Google “fundamentally started as a CIA project,” according to journalist and author of Propaganda in the Information Age, Alan MacLeod, who has warned that tech giants’ ties with intelligence agencies pose big problems for freedom of information as well as freedom of speech.

MacLeod, who has extensively researched the ties between the national security state and Big Tech, explained to journalist Whitney Webb on the Unlimited Hangout podcast how a prior investigation by Dr. Nafeez Ahmed found that the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) were “bankrolling” research by Sergey Brin at Stanford University, which “produced Google.”

“Not only that … but his supervisor there was a CIA person. So the CIA actually directly midwifed Google into existence. In fact, until 2005, the CIA actually held shares in Google and eventually sold them,” MacLeod told Webb.

Ahmed explained that Brin and his Google co-founder, Larry Page, developed “the core component of what eventually became Google’s search service” “with funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI),” a program of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, and DARPA.

In addition, the intelligence community’s Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) initiative, a project sponsored by the NSA, CIA, and the Director of Central Intelligence, “essentially provided Brin seed-funding, which was supplemented by many other sources.”

Brin and Page “regularly” reported to Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser, who were “representatives of a sensitive US intelligence community research programme on information security and data-mining,” Ahmed shared.

In his own research, MacLeod has found that the CIA’s ties with Google continue today, as “there are dozens and dozens of examples” of former CIA agents who now work at Google, “who had just been parachuted into these positions of extreme importance.”

That is, these former CIA employees often cluster in “trust and safety” roles, which are hugely influential in their management of so-called “misinformation” and “hate speech.” Examples include Jacqueline Lopour, Ryan Fugit, and Nick Rossman.

Such hiring preferences suggest, MacLeod noted, that either Big Tech is “is actively recruiting from the intelligence services or that there is some sort of backroom deal between Silicon Valley and the national security state.”