As I have said from day one which is why I have never had a personal facebook, myspace, or twitter account. I urge everyone to share this story with everyone they know, as well as the other facebook stories I have covered.
Source
My loyal readers may recall that DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has some grotesque tentacles: the Information Awareness Office (IAO); TIA (Total Information Awareness, renamed Terrorism Information Program); and TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System).
It is commonly believed that in 2003 an irate American people forced the government to stop these Orwellian command-and-control police state operations—or did they?
Congress stopped the IAO from gathering as much information as possible about everyone in a centralized nexus for easy spying by the United States government, including internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver’s licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and all other available data. The government’s plan was to emulate Communist East Germany’s STASI police state by getting mailmen, boy scouts, teachers, students and others to spy on everyone else. Children would be urged to spy on parents.
These layers of the mind control infrastructure were seemingly dead and buried. But was the stake actually driven through its evil heart? History leads us to believe that it was not.
Then shazam here comes the privacy killing juggernaut called Facebook.
Facebook, however, does what Chairman Mao, Joseph Stalin, or Adolf Hitler could not have dreamt of - it has a half billion people willingly doing a form of spy work on all their friends, family, neighbors, etc.—while enthusiastically revealing information on themselves. The huge database on these half a billion members (and non-members who are written about) is too much power for any private entity—but what if it is part of, or is accessed by, the military-industrial-national security-police state complex?
We all know that “he who pays the check, calls the shots,” therefore; whoever controls the purse strings controls the whole project. When it had less than a million or so participants, Facebook demonstrated the potential to do even more than IAO, TIA and TIPS combined. Facebook really exploded after its second round of funding—$12.7 million from the venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager, James Breyer, was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital front established by the CIA in 1999. In-Q-Tel is the same outfit that funds Google and other technological powerhouses. One of its specialties is “data mining technologies.”
Dr. Anita Jones, who joined the firm, also came from Gilman Louie and served on In-Q-Tel’s board. She had been director of Defense Research and Engineering for the U.S. Department of Defense. This link goes full circle because she was also an adviser to the secretary of defense, overseeing DARPA, which is responsible for high-tech, high-end development.
But as bad as the beginning of Facebook is, the parallels between the CIA’s backing of Google’s dream of becoming “the mind of God,” and the CIA’s funding of Facebook’s goal of knowing everything about everybody is anything but benign.
Furthermore, the CIA uses a Facebook group to recruit staff for its National Clandestine Service. Check it out if you dare.
Do not become a victim of this full frontal assault on your personal information. Think twice about putting your entire life on Facebook or by that matter on any social media site. None of it is ever private. Everything you put online stays online forever in a server farm somewhere for anyone to analyze you and the people you love. They do not care about your privacy at all and put great value on uncovering all they can about you. They have an agenda that will become more and more apparent to people as time goes by. Believe it or not there is a great change coming in our culture that many choose to be blind too. The mass loss of liberty and freedom we are experiencing is just a signal to the direction this is all going.
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Friday, October 22, 2010
Friday, September 3, 2010
How Zuckerberg Stole Facebook
I've posted before about facebook and zuckerberg, and then came across this article which just puts a nail in the coffin of this rat who clearly stole the idea and then quickly got venture capital from the big boys. It's amazing what you can do when your all part of the tribe!
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The origins of Facebook have been in dispute since the very week a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg launched the site as a Harvard sophomore on February 4, 2004.
Then called "thefacebook.com," the site was an instant hit. Now, six years later, the site has become one of the biggest web sites in the world, visited by 400 million people a month.
The controversy surrounding Facebook began quickly. A week after he launched the site in 2004, Mark was accused by three Harvard seniors of having stolen the idea from them.
This allegation soon bloomed into a full-fledged lawsuit, as a competing company founded by the Harvard seniors sued Mark and Facebook for theft and fraud, starting a legal odyssey that continues to this day.
New information uncovered by Silicon Alley Insider suggests that some of the complaints against Mark Zuckerberg are valid. It also suggests that, on at least one occasion in 2004, Mark used private login data taken from Facebook's servers to break into Facebook members' private email accounts and read their emails--at best, a gross misuse of private information. Lastly, it suggests that Mark hacked into the competing company's systems and changed some user information with the aim of making the site less useful.
