… the evidence which details the creation of today’s mainstream social media platforms by the U.S. military (DARPA) and intelligence community, of which Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook played a crucial role, though the full story extends beyond U.S. borders. Some of the key players in this story include Michael McKibben, CEO of Leader Technologies, Doug Gage, former manager of DARPA’s LifeLog surveillance program, Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University, Peter Thiel, political activist and billionaire founder of PayPal, Sheryl Sandberg, a technology executive and COO of Meta (Facebook) and former Harvard student, and James Chandler, former Harvard Law Professor. Some of the organizations involved include In-Q-Tel, a CIA investment company, Palantir, a revenue-bleeding data analysis company whose sole client was the CIA for some time, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), The Highlands Group, the Naval Intelligence Net Assessment Office, and Accel, a venture capital firm.
Among the plethora of documents Snowden released to journalists were those detailing intimate relationships between Big Tech and the intelligence community,1 such as those illustrating the NSA’s patently unconstitutional PRISM domestic surveillance and data collection program which stands in gross violation of American’s 4th amendment rights.2 After Edward Snowden leaked NSA slides in 2013, two names became synonymous with the agency’s vast online spying powers: Upstream and PRISM. Those two types of surveillance work in different ways but pose similar threats to the privacy of Internet users around the world, including innocent Americans. Both also fall under a surveillance authority known as Section 702 , a provision of law that was enacted by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 and is set to expire at the end of 2017.
In early 2017, the intelligence community rebranded these two kinds of surveillance, referring to them as “upstream” and “downstream.” The names may have changed, but the surveillance is the same. Upstream surveillance involves collecting communications as they travel over the Internet backbone, and downstream surveillance (formerly PRISM) involves collection of communications from companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. Documents leaked by Snowden show that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple give the NSA direct access to its users’ information. According to the documents, Dropbox also joined this list (one of the many reasons we recommend our readers stick with secure alternatives to this service).