DARPA, LifeLog, Facebook, et al

This will be a multi-part OP, please refrain from responding until I have all parts up, thank you in advance.

As a result of a post by esteemed ATS member IgnoranceIsntBliss, over in Part V of the Q thread, this thread has come into being.

Back in 2004, DARPA put an end to a project called LifeLog:

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.

...

Researchers close to the project say they're not sure why it was dropped late last month. Darpa hasn't provided an explanation for LifeLog's quiet cancellation. "A change in priorities" is the only rationale agency spokeswoman Jan Walker gave to Wired News.

However, related Darpa efforts concerning software secretaries and mechanical brains are still moving ahead as planned.

Pentagon Kills LifeLog Project - Wired, 02.04.04

Guess what else happened the very day this Wired article was published?

Facebook is an American online social media and social networking service company based in Menlo Park, California. Its website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.

Facebook - Wikipidea

Facebook has recently been in the news and indeed Mark Zuckerberg recently gave testimony to congress:



What came out of that testimony is still being chewed over in various news articles and internet forums, but what stands out are a few key factors.

There is an extreme amount of distrust among many members of the public for government and corporations in as far as what is done with information gathered about each individual and what is done with said information. With whom is it shared, what safeguards are placed on it, and who owns the information?

Looking back into the research, it seems hat these questions have been around and look to not have been addressed in a satisfactory manner.

It also seems as though LifeLog was not the only such project from that time period:

The emergent interest in the concept of lifelogging stems from the growing capacity to store and retrieve traces of one’s life via computing devices. Products to assist lifelogging are already on the market,6 but the technology that will enable people fully and continuously to document their entire lives is still in the research and development phase.7 Creative inventors like Steve Mann have led the way.8 “MyLifeBits” is the name of a Microsoft Company–sponsored full-life lifelogging project conceived in 1998 to explore the potential of digitally chronicling a person’s life.9 MyLifeBits focuses on preserving the life of veteran researcher Gordon Bell.

Back in the late nineties to early 2k, technology was still very clunky and not as ubiquitous as it has since become. Take a look at cell phone technology from the time period:



Compared to the average smartphone of today, nothing at the time period could compare in capability or sophistication.

Lifelog innovators are promising to better the ancients with their memory machines. The idea of a memory machine was once pure fantasy. 17 But technologists predict that full-life lifelogging devices will one day be integrated into everyday existence, becoming as ordinary as telephones.

I think it is inarguable that we have arrived at that point today; indeed we have likely been here for a fair few years.


As for what was envisioned by DARPA for LifeLog:

In 2003, DARPA solicited proposals for a lifelog technology project with possible military applications. The lifelog technology DARPA conceived “can be used as a stand-alone system to serve as a powerful automated multimedia diary and scrapbook.”23 Moreover, “[b]y using a search engine interface,” the user of the lifelog DARPA hoped to create could “easily retrieve a specific thread of past transactions, or recall an experience from a few seconds ago or from many years earlier in as much detail as is desired, including imagery, audio, or video replay of the event.”24 Project LifeLog was short-lived; but during its evocative span, it invited the public to imagine the greater effectiveness of military commanders equipped with lifelogs and with access to lifelog data concerning the experiences of their troops.25

All sounds very noble and high minded, does it not?

And yet, we know that any such system is open to potential abuse. Indeed, the possibility of abuse is what is said to have shut down DARPA's project.

One person’s comprehensive, full-life lifelog would inevitably capture biography and expressions of the lives of othe persons. How, if at all, should the capture and surveillance implicit in personal sousveillance be regulated?32 How can security against harmful falsification, deletion, data breaches, or identity theft be assured? Would lifelogs turn individuals into surveillance partners of government? How much access should the government have to an individual’s lifelog for national security, law enforcement, public health, tax compliance, and routine administrative purposes? The ethical and legal implications of lifelogging merit the serious attention it is beginning to receive.

Unfortunately, I odn't think those implications were ever adequately considered.

One final paragrapah from this paper before I move on:

Comprehensive full-life lifelogging technology does not yet exist outside the laboratory and is not, therefore, ripe for legal rules and regulation. Yet ethical limitations and design parameters suggest themselves.101 No one should be required to keep a lifelog. No one should be suspected for not keeping a lifelog. Personal lifelogs should be deemed the property of the person or persons who create them. No one should record or photograph others for a lifelog without the consent of the person or their legal guardian. A counter-technology to block lifelog surveillance should be designed and marketed along with lifeloggers. The owner/subject of a lifelog should be able to delete or add content at will. No one should copy a lifelog or transfer a lifelog to a third party without the consent of its owner.

D redging up the Past:
Lifelogging, Memory, and Surveillance
Anita L. Allen(direct .pdf link)

...to be continued.