The primary dispute around Facebook's origins centered around whether Mark had entered into an "agreement" with the Harvard seniors, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and a classmate named Divya Narendra, to develop a similar web site for them -- and then, instead, stalled their project while taking their idea and building his own.
The litigation never went particularly well for the Winklevosses.
In 2007, Massachusetts Judge Douglas P. Woodlock called their allegations "tissue thin." Referring to the agreement that Mark had allegedly breached, Woodlock also wrote, "Dorm room chit-chat does not make a contract." A year later, the end finally seemed in sight: a judge ruled against Facebook's move to dismiss the case. Shortly thereafter, the parties agreed to settle.
But then, a twist.
After Facebook announced the settlement, but before the settlement was finalized, lawyers for the Winklevosses suggested that the hard drive from Mark Zuckerberg's computer at Harvard might contain evidence of Mark's fraud. Specifically, they suggested that the hard drive included some damning instant messages and emails.
The judge in the case refused to look at the hard drive and instead deferred to another judge who went on to approve the settlement. But, naturally, the possibility that the hard drive contained additional evidence set inquiring minds wondering what those emails and IMs revealed. Specifically, it set inquiring minds wondering again whether Mark had, in fact, stolen the Winklevoss's idea, screwed them over, and then ridden off into the sunset with Facebook.
Unfortunately, since the contents of Mark's hard drive had not been made public, no one had the answers.
But now we have some.
Over the past two years, we have interviewed more than a dozen sources familiar with aspects of this story -- including people involved in the founding year of the company. We have also reviewed what we believe to be some relevant IMs and emails from the period. Much of this information has never before been made public. None of it has been confirmed or authenticated by Mark or the company.
Based on the information we obtained, we have what we believe is a more complete picture of how Facebook was founded. This account follows.
And what does this more complete story reveal?
We'll offer our own conclusions at the end. But first, here's the story:
In the fall of 2003, Harvard seniors Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra were on the lookout for a web developer who could bring to life an idea the three say Divya first had in 2002: a social network for Harvard students and alumni. The site was to be called HarvardConnections.com.
The three had been paying Victor Gao, another Harvard student, to do coding for the site, but at the beginning of the fall term Victor begged off the project. Victor suggested his own replacement: Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard sophomore from Dobbs Ferry, New York.
Back then, Mark was known at Harvard as the sophomore who had built Facemash, a "Hot Or Not" clone for Harvard. Facemash had already made Mark a bit of a celebrity on campus, for two reasons.
The first is that Mark got in trouble for creating it. The way the site worked was that it pulled photos of Harvard students off of Harvard's Web sites. It rearranged these photos so that when people visited Facemash.com they would see pictures of two Harvard students and be asked to vote on which was more attractive. The site also maintained a list of Harvard students, ranked by attractiveness.
On Harvard's politically correct campus, this upset people, and Mark was soon hauled in front of Harvard's disciplinary board for students. According to a November 19, 2003 Harvard Crimson article, he was charged with breaching security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. Happily for Mark, the article reports that he wasn't expelled.
The second reason everyone at Harvard knew about Facemash and Mark Zuckerberg was that Facemash had been an instant hit. The same Harvard Crimson story reports that after two weeks, "the site had been visited by 450 people, who voted at least 22,000 times." That means the average visitor voted 48 times.
It was for this ability to build a wildly popular site that Victor Gao first recommended Mark to Cameron, Tyler, and Divya. Sold on Mark, the Harvard Connection trio reached out to him. Mark agreed to meet.
They first met in the early evening on November 30 in the dining hall of Harvard College's Kirkland House. Cameron, Tyler, and Divya brought up their idea for Harvard Connection, and described their plans to A) build the site for Harvard students only, by requiring new users to register with Harvard.edu email addresses, and B) expand Harvard Connection beyond Harvard to schools around the country. Mark reportedly showed enthusiastic interest in the project.
Later that night, Mark wrote an email to the Winklevoss brothers and Divya: "I read over all the stuff you sent and it seems like it shouldn't take too long to implement, so we can talk about that after I get all the basic functionality up tomorrow night."
The next day, on December 1, Mark sent another email to the HarvardConnections team. Part of it read, "I put together one of the two registration pages so I have everything working on my system now. I'll keep you posted as I patch stuff up and it starts to become completely functional."
These two emails sounded like the words of someone who was eager to be a part of the team and working away on the project. A few days later, however, Mark's emails to the HarvardConnection team started to change in tone. Specifically, they went from someone who seemed to be hard at work building the product to someone who was so busy with schoolwork that he had no time to do any coding at all.
December 4: "Sorry I was unreachable tonight. I just got about three of your missed calls. I was working on a problem set."
December 10: "The week has been pretty busy thus far, so I haven't gotten a chance to do much work on the site or even think about it really, so I think it's probably best to postpone meeting until we have more to discuss. I'm also really busy tomorrow so I don't think I'd be able to meet then anyway."
A week later: "Sorry I have not been reachable for the past few days. I've basically been in the lab the whole time working on a cs problem set which I"m still not finished with."
Finally, on January 8:
Sorry it's taken a while for me to get back to you. I'm completely swamped with work this week. I have three programming projects and a final paper due by Monday, as well as a couple of problem sets due Friday. I'll be available to discuss the site again starting Tuesday.
I"m still a little skeptical that we have enough functionality in the site to really draw the attention and gain the critical mass necessary to get a site like this to run…Anyhow, we'll talk about it once I get everything else done.
So what happened to change Mark's tune about HarvardConnection? Was he so swamped with work that he was unable to finish the project? Or, as the HarvardConnection founders have alleged, was he stalling the development of HarvardConnection so that he could build a competing site and launch it first?
Our investigation suggests the latter.
As a part of the lawsuit against Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, the above emails from Mark have been public for years. What has never been revealed publicly is what Mark was telling his friends, parents, and closest confidants at the same time.
Let's start with a December 7th (IM) exchange Mark Zuckerberg had with his Harvard classmate and Facebook cofounder, Eduardo Saverin.
Former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel gets a lot of credit for being the first investor in Facebook, because he led the first formal Facebook round in September of 2004 with a $500,000 investment at a $5 million valuation. But the real "first investor" claim to fame should actually belong to a Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg's named Eduardo Saverin.
To picture Eduardo, what you need to know is that he was the kid at Harvard who would wear a suit to class. He liked to give people the impression that he was rich -- and maybe somehow connected to the Brazilian mafia. At one point, in an IM exchange, Mark told a friend that Eduardo -- "head of the investment society" -- was rich because "apparently insider trading isn't illegal in Brazil."
Eduardo Saverin wasn't directly involved with Facebook for long: During the summer of 2004, when Mark moved to Palo Alto to work on Facebook full time, Eduardo took a high-paying internship at Lehman Brothers in New York. While Mark was still at Harvard, however, Eduardo appears to have bankrolled Facebook's earliest capital expenses, thus becoming its initial investor.
In January, however, Mark told a friend that "Eduardo is paying for my servers." Eventually, Eduardo would agree to invest $15,000 in a company that would, in April 2004, be formed as Facebook LLC. For his money, Eduardo would get 30% of the company.
Eduardo was also involved in Facebook's earliest days, as a confidant of Mark Zuckerberg.
In December, 2003, a week after Mark's first meeting with the HarvardConnection team, when he was telling the Winklevosses that he was too busy with schoolwork to work on or even think about HarvardConnection.com, Mark was telling Eduardo a different story. On December 7, 2003, we believe Mark sent Eduardo the following IM:
Check this site out: www.harvardconnection.com and then go to harvardconnection.com/datehome.php. Someone is already trying to make a dating site. But they made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them. So I'm like delaying it so it won't be ready until after the facebook thing comes out.
This IM suggests that, within a week of meeting with the Winklevosses for the first time, Mark had already decided to start his own, similar project--"the facebook thing." It also suggests that he had developed a strategy for dealing with his would-be competition: Delay developing it.
A few weeks after the initial meeting with the HarvardConnection team, after Mark sent the IM to Eduardo Saverin talking about developing "the facebook thing" and delaying his development of HarvardConnection, Mark met with the HarvardConnection folks, Cameron, Tyler, and Divya, for a second time.
This time, instead of meeting in the dining hall of Mark's residential hall, Kirkland House, the four met in Mark's dorm room. Divya is said to have arrived late.
In Kirkland House, the dorm rooms aren't laid out in cinder-block-cube style: Mark's room had a narrow hallway connecting it to his neighbor's. As Cameron and Tyler sat down on a couch in Mark's room, Cameron spotted something in the hallway. On top of a bookshelf there was a white board. It was the kind Web developers and product managers everywhere use to map out their ideas.
