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The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-45
Mark2@4
“What has happened to the internet ? (Since Trump)”
2012 March 29, the Obama administration announced more than $200 million in funding for ‘‘Big Data Research and Development Initiative’.’ Information Innovation Office, explains Lee, has replaced the Information Awareness Office. The first wave of agency commitments includes National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Energy (DOE), U.S. Geological Survey, and Department of Defense (including DARPA).
2016- December 23, obama signs Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act. (CFPDA)In both the House and Senate the bill was included in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2017. It passed the House in this fashion in a conference report vote on 2 December 2016. The Senate then passed the measure in a conference report on December 8 by a tally of 92–7. the United States Secretary of State to collaborate with the United States Secretary of Defense and other relevant Federal agencies to create a “Global Engagement Center” (GEC) to fight against propaganda from foreign governments, and publicize the nature of ongoing foreign propaganda and disinformation operations against the United States and other countries. The bill said this inter-agency effort should: “counter foreign propaganda and disinformation directed against United States national security interests and proactively advance fact-based narratives that support United States allies and interests
2018-April 6, n a job request posted last week to the Federal Business Opportunities website, the main contracting website used by the federal government, DHS wrote that it is seeking a contractor that is able to monitor up to 290,000 global news sources.
The successful contracting company will have “24/7 access to a password protected, media influencer database, including journalists, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers etc.” in order to “identify any and all media coverage related to the Department of Homeland Security or a particular event.”
“Any and all media coverage,” as you might imagine, is quite broad and includes “online and social media.”
The chosen contractor should “present contact details and any other information that could be relevant, including publications this influencer writes for, and an overview of the previous coverage published by the media influencer.”One aspect of the media coverage to be gathered is its “sentiment.”
DHS says the “NPPD/OUS [National Protection and Programs Directorate/Office of the Under Secretary] has a critical need to incorporate these functions into their programs in order to better reach Federal, state, local, tribal and private partners.”
And of course you have social media giants who censor these blogs which present narratives that contrast with officially sanctioned narratives. Lets look at Google and Facebook (Zuckerberg calling for more regulation to help FB censor and Trumps ready to give him what he wants with his fake war against Twitter pretending such regulation will stop censoring-lol)
To understand how interlocked they all are one needs to look back into the past
1998/September , Andreas Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton, both connected to DARPA, invested $100,000 each in Google.
1999-After Google’s incorporation, the company received $25 million in equity funding led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. According to Homeland Security Today, “A number of Sequoia-bankrolled start-ups have contracted with the Department of Defense, especially after 9/11 when Sequoia’s Mark Kvamme met with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to discuss the application of emerging technologies to warfighting and intelligence collection.”
1999-Similarly, Kleiner Perkins had developed “a close relationship” with In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s newly created venture capital arm, named in reference to Q, the fictional inventor who supplies technology to James Bond. The idea was to essentially replace the functions once performed by the ORD , by mobilizing the private sector to develop information technology solutions for the entire intelligence community. In addition to the CIA, In-Q-Tel has also been backed by the FBI, NGA, and Defense Intelligence Agency, among other agencies. Gilman Louie, is a former CEO of In-Q-Tel , was a participant of the Highlands Forums. As was fellow board member Dr. Anita Jones, a CFR member and MITRE trustee , who served as director of DARPA and head of research and engineering at the Pentagon.
In-Q-Tel has been investing in companies engaged in social media mining and surveillance. Dataminr streams data from Twitter in search of trends for law enforcement agencies and hedge funds. Geofeedia collects social media messages in order to follow activists for police departments and corporations. Pathar is hired by the FBI to mine social media in order to determine networks and signs of radicalization. Netbase scans billions of sources online and Recorded Future monitors the world’s online traffic to predict future events
2002- TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS. Platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube are leading the way towards Total Information Awareness (TIA), a mass detection program by the United States Information Awareness Office established by DARPA in 2002.
Based on the concept of predictive policing, TIA aimed to digitally collect detailed information about individuals in order to anticipate and prevent crimes before they were committed. TIA was the aim of the Information Awareness Office (IAO) established by DARPA in 2002.
Shortly after 9/11, Brian Sharkey, chief technology officer at SAIC and deputy director of the Information Systems Office (ISO) at DARPA, teamed up with John Poindexter to propose the Total Information Awareness (TIA) surveillance program.
The IAO was headed by Admiral John Poindexter, former United States National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan. Poindexter was convicted in April 1990 of multiple felonies as a result of his actions in the Iran–Contra affair, but his convictions were reversed on appeal in 1991. According to David Teacher, besides the channels to Reagan via CIA director William Casey, Le Cercle and Brian Crozier’s 6I also liaised directly with Reagan’s successive National Security Advisors, Dick Allen, William P. Clark, Bud McFarlane and Poindexter
Following public criticism that this technology could potentially lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003. However, several IAO projects continued to be funded and merely run under different names, as revealed by Edward Snowden during the course of the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures.