...continued from above.

Taking a look at another paper, similar concerns are raised:

In this paper we look at the technological possibilities and constraints for lifelogging tools, and set out some of the most important privacy, identity and empowerment-related issues. We argue that some of the privacy concerns are overblown, and that much research and commentary on lifelogging has made the unrealistic assumption that the information gathered is for private use, whereas, in a more socially-networked online world, much of it will have public functions and will be voluntarily released into the public domain.

The possibility that some of the concerns which were considered to be overblown was based on four key factors:

Certainly the dangers exist, but the discussion so far is framed on possibly false assumptions that lifelogs will (a) consist of personal information, (b) be universal in scope, (c) include information that has traditionally been held private by owners, and (d) become a mainstream activity, possibly via social pressure. The falsity of any one of those assumptions would undermine the arguments against lifelogging, and it is quite conceivable that all four of them are false.

Lifelogging: Privacy and empowerment with memories for life

Take a look at the last statement of that paragraph, “The falsity of any one of those assumptions would undermine the arguments against lifelogging, and it is quite conceivable that all four of them are false.”

Now let's look at the statements as they apply to concerns with this type of project:

(a) consist of personal information
(b) be universal in scope
(c) include information that has traditionally been held private by owners
(d) become a mainstream activity, possibly via social pressure

If we look at Facebook, and we seek to apply the 4 above considerations, does Facebook consist of personal information, is it universal in scope, does it include information that has been traditionally held by private owners, and has it become a mainstream and is it susceptible to social pressures?

Does Facebook represent a dangerous application of this type of activity?

Thank you for your time and consideration.

What says ATS?

Considering that the INTERNET itself was a DARPA project to begin with, it doesn't surprise me that its main players would be part of the same. Googles CIA links have already been established elsewhere and I'm sure Twitters Government links will also come to LIGHT. What better way to create a surveillance society than with everyone wholeheartedly embracing it.

S+F

a reply to: jadedANDcynical

If my goal were to compile a dossier on everyone I could with as little work as possible, how would I do it?

Well, very similar to LifeLog (FB).

Great thread and I can think of none better (besides maybe IIB) to compose it. Well done.

a reply to: Skyfloating

With regards to Google and the CIA:

Two decades ago, the US intelligence community worked closely with Silicon Valley in an effort to track citizens in cyberspace. And Google is at the heart of that origin story. Some of the research that led to Google’s ambitious creation was funded and coordinated by a research group established by the intelligence community to find ways to track individuals and groups online.

...

There was already a long history of collaboration between America’s best scientists and the intelligence community, from the creation of the atomic bomb and satellite technology to efforts to put a man on the moon.

In fact, the internet itself was created because of an intelligence effort: In the 1970s, the agency responsible for developing emerging technologies for military, intelligence, and national security purposes—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—linked four supercomputers to handle massive data transfers. It handed the operations off to the National Science Foundation (NSF) a decade or so later, which proliferated the network across thousands of universities and, eventually, the public, thus creating the architecture and scaffolding of the World Wide Web.

...

In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

...

It was the beginning of what in just a few years’ time would become Google. The two intelligence-community managers charged with leading the program met regularly with Brin as his research progressed, and he was an author on several other research papers that resulted from this MDDS grant before he and Page left to form Google.

The grants allowed Brin and Page to do their work and contributed to their breakthroughs in web-page ranking and tracking user queries. Brin didn’t work for the intelligence community—or for anyone else. Google had not yet been incorporated. He was just a Stanford researcher taking advantage of the grant provided by the NSA and CIA through the unclassified MDDS program.

...

Google has said in the past that it was not funded or created by the CIA. For instance, when stories circulated in 2006 that Google had received funding from the intelligence community for years to assist in counter-terrorism efforts, the company told Wired magazine founder John Battelle, “The statements related to Google are completely untrue.”

Did the CIA directly fund the work of Brin and Page, and therefore create Google? No. But were Brin and Page researching precisely what the NSA, the CIA, and the intelligence community hoped for, assisted by their grants? Absolutely.

Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance

Thanks for creating this thread J&C, star and flagged.

Just had to comment that I had 6 out of 7 o those 80s to 90s phones!

a reply to: JinMI
and
a reply to: RelSciHistItSufi

Thank you both very much!

Now, as to Facebook's beginnings:

Facebook's first round of venture capital funding ($US500,000) came from former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel. Author of anti-multicultural tome 'The Diversity Myth', he is also on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC.

The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its 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, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies".

Facebook - the CIA conspiracy

Excellent thread, J&C,
It wouldn't surprise me to discover the Clowns own most of Silicon Valley.

Thanks!