On it, Cameron read two words, "Harvard Connection." He got up to go look at it. Immediately, Mark asked Cameron to stay out of the hallway.
Eventually Divya arrived and the four of them talked about plans for Harvard Connection. One feature Mark brought up was designed to keep more popular and sought-after Harvard Connection users from being stalked and harassed by crowds of people.
In this second meeting, Mark still appeared to be actively engaged in developing Harvard Connection. But he never showed the HarvardConnection folks any site prototypes or code. And they didn't insist on seeing them.
During the weeks in which Mark was juggling the two projects in tandem, he also had a series of IM exchanges with a friend named Adam D'Angelo (above).
Adam and Mark went to boarding school together at Phillips Exeter Academy. There, the pair became friends and coding partners. Together they built a program called Synapse, a music player that supposedly learned the listener's taste and then adapted to it. Then, in 2002 Mark went to Harvard and Adam went to Cal Tech. But the pair stayed in close touch, especially through AOL instant messenger. Eventually, Adam became Facebook's CTO.
Through the Harvard Connection-Facebook saga and its aftermath, Mark kept Adam apprised of his plans and thoughts.
One purported IM exchange seems particularly relevant on the question of how Mark distinguished between the two projects--the "facebook thing" and "the dating site"--as well as how he was considering handling the latter:
Zuck: So you know how I'm making that dating site
Zuck: I wonder how similar that is to the Facebook thing
Zuck: Because they're probably going to be released around the same time
Zuck: Unless I fuck the dating site people over and quit on them right before I told them I'd have it done.
D'Angelo: haha
Zuck: Like I don't think people would sign up for the facebook thing if they knew it was for dating
Zuck: and I think people are skeptical about joining dating things too.
Zuck: But the guy doing the dating thing is going to promote it pretty well.
Zuck: I wonder what the ideal solution is.
Zuck: I think the Facebook thing by itself would draw many people, unless it were released at the same time as the dating thing.
Zuck: In which case both things would cancel each other out and nothing would win. Any ideas? Like is there a good way to consolidate the two.
D'Angelo: We could make it into a whole network like a friendster. haha. Stanford has something like that internally
Zuck: Well I was thinking of doing that for the facebook. The only thing that's different about theirs is that you like request dates with people or connections with the facebook you don't do that via the system.
D'Angelo: Yeah
Zuck: I also hate the fact that I'm doing it for other people haha. Like I hate working under other people. I feel like the right thing to do is finish the facebook and wait until the last day before I'm supposed to have their thing ready and then be like "look yours isn't as good as this so if you want to join mine you can…otherwise I can help you with yours later." Or do you think that's too dick?
D'Angelo: I think you should just ditch them
Zuck: The thing is they have a programmer who could finish their thing and they have money to pour into advertising and stuff. Oh wait I have money too. My friend who wants to sponsor this is head of the investment society. Apparently insider trading isn't illegal in Brazil so he's rich lol.
D'Angelo: lol
Eduardo Saverin and Adam D'Angelo were not the only people Mark discussed his Harvard Connection - Facebook situation with. We believe he also had many IM exchanges about it with relatives and a close female Harvard friend.
In January 2004, Mark met with the Winklevoss brothers and Divya Narendra for what would be the last time. The meeting was on January 14, 2004, and it was held at the same place Mark met with the HarvardConnection team for the first time -- in the dining hall of Mark's residence, Kirkland House.
By this point, Mark's site, thefacebook.com, wasn't complete, but he was working hard on it. He'd arranged for Eduardo Saverin to pay for his servers. He had already told Adam that "the right thing to do" was to not complete Harvard Connection and build TheFacebook.com instead. He had registered the domain name.
He therefore had a choice to make: Tell Cameron, Tyler and Divya that he wanted out of their project, or string them along until he was ready to launch thefacebook.com.
Mark sought advice on this decision from his confidants. One friend told him, in so many words, you know me. I don't ever think anyone should do anything bad to anybody.
Mark and this friend also had the following IM exchange about how Mark planned to resolve the competing projects:
Friend: So have you decided what you're going to do about the websites?
Zuck: Yeah, I'm going to fuck them
Zuck: Probably in the year
Zuck: *ear
And so, it appears, he did. (In a manner of speaking).
On January 14, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg met with Cameron, Tyler, and Divya for the last time. During the meeting at Kirkland House, Mark expressed doubts about the viability of HarvardConnection.com. He said he was very busy with personal projects and school work and that he wouldn't be able to work on the site for a while. He blamed others for the site's delays.
He did not say that he was working on his own project and that he was not planning to complete the HarvardConnection site.
After the meeting, Mark had another IM exchange with the friend above. He told her, in effect, that he had wimped out. He hadn't been able to break the news to Cameron and Tyler, in part, he said, because he was "intimidated" by them. He called them "poor bastards."
So then what happened?
Three days earlier, on January 11, 2004, Mark had registered the domain THEFACEBOOK.COM.
On February 4, he opened the site to Harvard students.
On February 10, Cameron Winklevoss sent Mark a letter accusing him of breaching their agreement and stealing their idea.
In late May, after going through two more developers, Cameron, Tyler and Divya launched HarvardConnection as ConnectU, a social network for 15 schools.
On June 10, 2004, a commencement speaker mentioned the amazing popularity of Mark's site, thefacebook.com.
In the summer of 2004, Mark moved to Palo Alto to work on Facebook full time and soon received a $500,000 investment from Peter Thiel.
In September 2004, HarvardConnection, now called ConnectU, sued Mark Zuckerberg and the now-incorporated "Facebook" for allegedly breaching their agreement and stealing their idea.
In February 2008, Facebook and ConnectU agreed to settle the lawsuit.
In June 2008, ConnectU appealed the settlement in California's ninth district, accusing Facebook of trading its stock without disclosing material information. This appeal is on-going.
When we described the specifics of this story to Facebook, the company had the following comment:
"We’re not going to debate the disgruntled litigants and anonymous sources who seek to rewrite Facebook’s early history or embarrass Mark Zuckerberg with dated allegations. The unquestioned fact is that since leaving Harvard for Silicon Valley nearly six years ago, Mark has led Facebook's growth from a college website to a global service playing an important role in the lives of over 400 million people."
On the latter point, we agree. What Mark Zuckerberg has accomplished with Facebook over the past six years has been nothing short of amazing.
So, having revisited the founding of Facebook with additional information, what do we conclude?
First, we have seen no evidence of any formal contract between Mark Zuckerberg and the Winklevosses in which Mark agreed to develop Harvard Connection.
Second, any agreement the parties may have had--as well as most of the purported IMs and emails we have reviewed from the period--appear to have been at the level of, as Judge Ware described them, "dorm-room chit-chat." (Albeit interesting and entertaining chit-chat.)
Third, only a week after beginning development of Harvard Connection, which he referred to as "the dating site," Mark had begun work on a separate project -- "the facebook thing." Mark appears to have considered the products as competing for the attention of the same users, but he also appears to have regarded them as different in some key ways.
Fourth -- and because of this foreseen competition -- Mark does appear to have intentionally strung along the Harvard Connection folks with the goal of making his project, thefacebook.com, have a more successful launch.
Bottom line, we haven't seen anything that makes us think that, whatever Mark did to the Harvard Connection folks, it was worth more than the $65 million they received in the lawsuit settlement. In fact, this seems like a huge sum of money considering that the entire dispute took place over two months in 2004 and that, in the six years since, Mark has built Facebook into a massive global enterprise.
That said, in the course of our investigation, we also uncovered two additional anecdotes about Mark's behavior in Facebook's early days that are more troubling. These episodes -- an apparent hacking into the email accounts of Harvard Crimson editors using data obtained from Facebook logins, as well as a later hacking into ConnectU -- are described in detail here.
How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked The Harvard Crimson Using Data From TheFacebook.com
How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked Into Rival ConnectU In The Summer Of 2004
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The origins of Facebook have been in dispute since the very week a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg launched the site as a Harvard sophomore on February 4, 2004.
Then called "thefacebook.com," the site was an instant hit. Now, six years later, the site has become one of the biggest web sites in the world, visited by 400 million people a month.
The controversy surrounding Facebook began quickly. A week after he launched the site in 2004, Mark was accused by three Harvard seniors of having stolen the idea from them.
This allegation soon bloomed into a full-fledged lawsuit, as a competing company founded by the Harvard seniors sued Mark and Facebook for theft and fraud, starting a legal odyssey that continues to this day.
