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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Whether they received investment is one thing. What would be much more interesting to know about are the conditions of the investments and whether or not there were any side-letters or small favours to be done in return for the investments, I find it hard to believe that the CIA would make 'investments' hoping for a monetary ROI but at the same time I find it even harder to believe that they would make an investment without any kind of ROI at all.

Some surprisingly august names in that roster, not everybody there will be happy to be associated in this particular manner.

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The point of In-Q-Tel is not to make money, or even traditional ROI. It's to bring technologies to the intelligence market that might not otherwise exist.

They're actually not for profit. https://www.iqt.org/about-iqt/ . It's certainly an interesting approach to the problem.

In fact, if I remember correctly they are literally not profitable -- the fund has lost money every year since its inception. In some ways they're the ideal investor.

EDIT: decent article on In-Q-Tel from NPR last year that explains that they originally intended to make money, but as of last year they hadn't (and weren't on track to do so)http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/07/16/156839...

Correct; In-Q-Tel is not trying to make a profit.

The purpose of In-Q-Tel is to subsidize technologies that could be useful for the intelligence community (CIA, NSA, etc.) -- with the implication that entrepreneurs might have less incentive to develop such technologies if there weren't someone willing to fund them. A lot of these technologies are R&D-intensive, aren't massively scalable, don't have a huge consumer TAM, and wouldn't meet the criteria traditional VCs would demand from an ROI standpoint. So the presence of an investor without a profit motive makes a lot of sense.

In many respects this is similar to DARPA, and I don't see anyone up in arms about DARPA.

I know the NSA is a hot-button topic right now, as well it should be. But let's not bust out the torches and pitchforks over anything and everything with some connection to the intelligence community. We're placing some pretty heavy burdens of guilt by association on the startups in this list, whether fairly or unfairly.

I'm skeptical.

If there's anything going on, it's probably more like, "We bought a product from this company and don't want them to disappear in case we need support/more product/whatever, so we're going to invest in them so they can stick around."

I agree, both with you and with TPTACEK, as in-and-of-itself, an investment by In-Q-Tel just means that they are interested in the value of the tech in general defense/intel perspective.

What I would be interested in, and there is likely never going to be any way, other than an actual leak of proof, whether IF a company could be leaned on to comply with some NSA/CIA request based on their funding;

E.g.

"Hey, you know how we gave you $100MM to build out your infra? Yeah - well here - install this box into your DCs as well."

Barring such a leak this is really just speculative. But such a leak would definitely shine a different light on all the other investments. So until then this amounts to a big fat '0'.

The current rumor is that the NSA told Facebook, Microsoft, et. al to do this and they have yet to receive any In-Q-Tel funding.

These types of things don't go in "side letters", and reciprocation often doesn't even need to be discussed explicitly.

If it wasn't discussed explicitly I'd be happy to read that as that it wasn't discussed if I were the recipient of this money. Either there is a paper trail or it did not happen.

I'm not saying it did happen (I have no idea what "it" even is here), but "paper trail or it did not happen" is laughable. I think I see what you are trying to say with that, but you know that successful corruption actively avoids paper trails, right?

Oliver North would disagree. Hence all the shredding when the tide turns.

Do you have any evidence In-Q-Tel has ever done anything like that?

I know the NSA disclosures have everyone all amped up, but if the only evidence for an accusation is that nobody can prove it didn't happen, then it's still a conspiracy theory in my book.

None whatsoever. That's why it is interesting. If someone throws around large amounts of money without asking for anything in return that's normally called charity.

DOD does a lot of that (pretty much the whole internet came from there) and I'd happily assume this is just like that. So unless someone steps forward with something concrete that's where it stands. But given the latest batch of revelations investments like these will be scrutinized a lot more than in the past. We can ridicule these ties all we want but after it has become a documented fact that industry has received (substantial) investment in order to facilitate wholesale eavesdropping nothing else you could think of seems too far-fetched to possibly be reality.

That's maybe one of the biggest bits of fall-out from all this media hype, conspiracy nuts suddenly seem to be fairly respectable and maybe a little bit gullible and naive. It's gone a lot further than I ever thought it would have.

I'm not in a position to receive funds from a CIA backed VC but if I were they wouldn't be on my shortlist for ethical reasons, but for practical reasons I'd be happy to take the money.

There is some irony in the CIA indirectly investing in HyTrust, if the NSA had used that product then Snowden wouldn't have been able to do what the did :)

Absent any evidence whatsoever, I see no reason to doubt the official story: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/07/16/156839...

I wish the government would do more to help fund research and innovation.

I tried to address this here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6393680

Almost all technology is 'dual use', even a hammer. It is probably a lot harder to find something that does not benefit the CIA/NSA/Bogeyman than something that does.

The tricky part is that three letter agencies are now toxic in a way they weren't before and that could easily hurt perfectly good entrepreneurs that took their money in good faith, if only because other entrepreneurs took such money in bad faith. Especially palantir will have a hard time with such associations.

In-Q-Tel is something of the blue sky research arm of the CIA, a bit like DARPA is for the DoD. Special deals would generally be handled by normal classified contracting/procurement, which for the CIA can include just about anything you can imagine.

Not exactly, IARPA is the intelligence community equivalent of DARPA. I don't think DoD has anything like In-Q-Tel.

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