The U.S. government has long considered Google to be a monopoly.
It has been revealed that the U.S. military’s powerful classified intranet is not being hosted on government servers, but is being powered by Google.
The revelation came on the opening day of Bradley Manning’s court-martial at Fort Meade in Maryland.
United States officials accuse Manning of downloading 700,000 documents and passing them on to WikiLeaks using the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), a system of interconnected computer networks used by the United States Defense Department, with its Intelink browser.
On Monday, Captain Morrow, the government’s chief prosecutor, explained to the judge how Manning had systematically accessed the SIPRNet to obtain classified diplomatic cables and military files.
Forensic computer examiners can monitor Manning’s movements “minute by minute” by using Intelink logs.
Morrow explained Intelink as follows:
Interlink is a SIPRNet search engine that is very similar to Google, in fact it is powered by Google.”
On Wednesday, Major Ashden Fein asked Chief Warrant Officer Two Kyle Balonek to describe Intelink for the prosecution.
Basically, Intrelink is Google simplified. It lets you find information quickly sometimes.
Major Fein asked, “How did analysts use Intelink?”
Balonek explained, “If you couldn’t find something, you usually try Intelink first to see if you can pull out the report without having to go into the database and search for a single report,”. “If there was a numbered report, you could pull it out of Intelink without having to go into the database.”
“Was Intelink a common tool used by Foxes Shia analysts?””?””?”” Fein asked.
I agree, sir.”
On Wednesday, another witness confirmed that emails are being sent through SIPRNet between military personnel, including analysts.
Despite the fact that Mountain View, California-based Google provides custom search engines for hundreds of thousands of websites, this is the first time it has been revealed publicly that the United States military and intelligence services are among its customers.
Since then, it has been revealed that the Google infrastructure that powers Intel is the largest outside of the one powering its own operations.
The US government itself is trusting the care of the bulk of its inventory of classified military intelligence to a large commercial organization that makes no secret of making use of the personal and private information it has accessed from users. At a time when an army private faces up to 154 years in prison for mishandling confidential and classified documents, it is somewhat ironic that the US government itself is confident in the care of its classified military intelligence inventory.
Bradley Manning may have downloaded documents from a search engine hosted on Google’s servers, which is one concern. The US government itself failed to detect 700,000 documents downloaded from its highly classified system, including 250,000 diplomatic cables in a single day. Both Google and the US government have extensive monitoring and hacking detection tools, yet these downloads took place without Google and the Department of Defense knowing about it, let alone preventing it.