poindexter, a retired rear admiral who had been forced to resign as Reagan’s national-security adviser over his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, wasn’t exactly the kind of starry-eyed idealist who usually appeals to Silicon Valley visionaries. Returning to the Pentagon after the 9/11 attacks, he had begun researching ways to develop a data-mining program that was as spooky as its name: Total Information Awareness. His work — dubbed a “super-snoop’s dream” by conservative columnist William Safire — was a precursor to the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance programs that were exposed a decade later by Edward Snowden.

Yet Poindexter was precisely the person Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, the co-founders of Palantir, wanted to meet. Their new company was similar in ambition to what Poindexter had tried to create at the Pentagon, and they wanted to pick the brain of the man now widely viewed as the godfather of modern surveillance.

“When I talked to Peter Thiel early on, I was impressed with the design and the ideas they had for the user interface,” Poindexter told me recently. “But I could see they didn’t have — well, as you call it, the back end, to automatically sort through the data and eliminate that tedious task for the users. And my feedback from the people who used it at the time, they were not happy with it at all. It was just much too manual.”

Smoking his pipe, just as he had when he testified to Congress 33 years ago about his role in facilitating covert arms sales to Iran, Poindexter told me he had suggested to Karp and Thiel that they partner with one of the companies that worked on Total Information Awareness. But the two men weren’t interested. “They were a bunch of young, arrogant guys,” Poindexter said, “and they were convinced they could do it all.”

Seventeen years later, Palantir is seeking to cash in on its ability to “do it all.” Over the years, the company has worked with some of the government’s most secretive agencies, including the CIA, the NSA, and the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command. As recently as two years ago, its value was estimated at $20 billion, elevating it to the loftiest heights of the tech “unicorns,” privately held companies valued at more than $1 billion. On September 30, Palantir is scheduled to go public, selling shares in a highly anticipated gambit that could make Karp one of Silicon Valley’s richest CEOs and cement the reputation of Thiel, the first outside investor in Facebook and a co-founder of PayPal, as one of the most visionary tech entrepreneurs of his generation.

Palantir’s public offering is founded on the company’s sales pitch that its software represents the ultimate tool of surveillance. Named after the “Seeing Stones” in The Lord of the Rings, Palantir is designed to ingest the mountains of data collected by soldiers and spies and police — fingerprints, signals intelligence, bank records, tips from confidential informants — and enable users to spot hidden relationships, uncover criminal and terrorist networks, and even anticipate future attacks. Thiel and Karp have effectively positioned Palantir as a pro-military arm of Silicon Valley, a culture dominated by tech gurus who view their work as paving the way for a global utopia. (Palantir declined to comment for this story, citing the mandatory “quiet period” prior to a public listing.)

It’s a strange moment, given the widespread alarm over the ever-expanding reach of technology, for a tech company to be marketing itself as the most powerful weapon in the national-security state’s arsenal — wrapping itself in what one Silicon Valley veteran calls “the mystique of being used to kill people.” But as Palantir seeks to sell its stock on Wall Street, even some of its initial admirers are warning that the company’s software may not live up to its hype. More than a dozen former military and intelligence officials I interviewed — some of whom were instrumental in persuading government agencies to work with Palantir — expressed concerns about the firm’s penchant for exaggeration, its apparent flouting of federal rules designed to ensure fair competition, and its true worth. The company has largely succeeded, they say, not because of its technological wizardry but because its interface is slicker and more user friendly than the alternatives created by defense contractors.

“Where you get into trouble is when the software gets so complicated that you have to send people in to manage it,” said one former CIA official who is complimentary of Palantir. “The moment you introduce an expensive IT engineer into the process, you’ve cut your profits.” Palantir, it turns out, has run headlong into the problem plaguing many tech firms engaged in the quest for total information awareness: Real-world data is often too messy and complex for computers to translate without lots of help from humans.

One of the central claims made about Palantir — its creation myth, in essence — is that its software was somehow instrumental in locating Osama bin Laden. The company, which has posted a news story repeating the rumor on its website, likes to shroud its supposed involvement in an air of mystery. “That’s one of those stories we’re not allowed to comment about,” Karp once said in an interview.

