谷歌（Google）和雅虎（Yahoo）以及其它近期因为参与了政府监视项目陷入舆论风波的科技巨头们正在发起一场公关保卫战，以挽救突然间急转直下的名声。

    它们纷纷做出令人同情的表态，坚称自己和许多美国人一样，对传闻中联邦政府如此大范围的监视感到困惑和担忧。《纽约时报》（New York Times）等不少媒体报道称，这些公司至少数次拒绝了政府查看用户信息的要求。

    谷歌和雅虎自称对“911”恐怖袭击后大幅扩展的监视体系感到失望，但至少在这个体系刚推出的时候，它们就已经先人一步知道内情了。2001年，“911”恐怖袭击刚过去两个月，谷歌联合创始人拉里•佩奇和谢尔盖•布林，以及雅虎联合创始人大卫•费罗——以及风投家马克•安德森和一帮硅谷大佬——就集体飞往华盛顿，在当时遭到袭击后还露着窟窿的五角大楼里召开会议。

    这个会议开了整整一天，其中专门用一段时间讨论了政府参与网络监控的问题，技术巨头们对此发表了自己的看法。丹•法默是当时与会的网络安全先驱。他在业内颇有名气是因为发明了首台用于评估网络安全隐患的扫描仪——“网络分析安全管理工具”（Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks），简称为SATAN。他表示，会上有一个演示提供了五角大楼的网络遭到黑客攻击的具体次数，他当时就坦诚地表达了观点。他说：“这个演示很荒唐。不可能这么确定，尤其对国防部来说。认为国防部能够做到如此精确的监控是很可笑的。”

    法默说，为了解决这个难题，谷歌的两位联合创始人“开始兜售自己的新设备。那是一台能放在特定网络中的服务器，已内置了谷歌的应用。他们认为，如果政府更了解最新网络动态，以及了解哪些信息更容易获取，就能更好地把握外界情况。”

    五角大楼的这次“盛会”是约翰•凯西克和马克•科瓦姆联袂推动的。前者曾是共和党众议员，当时效力于雷曼兄弟公司（Lehman Brothers），后者是一位风险投资家，当时是红杉资本（Sequoia Capital）的合伙人【《财富》杂志（Fortune）去年夏天在一份关于科瓦姆的简介中首次提到了这次会议。科瓦姆曾到俄亥俄州帮助现任该州州长的凯西克成功地振兴了该州经济】。为了确保这次会议顺利召开，科瓦姆负责召集科技公司的领军人物，而凯西克则负责向军方高层推广其理念。

    科瓦姆是硅谷传奇人物弗洛伊德•科瓦姆的儿子。据他回忆，会议当天他正好坐在时任国防部部长唐纳德•拉姆斯菲尔德对面。他向拉姆斯菲尔德解释说：“我父亲是国家半导体公司（National Semiconductor）的创始人，我永远忘不了孩提时代，硅谷与政府及美国航空航天局（NASA）通力合作，把人类送上月球的历史。然而今天，我们却想方设法避开政府，不愿意与政府合作，因为这种合作没什么好果子吃。”拉姆斯菲尔德回应道：“那我们现在开始改变这种局面吧。”

    Google and Yahoo -- and the other tech giants stung by the recent news of their participation in government surveillance programs -- are in the midst of a public-relations offensive to steady suddenly wobbly reputations.

    They're sounding a commiserating note, insisting they're just as confounded and concerned as many Americans by the reported extent of the feds' reach. And indeed, the New York Times, among others, has reported that the companies resisted government requests for information on their users on at least a few occasions.

    But if Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) are as frustrated as they sound with the sprawl of the post-9/11 surveillance regime, at least they can say they got front-row seats to its launch. Two months after the 2001 attacks, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Yahoo co-founder David Filo -- along with venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and a handful of other Silicon Valley heavyweights -- jetted to Washington for a meeting at the still-gaping Pentagon.

    The all-day session focused partly on the government's own exposure to cyber-snoops, with the tech luminaries offering their assessments. Dan Farmer, a cyber-security pioneer in attendance, says he was frank after hearing a presentation that put hard numbers to detected breaches of the Pentagon's network. "It was an absurd presentation," says Farmer, whose claim to fame at the time was having created one of the first scanners to assess a network's vulnerability -- called the Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks, or SATAN. "You can't have that much certainty, particularly with the Defense Department. The idea that they had these precise metrics was laughable."

    To meet that challenge, Farmer says, the Google cofounders were "flogging their new appliance. It was a little server you could put in your network and Google inside it. They thought if the government knew more about what was out there, and what was more easily accessible, they could get a better sense of what was going on."

    The Pentagon huddle was a collaborative effort by John Kasich, a former Republican congressman then working for Lehman Brothers, and venture capitalist Mark Kvamme, then a partner at Sequoia Capital. (Fortune first mentioned the meeting last summer in a profile of Kvamme, who moved to Ohio to help Kasich, now governor of that state, engineer an economic turnaround.) To make the meeting happen, Kvamme recruited the tech leaders, and Kasich pitched the idea to top military brass.

