A former clandestine services officer for the CIA who also maintains close relationships with top Google representatives says that the company is "in bed with" the intelligence agency and the U.S. government. He has also gone public on his deep suspicions about the official explanation behind 9/11.

Robert David Steele appeared on the nationally syndicated Alex Jones radio show and began by voicing his deep doubts about the official 9/11 story.

While Steele stopped short of saying 9/11 was a complete inside job, he agreed that the evidence points to the overwhelming complicity of the Bush administration.

"The U.S. government did not properly investigate this and there are more rocks to be turned over," said Steele adding, "I'm absolutely certain that WTC 7 was brought down by controlled demolition and that as far as I'm concerned means that this case has not been properly investigated."

"There's no way that building could have come down without controlled demolition."

Steele pointed the finger of suspicion directly at the Vice President saying, "There's no question in my own mind that Dick Cheney is the tar baby in this whole thing."

Steele outlined the bizarre circumstances preceding the attack that would have greased the skids for bombs to be planted in the buildings.

"You do have the whole issue of the security cameras being disengaged, the bomb sniffing dogs being removed, the family ties with Bush - I mean if you smell a rotten fish there's probably a rotten fish somewhere around."

Steele's biography is impressive. He was the second-ranking civilian (GS-14) in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence from 1988-1992. Steele is a former clandestine services case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency.

He is the founder and president of Open Source Solutions, Inc., and is an acknowledged expert on computer and information vulnerabilities. Steele holds graduate degrees in International Relations and Public Administration from Leigh University and the University of Oklahoma. He has also earned certificates in Intelligence Policy from Harvard University and in Defense Studies from the Naval War College.

Before the 2004 election Steele advocated the re-election of George W Bush and he has been cited by numerous Republican luminaries as a credible source. His testimony is added to the chorus of other credible 9/11 whistleblowers both in and out of government and academia.

Steele raised eyebrows when he confirmed from his contacts within the CIA and Google that Google was working in tandem with "the agency," a claim made especially volatile by the fact that Google was recently caught censoring Alex Jones' Terror Storm and has targeted other websites for blackout in the past.

"I think that Google has made a very important strategic mistake in dealing with the secret elements of the U.S. government - that is a huge mistake and I'm hoping they'll work their way out of it and basically cut that relationship off," said the ex-CIA man.

"Google was a little hypocritical when they were refusing to honor a Department of Justice request for information because they were heavily in bed with the Central Intelligence Agency, the office of research and development," said Steele.

Steele called for more scrutiny to be placed on Google if it continues to engage in nefarious practices, saying, "If Google is indeed starting to do harm then I think it's important that be documented and publicized."

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Analysis A Belgian court ruled against Google’s use of newspaper stories in early September. If you believe Google, it did nothing wrong and failed to defend itself because it was unaware of the publishers’ lawsuit. If you believe the publishers, Google is lying and infringes copyright on a colossal scale. The parties return to court on 23rd November in a case that finds legal uncertainty looming over the world’s leading search engines.

The case focused on Google’s news aggregation service, which automatically scans the websites of newspapers, extracting headlines and snippets of text from each story. These are displayed at Google News and the headlines link users to the full stories on the source sites. Newspaper group Copiepresse, which represents leading Belgian, French and German publications, said this amounted to copyright infringement and a breach of database rules because its members had not been asked for permission.

Copiepresse could have stopped Google without going to court but chose not to. Instead, it wants Google to continue directing traffic to its sites – and it wants Google to pay for the privilege.

The court also ruled that Google’s cache, which is not part of Google News, infringed copyright.

When a person performs a search at Google, results are displayed with a link to the page on the third party site and also a link to a ‘cached’ copy of the same page stored at Google’s own site. The newspapers say this copy undermines their sale of archive stories. Why buy an archived story if you can find it in Google’s cache? Again, newspapers could have stopped their pages being cached.

