In-Q-Tel

Type	Privately held not-for-profit corporation
Genre	Technology research, Venture capital
Founded	September 29, 1999 (1999-09-29)
Founders	Norm Augustine[1]
Headquarters	Arlington, Virginia[2]
Key people	Christopher Darby, CEO[3]
Services	Investment in information technology supporting U.S. intelligence capability
Website	http://www.iqt.org/

In-Q-Tel of Arlington, Virginia, United States is a not-for-profit venture capital firm that invests in high-tech companies for the sole purpose of keeping the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United States intelligence capability.^[4]

History

Originally named Peleus and known as In-Q-It, In-Q-Tel was launched in 1999 under the direction of Gilman Louie.^[4] In-Q-Tel’s mission is to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve United States national security interests. Originally associated with^{[clarification needed]} the Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science & Technology, In-Q-Tel now engages with entrepreneurs, growth companies, researchers, and venture capitalists to deliver technologies that provide superior capabilities for the CIA, DIA, NGA, and the wider intelligence community.^[5] In-Q-Tel concentrates on three broad commercial technology areas: software, infrastructure and materials sciences.

Former CIA director George Tenet says,

We [the CIA] decided to use our limited dollars to leverage technology developed elsewhere. In 1999^{[contradiction]} we chartered … In-Q-Tel. … While we pay the bills, In-Q-Tel is independent of CIA. CIA identifies pressing problems, and In-Q-Tel provides the technology to address them. The In-Q-Tel alliance has put the Agency back at the leading edge of technology … This … collaboration … enabled CIA to take advantage of the technology that Las Vegas uses to identify corrupt card players and apply it to link analysis for terrorists [cf. the parallel data-mining effort by the SOCOM–DIA operation Able Danger ], and to adapt the technology that online booksellers use and convert it to scour millions of pages of documents looking for unexpected results.^[6]

In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google, worth over $2.2 million, on November 15, 2005.^[7] The stocks were a result of Google’s acquisition of Keyhole, the CIA funded satellite mapping software now known as Google Earth.

As of August 2006,^{[dated info]} In-Q-Tel had reviewed more than 5,800 business plans, invested some $150 million in more than 90 companies, and delivered more than 130 technology solutions to the intelligence community.^[4][8] In 2005 it was said to be funded with about $37 million a year from the CIA.^{[9][dated info]}

Former board members include Norman Augustine, William Perry, Anita K. Jones and Gilman Louie.^{[citation needed]}

Governance

This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2012)

In-Q-Tel is a Virginia-registered corporation, legally independent of the CIA or any other government agency. The corporation is bound by its Charter agreement and annual contract with the CIA, which set out the relationship between the two organizations. In-Q-Tel’s mission to support the Intelligence Community’s technical needs is promoted by the In-Q-Tel Interface Center (QIC), an office within the CIA that facilitates communication and relationships between In-Q-Tel and government intelligence organizations. While In-Q-Tel is a nonprofit corporation, it differs from IARPA and other models in that its employees can profit from its investments. According to public records, In-Q-Tel’s current^[when?] principals include:

• Christopher A. R. Darby, President/CEO
• Bruce Adams, Secretary
• Michael M. Crow, Chairman
• Paul G. Kaminski, Director
• Jeong H. Kim, Director

Investments

Many companies listed on In-Q-Tel’s investment website page^[10] are secret. In-Q-Tel functions partially in public; however, what products it has and how they are used is strictly secret.^[9] According to the Washington Post, “virtually any U.S. entrepreneur, inventor or research scientist working on ways to analyze data has probably received a phone call from In-Q-Tel or at least been Googled by its staff of technology-watchers.”^[9]

Software

This list of companies needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2014)

• Socrata – Open Data Solutions for Government Innovation

Material science

This list of companies needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2014)

Biotech

• Biomatrica – biolab tech anhydrobiosis storage
• SpectraFluidics – detection of trace airborne chemicals
• Arcxis Biotechnologies – sample processing and pathogen detection
• febit group – DNA
• Boreal Genomics – DNA fingerprints
• T2 Biosystems – medical diagnostic devices, miniaturized magnetic resonance (MR)
• OpGen -microbial genome analysis
• Infobionics – biotech cellular database
• Microchip Biotechnologies -analysis instrumentation for biodefense
• Cambrios Technologies – biomaterials for solid-state electronic devices
• Seahawk Biosystems – diagnosis biosensor products
• Sionex -chemical and biological sensors
• Polychromix -material analysis and chemical sensing
• IatroQuest – detect biological and chemical agents
• IntegenX – NanoBioProcessor & molecular diagnostics
• Seventh Sense Biosystems – health monitoring and medical diagnostics
• Sonitus Medical – transmits sound via the teeth
• MedShape – orthopedic devices from shape memory materials