Note that Myspace is what took cyberspace by storm well ahead of facebook. Then Rupert Murdoch bought it and literally torpedoed it. It was wicked for activism. I never could get the same feeling, or ability to nudge materials out of the echo chamber in facebook like i could in Myspace, nor get past the name "Facebook" LOL. Just never got into it so with the myspace front out it was a major setback and I know others from back then pre-Fox Myspace felt it too.

And here we are. Even here. Top-Shelf Thread, J&C.

The international deep-state architects weren't fooling around when they've stated their goals:

“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values.

Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities. ”

― Zbigniew Brzeziński, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era

“In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.”

― Zbigniew Brzeziński, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era

Just imagine a media-slick dashboard--a few pics pop-up of you and a bunch of quotes and posts you've made on FB and Twitter and ATS.

And voice hearers (targeted individuals reported since the first freudian analysis in the 1800s of

People seeing through eyes
All knowing voices
Physical forced speechmovements
Internal organ manipulation
Alien implants
Alot more making my thumb sore

Im saying people who dont research this or experience are left to think circuits and satallites are the only things rationaly possible to accomplish this.

Man if i could record my subvocal speech when they converse or abuse me. Ever seen holographic people in your eyes? I have. Ive seen a real life demon or creature. Which later told me it was an energy shapeshifter.

a reply to: The GUT

Muchos grassy-ass, good sir!

You bring up a very salient point, and that is the manipulation and control of those who's data has been absconded with. Though they slyly got us to give them what could never had been taken had they chose a different means of gathering the information.

The big Zbig was a wily ol' fox, wasn't he?

Now, I wonder if any of FB's execs have ties to companies such as In-Q-Tel and others? We know they got spooky money, how likely is it that the Company isn't watching over its interests?

a reply to: jadedANDcynical

I'd say that's a big 10-4 for Big Brother. I also say--and with mucho gusto--"Eff "Em. Say it while we still can lol.

originally posted by: Skyfloating
Considering that the INTERNET itself was a DARPA project to begin with, it doesn't surprise me that its main players would be part of the same. Googles CIA links have already been established elsewhere and I'm sure Twitters Government links will also come to LIGHT. What better way to create a surveillance society than with everyone wholeheartedly embracing it.

S+F

As if $25 Million from Kleiner-Perkins (Al Gore), Stanford University, Andy Bechtolsheim, etc "wasnt" good enough...
googlepress.blogspot.com...

They also got startup cash from DARPA, NSA, CIA, NASA and NSF.
medium.com...

And lookie here:

The next Facebook data center is going to be built in Richmond, Virginia, in the same technology park that houses a massive QTS data center inside a former Qimonda processor plant, Richmond Times-Dispatch reported, citing multiple anonymous sources.

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe is expected to announce the $1 billion Facebook project, codenamed “Project Echo,” in the White Oak Technology Park Thursday morning, the report said.

Facebook to Build $1B Data Center in Virginia: Report

Also in the same article and possibly of interest:

Perhaps more importantly, Richmond is about 100 miles northeast of Virginia Beach, the place where Marea, a new US-Europe submarine cable owned by Facebook, Microsoft, and Telxius, lands. Its ability to transmit up to 160 terabits per second makes 4,000-mile Marea the highest-capacity cable to cross the Atlantic. Work to lay the cable -- whose other end lands in Bilbao, Spain -- was completed last month.

a reply to: jadedANDcynical

Just want to say as always you have made a great presentation J&C. Glad you brought this to the board.

a reply to: liveandlearn

Thank you so much, I really appreciate all the kind words!

Looking at FB's current BOD:

Mark Zuckerberg Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Sheryl Sandberg Chief Operating Officer

Marc Andreessen

Erskine B. Bowles

Kenneth I. Chenault

Susan Desmond-Hellmann

Reed Hastings

Jan Koum

Peter A. Thiel

Several interesting companies in the CVs of the members of the board that might bear a closer look.

a reply to: jadedANDcynical

I can see a dashboard like Thiel's Palantir. Taking all kinds of different views and relationships to provide actionable intelligence on any target.

Anyone heard anything lately of the mysterious , huge Data Center in Utah ?
Thought not..

The Utah Data Center, also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center

Utah Data Center

originally posted by: jadedANDcynical
a reply to: liveandlearn

Thank you so much, I really appreciate all the kind words!

Looking at FB's current BOD:

Mark Zuckerberg Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Sheryl Sandberg Chief Operating Officer

Marc Andreessen

Erskine B. Bowles

Kenneth I. Chenault

Susan Desmond-Hellmann

Reed Hastings

Jan Koum

Peter A. Thiel

Several interesting companies in the CVs of the members of the board that might bear a closer look.

Wasn't FB COO Sheryl Sandberg Obama S.E.S.?