The CIA helped sell a mapping startup to Google (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The CIA helped sell a mapping startup to Google (2015)

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123 pointsLammy13 comments

I remember working at a company in the early 2000s that did a bit of GIS work and getting a copy of Keyhole. It was absolutely mindblowing at the time. I remember spending an hour or so after work nearly every day for a few weeks just browsing around the globe and looking at places all over the world.

There was absolutely nothing like it anywhere, this was even before Google Maps was a thing and most people printed out directions, on paper, from mapquest.com. The Motorola Razr flip phone still hadn't been released. This was absolutely impossible technology from the future. Lots of the senior technical people I worked with used to spend their lunches trying to figure out the architecture Keyhole used to stream the map data. And then they'd spend their coffee breaks trying to figure out how they got all that to run performantly on the primitive graphics hardware we had in the "Keyhole" desktop -- which somebody took to one of our conference rooms and hooked up to a projector and gave people wall-sized flying tours of the Earth.

What's amazing to me is that even after Google acquired it, the capabilities haven't become significantly better than that original tool. Sure it's been cleaned up, and better data tiles, more POI, etc. They added 3d buildings and so on. But it's still entirely recognizable as that original software -- after two decades.

I remember wanting to have it at home, but it was prohibitively expensive, and then NASA released WorldWind [1] which was achingly close but never quite got the high resolution map data that Keyhole did at the time.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_WorldWind

If you want to read from an insider's perspective, read this book from a Keyhole PM (I just finished).

Very interesting to see how Keyhole struggled with cash flow needs and long sales cycles in the post-dot.com bubble just as the average startup struggles now.

Also, In-Q-Tel was just an investor at the company, and many were wary about why Google (who didn't have any mapping product) would go that route.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35820393-never-lost-agai...

I don't mean to imply any correlation, but it is a fun coincidence that Keyhole Inc shared that name with NRO's orbital imaging platforms: https://www.americaspace.com/2012/06/06/top-secret-kh-11-spy...

I always assumed that Keyhole Inc. was the Civil part of the NRO and that they use the same satellites.

Probably this is another way for generating moneyflow - selling satellite images to everyone.

This also explain why we can't get detailed images for "sensitive" areas like Area 51.

Actually taking and distributing pictures of the earth from space requires a license (issued by NOAA of all agencies) which requires certain protections for the national security of the US and some allied nations. I presume the other nations capable of launching satellites have similar laws in place. SpaceX had to modify their launch broadcasts to stop showing images taken from space as they do not (or at least didn't at the time) have such a license.

[0] https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/CRSRA/files/15%20CFR%20Part%2096...

In my mind the workflow was like that:

-Mil. Satellite makes Photos

-They are Redacted/Checkt by the NRO

-The "Clear for Civil use" material is sold by Keyhole Inc.

Not so much. Satellite image data was already available to everyone with money, what they did not have was cartography, and annotations.

I bet Google Map today has thousand times more cartographic data, and annotations than when it was managed by the Keyhole. Now you have croudsourced data from military sites, and even some selfie photos from Russian missile bases where guards have authorisation to shoot without warning.

Most likely reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyhole_Markup_Language

I’ve always thought that the Alphabet company that acquired Google was just a front and the name was a nod at the alphabet agencies.

It didn't acquire Google. The other irrelevant divisions (e.g., waymo) from Google got pulled up a level as peers under alphabet. The actual people in charge didn't change one bit.

What you're saying is just semantics. On paper, the financials were changed significantly and the reorg compartmentalizes risk in a favorable way. Why would the people in charge need to be changed, based on what I said?

I guess I hit a nerve with all of the downvotes, and I don't think anything I've said is very controversial, so that's puzzling.

>the Alphabet company that acquired Google was just a front

I'm saying that it was an internal re-org, not an acquisition from an external organization (or cabal of 3-letter-agencies).

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