Now that the Bush Administration is gone, whistleblowers are speaking out. I just watched the second night of the NSA whistleblower on Countdown with KO, and heard him mention DARPA’s Total Information Awareness Project. This reminded me of a pet research project of mine.
DARPA was rumored to be developing a system that would allow everyone in America, and ideally, throughout the world, to be in a database that could connect everything from their contacts, financial activity, friends, and history, in one database. This would allow Intelligence Agencies to easily find out information about anyone in the world.
This project was rejected by congress. A few months later, Facebook was launched at Harvard…
Facebook’s growth has been immense. Based on predecessors social networking systems (Friendster & MySpace), Facebook started with no attempt at income. Many early adapters thought the system was a non-profit organization paid for by colleges or some other organization. Facebooks initial technology was more advanced then other services were able to offer, yet presented it in a very very simple way…
Now to the dark side…

We are all in agreement that the CIA doesn’t follow American laws, from drug dealing to torture and secret prisons, the CIA is “above the influence” of our nation. They have extensive funding from known Venture Capital firms. The CIA has been behind many companies and entertainment commonplace in American life.
Would it be far fetched to think that Facebook was started as a CIA operation to implement a user generated database on unsuspecting college students… which has expanded today to a larger portion of society.
There are detailed research papers on the internets that goes into detail about the initial funding of Facebook, so if you are interested in it, just google it.
The most interesting piece of information I came across while researching DARPA was several of their own presentations from the early 2000s. I posted all of them to my website, http://NotCIA.com/darpa/ All of these presentations were downloaded from the official DARPA website in December 2007.
Facebook has always been in a class of its own. For the first few years of its existence, they had no ads, a higher technological interface then the rest of the internet, as well as other unique qualities. I have been told that if a traceroute is done for Facebook, weird things show up. Small parts of Facebook’s code have been leaked over the past several years, and in each situation, more results of the detailed information Facebook collects on users is discovered, such as how many times you view each friends profile.
A few months ago I emailed Facebook asking if my messages sent over their service were private. They responded that the message is only viewable to the recipient and the sender, but didn’t answer my real question, does Facebook guarantee the privacy of the message from prying eyes at Facebook. They never responded to my request for clarification…
Large portions of the NSA’s surveillance is still unknown. I predict that this unknown section of the secret surveillance has to do with Facebook, which will be known to the masses in the coming months…
America has little, if any, privacy laws. We all must remain vigilant on all threats to our privacy.

Some Comments From Daily Kos

Murdoch (owner of Fox News) has MySpace. Facebook does have CIA links, and both can essentially do whatever they want with their data.
This isn’t about getting terrorists and never was.
This is about social control, and it has a fully developed ideology behind it. In a nutshell, the concept is that people are sheep (mimetic desire). Facebook is a kind of electronic sheepdog.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook
by M Aurelius

Telephone systems engineer here, 25 years in the industry, was involved with crypto back in the early eighties, and knows more about SIGINT and surveillance in general than just about anyone on this blog except a guy who has a bunch of current SCI tabs on his badge.
And I knew what traffic analysis and network analysis were, 20 years before most people in the general public even heard the words.
When Facebook and the rest of those started popping up, my immediate reaction was, “that’s a SIGINT collector,” meaning, a surveillance system. I didn’t join any of those, and basically ignored them.
By analogy, if there’s a place serving crappy food on the corner, I don’t eat there, I tell my friends to not eat there, and I don’t waste my time counting the number of health & sanitary violations they get each month.
The point about Facebook coming online with advanced tech and no ads, and the Harvard connection, scream intel agency funding & origins.
But I’ll tell you what’s actually going on here, based on my experience & knowledge.
Facebook isn’t the “real thing.” Facebook is a test case. That is, the goal of Facebook isn’t to build dossiers on every teenager and undergrad in America. Facebook is a live guinea-pig test for how to develop and deploy this kind of software to collect intel on people on a network, and how to do analyses to extract actionable intel from the noise.
The people watching the output from Facebook aren’t really concerned with whether Dick is going to ask Jane to the prom. What they’re concerned with is how accurately they can PREDICT who is going to ask who to the prom. So they attempt to develop algorithms to make automated predictions with Dick and Jane, and all their classmates, and see what happens.
And they also study how information propagates through social networks, and what are the characteristics of meme-originators and meme-spreaders, and a bunch of other stuff I could go into detail about if I had more time.
Mark my words. This will eventually come out in the news.

by G2geek