Electricity

• Electro Energy – nickel-metal hydride batteries for satellites & aircraft
• Qynergy Corporation – Long-lived batteries, Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems
• Infinite Power Solutions -micro-batteries
• Skybuilt Power – solar, wind, fuel cells, batteries, fossil fuels, telecommunications -Mobile Power Station(MPS) 3.5 kW to 150 kW
• Semprius – solar energy
• AdaptivEnergy – miniature piezo generators
• Power Assure – managing power consumption
• MiserWare – reduces energy

Electronics

• Nanosys – nanotech components
• Alfalight – high-power lasers & torches
• IDELIX Software – pliable display technology
• Perceptive Pixel – multi-touch displays
• WiSpry – radio components
• Nextreme Thermal Solutions – circuit-board thermoelectric components
• Digital Solid State Propulsion – electronic controls for solid rocket motors
• Infinite Z – virtual-holographic monitors

Video

• 3VR Security – DVR archiving
• MotionDSP – digital video
• Pixim – video cameras
• COPAN – data storage
• iMove – immersive video
• Pelican Imaging – better camera phones
• LensVector -optical autofocus
• InView Technology Corporation – cameras and hyper-spectral imagers
• Rhevision – tunable camera lens
• Signal Innovations Group – signal, image, and video analytics
• Elemental Technologies -video processing
• KZO Innovations – streaming video software
• VSee – video conferencing

Infrastructure

This list of companies needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2014)

Hardware

• Genia Photonics – fiber-optics products
• Advanced Photonix, Inc. -fiber optics
• SitScape -Command & Control room hardware
• SpotterRF – micro surveillance radar
• QD Vision -monitors, displays and lighting
• GATR Technologies -inflatable satellite dishes
• CoreStreet – door access control systems
• Etherstack – radios
• Paratek microwave – smart scanning antennas
• D-Wave Systems – quantum computers

Sensor networks

• ThingMagic – RFID
• Dust Networks – low-power wireless mesh networking systems
• Ember Corporation – ZigBee- wireless semiconductor
• Gainspan – low power Wi-Fi
• Tendril Networks – software for wireless sensor and control networks
• TenXsys -telemetry systems for remote monitoring, NASA
• StreamBase -real-time data in government/military, RFID/sensor networks
• Thetus – software for remote sensing instruments
• Soflinx defender -a Wireless Sensor Network for fences
• PlateScan -automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) sensor network

Data centers

• Bay Microsystems – packet processing and data traffic
• Cleversafe – data storage clouds and massive digital archives
• Cloudera – data storage and analysis
• Asankya – Hypermesh data streams
• CopperEye – data retention
• Systems Research and Development – real-time data warehousing
• Network Appliance – Decru (networked data storage)

Security testing

• RedSeal Systems – security testing
• Network Chemistry – RFprotect, WiFi security
• Veracode – application security testing

Other related personnel

This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2012)

Numerous noteworthy business and intelligence community professionals have been involved with In-Q-Tel at various times, including the following:^{[citation needed]}

• Dan Geer (2008 – current) Chief Information Security Officer ^[12]
• Michael D. Griffin – former President; later Administrator of NASA.
• Norman R. Augustine
• Gilman Louie
• Amit Yoran
• John Seely Brown
• Stephen Friedman
• Paul McMahon
• William Perry
• Alex J. Mandl
• Craig Goss
• Rob Painter – former Director for Technology Assessment; left to become Senior Federal Sales Manager at Google.
• Christopher K. Tucker, first chief strategic officer

References

External links

• Official website
  • Fact sheet from the company’s website
• White Paper on the In-Q-Tel concept from the CIA’s website
• In-Q-Tel from Federal Computer Week
• In-Q-Tel from govexec.com
• The Report of the Independent Panel on the CIA In-Q-Tel Venture from Business Executives for National Security (bens.org)
• Press releases from cryptome.org

 

In-Q-Tel

 

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PDF REPORT:

http___www.thebaffler

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THE SPY AGENCY SHOULD CLOSE ITS VENTURE CAPITAL FIRM

 

May 15, 2006 — IF former National Security Agency chief Michael Hayden hangs in there as President Bush’s nominee to head the CIA and makes it to a Senate confirmation hearing, one of the panel’s members should ask him this:

“Sir, please tell the committee how much further you anticipate allowing the CIA to expand its presence on Wall Street via the private venture capital firm known as In-Q-Tel, Inc.”

Hayden came under withering fire in Washington last week as word spread that the ex-NSA chief had presided over the White House’s post-9/11 surveillance program of monitoring domestic U.S. telephone calls. The White House, politically weakened from a year of setbacks both at home and abroad, may decide to withdraw Hayden from consideration and submit an alternative nominee burdened with less civil liberties baggage.

Yet whoever winds up in the CIA’s top job will inherit a developing mess involving In-Q-Tel that was largely ignored by the agency’s departing director, Porter Goss. Hints that all is not well with In-Q-Tel have begun seeping into view as this little-known domestic CIA front operation continues to funnel agency money into penny stock and micro-cap companies in Wall Street’s murkiest back alleys.

Two In-Q-Tel CEOs have resigned from the six-year-old venture capital fund in just the last four months; the fund is being run on a day-to-day basis by a man from Washington’s politically greased Carlyle Group who has been with In-Q-Tel for only a few weeks. Headhunters are said to be having trouble coming up with candidates for a permanent replacement.

And there are even reports, largely unconfirmed, that the Securities and Exchange Commision is looking into several penny stock promoters with ties to In-Q-Tel.

Launched in 1999 by CIA director George Tenet as a Wall Street venture fund to finance new technologies for the spy world, In-Q-Tel quickly found friends on Capitol Hill, where policymakers seized on the fund as a way to remind constituents that the ghost of Vietnam no longer walked the land. The attacks of 9/11 gave In-Q-Tel even more stature in Congress, where the fund came to be seen as an essential element in the war effort.

Yet the public’s visceral reaction to last week’s NSA revelations suggests that war or no war, a backlash against government snooping may be starting. And that in turn promises to crank up the heat under In-Q-Tel, where at least some of the fund’s investments raise questions of judgment regarding how taxpayer money is being spent by the organization, as well as who it is choosing for business partners.

A year ago, this column drew back the curtain on a fishy In-Q-Tel in vestment, financed out of the black box budget of the CIA, in a defense-sector start-up called Ionatron Inc.

Run by a longtime Wall Street regulatory violator named Robert Howard, Ionatron used a cash infusion from In-Q-Tel to promote itself around Washington as the developer of a laser-equipped, remotely controlled device the size of a golf cart that could patrol the highways of Iraq, ferreting out and detonating insurgent land mines ahead of troop movements.

We warned in this space that the technology being trumpeted by Ionatron was not only unproven, but had been obtained by Howard and some midlevel researchers at Raytheon Corp. under highly irregular circumstances designed to persuade a West Coast laser researcher into turning over his research to Howard’s group.

Nonetheless, Sen. Hillary Clinton and her Democratic colleague from California, Barbara Boxer, quickly embraced the Ionatron program, which eventually devoured more than $12 million in government funding before the Pentagon finally concluded last week that the devices are not reliable and cancelled plans to deploy them.

Ionatron’s stock price has tumbled more than a third in the last three weeks, leaving the company’s largest investor – prominent hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, run by Steven A. Cohen of Connecticut – sitting with millions in paper losses.

SAC Capital has acknowledged that it is under investigation by the SEC in what appears to be a separate matter involving stock trading, and the SEC may soon start taking a look into the hedge fund’s buying of Ionatron’s shares.

In-Q-Tel’s growing portfolio of investments includes a few successes. Yet the fund has more often poured money into companies that were barking dogs long before In-Q-Tel showed up, and have failed to improve since.

Consider a North Carolina outfit called ID Technologies Corp., which began life in 1994 as CardGuard International Inc. to promote a fingerprint identification system no one wanted to buy. In the four years that followed, the company racked up losses of $3 million on a mere $92,000 in revenues.

In 1998, the company changed its name to ID Technologies and added $2.5 million more to the loss column on barely $100,000 more in revenues.

Along the way, In-Q-Tel popped up with plans to invest $400,000 more in ID Tech, but the firm collapsed, leaving investors with $5.58 million in cumulative losses and a stock that now sells for a fraction of a penny per share.

Another In-Q-Tel investment, in a data software company called Convera Corp., may be headed in the same direction, bearing much greater losses. In 2004 the fund took a stake in Convera, which had yet to turn a profit while piling up more than $1 billion in cumulative losses since its founding in the mid-1980s.

By the end of 2005, a resulting bounce in Convera stock had topped out at $16, and the shares have since lost half their value. Last week they were trading below $8 on investor disenchantment with the perennial money loser’s latest offering: an Internet search engine for extracting information from video files.

Because its funding comes from the CIA, In-Q-Tel has been an irresistible target for conspiracy theorists who charge that the CIA is somehow linked through it to every penny stock that goes south.

Last week, one left-leaning Web site reported that SEC investigators think the CIA-backed venture fund has been steering money into penny stock “pump and dump” firms in Israel, Dubai and Malaysia.

But a day’s worth of phoning around traces these claims to a tireless complainant named Tony Ryals, who has been bombarding the SEC and Internet message boards for years with claims that he has uncovered a submerged world of In-Q-Tel-linked fraud stretching for Kuala Lumpur to the Middle East.

The alleged linkages are bewildering in their complexity and typically impossible to follow, but conspiracy buffs find them irresistible, since they seem to echo some of the CIA’s worst excesses from 30 to 40 years ago, and by their nature, they can never be entirely disproved.

WHETHER the SEC has looked into Ryals’ charges and found them baseless isn’t known, but thanks to In-Q-Tel and the lengthening shadow of the CIA on Wall Street, the most improbable of such claims once again have a whiff of credibility.

Bottom line: There are many sensible ways the CIA could have gone about developing the technologies it needs, but funneling money into Wall Street via an outfit like In-Q-Tel was never one of them. So it will be a good thing for Wall Street – and for America, too – if the CIA’s next spymaster simply shuts the operation down.

cbyron@nypost.com