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发帖数: 26222 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 Military 讨论区 】
发信人: smokinggun (硝烟), 信区: Military
标 题: Facebook, In-Q-Tel and CIA
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Wed Oct 26 11:04:09 2011, 美东)
Facebook, the CIA, and You.
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Author: thirtyseven
Date Created: July 06, 2007
Last Modified: June 30, 2008
Category: The Abyss
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I Facebooked Your MomAfter over a decade of being immersed in the conspiracy
theory culture—and I’m still there wether I like it or not—my core beef
remains the same. It’s not something unique to conspiracy research. It’s
a universal problem with all true believers: exaggeration for dramatic
effect. Subtlety is interesting. Details are brainfood. Overstatements
are good for getting people alarmed and worked up, but what happens when
people start realizing they were decieved?
Is Facebook a CIA front, devoted to identifying, tracking and crushing
dissent in the college generation? Actually, no. Facebook is a website,
devoted to “social networking.” However, there’s also a lot more going on
behind the curtain. As always, it’s the grey areas that interest me the
most. So with this article, I want to ask refined and specific questions to
get accurate and detailed answers. Because it’s not an exaggeration to
say that there are very real ties between Facebook and CIA—and there’s a
whole covert landscape of semi-legal databases, companies selling private
information, and the new horizon of computer-driven “Data Mining”.
In short, this is a great angle to sneak a peek one of the most hidden, and
profitable, sectors of the US economy. What we’ll see is a lot less simple
than a good conspiracy theory, but I also think it’s a hell of a lot more
interesting than the “Facebook = CIA” mantra that passes for “
investigation” on the internets.
We may use information about you that we collect from other sources,
including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs,
instant messaging services and other users of Facebook, to supplement your
profile.”
Let’s start right there. The quote above is from Facebook’s Terms and
Conditions—specifically, their privacy policy. With a declaration like
that, you have to give these folks credit for being pretty damn blunt about
the nature of the game. Facebook is a long-term investment in my generation
, just like MySpace. The payoff these days is millions and millions in
advertising revenue—but what about the payoff one decade from now, when
their databases have multi-gigabyte files about you? Your interests, habits
, porn preferences, mindless surveys, purchases, friends, bulletins, and
little sparkly animated .gif files? How much do you think that information
will be worth—to advertisers, to corporations, to the military, to
intelligence services?
Just Kids Being Kids
Mark Zuckerberg FacebookAnyone who has concerns about their “privacy”
being violated by Facebook is completely, unconditionally justified in their
concern. After all, Facebook was born out of data theft—founder Mark
Zuckerberg stole tens of thousands of digital files on his fellow Harvard
students, directly from the University’s “secure” servers. Maybe that’s
alarming to you, but I find it endearingly psychotic. Anyone who can found
a multi-billion dollar business with stolen property is worth paying
attention to. From the always-excellent Fast Company magazine:
Harvard didn’t offer a student directory with photos and basic
information, known at most schools as a face book. Zuckerberg wanted to
build an online version for Harvard, but the school “kept on saying that
there were all these reasons why they couldn’t aggregate this information,
” he says. “I just wanted to show that it could be done.” So one night
early in his sophomore year, he hacked into Harvard’s student records. He
then threw up a basic site called Facemash, which randomly paired photos of
undergraduates and invited visitors to determine which one was “hotter” (
not unlike the Web site Hot or Not). Four hours, 450 visitors, and 22,000
photo views later, Harvard yanked Zuckerberg’s Internet connection. After a
dressing-down from the administration and an uproar on campus chronicled by
The Harvard Crimson, Zuckerberg politely apologized to his fellow students.
But he remained convinced he’d done the right thing: “I thought that the
information should be available.” (Harvard declined to comment on the
episode.)
The next anaecdote in the article is even more telling and fairly funny, too
. Since Fast Company was kind enough not to sue me over my excessive
quotitude in the Clotaire Rapaille article, I figure I’ll push the envelope
a little further:
The new project consumed so much of his time that by the end of the
first semester, with just two days to go before his art-history final, he
was in a serious jam: He needed to be able to discuss 500 images from the
Augustan period. “This isn’t the kind of thing where you can just go in
and figure out how to do it, like calculus or math,” he says, without a
trace of irony. “You actually have to learn these things ahead of time.”
So he pulled a Tom Sawyer: He built a Web site with one image per page and a
place for comments. Then he emailed members of his class and invited them
to share their notes, like a study group on cybersteroids. “Within two
hours, all the images were populated with notes,” he says. “I did very
well in that class. We all did.”
Regardless of your moral stance on cheating, you have to admit the dude is
CEO material. Anyone willing to cheat on such a brazen and effective level
is worth giving a lot of money to, these days. That’s what Venture
Capitalism is all about.
