Paranoid

I wouldn't say that I'm a generally paranoid person, but I have wondered whether some of those hangup phone calls I get every now and again are secret CIA calls made to capture my vocalization of "hello" --- Then the CIA could catalog this captured audio for use in voice mapping... kind of like that scene from A Clear and Present Danger. My fear of this has waned in recent years as the evidence of CIA incompetence in intelligence gathering has presented itself. Although, maybe they were too busy capturing my "hello" to thwart 9/11 and refine pre-war intelligence. I swear, I'm not paranoid... but that doesn't mean people AREN'T following me.

Nevertheless, this post has nothing to do with my questions about dropped phone calls... what it does have to do with is the social networking site TheFaceBook. I found this little article which claims that a significant portion of the venture capital money ($12.7 Million) that Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg received to build TheFaceBook, came from Accel Partners whose manager sits on a number of boards, but has close relations with the CEO of In-Q-Tel. In-Q-Tel is a venture capital firm run by the CIA whose mission includes - "nurturing data mining technologies". The article goes on to speculate about an even larger conspiracy relating to the Information Awareness Office whose funding was cut following an congressional investigation into the legality of it's activities as they related to American civil liberties. It was seen as an Orwellian arm of the US Government.

Information from TheFaceBook has been used by Universities and local police to investigate student misconduct. My sister (who attends Penn State) informed me that a group created on TheFaceBook for individuals who charged onto the field at the conclusion of the Penn State vs. Ohio State game was used by administrators and local police to issue fines to students.

Is TheFaceBook a secret government funded operation aimed at collecting details about unwitting American college students? Perhaps. It seems like a few too many degrees of separation to be considered an obvious connection. I'd like to take some more time to investigate some of this poster's sources. Regardless, the portions of TheFaceBook's privacy policy (which no one bothers to read) the author quotes are definitely cause for concern.

Comments

[Raja]

Paul don't ask me how it is that I came across this article seven months after you posted it but i felt the need to comment on it nonetheless. I hate to nitpick (acutally who am i kidding, we both know i love to pick out fallacies!) but you made an inaccurate deduction. In-Q-Tel isn't run by the CIA. Yes they have a strong bond with each other. Yes a great deal of money is exchanged between the CIA and In-Q-Tel. Yes In-Q-Tel's creation was heavily supported the CIA. But the CIA merely invests in what to date accounts for 77% of In-Q-Tel's portfolio. Decisions made by the venture capitalists at In-Q-Tel are not directed, swayed, or inspired by anyting coming from the CIA. The venture capitalists do however focus primarily on those technologies that would be beneficial to CIA and military uses. In-Q-Tel has a great deal more autonomy than you lead readers to infer from your piece. Nonetheless, nice little Lone Gunmen-esque conspiracy theory.