NEED to KNOW: Big Brothers, Big Facebook: Your Orwellian Community

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NEED to KNOW: Big Brothers, Big Facebook: Your Orwellian Community

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More and more people are questioning the integrity of Facebook.com, and, as it turns out, with VERY good reason.

See a brilliant Flash movie outlining the history of Facebook.com here - and this has sound:
http://www.albumoftheday.com/facebook/

The script follows below.

First, I'd like to share my personal experience of Facebook.com. I signed up to Facebook recently, because a friend invited me. I'd heard about it, but didn't know it's purpose reached beyond networking for college students. So, when I went to sign up, I was a little surprised that aspects of it made me feel embarrassed! An intuitive warning!
- but I filled out the form anyway, thinking I was discovering a new form of 'college' lingo.

For example, under the required field titled "Looking For" –re. selecting from a choice of reasons for joining Facebook, besides "Friendship" it offers "Random Play" and "What ever I can get".

I went on, –curiouser and curiouser. I found the section on how we 'credit' how we know someone on the Friend's List to be very limiting and inadequate for me.

Then, there are options for contacting friends to invite them to your Friends List: "Send an Email" - okay. –but another option is to "Poke" a friend, which seems to indicate that one would contact a friend for no purpose!

I am unimpressed by this use of LANGUAGE.


But then, and here Facebook.com's agenda becomes seriously questionable –in the section where members click to invite friends to join their Friend's network, all one need do is enter one's own email address, and a list of names with email addresses comes up. These were random names of people I knew– which led me to think these people were ALL members of Facebook.com! I sent some of them an invitation to link to my page - just to test it out. To my astonishment, the automatic invitation went out with the heading "I HAVE ADDED YOU to my Friend's List" - which I hadn't done!
This is totally misleading - especially since this is supposed to be an "invitation"! 

Worst of all, I've since found out that only a few of those people whose names and email addresses appeared on MY Facebook.com PROFILE PAGE are actually members of Facebook.com!

I have no idea how some of my friend's email address appeared on that site if they weren't already registered!

I'm on Mac OSX, which has Firewall built in and I have a program called Little Snitch which is supposed to "call home" - meaning, alert me– if someone is trying to get into my computer. Nothing happened to indicate a trespass to my computer.


So, I've begun an investigation, and, lo and behold! it turns out Facebook.com is a US government initiatives. –QUOTE, from the script, below: According to Wikipedia, "the IAO has the
stated mission to gather as much information as possible about
everyone, in a centralized location, for easy perusal by the United
States government, including (though not limited to) Internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver's licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and any other available data."


And, that is not all! I decided to delete my membership - and I can't !

I can only "deactivate" my membership!

So, be forewarned.

And read on! 

Big Brothers, Big Facebook: Your Orwellian Community



A few days ago I stumbled across a couple articles mentioning
TheFacebook, and a little start-up capital they happened to get in the sum of $13 million. The number intrigued me, so I did a little more research, a little more stumbling, and found something that even I still have a hard time accepting. So, here's what I came up with:

(p.s.
- I'm hoping that someone from EFF or people concerned with privacy
rights will take notice. This really worries me and a lot of my
friends.)

TheFacebook.com, created in February of 2004 by 21 year old Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, is a student social network now active at more than 800 campuses, with more than 2.8 million registered users. [1] Among its features, TheFacebook allows a user to upload a picture of themselves and can include information about their
favorite music, books, movies, their address, phone number, e-mail,
clubs, jobs, educational history, and even political affiliations.
Facebook is extremely popular, attracting on average 80 percent of a
school's undergraduate population. However, there are some questions
raised regarding privacy concerns on the site, and when some digging is done to find out who is really behind the site's management, there are more questions than answers.



The first venture capital money to come into TheFacebook, $500,000 worth, came from venture capitalist Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of Paypal. [1] A Stanford graduate and former columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Thiel is author of the book "The Diversity Myth," [2] which received praises from notable neo-conservatives such as William Kristol. [3] In fact, Thiel is on the board of the radical conservative group VanguardPAC. [4]

Further funding came in the form of $12.7 million from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel's manager James Breyer was former chair of the National Venture Capital Association (NVAC). [1] Breyer served on NVAC's board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, [5] a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. [6] This firm works in various aspects of information technology and intelligence, including most notably "nurturing data mining technologies."

Breyer has also served on the board of BBN Technologies, a research and development firm known for spearheading the ARPANET, or what we know today as the Internet. [7] In October of 2004, Dr. Anita Jones climbed on board, becoming a part of a firm packed with leaders from other areas of Silicon Valley's venture capital community, including none other than Gilman Louie. But what is most interesting is Dr. Jones' experience prior to joining BBN.

Jones herself served on the Board of Directors for In-Q-Tel, and was
previously the Director of Defense Research and Engineering for the
U.S. Department of Defense. Her responsibilities included serving as an advisor to the Secretary of Defense and overseeing the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).



While the nearly $13 million that came from Accel to fund The Facebook certainly looks suspicious and unfortunately disturbing after reviewing all of this information, the only problem on the surface seems to be the appearance of some incestuous relationships between the Pentagon, the CIA, and these venture capital firms. But this goes further than just the initial appearances. DARPA shot to national fame in 2002 when John Markoff of the New York Times announced the existence of the "Information Awareness Office" (IAO). [8] According to Wikipedia, "the IAO has the stated mission to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralized location, for easy perusal by the United States government, including (though not limited to) Internet activity,
credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver's licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and any other available data." [9] Protests came from civil libertarians on both the right and the left who saw the IAO as a new Orwellian arm of the United States government. After Congress investigated DARPA's project, funding was cut off and IAO was essentially dead in the water.

The Information Awareness Office seems to have survived some of its original purposes in a mutated form, found in today's Facebook. In fact, one of IAO's original example technologies included "human network analysis and behavior model building engines," [10] a surprising echo of the social networking mapping that Facebook does using SVG visualizations. [11] Add that to the information that Facebook collects and compare it to the startlingly similar goal of the IAO. It appears at first glance that DoD, along with the CIA, has managed to circumvent its previous Congressionally established limitations and find corporate sponsorship for its programs, under the thin veil of a useful social network for unwitting college students.

And those college students continue to log on to TheFacebook, completely unaware of the massive affronts to their privacy. The so-called "Privacy Policy" [12] of Facebook includes a statement saying that they "may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship." It goes on to say that, "We may be required to disclose customer information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or
court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law or to protect our interests or property. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies."

Some of the aspects of the privacy policy are downright creepy and confusing. This particular gem is especially disturbing: "Thefacebook also collects information about you from other sources, such as newspapers and instant messaging services. This information is gathered regardless of your use of the Web Site." And there's no telling when the privacy policy may change. As of when this
was written (July 1, 2005), the policy was effective as of June 28,
2005.

Who knows where the information they collect about these three million college students, alumni, and professors is going, or
what they intend to do with it. The fact that these companies and
agencies are all so closely related, and that The Facebook has almost no organizational transparency are all cause for concern. Hopefully we can soon uncover the truth.

Read the original article here:

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=34949

and

http://www.thecolorofinfinity.com/blog/arc...rothers_bi.html