Speaking of Venture Capitalism
In-Q-Tel LogoIn-Q-Tel is interesting company. Considering they’ve changed
their name 3 times in 8 years and all their money comes from the CIA, that’
s probably inevitable. Their website lays things out in simple and upfront
terms (allegedly):
In-Q-Tel was established in 1999 as an independent, private, not-for-
profit company to help the CIA and the greater US Intelligence Community (IC
) to identify, acquire, and deploy cutting-edge technologies. In-Q-Tel’s
entrepreneurial strategic investment and technology advancement model gives
it the agility - lacking within traditional government approaches - to help
the IC benefit from the rapid pace of change in information technology and
other emerging technology fields.
In-Q-Tel’s mission is to deliver leading-edge capabilities to the CIA
and the IC by investing in the development of promising technologies.
Because early-stage technologies are often unproven, In-Q-Tel takes the
calculated risks necessary to develop, prove, and deliver them to the
Intelligence Community.
In-Q-Tel is very much worth investigating further. I don’t mean that as an
ominous, pre-Casolaro warning—it’s just that the company’s portfolio is
full of fascinating companies doing fascinating work. I would also
recommend, to any college-attending humans reading this, investigating their
Outreach Program. I realize some readers find that immoral, but it’s
worth noting that money with blood on it is still valid currency,
exchangable for food, equipment and firearms.
Ever heard of Attensity? “Two of the clearest and most charismatic
speakers in the text mining business are Attensity cofounders Todd Wakefield
and David Bean,” sez Text Technologies. (That’s a site worth digging
around, by the way.)
Keyhole, Inc was also an asset of In-Q-Tel until Google bought them in 2004,
for an undisclosed sum. Keyhole does work in “geospatial data
visualization applications,” but we know them as the engine behind
GoogleEarth, the greatest piece of software humankind has ever created.
In-Q-Tel has considerable overlapping tentacles with SAIC—the Science
Applications International Corporation, who are a study unto themselves. If
you’re unfamiliar with their $8 billion global operation, you should
definitely check out this recent Vanity Fair article.
Stay Skeptical
They Rule Wal-MartOf course all this information is interesting—but where’
s the connection to Facebook? Does this mean that Facebook is somehow a CIA
front company as well? I’d have to say “hell no,” but let’s take a look
at the basic equation behind the claim so you can, like...decide for
yourself.
It’s a long chain of association: once Facebook begins to take off, venture
capital firm ACCEL gives facebook $12.7 million. One of the 18 member
investors of Accel, James Bryer, is also on the board of a venture capital
firm called NVCA. Sitting on the board of NVCA with Bryer is Gilman Louie,
who is on the board of In-Q-Tel. Gilman Louie is also responsible for
bringing Tetris to the United States. He got started in video games, and
developed several flight simulators for the Air Force.
The NVCA link is weakest in the chain. First of all, James Bryer and Gilman
Louie were two of twenty-six board members. Second of all, and probably
more important: neither Bryer nor Louie are on the NVCA board any longer. (
Here’s a list of the 2007-2008 officers.) Currently, Gilman Louie is still
doing work with In-Q-Tel, and Bryer is on the board of directors for good
old Wal Mart—which actually is a conspiracy, and probably a CIA front as
well.
For the sake of objectivity, here’s how Prison Planet sums things up:
So who do we have to thank for this? According to the official story,
TheFaceBook was founded by 3 students from the CIA’s favorite breeding
ground of Harvard University. Their first $500,000 in funding came from
Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of Paypal.
Thiel is also a former columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a
graduate of Stanford University, the home of NSA computer research and CIA
mind control projects like MK ULTRA. He is an avowed neocon and globalist
whose book ”The Diversity Myth“ received praises from William Kristol,
Christopher Cox, Edward Meese, and Linda Chavez. Thiel sits on the board of
the radical right-wing VanguardPAC and he personally donated $21,200 to
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign for governor.
It’s funny how the CIA’s “favorite breeding ground” changes every time
the phrase comes up—is it MIT? Yale? Stanford? Virginia Tech? Depends on
the article you’re writing, apparently. Small quibbles aside, the basic
concept here is fundamentally sound: Facebook, just like MySpace and every
single other large-scale interactive website in existence, is designed to
collect demographic data about the people who use it.
Is this a violation of your right to privacy? Yes and no.
Yes, of course it is, but no, you don’t have a right to privacy and you
never did. Nobody does. If you’re reading this article, everything you do
is being backed up to multiple databases. (If you have any illusions about
“anonymizers” or “encryption”, please do us both a favor and read this
Crytogon article ASAP.) |
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