QinetiQ to buy Apogen

The US isn't the only country whose spy agency has turned to the open market for financing and research. The UK has been doing it for four years. Strangely, both the British (QinetiQ) and American (In-Q-Tel) versions of this idea contain the letter Q:

"Pending U.S. federal regulators' approval, QinetiQ, a $2 billion defense and security company spun off from the U.K. Ministry of Defence in 2001, will buy Apogen for about $300 million in cash...In December 2002, the Defence Ministry, which retained majority ownership in QinetiQ, brought in the Carlyle Group, a Washington, D.C.-based private equity firm. Carlyle took a minority stake in the company. QinetiQ, which posted about $1.5 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ending March 31, has about 12,000 employees in the United Kingdom and the United States." (FCW.com)

In-Q-Tel Invests in Nanosys

CIA spinoff venture capital firm In-Q-Tel is investing heavily in nanotech, most recently in Nanosys, innovator of the super-thin 'paint-on' antennae required for the production of RFIDs and other ultra-miniaturized tracking devices:

"Nanosys, Inc. today announced that it has signed an agreement expanding its collaboration with In-Q-Tel, a venture group of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to utilize Nanosys' high-performance thin-film electronics technology (Macroelectronics) to develop specialized antennas for the U.S. Government...[The technology] can be applied to numerous other application areas, including portable and large area flat panel displays and low cost RFID (radio frequency identification) tags." (ArriveNet Business)

WaPo on In-Q-Tel

Unwilling to enter into a discussion of the possible problems associated with for-profit government spy agencies, the Washington Post lavishes praise on the CIA's venture capital investment firm In-Q-Tel:

"...in interviews with more than a dozen current and former CIA officials, congressional aides, venture capitalists that have worked with [In-Q-Tel, Inc.] and executives who have benefited from it, no one disputed that what began as an experiment in transferring private-sector technology into the CIA is working as intended. The Army, NASA and other intelligence and defense agencies have, or are planning, their own "venture capital" efforts based on the In-Q-Tel model." (Washington Post)