Margaret Boribon, Secretary General of Copiepresse, told OUT-LAW that Google’s behaviour is “totally illegal” because it does not seek permission before extracting content for Google News or copying pages to its cache. Google disagrees.

Understanding Google’s position within the law means understanding how the search engine works.

Google uses an automated program to crawl across the internet, known as its Googlebot. It locates billions of pages and copies each one to its index. In doing so it breaks the page into tiny pieces, analysing and cross-referencing every element. That index is what Google interrogates to return search results for users. When the Googlebot visits a page, it also takes a snapshot that is stored in Google’s cache, a separate archive that lets users see how a page looked the last time the Googlebot visited.

It is easy for a website to keep Googlebot or other search engine robots away from all or particular pages. A standard has existed since 1994 called the robots exclusion standard.

Add ‘/robots.txt’ to the end of any site’s web address and you’ll find that site’s instructions for search engines. Google also offers a simple way to prevent a page being cached: just write the word ‘NOARCHIVE’ in the code of a page.

When asked why her members’ news sites didn’t follow these steps to exclude Google, Boribon replied, "then you admit that their reasoning is correct". She said all search engines should obtain permission before indexing pages that carry copyright notices.

But the real reason for not opting-out with a robots.txt file or mandating against caching is that Belgium’s newspapers want to be indexed by Google. “Yes, we have a problem with Google, but we don’t want to be out of Google,” Boribon said. “We want Google to respect the rules. If Google wanted to index us, they need to ask.”

Copiepresse also wants Google to pay for indexing sites. Boribon declined to discuss how or how much. "That has to be negotiated," she said.

The argument is not unique. The World Association of Newspapers (WAN), which represents 18,000 newspapers in 102 countries, said in January it would “explore ways to challenge the exploitation of content by search engines without fair compensation to copyright owners.”

At that time, WAN did not have a strategy for challenge. Copiepresse did. It took direct action and convinced the Brussels Court of First Instance to order Google to withdraw from its sites all the articles and photographs of Copiepresse member sites. Google was given 10 days to comply with the threat of a €1 million fine for each day of delay.

Since the ruling, Google has pulled the plug on the news sites in the lawsuit. They are not just missing from Google News Belgium, they have disappeared from Google’s main index and cache too.

“They have done it to punish us,” said Boribon, who didn’t want Google to go that far. “They have a bad attitude.” Yet Boribon went on to complain that some of her members’ content can still be accessed via Google News France. “They don’t apply the judgment fully so we will ask for the fine,” she said.

Boribon does not seem to think she is cutting off her nose to spite her face. “What I’m achieving now is getting all the information to my European colleagues so we will have other publishers taking part in the court case. Then maybe Google will change its mind. If they see this is not a Belgian case but a concern for all publishers all over the world, they will have to review their business model.”

Her hope is that if enough publishers withdraw their content, Google will have significantly less content to index – and that will force it to the negotiating table.

Copiepresse is using the law as leverage in a commercial argument: its content contributes to Google’s $10bn-a-year in revenue and newspapers want a cut. That argument should not focus on Google News because Google News does not display ads. It is only when newspapers’ pages appear in the results of the main search engine that Google serves the ads that fuel the $125 billion company.

Copiepresse told the court that Google damages the publishers’ ad revenue by bypassing their homepages. “We want search engines to send people to our homepage,” she said, explaining that only the homepage always carries ads.

Google says its practices are lawful. It acts as an intermediary that connects users to sites. Europe’s Copyright Directive and E-commerce Directive recognise the role of intermediaries and afford them special legal protection, including a special right for intermediaries to cache material. Confusingly, however, Google’s cache may not be what the lawmakers had in mind.

Internet service providers use caches to save bandwidth on delivering frequently-accessed web pages. Rather than deliver a live page, it is more efficient to deliver a cached copy to customers. The customer will never know the difference because the cached copy is updated when the live page changes.

