<nettime> CIA and New Technology

["nettime's_deep_sea_diver" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

From: Ralph McGehee <rmcgehee@igc.org>
Newsgroups: alt.politics.org.cia
Subject: CIA and New Technology
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 09:09:43 -0400
Organization: Institute for Global Communications


                       CIA and New Technology

   The CIA is to create its own venture capital firm, called "In-Q-It," 
to help connect better with the Internet revolution. CIA in a world of
start-ups and instant millionaires, isn't getting technology's best and
brightest. So it to create their own start-up, an office on Sand Hill Road
in Palo Alto. In-Q-It to fund promising technologies that can help it keep
pace with the info explosion. It will have a staff of 20 to 25 people, and
will operate much like a normal venture fund -- partnering with other
companies and funds. In theory, will be unclassified.

   It will be a nonprofit, but the goal is to invest wisely to be
self-financing. In-Q-It will work on, smarter CIA search engines, better
ways to visualize data, and better security for CIA web surfers.  CIA has
chosen a board of directors -- including such as John Seely Brown of Xerox
PARC, Jeong Kim of Lucent, Alex Mandl of Teligent and Norm Augustine of
Lockheed Martin. The first CEO is Gilman Louie.

   In-Q-It evolved out of frustration that CIA was losing its technical
edge. The idea for the venture-capital fund was hatched between DCI Tenet,
and a former investment banker named A. B. "Buzzy" Krongard, who joined
CIA in 2/98. The project was turned over to a group that included Sue
Gordon, working in the Science and Technology Directorate. The name: "In"
for intelligence; "It" for information technology, and "Q"  was the code
name for James Bond's technology wizard. What the intelligence community
didn't understand, says Louie, is that technology is moving too fast now
for anyone to try to control it. Op-ed by David Ignatius, Washington Post
9/29/99 A29. 

Ralph McGehee
http://come.to/CIABASE

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