The only known basis for the claim, which has been repeated in dozens of articles, comes from The Finish, Mark Bowden’s book on the 2011 raid that killed bin Laden. Bowden does not actually say Palantir was used in the raid, but he credits the company with perfecting the data collection and analysis that Poindexter had initiated with Total Information Awareness in the aftermath of 9/11. Palantir, Bowden writes, “came up with a program that elegantly accomplished what TIA had set out to do.”

No one I spoke with in either national security or intelligence believes Palantir played any significant role in finding bin Laden. Thiel, according to Poindexter, wasn’t even interested in building on TIA’s work. “His people were telling him they didn’t need it,” Poindexter recalled.

From the start, Palantir has drawn on a circle of loyal insiders to build the company. In the late 1980s, as an undergraduate at Stanford, Thiel founded a conservative student publication called The Stanford Review to wage war on what he saw as the university’s liberal agenda, including “mandatory race and ethnic studies” and “ ‘domestic partner’ status for homosexuals.” (Thiel, who is gay, married his longtime partner in 2017.) The Review served as a breeding ground for Palantir: Over the years, according to an analysis by a Stanford graduate named Andrew Granato, 24 of the company’s employees came from the staff of Thiel’s student publication.

Palantir’s initial technology was likewise adopted from one of Thiel’s other endeavors: PayPal. In 2000, engineers at the online-payment company wanted to use software to help identify fraudulent transactions, but they found that computer algorithms alone couldn’t keep up with how quickly criminals adapted. Their solution was a program called Igor, after a Russian criminal who was taunting PayPal’s fraud department, that flagged suspicious transactions for humans to review.

In 2003, after PayPal was sold, Thiel approached Alex Karp, a former Stanford classmate with a Ph.D. in neoclassical social theory, with a novel idea: Why not apply Igor to track terrorist networks through their financial transactions? At the time, the CIA unit responsible for locating bin Laden had little experience, or even interest, in such an approach. Thiel put in the seed money, and after a few years of pitching investors, Palantir got its first major breakthrough in the national-security world with an estimated $2 million investment from In-Q-Tel, a venture-capital firm set up by the CIA. According to a former intelligence official who was directly involved with that investment, the agency hoped that tapping the tech expertise of Silicon Valley would enable it to integrate widely disparate sources of data regardless of format. “I have mixed feelings about the CIA,” Richard Perle told me, “but their angel investment in Palantir may have been their most inspired move.”

In-Q-Tel’s investment provided Palantir with something even more important than cash: the imprimatur of the CIA. As doors started to open in Washington, Palantir began to attract fans in the secretive communities of intelligence and national security. One former senior intelligence official recalled visiting the company in Menlo Park, California, around 2005. Palantir didn’t even have its own space — it was working out of the offices of a venture capitalist involved in the firm. “We go out back to the carriage house, and there were sleeping bags under the desks,” the former official recalled. “That’s where the engineers who were doing the code were actually living and sleeping.”

But contracts with spy agencies were never going to provide Palantir with enough scale to satisfy investors. The company needed new customers, especially in the lucrative world of defense contracting, and Thiel knew just how to get them. In Zero to One, his 2014 book on entrepreneurship, Thiel notes a critical move in PayPal’s success: In the early days, the company essentially paid people to sign up, handing out $10 to each new customer.

Under federal rules for procurement, which are laid out in a telephone-book-size manual, you can’t pay Pentagon officials to buy your product because that would constitute bribery. And it makes no sense to entice individual soldiers to use your product, because they don’t have the power to make procurement decisions. But that, remarkably, is exactly what Palantir did.

Not long after In-Q-Tel’s investment, the company began providing software and training to members of the armed forces about to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan. Rather than focusing on lobbying the Pentagon from the outside, Palantir introduced its product from inside the military, creating both an internal demand and a network of pretrained users. “They would basically contact the soldiers and say, ‘Hey, I would like to give you some training on this tool you will get in theater. Would you like to get trained on it?’ ” recalled Heidi Shyu, then the Army’s chief weapons buyer.

