US Intelligence admits Facebook, MySpace ties

Admission confirms long-held suspicions of intelligence links to big internet companies

James Corbett
Corbett Report

August 22, 2007

In an online article yesterday, the Financial Times broke the news that a senior spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence in the United States has confirmed that his office has reached out to the CEOs of Facebook and MySpace to help them develop a new social networking site for spies. According to the article, the offer came for the CEOs to attend a conference being organized by the DNI and the National Security Alliance — billed as a public-private intelligence group — although "so far Mark Zuckerburg, the CEO of Facebook, has declined." The offer itself is of note, as there have long been concerns about the relationship between the intelligence apparatus of the United States and various big internet companies, inlcuding most notably Facebook and Google. As the article notes, "the Central Intelligence Agency recently used Facebook to help boost applications for the national clandestine service...spark[ing] concerns that the CIA was monitoring members, which the agency denies."

The Information Awareness Office sought to implement data mining techniques to gain information about the public. It was banned by Congress in 2003, but Facebook venture capital money has ties to the program.
Facebook venture capital leads back to the Information Awareness Office.

But the CIA-Facebook connection is much deeper than that gloss would suggest. As numerous researchers have demonstrated, Facebook was in fact helped into existence by $12.7 million of venture capital money from Accel Partners, whose manager, James Breyer, has multiple links to CIA venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, including ties to Dr. Anita Jones. Dr. Jones' links go back to the Department of Defense and DARPA, the office that brought you the Orwellian government agency known as the Information Awareness Office, which failed to go away despite being banned by Congress.

Indeed, Facebook is not the only ubiquitous website to have deep ties to the intelligence community. Google has long been known to have deep ties to the CIA, as noted in an article at HSToday.us, an industry publication marketed to homeland security professionals. The article quoted Robert David Steele, a veteran intelligence official, who revealed that Google "has been taking money and direction for elements of the US Intelligence Community, including the Office of Research and Development at the Central Intelligence Agency, In-Q-Tel, and in all probability, both the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Army's Intelligence and Security Command." The article goes on to point out that Google received $25 million in equity funding back in 1999 from an investor with a "close relationship" to In-Q-Tel, the CIA venture capital firm whose ties to Facebook have already been outlined. In-Q-Tel also nurtured Keyhole Inc., a company which was acquired by Google in 2004 and whose mapping technology eventually became Google Earth. Robert Steele confirmed all of this in a 2006 interview with Alex Jones, an American radio talk show host.

It is of course no surprise that the CIA and other government institutions seek to utilize web 2.0 apps to improve their credibility, but their relationship with the most popular websites is not skin-deep and not by coincidence, as we have seen. Now the DNI is taking back some of the investment it has made in sites like Google and Facebook by way of "A-space" which, the Financial Times article notes, will include web-based email, document creation, modification and recommendation, as well as access to an intelligence wikipedia and a social bookmarking application. The DNI wants the service, which will initially be offered on a "voluntary" basis—implying it will eventually be mandatory—to be utilized by "foreign intelligence services" as well, although "there has been some resistance."