The E-commerce Directive doesn’t distinguish internet service providers from search engine service providers. Instead it says “a service provider is not liable for the automatic, intermediate and temporary storage of that information, performed for the sole purpose of making more efficient the information’s onward transmission to other recipients of the service”. There are other conditions, including that “the provider does not modify the information” and that “the provider complies with conditions on access to the information”.

Google has explained the purpose of its cache before, when the function was challenged in a US court in January. Google listed three purposes for the Nevada District Court: it allows users to view pages that the user cannot access directly, perhaps because the destination site has gone down; it allows users to make comparisons between a live and cached web page; and it allows users to identify search query terms (which are highlighted wherever they appear in the cached page). Copiepresse might argue that these purposes go too far beyond the Directive’s “sole purpose of making more efficient the information’s onward transmission to other recipients of the service”.

Even the legality of the primary search function of a search engine is open to question. The Directive’s condition that a provider “does not modify the information” is arguably breached as soon as a search engine breaks a page into tiny elements for analysis and cross-referencing in its gigantic index. That argument was not raised in court but would cut to the heart of almost any search engine’s operation.

Google won the Nevada case. Its opponent, a lawyer called Blake Field, had “decided to manufacture a claim for copyright infringement against Google in the hopes of making money from Google’s standard practice,” according to Judge Robert Jones. Field knew how the system worked and he placed copyrighted articles on his site, waiting for Google to find and cache his work. When it did, he sued.

The court endorsed Google’s opt-out approach: because Field knew about the robots protocol and the NOARCHIVE command, Field’s conduct was interpreted by Judge Jones “as the grant of a licence to Google for that use.”

Google could use the implied licence argument when the Copiepresse case returns to court. The robot exclusion standard has been around for 12 years; Google could argue acquiescence.

Field also argued that Google’s cache was not “intermediate and temporary storage”, as required by a US law. Judge Jones said that Google’s caching for approximately 14–20 days at a time is temporary. That may or may not influence a European court if it has to decide the same issue: the wording is common to laws on both sides of the Atlantic.

If the legality of the cache is uncertain, the legality of Google News is no clearer. The Belgian court heard that it is an information portal , not a search engine. It uses 4,500 English-language news sources and a few hundred Belgian sources, in many cases without prior permission. Google says that’s okay.

“Copyright law allows for snippets to be published from results,” Google spokesman D-J Collins told OUT-LAW. “That’s why we have argued that the court order was flawed. Google News does not break copyright law.”

Copiepresse disagrees with Google’s view that snippets of text are unprotected. Copyright only protects against substantial copying; but publishers would argue that a snippet can be substantial in a qualitative sense, just as courts will protect short samples from songs. Google takes each story’s headline – the craft of a subeditor; and sometimes the entire first sentence or more from the intro – the most labour-intensive part of a journalist’s writing. The legality has never been fully resolved.

The publishers might also argue that thousands of snippets in aggregate amount to substantial copying in a quantitative sense. Google might counter that it is taking only one

snippet of each copyright work – i.e. its thousands of snippets are from thousands of works, not one work.

The Belgian court found that Google had also infringed database laws. The EU’s Database Directive says that the repeated and systematic extraction of insubstantial parts of a database can amount to infringement of a database right.

Some courts have characterised websites as databases and ruled against sites that aggregate content. But that was before controversial rulings by the European Court of Justice in 2004 over the use of horseracing and football fixtures data.

The upshot: many databases are only protected if the owners do not ‘create’ their own data but obtain the data from others.

Google told OUT-LAW that it does not believe that Google News breaks this database law. It did not elaborate, but might argue that a newspaper’s site is not a protected database because the database right does not cover the investment in creating the news; it would only cover the obtaining of news from others. It might say that there is no systematic extraction of a single database; it is systematic extraction from lots of databases. But publishers could argue that news stories are not the same as raw facts such as when two football teams will play each other; and that their websites are not a mere byproduct of investment, unlike the databases in the fixtures cases.