Chris Ieva, a Marine infantry officer who was attending the Naval Postgraduate School in 2006, was an early beneficiary of Palantir’s unorthodox marketing technique. The school is located in Monterey, California, just down the road from Silicon Valley, and Palantir had already established a foothold at the institution. Ieva was excited when he was invited to visit the tech start-up, where he saw engineers walking around with T-shirts that read GOOGLE IS OUR BACKUP JOB.

But Palantir wasn’t trying to recruit Ieva as an employee. Instead, he said, he got funding worth about $10,000 to support his graduate work, which paid for a high-end computer and access to critical data. Ieva was also supplied with Palantir’s software, which the school was leasing for $19,000 a year; the company provided an analyst at its own expense to work with students. “In return,” Ieva told me, “I had to publish a thesis, and the findings would sort of go back to them.” By the time he deployed to Afghanistan in 2011, Ieva was a true believer in Palantir. He was not only trained to use the company’s software but given a personal version to take with him....

....MUCH MORE

Quantum Computing: CIA and Bezos Invest in D-Wave Systems In.

Answer a simple Question and win a million bucks:

P vs. NP

The Clay Mathematics Institute posted the prizes for seven damn-near insoluble math problems back in 2000.
The first of the Millennium questions to be solved, Poincaré's Conjecture, was proved in 2006. In 2010 the Institute announced that Dr. Grigoriy Perelman had indeed resolved the Conjecture. It was a big deal in Topology circles.
Perelman turned down the money and went back to his office.

Next up, one of the most difficult unanswered problems in Computer Sciences P vs. NP which will probably take a quantum computer to solve.*

I've mentioned that one of our interests are screaming fast computers. Quantum Computing is one approach to get there. Thanks to a reader for the heads-up on D-Wave.
First up, Reuters, October 4:

Quantum computing firm D-Wave gets $30 mln investment

* Canadian company D-Wave lands $30 million investment
* Firm says technology has applications for drug development, security
* Debate continues over what defines quantum computing

D-Wave Systems, a Vancouver-based company that aims to develop quantum-computing applications, said on Thursday it had received $30 million in funding from investors including the firm that manages Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's venture investments and an investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The investments, from Bezos Expeditions and In-Q-Tel, mark a vote of confidence in the potential for practical applications for the emerging technology underpinning quantum computing.

Advocates say the controversial technology works orders of magnitude faster than classical computing and has the potential to revolutionize fields such as drug development. It has remained mainly an academic concept since its introduction 30 years ago, but investors see new commercial opportunities.


Last year, D-Wave sold a $10 million superconducting-based quantum computer to Lockheed Martin, which installed it at the University of Southern California. This year, it hopes to sell a much more powerful version.

It is also marketing its own quantum-computing capability to other companies, which can tap into D-Wave's facilities using cloud computing, or remote servers. D-Wave chief executive Vern Brownell describes it as infrastructure-as-a-service, adding the company inked its first contract in the area a few weeks ago.

The company's technology is controversial in the scientific community, in part because D-Wave places a premium on working at large-scale rather than perfect error correction.
Some scientists question whether it is quantum computing at all, but D-Wave Brownell dismisses the skeptics.

"It's very simple to determine if you've built a quantum computer or not," he says. "If your machine is running a quantum algorithm - that is, a problem solving a procedure forbidden by the laws of classical physics but permitted by quantum mechanics - it's a quantum computer." ...MORE

Next Big Future has been following the company pretty closely, also Oct. 4:

Technology Review - Bezos and In-Q-Tel (CIA Investment arm) are in a group of investors who are betting $30 million on DWave Systems If the bet works out, some of the world's thorniest computing problems, such as the hunt for new drugs or efforts to build artificial intelligence, would become dramatically less challenging....

...The Technology Review article plays up the criticism that DWave received and says that DWave Systems has been publicly quiet.

Nextbigfuture has had 40 articles on Dwave systems and over 80 articles on Adiabatic Quantum Computing. The criticism was wrong and was made without taking the time to understand what DWave was doing. DWAve has continued to make many important developments and announcements. The later work received less attention than the initial coverage. Although IEEE Spectrum and Technology Review have had articles covering Dwave in the intervening years....MUCH MORE

Finally Daily Tech has some pretty good backround.

