Peter B. Collins Presents Yasha Levine
Google Earth Enterprise is an intelligence product now being sold to state and local law enforcement, and was recently pitched to Oakland, California officials for its $11 million federally funded “Domain Awareness Center”. Yasha Levine exposes how Google developed “Earth” in close collaboration with NSA and NGA (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) and bought a mapping startup called Keyhole after the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, had rescued Keyhole from impending bankruptcy. We talk about the conflicts of interest of Google chairman Eric Schmidt, who was a major donor to Obama and supported his campaign with a big data team called “the Cave”. In 2010, Google got an NGA no-bid contract for $27 million, which NGA defended because of its “significant investment in Google Earth technology. We begin our conversation with a look at the new Pando tech news website, and its recent coverage of Pierre Omidyar’s investments in Ukraine and in the new media startup, First Look.
*Yasha Levine is a roving correspondent for Pando; read his Google article here. Levine previously wrote for The eXiled in Moscow, and is the author of The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell.
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