WAN and other publisher groups will watch the rematch between Copiepresse and Google with interest. A week after the September ruling they identified the strategy that they had been seeking since January: the Automated Content Access Protocol, or ACAP.

A briefing paper was sent to OUT-LAW. It describes a system very similar to the robots exclusion standard: “a standardised way of describing the permissions which apply to a website or webpage so that it can be decoded by a dumb machine without the help of an expensive lawyer.”

Angela Mills, executive director of the European Publishers’ Council, told OUT-LAW: “This isn’t about blocking content, it’s about enabling it but with more sophisticated rules than are currently possible. Right now we can say ‘don’t index’ – but that’s not sophisticated enough. It’s very boring to have the choice of yes or no.”

ACAP might say that text can be taken but not images; or that images can be taken on condition that the photographer’s name appears. Demanding payment for indexing might also be part of the protocol, said Mills.

The plan is for ACAP to be a voluntary system. “If people wanted to ignore the rights expression they could,” Mills said, “but that obviously puts them in a much weaker position if challenged in court.”

When asked what it thought of ACAP, Google’s Collins told OUT-LAW, “We welcome any initiative that enables search engines and publishers to work together more closely. We look forward to discussing this proposal with the WAN and in particular how it can build on robots.txt”. But asked if Google would pay publishers to index their content, Collins replied, “That’s not something we do.”

Copyright © 2006, OUT-LAW.com

An ex-CIA agent has gone further than ever before in detailing Google's relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency, claiming sources told him that CIA seed money helped get the company off the ground and naming for the first time Google's CIA point man.

Robert David Steele, a 20-year Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer and a former clandestine services case officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, is the CEO of OSS.net.

Speaking to the Alex Jones Show, Steele elaborated on his previous revelations by making it known that the CIA helped bankroll Google at its very inception.

"I think Google took money from the CIA when it was poor and it was starting up and unfortunately our system right now floods money into spying and other illegal and largely unethical activities, and it doesn't fund what I call the open source world," said Steele, citing "trusted individuals" as his sources for the claim.

"They've been together for quite a while," added Steele.

Asked to impart to what level Google is "in bed" with the CIA, Steele described the bond as a "small but significant relationship," adding, "it is by no means dominating Google in fact Google has been embarrassed because everything the CIA asked it to do they couldn't do."

"I also think it's very very wrong of Google to have this relationship," cautioned Steele.

The former agent went further than before in identifying by name Google's liaison at the CIA.

"Let me say very explicitly - their contact at the CIA is named Dr. Rick Steinheiser, he's in the Office of Research and Development," said Steele.



Steele highlighted Google's blatant censorship policies whereby press releases put out by credible organizations that are critical of Dick Cheney and other administration members don't make it to Google News even though they are carried by PR Newswire.

We have repeatedly highlighted past examples of censorship on behalf of Google, including their blacklisting of a mainstream news website that was mildly critical of China, and also the deliberate stifling and manipulation of Alex Jones' Terror Storm film ranking on Google Video. Google was also caught red-handed attempting to bury the Charlie Sheen 9/11 story at the height of its notoriety.

Saying Google had become "too big for itself," Steele opined that Google was "long overdue for a public audit."

"One of the problems with privatized power is that it's not subject to public audit," said Steele, arguing that groups should rally to "put Google out of business unless they're willing to go the open source software route."

We regularly highlight Google's damaging role in aiding the march towards a big brother society, but the admission that Google were planning on teaming up with the U.S. government to use microphones in the computers of an estimated 150 million-plus Internet active Americans to spy on their lifestyle choices and build psychological profiles which will be used for surveillance and minority report style invasive advertising and data mining, astounded even us.

Steele said that our previous story about Google's ties to the CIA, which was picked up by dozens of top technology websites, concerned Google enough to lie to the public about it and deny its validity.

It remains to be seen how Google will react to these latest revelations.

Listen to the interview with Robert David Steele, in which he also questions the official version of 9/11, by clicking here.