*Back to P=NP, here is famed mathematician Homer Simpson in some outtakes of Treehouse of Horror VI, original airdate October 29, 1995, attempting to solve the problem:

Venture Capital: "Quantum" Computing Co. D-Wave Raises $29 Mil From Goldman, Bezos, CIA

The usual suspects. although technically In-Q-Tel is distinct from the CIA.
From PE HUB:

D-Wave Systems Inc, a quantum computing company headquartered in Burnaby, British Columbia, has secured C$29 million in funding. The investors in this round were not named; however, D-Wave’s previous backers include Bezos Expeditions, BDC Capital, DFJ, Goldman Sachs, Growthworks, Harris & Harris Group, In-Q-Tel, International Investment and Underwriting and Kensington Partners Limited.

PRESS RELEASE
Burnaby, British Columbia – January 29, 2015 – D-Wave Systems Inc., the world’s first quantum computing company, today announced that it has closed $29 million in funding from a large institutional investor, among others. This funding will be used to accelerate development of D-Wave’s quantum hardware and software and expand the software application ecosystem. This investment brings total funding in D-Wave to $174 million (CAD), with approximately $62 million raised in 2014.

“The investment is a testament to the progress D-Wave continues to make as the leader in quantum computing systems,” said Vern Brownell, CEO of D-Wave. “The funding we received in 2014 will advance our quantum hardware and software development, as well as our work on leading edge applications of our systems. By making quantum computing available to more organizations, we’re driving our goal of finding solutions to the most complex optimization and machine learning applications in national defense, computing, research and finance.”

The funding follows a year of strong growth and advancement for D-Wave. Highlights include:

• Significant progress made towards the release of the next D-Wave quantum system featuring a 1000 qubit processor, which is currently undergoing testing in D-Wave’s labs.
• The company’s patent portfolio grew to over 150 issued patents worldwide, with 11 new U.S. patents being granted in 2014, covering aspects of D-Wave’s processor technology, systems and techniques for solving computational problems using D-Wave’s technology....MORE

"Pokémon Go Is a Government Surveillance Psyop Conspiracy"

From Gawker:

Less than a week after Pokémon Go’s launch, our streets are already filled with packs of phone-wielding, Weedle-catching zombies. They’re robbing our teens, filling our churches with sinners, and tricking our children into exercising. But worst of all, Pokémon Go is turning us all into an army of narcs in service of the coming New World Order.

Allow me to explain.

More like Privacy Poli-See Everything

Lots of apps have sketchy privacy policies, that’s nothing new. But the first set of alarms go off as soon as you realize that Pokémon Go’s policy does seem a bit more liberal than most, because not only are you giving Pokémon Go access to your location and camera, you’re also giving it full access to your Google account (assuming you use that to sign in).

There’s one section of the privacy policy in particular that seems to be getting the conspiracy theorists of the world up in arms and which Reddit user Homer_Simpson_Doh calls “very Orwellian”:

Most Orwellian of all is this line:

We may disclose any information about you (or your authorized child) that is in our possession or control to government or law enforcement officials or private parties.

As TechCrunch explained, Pokémon-loving millennials are far less likely to object to a few extra permissions when its Squirtle staring them in the face as they abandon their every god-given freedom than they do when Google reads their email.

Pokémon Go comes directly—directly—from the intelligence community

And it’s not like Pokémon Go itself doesn’t already have a direct(-ish) line to the CIA. After all, Pokémon Go was created by Niantic, which was formed by John Hanke.

Now, Hanke also just so happened to help found Keyhole. What does Keyhole do, you ask? I’d tell you to go to Keyhole’s website—but you can’t. It just takes you straight to Google Earth. That’s because Keyhole was acquired by Google back in 2004.

Before that, though, Keyhole received funding from a firm called In-Q-Tel, a government-controlled venture capital firm that invests in companies that will help beef up Big Brother’s tool belt. What’s more, the funds In-Q-Tel gave Keyhole mostly came from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), whose primary mission is “collecting, analyzing, and distributing geospatial intelligence.”

Still unsure if Pokémon Go’s creator is a government spook? Check out this excerpt from the NGA’s in-house publication...MORE

The techcrunch story is titled "Pokemon Go wants to catch (almost) all your app permissions".