New information uncovered by Silicon Alley Insider suggests that some of the complaints against Mark Zuckerberg are valid. It also suggests that, on at least one occasion in 2004, Mark used private login data taken from Facebook's servers to break into Facebook members' private email accounts and read their emails--at best, a gross misuse of private information. Lastly, it suggests that Mark hacked into the competing company's systems and changed some user information with the aim of making the site less useful.
The primary dispute around Facebook's origins centered around whether Mark had entered into an "agreement" with the Harvard seniors, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and a classmate named Divya Narendra, to develop a similar web site for them -- and then, instead, stalled their project while taking their idea and building his own.
The litigation never went particularly well for the Winklevosses.
In 2007, Massachusetts Judge Douglas P. Woodlock called their allegations "tissue thin." Referring to the agreement that Mark had allegedly breached, Woodlock also wrote, "Dorm room chit-chat does not make a contract." A year later, the end finally seemed in sight: a judge ruled against Facebook's move to dismiss the case. Shortly thereafter, the parties agreed to settle.
But then, a twist.
After Facebook announced the settlement, but before the settlement was finalized, lawyers for the Winklevosses suggested that the hard drive from Mark Zuckerberg's computer at Harvard might contain evidence of Mark's fraud. Specifically, they suggested that the hard drive included some damning instant messages and emails.
The judge in the case refused to look at the hard drive and instead deferred to another judge who went on to approve the settlement. But, naturally, the possibility that the hard drive contained additional evidence set inquiring minds wondering what those emails and IMs revealed. Specifically, it set inquiring minds wondering again whether Mark had, in fact, stolen the Winklevoss's idea, screwed them over, and then ridden off into the sunset with Facebook.
Unfortunately, since the contents of Mark's hard drive had not been made public, no one had the answers.
But now we have some.
Over the past two years, we have interviewed more than a dozen sources familiar with aspects of this story -- including people involved in the founding year of the company. We have also reviewed what we believe to be some relevant IMs and emails from the period. Much of this information has never before been made public. None of it has been confirmed or authenticated by Mark or the company.
Based on the information we obtained, we have what we believe is a more complete picture of how Facebook was founded. This account follows.
And what does this more complete story reveal?
We'll offer our own conclusions at the end. But first, here's the story:
In the fall of 2003, Harvard seniors Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra were on the lookout for a web developer who could bring to life an idea the three say Divya first had in 2002: a social network for Harvard students and alumni. The site was to be called HarvardConnections.com.
The three had been paying Victor Gao, another Harvard student, to do coding for the site, but at the beginning of the fall term Victor begged off the project. Victor suggested his own replacement: Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard sophomore from Dobbs Ferry, New York.
Back then, Mark was known at Harvard as the sophomore who had built Facemash, a "Hot Or Not" clone for Harvard. Facemash had already made Mark a bit of a celebrity on campus, for two reasons.
The first is that Mark got in trouble for creating it. The way the site worked was that it pulled photos of Harvard students off of Harvard's Web sites. It rearranged these photos so that when people visited Facemash.com they would see pictures of two Harvard students and be asked to vote on which was more attractive. The site also maintained a list of Harvard students, ranked by attractiveness.
On Harvard's politically correct campus, this upset people, and Mark was soon hauled in front of Harvard's disciplinary board for students. According to a November 19, 2003 Harvard Crimson article, he was charged with breaching security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. Happily for Mark, the article reports that he wasn't expelled.
The second reason everyone at Harvard knew about Facemash and Mark Zuckerberg was that Facemash had been an instant hit. The same Harvard Crimson story reports that after two weeks, "the site had been visited by 450 people, who voted at least 22,000 times." That means the average visitor voted 48 times.
It was for this ability to build a wildly popular site that Victor Gao first recommended Mark to Cameron, Tyler, and Divya. Sold on Mark, the Harvard Connection trio reached out to him. Mark agreed to meet.
They first met in the early evening on November 30 in the dining hall of Harvard College's Kirkland House. Cameron, Tyler, and Divya brought up their idea for Harvard Connection, and described their plans to A) build the site for Harvard students only, by requiring new users to register with Harvard.edu email addresses, and B) expand Harvard Connection beyond Harvard to schools around the country. Mark reportedly showed enthusiastic interest in the project.
Later that night, Mark wrote an email to the Winklevoss brothers and Divya: "I read over all the stuff you sent and it seems like it shouldn't take too long to implement, so we can talk about that after I get all the basic functionality up tomorrow night."
