The Nosey Faces Behind Facebook
Introduction by Rob Argento
February 1, 2008
So you’re a hip chick or cool dude who loves cyberspace and all your cool cyberfriends, right? Of course you do, just like 62 million Facebook users. What the ancient mystics and prophets promised in terms of the coming millennial global community is being fulfilled right before our very eyes. Only it’s not anything mystical at all that’s accomplishing all this. It’s just one more stroke of genius from Her Highness Technology, so we are to believe. What supernature could not accomplish, silicon wafers and a bunch of wide-eyed geeks needed only a few years of some hard work to provide. Oh, with a little venture capital thrown in from a couple of big brothers and the leadership of a very aggressive libertarian Stanford grad, that is. It was all in the cards…err, I mean the digits. Inevitable. Speedelicious. Gracious, even!
The key founder and guiding light of Facebook.com is Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley VC (venture capitalist) and philosophy graduate from Stanford University, itself a Valley pantheon of Digerati icons. Thiel’s own mentor’s explanation, however, for the remarkable success of Facebook should give pause. It might not be a solely pastoral concern for the flock that’s behind Facebook but something less pure, according to Stanford’s René Girard’s explanation of cultural trends and movements. Yes, Facebook does indeed treat us like a flock of sheep, but perhaps not sheep to be lovingly shielded from the wolves — even if we are assumed sheep-like in our tendency to follow the herd whithersoever it goeth with hardly a thought for its destination. It is this same human need to mimic that drives us into questionable fashionable movements such as financial bubbles, and that so readily indentures us to peer pressure. Our herd-like tendencies, unfortunately, are far more dominant than our need for anything so abstract as truth — like, for instance, the truth about the nosey faces behind Facebook.
Now, a little background on Facebook’s other key associates is in order before we proceed. Everybody knows that money can be laundered, but project proposals and personal information can be too. And where you find one you often find the other. In the case of Facebook the laundry route is a little tricky; but lets see if we can trace it.
Illustration: Some Facebook History
To begin with, we know that within days of the infamous 9/11 tragedy the government sermonized that we all had to do whatever it takes to prevent another 9/11-type event, even if that meant surrendering our privacy. The federal government agencies, we were told, could only protect us from terrorists — both foreign and domestic — if our lives became transparent to them so that they could track, profile and identify all those terrorists and would-be-terrorists that allegedly were covertly conspiring to devastate the Homeland. To this end DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) spawned the Total Information Awareness program to harness the most glitzy information technologies to ferret out terrorist information signatures and make pre-emptive arrests, a la Spielberg’s Minority Report.
TIA, however, did not register very well with much of the public and soon fell off the mainstream media radar, only to re-emerge as the Information Awareness Office (IAO). The name had changed but the purpose remained the same; and public reaction was somehow now more acquiescent. Instrumental at DARPA was one Dr. Anita Jones, a some time Director of Defense Research and Engineering. Jones, it turns out, had also served on the Board of Directors for In-Q-Tel, whose purpose it was to identify and partner “with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions.” Of this In-Q-Tel/Intelligence collaboration former CIA director George Tenet said that it “…enabled CIA to take advantage of the technology that Las Vegas uses to identify corrupt card players and apply it to link analysis for terrorists.” Got that? DARPA, In-Q-Tel and the intel community are spending our tax dollars looking for links between card sharps, terrorists…and us.
Just as an aside, In the pre-9/11 days — the real world — they used to call that sort of thing “going on a fishing expedition.” A cynical observer of all this might think that the government was trying to find something “heretical” about as many of us as they can, looking for any excuse to populate the mushrooming prison-industrial complex and return a profit for their buddies who invested in it (and them) back in the nineties. Back then the carjackers were the terrorists; today any one of us is a suspect. You never know, right?
Back to In-Q-Tel. The CEO at In-Q-Tel was Gilman Louie. Both Louie and Jones were associates with James Breyer at BBN Technologies, best known for its work in the area of packet switching, the secret of the ARPANET — itself the precursor of today’s Internet.
So, summarizing what we’ve found so far, we have the Information Awareness Office “linked” — the government is not the only one who can find “links” — to BBN Technologies and the Internet by way of Jones, Louie and Breyer. At this point, someone might dare to suggest that IAO was looking for an Internet application to “link analysis for terrorists,” in the words of the former CIA director. Now, how did they finally come up with that very convenient Internet application that would suffice to spy on huge numbers of us in a totally inconspicuous and innocent way? Let’s keep looking.
Surprise, surprise! We find Breyer and Louie linked again, this time at the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), with Breyer on the chair and Louie on the board. NVCA is a group of VCs “that manage pools of risk equity capital designated to be invested in high growth companies.” Okay, so now we have the IAO, by way of NVCA, looking for a high growth Internet startup to do some big time domestic spying. But the final link to Facebook comes by way of James Breyer.
In addition to his duties at NVCA and BBN, the exceptionally productive Breyer was also a manager at Accel Partners, a Palo Alto VC firm that “focuses on early-stage investments in only two sectors, software and networking.” And it was Accel that made a multimillion dollar investment in Facebook, which has gone on to develop the immensely popular Internet social networking application that the IAO longed for. With Facebook databasing all the right stuff from its tens of millions of cyberfriends and making it available for “national security interests,” the government can finally get what it wants without arousing much suspicion. And it’s all for our own good. Who better to protect you from all those cumbersome terrorists you keep finding under your bed than Uncle Sam, our Big Brother?
Still don’t believe the government uses our own computers for spying on us? Then have a look at "TECHNOLOGY; Software Pioneer Quits Board of Groove," an article posted several years ago by the New York Times. Wrote the Times, “Mitchell D. Kapor, a personal computer industry software pioneer and a civil liberties activist, has resigned from the board of Groove Networks after learning that the company’s software was being used by the Pentagon as part of its development of a domestic surveillance system.” There ya have it, right from the Times.
