A Blurred In-Q-Tel X-Ray: Real Journalists Uncover Old News
September 4, 2016
I noted this write up by the Rupert Murdoch outfit, the Wall Street Journal: “The CIA’s Venture-Capital Firm, Like Its Sponsor, Operates in the Shadows.” You may have to buy a dead tree version of the Wall Street Journal, go to your public library, or subscribe to read the source itself. (Don’t hassle me if the link begs for dollars. Buzz Mr. Murdoch and express your views.)
The point of the article is that the US government’s intelligence outfit operates a venture capital firm. That investment entity does business as In-Q-Tel. The goal, in my opinion, is to identify promising technologies which may have application at the Central Intelligence Agency. Please, note that much of the work at the CIA is not public. That’s because it mostly operates in secrecy. The fact that a government has secret activities is not exactly news.
Furthermore, whom do you think advises the Central Intelligence Agency and its various units? Choose from the following list:
- Immigrants without US entry authorizations
- Felons recently released from prison to a half way house
- Individuals working for governments antithetical to the posture of the United States
- Investigative journalists looking for a gig
- Individuals with clearances or a track record of serving the US.
Okay, you picked one to three. You may qualify for work at a large, “real news” outfit. If you selected item four, you now understand why the news about the individuals and the companies exposed to In-Q-Tel is stale.
Obviously those in the spy game want folks who are in the same fox hole.
The write up reveals this stunning factoid: In-Q-Tel provides only limited information about its investments, and some of its trustees have ties to funded companies.
No kidding.
With considerable assiduity, the write up lists the companies in which In-Q-Tel has invested and notes:
Of about 325 investments In-Q-Tel says it has made since its founding, more than 100 weren’t announced, although the identities of some of those companies have leaked out. The absence of disclosure can be due to national-security concerns or simply because a startup company doesn’t want its financial ties to intelligence publicized, people familiar with the arrangements said. While moneymaking isn’t In-Q-Tel’s goal, when that happens, such as when a startup it funded goes public, In-Q-Tel can keep the profit and roll it into new projects. It doesn’t obtain rights to technology or inventions.
There you go. Why not let another nation’s intelligence services invest in high potential but little known innovators? The US government is trying to bring more business discipline to some of its activities. Therefore, is it not logical that an intelligence agency seeking high value products and services can use the proceeds from its investments to further the work of the intelligence agency?
I guess that’s a thought foreign to some real journalists.
What does one expect the CIA and In-Q-Tel to do? Publish a daily newspaper detailing the companies, people, and technologies the CIA is interested in? What about going on Fox News and explaining what’s hot and what’s not in advanced technology? Oh, right. Technology is not as much fun as pundits who over talk one another.
I know that an outfit owned by Rupert Murdoch is in the news business. I know that gathering information from the In-Q-Tel Web site is really difficult. For me, information about In-Q-Tel is a bit of a yawner.
I would much rather read about some of the management methods used in some major media entities. Government efforts to identify cutting edge technologies is just not that interesting to me. Where’s the beef? Why not consider why certain categories of investments have not yielded products and services which can be used across missions? Why not explore why Purple Yogi was a dead end and why Palantir is not? Oh, right. That’s harder than realizing that in certain types of work one wants to deal with individuals from that fox hole.
Stephen E Arnold, September 4, 2016
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