https://investigatemagazine.co.nz/1601/is-facebook-the-new-big-brother/
From Article
The first CEO of In-Q-Tel was Gilman Louie, and he and his CIA subsidiary were appointed with seven others to the Board of Directors of the National Venture Capital Association of America in 2004. The chairman of the NVCA was James Breyer of Accel Partners, and one of his first tasks that year was to give a young student named Mark Zuckerberg US$13 million in venture capital. What for? Well, in February 2004, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, a new social networking service designed to help fellow students stay in touch with each other.
James Breyer was also chairman of BBN, a Silicon Valley company whose Arpanet technology had helped kick off the internet with the assistance of the US Defence agencies. Joining Breyer at BBN in 2004 were both In-Q-Tel’s Gilman Louie and Dr Anita Jones, a colleague of Gilman Louie’s at In-Q-Tel, and a former advisor to DARPA, or the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency.
In Facebook terms, these CIA and US Defence Department types were just one degree of separation from Facebook itself, and their chairman James Breyer was one of the initial bankrollers of Facebook.
One of DARPA’s projects was “scalable social network analysis”, or SSNA, which researcher Sean McGahan described this way: “The purpose of the SSNA algorithms program is to extend techniques of social network analysis to assist with distinguishing potential terrorist cells from legitimate groups of people … In order to be successful SSNA will require information on the social interactions of the majority of people around the globe. Since the Defense Department cannot easily distinguish between peaceful citizens and terrorists, it will be necessary for them to gather data on innocent civilians as well as on potential terrorists.”
As New Zealand Herald journalist Matt Greenop reported, DARPA and its new Information Awareness Office (whose official US government logo came straight from The X-Files) were planning to strip-mine the internet in search of whether ordinary citizens were somehow, through “friends of friends”, linked to subversive or terrorist organisations.
“The IAO has the stated mission to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralised 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.”
If you’ve been paying attention, you will note the mission statement is remarkably similar to the former covert PROMIS project. Only this time, US intelligence agencies have been able to do it largely in the open.
But it’s not just US intelligence that might have an interest in knowing the whereabouts and friends-lists of Facebook users. In 2008 Chinese industrialist and People’s Liberation Army frontman Li Ka-shing purchased a US$120 million stake in Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook.