Highlands Forum

The Highlands Forum is hosted by Richard P. O’Neill, a Beltway political and economic consulting sycophant. Its first private gathering, sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and co-chaired by the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (PDASD) and the DARPA Director of Net Assessment, was held somewhere between December 1994 and February 1995 (inception date is vague). The meeting is said to have helped plant the idea of “network-centric warfare” in the minds of the nation’s top military. It is a forum used by the deep state to manipulate the military and scientific minds to think like they want them to think. It hosts forums for DARPA, Department of Defense, CIA, FBI, In-Q-Tel, Homeland Security, SAIC, and many other government agencies and organizations. 

All Highland Forums are private, invitation only, have no written agenda and basically are secret and did not happen. Except for the fact that the Corporate Warlords who are invited become privy to the direction of research for the US military, which subsequently creates the directions of Corporate Warlords. Nothing is written down so that no one is held responsible. The Highland Forums have been directing DARPA research and the research of the CIA’s research and development component called In-Q-Tel.

Since 1973, Andrew Marshall has headed up one of the Pentagon’s most powerful agencies, the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), the U.S. defense secretary’s internal ‘think tank’ which conducts highly classified research on future planning for defense policy across the U.S. military and intelligence community. Out of Marshall’s work in the ONA came an independent group called the Highlands Forum.

Marshall, now 93 years old, is the DoD’s most elusive but one of its most influential officials. He created the Highlands Forum as a secret think tank for warfare innovation. All meetings are invitation-only, not open to the public, and no written records are kept, except for the snippets that participants reveal in their braggadocio and biographies, which are considerable.

Marshall created this type of secret platform so that no one could prove the Highland Forum exists or that it has the greatest power over high-tech warfare on the planet. Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who are  widely considered the hawks of the neoconservative movement in American politics, were among Marshall’s star protégés.

The Highlands Forum’s influence on US defense policy has operated through three main channels: its sponsorship by the Office of the Secretary of Defense; its direct link to Marshall’s ONA; and its direct link to DARPA/In-Q-Tel and the Highlands Forum.

The Highlands Forum has served as a two-way ‘influence bridge’: on the one hand, for the shadow network of private contractors to influence the formulation of information operations policy across U.S. military intelligence; and on the other, for the Pentagon to influence what is going on in the private sector.

There is no clearer evidence of this than the instrumental role of the Forum in incubating the idea of mass surveillance as a mechanism to dominate information on a global scale. 

Around 1994, the Highlands Group was chaired by Richard O’Neill as an official Pentagon project at the appointment of Bill Clinton’s then defense secretary William Perry. In O’Neill’s own words, the group would function as the Pentagon’s ‘ideas lab.’

Total participants in the DoD’s Highlands Forum number over a thousand; although meetings and sessions largely consist of small closed workshop style gatherings of maximum 25–30 people, bringing together experts and officials depending on the subject.

The Forum has inside access to the chiefs of the main U.S. surveillance and reconnaissance agencies, as well as the directors and their assistants at DoD research agencies, from DARPA to the ONA, and is deeply plugged into the Pentagon’s policy research task forces. In 2001, under the Total Information Awareness Program, President Bush secretly authorized the NSA’s domestic surveillance of Americans without court-approved warrants.

From then on, Highlands Forum partner SAIC played a key role in the NSA roll out from inception. SAIC was then among a consortium receiving a $280 million contract to develop one of the NSA’s secret eavesdropping systems.

This was also the year that the Bush administration drew up its Information Operations Roadmap. Describing the internet as a “vulnerable weapons system,” Donald Rumsfeld’s IO roadmap had advocated that Pentagon strategy “should be based on the premise that the Department of Defense will ‘fight the net’ as it would an enemy weapons system.” The U.S. should seek “maximum control” of the “full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems,” advocated the document.

As of 2006, SAIC had been awarded a multi-million dollar NSA contract to develop a big data-mining project called ExecuteLocus, despite the colossal $1 billion failure of its preceding contract, known as Trailblazer. Core components of Total Information Awareness were being quietly continued under new code names. The new surveillance program was then fully transitioned from DARPA’s jurisdiction to the NSA.

O’Neill said his job as Forum chairman was to scope case studies from real companies across the private sector, such as eBay and Human Genome Sciences, to figure out the basis of U.S. Information Superiority — how to dominate the information market — and leverage this for what the president and the secretary of defense wanted to do with regard to transformation of the Department of Defense.

Every project of DARPA and In-Q-Tel have been weaponized before they are shared with the companies who then are the “front” for a DARPA sponsored company. DARPA and In-Q-Tel keep the encryption codes and build in backdoor keys so that they can always control the military weapons that have been released into the corporate world for public use. According to DARPA and In-Q-Tel, innovation and technological advances must first be a weapon that can be controlled by its makers – the military.

The Highland Forum directed the creation of weapons of every sort that have been released into the corporate world and now control your laptop, phone, computer, and every other device with a “bugged” microprocessor inside. Intel microprocessors are found in most of our “private” digital devices and are, in fact, collecting “intelligence” for the Department of Defense, CIA, and NSA.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THIS TOPIC, SEE THE AIM4TRUTH.COM CITIZENS INTELLIGENCE REPORT ENTITLED WHO REALLY OWNS THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: THE HIGHLANDS FORUM EXPOSED.

DARPA/In-Q-Tel and the Highlands Forum drive the process of continuous war from creating the devices that control all nuclear weapons to incubating the technologies that created the Internet, Intel microprocessers, Cisco routers, Google search engines, Facebook social networks, the IBM Internet of Things, cellphones, Microsoft software, MacAfee security software, and all other commercial and military warfare devices using their source code.

The Highlands Forum has been the headquarters of weaponizing military patents, intellectual property and trade secrets for five decades. Andrew Marshall has the blood of millions on his hands, yet he is considered an America hero instead of a warlord criminal.

“A thousand thinkers have participated over the past 12 years, attending the sessions to which they have the most to contribute.” – Brian Friel, GOVEXEC.com (undated)

“I’m an active member of the (informal) Highlands community, and it is a wonderful thing. The Forums are an opportunity to meet with high-level military officials in a meaningful way. As a civilian and a pretty skeptical one, I’m impressed with the practicality of the operating military. They are not sitting around making policy; they work on the ground to make things happen. It’s definitely worth helping them to be more effective and accountable, which is the goal of Highlands.” – Esther Dyson, Chairman, EDVenture Holdings

“Dick is an amazingly talented individual and tremendous ‘connector’ in terms of bridging between the public and private sector. Through the Highlands Forum I have had a chance to establish productive, long-term relationships with individuals in defense and intelligence communities, with influential individuals in NGOs, with fascinating authors and independent thinkers, and with other notable figures from the commercial world. Highlands’ approach to catalyzing relevant conversation and high-level connection is, in my viewpoint, unique and uniquely valuable.” – Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect, Microsoft

“The Highlands Forum is a unique operation. It examines key topics and brings together the people who really understand what’s happening. Dick has a unique ability to frame the questions and bring the right people together. He does a lot of homework, he has a huge network of very smart people, and he’s amazingly poised and comfortable with high egos. I have attended quite a few Highland Forums and always find they hold my attention and teach me things I didn’t know. The Highlands Forum started as a unpublicized operation within the Defense Department many years ago, and blossomed into one of the most enduring and useful forums for assembling specialists on technology of every sort. It’s a real treat to attend.” – Steve Crocker, CEO of Shinkuro; Obama’s chair of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers); Crocker oversaw the ICANN transfer of management to a U.N. body, which is probable treason given Crocker’s collusion with Clinton, Podesta and Chandler.

The description below is taken from their website:

Highland Forums Program Description Overview

“Information Warfare, Information Operations, Information Assurance, and Operational Resilience Information is an instrument of national, global, and corporate power. As such, control over its use, its protection, and its manipulation, are national and global security issues. This Research Program examines strategic and tactical offensive and defensive aspects of information operations (IO) by state and non-state actors to achieve political, military, and economic goals through IO means, including computer network operations (CNO), computer network attack (CNA), computer network exploitation (CNE), computer network defense (CND), psychological operations (PSYOPS), perception management, media manipulation, propaganda, strategic influence, and public diplomacy, among others.”

Richard ‘Dick’ Patrick O’Neill, the director of Highlands Group describes his work on their website as: “A core element of the Highlands Group activity has been the Highlands Forum. Over the past 18 years almost fifty major meetings and twenty enrichment sessions have been held around the country. Each succeeding session, small and cross-disciplinary in nature, brought remarkable people–from Nobel laureates and Pulitzer winners to young tech pioneers; from science fiction authors to corporate CEO’s; from scientists to military leaders–to link innovators from the “core and the edge”, without an outcome in mind, exploring a theme and a set of ideas, looking for novelty and emergence. The in-depth proceedings of those events are posted to the Secretary of Defense Highlands Forum website, along with interviews, original papers, and book reviews.” http://www.highlandsgroup.net/perspectives.php?ID=17 

One of the only descriptions found on the internet about a presentation at a Highlands Forum is given below to show the direction the group is taking to ensure that “war” continues universally.

The Web and the Long, “Soft” War, by Irving Wladawsky-Berger at http://blog.irvingwb.com/blog

“A few weeks ago I attended a very stimulating meeting, the Highlands Forum. The Forum is sponsored by the Office of the US Secretary of Defense to explore new ideas and emerging trends that will help support high-level Department of Defense (DoD) policy and strategy, especially as they relate to information and information technologies. 

The Highlands Forum was organized in 1994 by retired US Navy captain Dick O’Neill. It is chaired by the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration. Each meeting is centered on a specific topic. Around 25 experts from government, industry, academia, the arts and the professions are invited to discuss their ideas on the subject – to be part a kind of strategic conversation.

While our discussions were generally technology-based, you cannot ponder how IT, the Web and related technologies could impact DoD without also thinking hard about the global environment that DoD, and society in general will face over the next decade and beyond. DoD’s primary task is “to deter conflict – but should deterrence fail, to fight and win the nation’s wars.”

The Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), also called the Open Government law, restricted how the government could solicit ideas from special interests. The Highlands Forum and later The Highlands Group evidently ignored those conflict of interest safeguards and reveled in its crony capitalism. Thus, the globalist Deep State shadow government’s takeover of the Internet was shrouded in garden variety greed, power-mongering and illegality from inception.

Highland Forum Dominates U.S. Defense Policy

Richard Patrick O’Neill, founding president of the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum served his last post as deputy for strategy and policy in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence, before setting up Highlands.

Since 1973, Andrew Marshall has headed up one of the Pentagon’s most powerful agencies, the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), the U.S. defense secretary’s internal ‘think tank’ which conducts highly classified research on future planning for defense policy across the US military and intelligence community. Marshall, now 93 years old and nicknamed “Yoda” by insiders, as “the DoD’s most elusive” but “one of its most influential” officials. Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz are  widely considered the hawks of the neoconservative movement in American politics –  were among Marshall’s star protégés.

The Highlands Forum’s influence on US defense policy has operated through three main channels: its sponsorship by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (around the middle of last decade this was transitioned specifically to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, which is in charge of the main surveillance agencies); its direct link to Marshall’s ONA; and its direct link to DARPA.

The Highlands Forum has served as a two-way ‘influence bridge’: on the one hand, for the shadow network of private contractors to influence the formulation of information operations policy across U.S. military intelligence; and on the other, for the Pentagon to influence what is going on in the private sector. There is no clearer evidence of this than the instrumental role of the Forum in incubating the idea of mass surveillance as a mechanism to dominate information on a global scale.

In 1989, Richard O’Neill, then a U.S. Navy cryptologist, wrote a paper for the U.S. Naval War College, ‘Toward a methodology for perception management.’  O’Neill’s paper for the first time outlined a strategy for “perception management” as part of information warfare (IW).

O’Neill’s proposed strategy identified three categories of targets for IW: adversaries – so they believe they are vulnerable; potential partners – so they perceive the cause as just; and civilian populations and political leadership – so they perceive the cost as worth the effort.

Around 1994, the Highlands Group was founded by O’Neill as an official Pentagon project at the appointment of Bill Clinton’s then defense secretary William Perry. In O’Neill’s own words, the group would function as the Pentagon’s ‘ideas lab.’ Total participants in the DoD’s Highlands Forum number over a thousand, although sessions largely consist of small closed workshop style gatherings of maximum 25–30 people, bringing together experts and officials depending on the subject.

The Forum has inside access to the chiefs of the main U.S. surveillance and reconnaissance agencies, as well as the directors and their assistants at DoD research agencies, from DARPA, to the ONA and is deeply plugged into the Pentagon’s policy research task forces. In 2001, under the Total Information Awareness Program, President Bush had secretly authorized the NSA’s domestic surveillance of Americans without court-approved warrants. From then on, Highlands Forum partner SAIC played a key role in the NSA roll out from inception. SAIC was then among a consortium receiving a $280 million contract to develop one of the NSA’s secret eavesdropping systems.

This was also the year that the Bush administration drew up its Information Operations Roadmap. Describing the internet as a “vulnerable weapons system,” Rumsfeld’s IO roadmap had advocated that Pentagon strategy “should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will ‘fight the net’ as it would an enemy weapons system.” The U.S. should seek “maximum control” of the “full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems,” advocated the document.

As of 2006, SAIC had been awarded a multi-million dollar NSA contract to develop a big data-mining project called ExecuteLocus, despite the colossal $1 billion failure of its preceding contract, known as ‘Trailblazer.’ Core components of TIA were being quietly continued under new code names.  The new surveillance program was then fully transitioned from DARPA’s jurisdiction to the NSA.

In addition to the CIA, In-Q-Tel (the CIA’s version of DARPA) has also been backed by the FBI, NGA, and Defense Intelligence Agency, among other agencies.

O’Neill said his job as Forum president was to scope case studies from real companies across the private sector, like eBay and Human Genome Sciences, to figure out the basis of U.S. Information Superiority — how to dominate the information market — and leverage this for what the president and the secretary of defense wanted to do with regard to transformation of the DoD.

By 2007, Facebook received its second round of $12.7 million worth of funding from Accel Partners. Facebook’s 2008 round of funding was led by Greylock Venture Capital, which invested $27.5 million. Apart from Breyer and Zuckerberg, Facebook’s only other board member is Peter Thiel, co-founder of defense contractor Palantir which provides all sorts of data-mining and visualization technologies to U.S. government, military and intelligence agencies, including the NSA and FBI, and which itself was nurtured to financial viability by Highlands Forum members.

By 2008, the NSA was effectively resurrecting the TIA project with a focus on Internet data-mining via comprehensive monitoring of e-mail, text messages, and Web browsing. We also now know (thanks to Snowden) that the NSA’s XKeyscore ‘Digital Network Intelligence’ exploitation system was designed to allow analysts to search not just internet databases like emails, online chats and browsing history, but also telephone services, mobile phone audio, financial transactions and global air transport communications — essentially the entire global telecommunications grid. Highlands Forum partner SAIC played a key role, among other contractors, in producing and administering the NSA’s XKeyscore.

The investment firm responsible for creating the billion dollar fortunes of the tech sensations of the 21st century, from Google to Facebook, is intimately linked to the U.S. military intelligence community. The convergence of these powerful financial and military interests around the Highlands Forum, through George Lee’s sponsorship of the Forum’s new partner, the MIIS Cybersec initiative, is revealing in itself. MIIS Cybersec’s director, Dr, Itamara Lochard, has long been embedded in Highlands. 

Dr Itamara Lochard is a senior Highlands Forum member and Pentagon information operations expert. She directs the MIIS CyberSec initiative that now supports the Pentagon Highlands Forum with funding from Goldman Sachs partner George Lee, who led the valuations of Facebook and Google. Dr. Lochard maintains a comprehensive database of 1,700 non-state groups including insurgents, militias, terrorists, complex criminal organizations, organized gangs, malicious cyber actors and strategic non-violent actors, to analyze their organizational patterns, areas of cooperation, strategies and tactics.

Her views disclose much about what the Highlands Forum has been advocating all these years. In 2004, Lochard was co-author of a study for the U.S. Air Force’s Institute for National Security Studies on US strategy toward ‘non-state armed groups.’ The study on the one hand argued that non-state armed groups should be urgently recognized as a ‘tier one security priority,’ and on the other that the proliferation of armed groups provide strategic opportunities that can be exploited to help achieve policy goals. There have and will be instances where the United States may find collaborating with armed group is in its strategic interests. But sophisticated tools must be developed to differentiate between different groups and understand their dynamics, to determine which groups should be countered, and which could be exploited for US interests.

In 2009, it also emerged from a Google patent application that the company had deliberately been collecting ‘payload’ data from private wifi networks that would enable the identification of “geolocations.” In the same year, we now know, Google had signed an agreement with the NSA giving the agency open-ended access to the personal information of its users, and its hardware and software, in the name of cyber security. It is not just Google that is a key contributor and foundation of the US military-industrial complex: it is the entire internet, and the wide range of private sector companies — many nurtured and funded under the mantle of the U.S. intelligence community (or powerful financiers embedded in that community) — which sustain the internet and the telecoms infrastructure; it is also the myriad of start-ups selling cutting edge technologies to the CIA’s venture firm In-Q-Tel, where they can then be adapted and advanced for applications across the military intelligence community.

Ultimately, the global surveillance apparatus and the classified tools used by agencies like the NSA to administer it, have been almost entirely made by external researchers and private contractors like Google, which operate outside the Pentagon.

In 2011, the Forum hosted two DARPA-funded scientists, Antonio and Hanna Damasio, who are principal investigators in the ‘Neurobiology of Narrative Framing’ project at the University of Southern California. Evoking Zalman’s emphasis on the need for Pentagon psychological operations to deploy “empathetic influence,” the new DARPA-backed project aims to investigate how narratives often appeal “to strong, sacred values in order to evoke an emotional response,” but in different ways across different cultures. The most disturbing element of the research is its focus on trying to understand how to increase the Pentagon’s capacity to deploy narratives that influence listeners in a way that overrides conventional reasoning in the context of morally questionable actions.

The research is based on extracting narratives from millions of American, Iranian and Chinese weblogs, and subjecting them to automated discourse analysis to compare them quantitatively across the three languages. The investigators then follow up using behavioral experiments with readers/listeners from different cultures to gauge their reaction different narratives “where each story makes an appeal to a sacred value to explain or justify a morally questionable behavior of the author.” Finally, the scientists apply neurobiological fMRI scanning to correlate the reactions and personal characteristics of subjects with their brain responses.

DARPA’s goal is to mine millions of American weblogs as part of its ‘neurobiology of narrative framing’ research. As the Pentagon’s extensive funding of propaganda on Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrates, population influence and propaganda is critical not just in far-flung theatres abroad in strategic regions, but also at home, to quell the risk of domestic public opinion undermining the legitimacy of Pentagon policy.

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, from 2008 to 2013, the five largest US defense contractors lost 14 percent of their employees, as the winding down of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan led to lack of business and squeezed revenues. The continuation of the ‘Long War’ triggered by ISIS has, for now, reversed their fortunes. Companies profiting from the new war include many connected to the Highlands Forum, such as Leidos, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and Boeing. War is profitable.

Yet in the long-run, the information imperialists have already failed. This investigation is based entirely on open source techniques, made viable largely in the context of the same information revolution that enabled Google.

The convergence of powerful financial and military interests around the Highlands Forum–through sponsorship of the Forum’s new partner, the MIIS Cybersec initiative–is revealing in itself. MIIS Cybersec’s director, Dr, Itamara Lochard, has long been embedded in Highlands. Dr. Itamara Lochard is a senior Highlands Forum member and Pentagon information operations expert. She directs the MIIS CyberSec initiative that now supports the Pentagon Highlands Forum with funding from Goldman Sachs partner George Lee, who led the valuations of Facebook and Google.

Dr. Lochard maintains a comprehensive database of 1,700 non-state groups including insurgents, militias, terrorists, complex criminal organizations, organized gangs, malicious cyber actors and strategic non-violent actors, to analyze their organizational patterns, areas of cooperation, strategies and tactics.

Her views disclose much about what the Highlands Forum has been advocating all these years. In 2004, Lochard was co-author of a study for the U.S. Air Force’s Institute for National Security Studies on US strategy toward ‘non-state armed groups.’ The study on the one hand argued that non-state armed groups should be urgently recognized as a ‘tier one security priority,’ and on the other that the proliferation of armed groups provide strategic opportunities that can be exploited to help achieve policy goals.

There have and will be instances where the United States may find collaborating with armed group is in its strategic interests. But sophisticated tools must be developed to differentiate between different groups and understand their dynamics, to determine which groups should be countered, and which could be exploited for US interests.

In 2009, it also emerged from a Google patent application that the company had deliberately been collecting ‘payload’ data from private wi-fi networks that would enable the identification of “geolocations.” In the same year, Google had signed an agreement with the NSA giving the agency open-ended access to the personal information of its users, and its hardware and software, in the name of cyber security.

It is not just Google that is a key contributor and foundation of the US military-industrial complex. It is the entire Internet, and the wide range of private sector companies — many nurtured and funded under the mantle of the U.S. intelligence community (or powerful financiers embedded in that community) — which sustain the internet and the telecoms infrastructure. It is also the myriad of start-ups selling cutting edge technologies to the CIA’s venture firm In-Q-Tel, where they can then be adapted and advanced for applications across the military intelligence community.

Ultimately, the global surveillance apparatus and the classified tools used by agencies like the NSA to administer it, have been almost entirely made by external researchers and private contractors like Google, which operate outside the Pentagon.

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e#.nu8se9bfx

Highlands Group / Forum Participants
Sponsor: U.S. Secretary of Defense
(Private meetings with military-industrial complex cronies in gross violation of FACA)