Listener Mail: Inside In-Q-Tel

Transcript

from ufos to psychic powers and government conspiracies history is riddled with unexplained events you can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know we are jumping to an email that was sent to us by someone we are going to lovingly refer to as nada as in not a sock puppet keep this person anonymous for reasons you will very soon understand and this message comes to us in response to our episode we made on inquitel you remember inquitel it's the cia the central intelligence agencies venture capital arm it's their it's their vc adventure time place where they invest in technology individuals and companies that will allow them to have an edge on all of their adversaries potential enemies and friends or frenemies as ben you like to call all others that are not the nation state with which you were operating okay no no you're right i stand by that exactly i think i mean i do too um let's begin says hey guys i just listened to the latest cast and wow it had my bells ringing in q-tel i worked as an implementation architect for a company called visual sciences it was bought in i think sometime 2009 by an analytics company called omniture and they rebranded the software as insights now if anyone else's bells are ringing by hearing those keywords uh stick with us this that's matt talking okay let's let's go back to to not a sock puppet visual sciences that's a capital v capital s was based in herndon virginia not far from dulles airport it was basically an analytics engine on steroids it could pivot to deal with any type of data as long as it had a data type which you could create and a time stamp i used to call it quote digital lego because you could build it out of the box or with some smarts make it do pretty much anything with data classification visual sciences was part funded privately and co-funded by inquitel refer to articles attached for more detail and there are two articles attached which we will get into and nada you continue by saying without getting too far into the tech you could ingest a huge amount of data quickly think ebay size data sets they were a client and then in that data you've loaded get to a single record or group of records in a matter of seconds this was done using its very flexible ingestion algorithms and the proprietary way it stored and retrieved data think no sql instead of select blah from to where etc databases before they were a thing it was a very flexible architecture and the limitation was only the processing power and the i o if you chained enough servers together it could expand out to in by which you mean insert any number here i built the largest civilian build for a british broadcasting company that is not the bbc and that was about 22 servers think about how much computing that is pre-cloud says nada this was unheard of do you think that sky or panorama what do you think that is no bbc is panorama it's just it's got to be sky right i mean i would suspect but so he says what is so interesting about visual sciences think about a lot of data processed quickly and data retrieval down to a single record very quickly data such as web browsing behavior sure and he's got a here phone calls he says so this this makes it much more easy to track and coalette people you can see why intel would in incutel rather would be into this because visual sciences could group and create dimensions and display them graphically in tables graphs charts whatever and geolocations on maps exactly what we were talking about we kind of just briefly mentioned it the whole google earth creation thing on that episode about inquitel um so we're getting some confirmation here not confirmation we had confirmation we're getting uh inner workings and details right we got some backup thank you yes thanks for here comes the calvary the cavalry is not a oh and my drawer just opened on its own so nsa if you're into opening drawers remotely now i i see you it sounds more like a poltergeist situation dab holder guys nsa what's the difference uh let's continue on right so we're seeing the pieces come together nada continues and says we could map and overlay data to locations with resolutions you could not believe this is all before google maps could do this and i think vs was possibly the first app to link with keyhole geolocation and imaging data before google earth we used to joke in-house that the maps were straight from the satellite and we would get data refreshes often when i would show the software to clients we would get wows on the geo geopiece and we get questions about where we got these map meshes don't forget nada adds this stuff was not available to most people at this point in time i would reply with some theater and say the cia if people questioned this and then we would mention inquitel and it was actually a great selling point we needed it because this software nada says was eye wateringly expensive so okay you can see that it has nefarious applications but was it used by the us government dramatic pause yes he says i was there for two weeks i would get in a car and drive with two colleagues to fort meade maryland guess the agency we were not allowed any devices and would digitally disappear for a few hours we would go into a room with whiteboards etc several agency employees would do a round-robin of asking us questions around configuration and sometimes specific questions on sorting algorithms at no time were we allowed to see the software or the data so these questions were all hypothetical it was ridiculous at one point we asked for a laptop so we could load up code or expressions to help show them examples to assist in answering the questions we were never allowed to take the usb keys away with us we had i think five meetings until the geeks at the agency i love that had enough data to run with and we never got asked back to my knowledge then not a sock puppet says we had a few more gigs i heard about but didn't participate in one guy i met for a beer after work had gone down to quantico that day uh make of that what you will that's the fbi's headquarters by the way just if you're not aware and there's more here in this message but we are not going to read this full thing but i'm not a sock puppet does sign off with uh giving us some information with the statement this is to prove i'm not a sock puppet that's why we called you that um so we can confirm anonymously that this is indeed not a sock puppet um so guys there are these links that this person sent to us that i think are worth our time uh it's really just backing up visual sciences what it was and that it was associated with inquitel and what it could do um really cool stuff in here i why don't we just let people know where they can read this stuff maybe that's one of the easiest ways for you to be armed with the information as well on iqt iqt.org which is a website we mentioned on that nqtel episode you can find an article visual sciences announces strategic investment and licensing agreement within qtel it's from 2004. you can find it there's another one from the washington post it is titled inquitel that's i n q t e l c i a's venture arm invests in secrets and that is uh from august 15 2005. so you can read both of those articles yeah yeah this is a this is a legitimate real story and people affiliated with visual sciences and incutel are on public record talking about how great they thought it was this was a win-win for a lot of people you know yep oh there's a lot of great quotes in this article unfortunately we don't have time to go into all of it today but uh read these articles on your own and you will see exactly what our listener whoever you are uh sent to us and was talking about oh can we do one quote matt there's yes there's one quote i really like okay so there's a guy named buzzy a b kronegaard who was the cia's at one time he was the cia's number three official and he was also a former invest investment banker because like we said once you get to the top of some structures things inevitably um things inevitably intertwine i think it was flannery o'connor who said all things arise must converge or something like that uh sorry flannery i'm paraphrasing you but here's a verbatim quote from kronegaard about about this uh about this relationship on a scale from one to ten he says i would give it an 11 referring to incutel and then he adds in in like with just like a little hint of pettiness he says it's done so well that even congress is taking credit for it that's right okay okay i see you buzzy i mean that's uh buzzy's uh investment banker for the cia weird what a life [Music] you