There was another DARPA program that also ‘disappeared’ one year before Facebook made its debut. Often cited as the precursor to Facebook. The Information Awareness Office (IAO) brought together several DARPA surveillance and information technology projects including MDDS which provided Google’s seed funding.
The stated aim of the IAO was to gather and store the personal information of every US citizen, including their personal emails, social networks, lifestyles, credit card records, phone calls, medical records, without, of course, the need for a search warrant. This information would funnel back to intelligence agencies, under the guise of predicting and preventing terrorist incidents before they happened. Reminiscent of Project Camelot’s early warning radar system for left wing revolutionaries.
Despite the government, apparently, abandoning their gambit for total information awareness over ordinary Americans, the core of the project survived. I draw your attention to Palantir, the spooky data analytics firm founded by Facebook’s board member, Peter Thiel. Portrayed as science fiction in the film Minority Report, Palantir’s predictive policing analytics have been deployed extensively against insurgents in Iraq and by police departments in the US. The CIA would join the FBI, DoD and NSA in becoming a Palantir customer in 2005, later acquiring an equity stake in the firm through their venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. At the time of his first meetings with Facebook, Theil had been working on resurrecting several controversial DARPA programs.
The CIA would join the FBI, DoD and NSA in becoming a Palantir customer in 2005, later acquiring an equity stake in the firm through their venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. At the time of his first meetings with Facebook, Theil had been working on resurrecting several controversial DARPA programs. By the same token, if Facebook didn’t exist it would need to be invented by the Pentagon. To achieve this, you would need to embed government officials in Facebook’s leadership and governance. Cherry picking your candidates from, say, the US Department of Treasury, and launching the platform from an academic institution, Harvard University, for example.
According to the official record, Zuckerberg built the first version of Facebook at Harvard in 2004. Harvard’s President at that time was economist Lawrence Summers, a career public servant who served as Chief Economist at the World Bank, Secretary of the Treasury under the Clinton Administration, and 8th Director of the National Economic Council. Summers’ protege, Sheryl Sandberg, is Facebook’s COO since 2008. Sandberg was at the dials during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and predictably, manages Facebook’s Washington relationships. Before Facebook, Sandberg served as Chief of Staff at the Treasury under Summers and began her career as an economist, also under Summer, at the World Bank. Another Summers-Harvard-Treasury connection is Facebook’s Board Member, Nancy Killefer, who served under Summers as CFO at the Treasury Department. Facebook’s Chief Business Officer, Marne Levine also served under Summers at the Department of Treasury, National Economic Council and Harvard University.
The icing on the cake, however, is former DARPA Director, Regina Dugan, who joined Facebook’s hardware lab, Building 8, in 2016, to roll out a number of mysterious DARPA funded-projects that would hack people’s minds with brain-computer interfaces. Dugan currently serves as CEO of Welcome Leap. A technology spin-off of the world’s most powerful health foundation, concerned with the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), including transdermal vaccines. Welcome Leap brings DARPA’s military-intelligence innovation to “the most pressing global health challenges of our time,” called COVID-19. Connecting the dots: Welcome Leap was launched at the World Economic Forum, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its founder is Jeremy Farrar, former SAGE member, long-time collaborator of Chris Witty and Neil Ferguson and the patsy taking the wrap for the Wuhan leak cover-up story.
The pandemic largely happened in the flawed doomsday modelling of epidemiologists, it happened across the corporate media, and it happened on social media platforms like Facebook. It wasn’t so much a pandemic, but the social contagion experiment playing out in real time. But there was more than just social media manipulating our emotional states; fear, shame, and scapegoating was rife throughout as the British government deployed behavioural economics to, essentially, nudge the public towards compliance. Launched under David Cameron’s Government, the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) – affectionately known as the Nudge Unit – are a team of crack psychologists and career civil servants tasked with positively influencing appropriate behaviour with tiny changes. But according to whose measure of appropriate behaviour, exactly? A clue lies in the fact that BIT was directed by Sir Mark Sedwill during the first lockdown. He’s one of Britain’s most senior national security advisors with links to M15 and MI6.
That’s an intelligence operative ruling by psychological manipulation. Though we are led to believe that in a democracy – government is an agency of the people and parliament is given force of law by the will of the people. Overtime, however, the intelligence state (has) lost touch with reality, as the focus of its (earlier) “counterinsurgency” programs (has) shifted from foreign to domestic populations, from national security risks to ordinary citizens. Particularly in the wake of 9/11, when the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, began mapping out the Internet. Before anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, you had civil rights and anti-war activists. The ideology guiding dissent may have changed, but the military tactics used to counter it remain the same.
This is, of course, nothing new for the Chinese. The convergence of big tech data analytics with social credits has been put to good use by the CCP to weed out and punish dissidents who can find themselves held indefinitely without charge or trial in political re-education camps for holding the wrong set of political beliefs. But it must also be accepted, these Orwellian methods of repression did not originate in China. The encroachment of the CIA onto the public sphere has been happening since the 1960’s, when the US imported decades of counterinsurgency from the soviet satellites to tackle the anti-war and civil rights movements. This was ramped up in the wake of 9/11 and now through the backdoor of COVID-19 total information awareness is coming home to roost, as China’s social credits system has been implemented on the back of the Green Pass.