If all this sounds like “conspiracy think,” it’s not. It’s just business as usual.
To learn more about the nosey faces behind Facebook, have a look below at Big Brothers, Big Facebook: Your Orwellian Community, posted by an unidentified blogger.
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www.commongroundcommonsense.org
Big Brothers, Big Facebook: Your Orwellian Community
A few days ago I stumbled across a couple articles mentioning TheFacebook[sic], and a little start-up capital they happened to get in the sum of $13 million. The number intrigued me, so I did a little more research, a little more stumbling, and found something that even I still have a hard time accepting. So, here’s what I came up with:
(P.S. — I’m hoping that someone from EFF or people concerned with privacy rights will take notice. This really worries me and a lot of my friends.)
Facebook.com, created in February of 2004 by 21 year old Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, is a student social network now active at more than 800 campuses, with more than 2.8 million registered users. [1] Among its features, TheFacebook allows a user to upload a picture of themselves and can include information about their favorite music, books, movies, their address, phone number, e-mail, clubs, jobs, educational history, and even political affiliations. Facebook is extremely popular, attracting on average 80 percent of a school’s undergraduate population. However, there are some questions raised regarding privacy concerns on the site, and when some digging is done to find out who is really behind the site’s management, there are more questions than answers.
The first venture capital money to come into TheFacebook, $500,000 worth, came from venture capitalist Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of Paypal. [1] A Stanford graduate and former columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Thiel is author of the book The Diversity Myth, [2] which received praises from notable neo-conservatives such as William Kristol. [3] In fact, Thiel is on the board of the radical conservative group VanguardPAC. [4]
Further funding came in the form of $12.7 million from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel’s manager James Breyer was former chair of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). [1] Breyer served on NVCA’s board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, [5] a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. [6] This firm works in various aspects of information technology and intelligence, including most notably “nurturing data mining technologies.”
Breyer has also served on the board of BBN Technologies, a research and development firm known for spearheading the ARPANET, or what we know today as the Internet. [7] In October of 2004, Dr. Anita Jones climbed on board, becoming a part of a firm packed with leaders from other areas of Silicon Valley’s venture capital community, including none other than Gilman Louie. But what is most interesting is Dr. Jones’ experience prior to joining BBN. Jones herself served on the Board of Directors for In-Q-Tel, and was previously the Director of Defense Research and Engineering for the U.S. Department of Defense. Her responsibilities included serving as an advisor to the Secretary of Defense and overseeing the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
While the nearly $13 million that came from Accel to fund The Facebook certainly looks suspicious and unfortunately disturbing after reviewing all of this information, the only problem on the surface seems to be the appearance of some incestuous relationships between the Pentagon, the CIA, and these venture capital firms. But this goes further than just the initial appearances. DARPA shot to national fame in 2002 when John Markoff of the New York Times announced the existence of the “Information Awareness Office” (IAO). [8] According to Wikipedia, “the IAO has the stated mission to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralized location, for easy perusal by the United States government, including (though not limited to) Internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver’s licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and any other available data.” [9] Protests came from civil libertarians on both the right and the left who saw the IAO as a new Orwellian arm of the United States government. After Congress investigated DARPA’s project, funding was cut off and IAO was essentially dead in the water.
The Information Awareness Office seems to have survived some of its original purposes in a mutated form, found in today’s Facebook. In fact, one of IAO’s original example technologies included “human network analysis and behavior model building engines,” [10] a surprising echo of the social networking mapping that Facebook does using SVG visualizations. [11] Add that to the information that Facebook collects and compare it to the startlingly similar goal of the IAO. It appears at first glance that DoD, along with the CIA, has managed to circumvent its previous Congressionally established limitations and find corporate sponsorship for its programs, under the thin veil of a useful social network for unwitting college students.
And those college students continue to log on to TheFacebook, completely unaware of the massive affronts to their privacy. The so-called “Privacy Policy” [12] of Facebook includes a statement saying that they “may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship.” It goes on to say that, “We may be required to disclose customer information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law or to protect our interests or property. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies.”
Some of the aspects of the privacy policy are downright creepy and confusing. This particular gem is especially disturbing: “Thefacebook also collects information about you from other sources, such as newspapers and instant messaging services. This information is gathered regardless of your use of the Web Site.” And there’s no telling when the privacy policy may change. As of when this was written (July 1, 2005), the policy was effective as of June 28, 2005.
Who knows where the information they collect about these three million college students, alumni, and professors is going, or what they intend to do with it. The fact that these companies and agencies are all so closely related, and that The Facebook has almost no organizational transparency are all cause for concern. Hopefully we can soon uncover the truth.
[1] “Accel Partners Invests In Thefacebook.com”
[2] Peter Thiel’s book, “The Diversity Myth”
[3] Kristol’s commentary, as well as others, can be found on the Internet
[4] VanguardPAC Board of Advisors
[5] In-Q-Tel - About Us
[6] “Jim Breyer of Accel Partners Elected Chairman of National Venture Capital Association”
[7] General Catalyst Partners :: News - “BBN Technologies Appoints Dr. Anita K. Jones to Board of Directors” (This includes information about BBN’s involvement in ARPANET, as well as Jones’ past with DARPA and In-Q-Tel)
[8] New York Times - “Many Tools Of Big Brother Are Now Up And Running” by John Markoff and John Schwartz, December 23, 2002, Late Edition - Final, Section C, Page 1, Column 2
[9] Information Awareness Office
[10] The Internet Archive’s archived page of DARPA’s Information Awareness Office
[11] Thefacebook.com FAQ - Visualizations
[12] Facebook.com Privacy Policy
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