Mitre Corporation

Mitre Corporation   (Research agency)
Formation	1958
Headquarters	Bedford, Massachusetts, McLean, Virginia
Staff	8,425
Sponsored by	Hewlett Foundation
Subpage	•Mitre Corporation/President •Mitre Corporation/Vice president
Membership	• Donald M. Kerr • Mike Rogers • George Campbell • Lance R. Collins • Nicholas M. Donofrio • David G. Fubini • George C. Halvorson • Paul G. Kaminski • Yvette Meléndez • Cathy E. Minehan • John Noseworthy • Jason Providakes • Adalio T. Sanchez • Rodney E. Slater • Jan Tighe • Jason Providakes • Cindy L. Williams • Martin C. Faga • Jane F. Garvey • David Jeremiah • Edmund P. Giambastiani Jr. • Paul F. Gorman • John J. Hamre • Richard J. Kerr • Donald M. Kerr • Montgomery Meigs • John P. Stenbit • James R. Schlesinger
“You may not know it, but Mitre touches your life most every day."

The Mitre Corporation is an organization for the operation of research institutes on behalf of the United States government. It was created by a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and as its promo material says: “You may not know it, but Mitre touches your life most every day.”

Overview

With 8,000 employees and an annual budget of between $1 billion and $2 billion of taxpayers’ money, Mitre Corp., a government-linked Skunk Works, has been making bleeding-edge breakthroughs for U.S. agencies for more than six decades. Unlike most of the military-industrial complex, it is run on a non-profit basis.

The organization has several dozen offices worldwide, mainly in the United States and internationally with a focus on Germany.

“The characteristic of Mitre that I've always explained to people is that when we say we do information sciences, we go way beyond what people would typically call IT,” Martin Faga, the Mitre CEO from 2000 to 2006, told Forbes Magazine.

History

Under the leadership of Clair W. "Hap" Halligan, Mitre was formed in 1958 to provide overall direction to the companies and workers involved in the U.S. Air Force and its attempt to create an air defense system against nuclear weapons.

Over the next 40 years, Mitre was behind the scenes of air surveillance technologies such as the Airborne Warning and Communications Systems (AWACS) and the Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (STARS). It also played a significant role in the development of much-used tech like GPS and the commercial airline Traffic Collision Avoidance System.

Mitre operates several federally funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs):

• for the Federal Aviation Administration the Center for Advanced Aviation System Development
• for the Department of Defense, the National Security Engineering Center
• for the Department of Homeland Security, the Homeland Security Systems Engineering and Development Institute
• for the federal courts of the United States, the Judiciary Engineering and Modernization Center.
• for the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Center for Enterprise Modernization

Project Examples

Mitre is given freedom to develop some of the more radical answers to the government's needs.

Fingerprint Collection From Social Media

A $500,000 “social media image fingerprinting project” for the FBI started in 2015. The goal was to collect fingerprints from peoples’ Facebook, Twitter and other social media posts.

It was run by an FBI hacking unit in Quantico, the Operational Technology Division, and funded by a previously unreported research funding body called Triad. Chris Piehota, the recently retired chief, said that Triad was designed to fund innovative research from objective outside bodies and that “image fingerprinting” is as literal as it sounds: trying to capture biometric information from social media images. Think of gang members who put up photos of themselves online, making gang signs with their hands, explains Piehota. “They’re also giving us access to their fingerprint patterns,” he adds. “The FBI can take your fingerprint characteristics from those images and they can build fingerprint files or fingerprint characteristics for individuals [for whom] we don’t have biographic information.”

Mitre has a history in assisting the U.S. government’s expansion of biometric surveillance. Another 2014 contract details Mitre’s work assisting the FBI on facial recognition tools, right down to “creating local watch lists by flagging subjects of interest.” It’s also helping the FBI build the Next Generation Identification (NGI) system, which is one of the biggest databases of criminal suspects’ faces, fingerprints and other identifying body parts on the planet. According to the FBI, the NGI is “the world's largest and most efficient electronic repository of biometric and criminal history information.” It’s cost the FBI at least $500 million since its incipience in 2007.

Hacking Internet of Things

Mitre’s high-tech snooping also extends to the fast-growing world of connected devices, such as smartwatches, speakers, TVs and security cameras. In a $500,000 September 2017 contract, the Department of Homeland Security asked Mitre to create a system that could locate and hack into smartwatches, fitness trackers, home automation devices or anything that could be classed as an Internet of Things (IoT) system.

JASON

The JASON Group has been working under Mitre since the late 1970s.

Members

The members are from the board of trustees per 2021, plus some historical members.

 

Known members

4 of the 31 of the members already have pages here:

Member	Description
Martin C. Faga
John Hamre	US MICC insider
Richard Kerr	Deputy Director of Central Intelligence under George H. W. Bush.
James R. Schlesinger	USDSO, DCI, RAND, US Defense secretary

 

Sponsor

Event	Description
Hewlett Foundation	Huge foundation setting the agenda by funding lots of deep state projects.

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