    Kvamme, the son of Silicon Valley icon Floyd Kvamme, recalled sitting across from then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and explaining, "My father was a founder of National Semiconductor, and I'll never forget when I was a kid how Silicon Valley and the government, NASA, worked together to put a man on the moon. In today's world, we do everything possible to stay away from the government. We don't want to work with you guys, because it's terrible." Rumsfeld responded, "Let's go change that."

    他们并不仅仅是在讨论打造国防部的防御体系。更重要的是，军方想让这些技术界的精英发挥最大的聪明才智，帮他们发动一场与常规战争迥异的战争，打击一群无国别的敌人。这次会议启动了一个机密项目，为此这些硅谷巨擘们要密切监视那些拥有潜在军事应用的新兴科技公司，把它们的情况及时汇报给军方和情报部门的高层。

    关键在于要迅速完成漫长繁琐的全部流程，从明确需求，到从零开始设计解决方案，再到呈现解决方案。一位与会者说：“为期18个月的‘提案请求’（request for proposal -RFP）过程并不会催生出创新方案。我们要实时解决问题，要让那些初创公司中有着新奇想法的人和那些致力于保卫国家的人通力合作。”会后的三年里，这些大佬一再去华盛顿碰头，同时把那些前景看好的创新项目提交给军方代表，以及来自联邦调查局（FBI）、中央情报局（CIA）和国家安全局（NSA）的代表。

    这些技术大佬表示，他们并不清楚这些做法后来到底执行情况如何，因为他们在提交方案后就基本对后续进展毫不知情了，也不清楚布林、佩奇和费罗在首次会议后又参加过哪些别的活动。科瓦姆称，有一次，立法机构听到了有关该项目的风声，打算提请国会进行监督，国防部于是暂缓了项目进程。2006年，该项目再次启动，并命名为“防务风险催化行动”（Defense Venture Catalyst Initiative）——或简称为DeVenCI——但发起成员没再继续参与。科瓦姆去年对我说：“他们给这个项目起了个缩写名称，并让它成为整个监视行动的一部分。我们当时就说，‘这事肯定成不了。我觉得这不是什么好兆头。它没法实现当时定下的目标。’”

    谷歌的一位发言人拒绝对此发表评论。截至发稿时，雅虎的一位代表也未做回应。而五角大楼的一位发言人则称，DeVenCI项目去年9月就暂停了，因为政府支出削减计划已在年度预算中取消了这个项目的400万美元预算。

    鉴于国家安全局的棱镜（PRISM）监听计划不久前被曝光，我们到底该如何看待这段历史？这些科技公司的高管推荐新应用——不管是他们自己的，他们同业的，还是他们投资组合里的——与他们偷偷把用户个人信息及通讯情况提交给监听部门是完全不同的两码事。而我们也开始明白，随着情报部门对硅谷的科技企业不断施压，迫使他们合作后，硅谷和华盛顿的关系也就变得日益复杂了。如今，这些科技公司的高管可能不再亲自飞往华盛顿义务帮助政府了，但值得注意的是，这种合作的根基非常深厚，而且历史悠久。（财富中文网）

    译者：清远

    They weren't just talking about building up Defense's defenses. More significant, the military wanted to squeeze the tech industry's brightest for help as they began a very different kind of war against a stateless enemy. The meeting launched a classified project for which the Silicon Valley chieftains scouted emerging technologies with potential military applications and reported them to military and intelligence agency leadership.

    The point was to end-run the lengthy bureaucratic process of identifying a need, designing a solution for it from scratch, and then bidding it out. "Innovation doesn't happen through 18-month RFPs," one participant said. "This was about real-time problems and getting people who had incredible ideas in early-stage companies together with the people who were trying to save our country." For the next three years, the group would reconvene in Washington and pitch promising innovations to representatives of the military branches, as well as the FBI, CIA, and NSA.

    The industry participants themselves say they don't know the full scope of what the effort yielded, because they were largely cut out of the loop after they presented. It is not clear how much Brin, Page, and Filo participated beyond the initial meeting. Kvamme said the Defense Department wound down the project once lawmakers got wind of it and wanted to subject it to Congressional oversight. It relaunched in 2006 under the moniker "Defense Venture Catalyst Initiative" -- DeVenCI for short -- but the founding members didn't rejoin. "The minute they gave it an acronym and made it part of the whole thing, we just said, 'This isn't going to work,'" Kvamme told me last year. "I just saw the writing on the wall. It wasn't going to be what it had been."

    A spokesperson for Google declined to comment. A Yahoo representative had not responded to requests for comment at press time. A Pentagon spokesperson says DeVenCI wound down in September of last year, after spending cuts eliminated the program's $4 million annual budget.

    What to make of this history in light of the recent disclosures about the NSA's PRISM program? There's a major difference between tech executives recommending new capabilities -- whether their own, their peers', or from their investment portfolios -- and secretly handing over users' personal data and communications. And as we're learning, the relationship between Silicon Valley and Washington has grown much more complicated as the intelligence agencies have increased the pressure on industry to cooperate. Tech executives may no longer be flying themselves across the country to volunteer their help, but it is worth noting the roots of the collaboration are both deep and lengthy.