Although the TIA program was formally suspended, its data mining software was later adopted by other government agencies, with only superficial changes being made.
2004- Thiel (Trump supporter) and his business partner Alex Karp met with John Poindexter in 2004, at the home of Richard Perle, another Andrew Marshall acolyte. “I told them I thought they had an interesting idea,” says Poindexter. After 9/11, co-founder Alex Karp had reconnected with Thiel, who had the idea that Silicon Valley should do something to improve national security and secure civil liberties.
Thiel and Karp then founded the CIA-backed Palantir Technologies, headquartered in Palo Alto, which specializes in big data analysis for the intelligence community, and which supposedly helped to locate Osama bin Laden. Thiel named the company after the crystal ball used by evil lord Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. Thiel saw Palantir as a “mission-oriented company” which could apply software similar to PayPal’s fraud recognition systems to “reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties.” Karp counts former CIA director George Tenet as a friend, as well as Tenet’s employer, Herb Allen, who runs Allen & Co, a Palantir investor. Thiel had also met with Gilman Louie of In-Q-Tel, securing the backing of the CIA. Poindexter also helped Palantir open doors, and to assemble “a legion of advocates from the most influential strata of government.”
Palantir’s clients included at least twelve groups within the U.S. government, including the CIA, DHS, NSA, FBI, CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force and Special Operations Command. Although the company denies the connection, the majority of security analysts are convinced that Palantir is the principal company behind the design of software used for the NSA’s PRISM program. PRISM’s existence was revealed when The Washington Post and The Guardian published leaked documents by Edward Snowden, which exposed the involvement of Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, AOL, Skype and Apple. A source told the Post that with PRISM, the NSA can “quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.”
2004 Feb 4, The Pentagon canceled its so-called LifeLog project, an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person’s entire existence.
Run by Darpa, the Defense Department’s research arm, LifeLog aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, the plane tickets bought, the e-mail sent and received. Out of this seemingly endless ocean of information, computer scientists would plot distinctive routes in the data, mapping relationships, memories, events and experiences.LifeLog’s backers said the all-encompassing diary could have turned into a near-perfect digital memory, giving its users computerized assistants with an almost flawless recall of what they had done in the past. But civil libertarians immediately pounced on the project when it debuted last spring, arguing that LifeLog could become the ultimate tool for profiling potential enemies of the state.
On same day Zuckerberg at Harvard set up Facebook. In June former Napster and Plaxo employee Sean Parker, who assumed himself as the “President” of Facebook was seeking investors for Facebook. He approached Reid Hoffma, CEO of LinkedIn who declined to invest in the social media platform “because of the potential for conflict of interest with his duties as LinkedIn CEO.”
He redirected Parker to Peter Thiel who he knew from the days of PayPal (both are considered as the members of PayPal Mafia). Parker and Mark really got along and Thiel agreed to back Facebook.
2004- Thiels’ Founders Fund was one of the earliest investors in Facebook. Facebook’s second round of funding came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel’s manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel. One of the Accel Partners’ key areas of expertise are in “data mining technologies.” Breyer and Louie also served on the board of R&D firm BBN Technologies, which was one of those companies responsible for the rise of the internet. In-Q-Tel’s board member Dr. Anita Jones also joined the firm.
Posted by: Kay Fabe | Jun 8 2020 23:10 utc | 140
Kay Fabe’s history of the internet is great.
To add, from the ground. Way back when, the idea that citizen journalism (local reports, etc.) would create a new media-sphere .. didn’t happen. Repression, individuals couldn’t make it, got no support, or only a mix of of insults and hoorays, or became bored, tired of the whole scene, etc. The no. of independent pol. bloggers has been hugely reduced.
Even the enthusiasm for ‘sharing’ knowledge in non-political spheres, such a deciphering Sumerian texts (one area I followed and was amazed! finally to see this or that! mind blowing!) sort of died down, atrophied, or didn’t blossom as hoped.
Not that they are all gone today, but the share and communicate more impulse was eroded for lack of funding, communal support, discouraged by those in power in many fields who were married to competition, authoritarian moves to conserve positions of power, or were just suspicious of employees, ordinary citizens, ‘going off the reservation’ aka questioning the conventional wisdom set up in a top-down structure.
Really only old-time bloggers are left to ‘trust’ – unfortunately they are dependent on MSM information, which is very carefully and rigorously censored, deceptively cherry-picked, molded, spun.
The result is that even with huge expenditure of time and thought on some topic, like the Skripal Saga, no conclusion emerges except that the ‘Official Story’ is BS. There is no alternative, plausible, coherent, narrative. Citizen journalists, commentators can’t get it together, because: fractioning, no central repository, no central coordination, etc., nothing is ever established, they (we..) argue and quarrel and can’t come up with anything solid. The PTB observe, take it for granted, smirk, the internet is their ever-lasting friend.
Posted by: Noirette | Jun 9 2020 18:28 utc | 167
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