The next day, on December 1, Mark sent another email to the HarvardConnections team. Part of it read, "I put together one of the two registration pages so I have everything working on my system now. I'll keep you posted as I patch stuff up and it starts to become completely functional."
These two emails sounded like the words of someone who was eager to be a part of the team and working away on the project. A few days later, however, Mark's emails to the HarvardConnection team started to change in tone. Specifically, they went from someone who seemed to be hard at work building the product to someone who was so busy with schoolwork that he had no time to do any coding at all.
December 4: "Sorry I was unreachable tonight. I just got about three of your missed calls. I was working on a problem set."
December 10: "The week has been pretty busy thus far, so I haven't gotten a chance to do much work on the site or even think about it really, so I think it's probably best to postpone meeting until we have more to discuss. I'm also really busy tomorrow so I don't think I'd be able to meet then anyway."
A week later: "Sorry I have not been reachable for the past few days. I've basically been in the lab the whole time working on a cs problem set which I"m still not finished with."
Finally, on January 8:
Sorry it's taken a while for me to get back to you. I'm completely swamped with work this week. I have three programming projects and a final paper due by Monday, as well as a couple of problem sets due Friday. I'll be available to discuss the site again starting Tuesday.
I"m still a little skeptical that we have enough functionality in the site to really draw the attention and gain the critical mass necessary to get a site like this to run…Anyhow, we'll talk about it once I get everything else done.
So what happened to change Mark's tune about HarvardConnection? Was he so swamped with work that he was unable to finish the project? Or, as the HarvardConnection founders have alleged, was he stalling the development of HarvardConnection so that he could build a competing site and launch it first?
Our investigation suggests the latter.
As a part of the lawsuit against Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, the above emails from Mark have been public for years. What has never been revealed publicly is what Mark was telling his friends, parents, and closest confidants at the same time.
Let's start with a December 7th (IM) exchange Mark Zuckerberg had with his Harvard classmate and Facebook cofounder, Eduardo Saverin.
Former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel gets a lot of credit for being the first investor in Facebook, because he led the first formal Facebook round in September of 2004 with a $500,000 investment at a $5 million valuation. But the real "first investor" claim to fame should actually belong to a Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg's named Eduardo Saverin.
To picture Eduardo, what you need to know is that he was the kid at Harvard who would wear a suit to class. He liked to give people the impression that he was rich -- and maybe somehow connected to the Brazilian mafia. At one point, in an IM exchange, Mark told a friend that Eduardo -- "head of the investment society" -- was rich because "apparently insider trading isn't illegal in Brazil."
Eduardo Saverin wasn't directly involved with Facebook for long: During the summer of 2004, when Mark moved to Palo Alto to work on Facebook full time, Eduardo took a high-paying internship at Lehman Brothers in New York. While Mark was still at Harvard, however, Eduardo appears to have bankrolled Facebook's earliest capital expenses, thus becoming its initial investor.
In January, however, Mark told a friend that "Eduardo is paying for my servers." Eventually, Eduardo would agree to invest $15,000 in a company that would, in April 2004, be formed as Facebook LLC. For his money, Eduardo would get 30% of the company.
Eduardo was also involved in Facebook's earliest days, as a confidant of Mark Zuckerberg.
In December, 2003, a week after Mark's first meeting with the HarvardConnection team, when he was telling the Winklevosses that he was too busy with schoolwork to work on or even think about HarvardConnection.com, Mark was telling Eduardo a different story. On December 7, 2003, we believe Mark sent Eduardo the following IM:
Check this site out: www.harvardconnection.com and then go to harvardconnection.com/datehome.php. Someone is already trying to make a dating site. But they made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them. So I'm like delaying it so it won't be ready until after the facebook thing comes out.
This IM suggests that, within a week of meeting with the Winklevosses for the first time, Mark had already decided to start his own, similar project--"the facebook thing." It also suggests that he had developed a strategy for dealing with his would-be competition: Delay developing it.
A few weeks after the initial meeting with the HarvardConnection team, after Mark sent the IM to Eduardo Saverin talking about developing "the facebook thing" and delaying his development of HarvardConnection, Mark met with the HarvardConnection folks, Cameron, Tyler, and Divya, for a second time.
This time, instead of meeting in the dining hall of Mark's residential hall, Kirkland House, the four met in Mark's dorm room. Divya is said to have arrived late.
In Kirkland House, the dorm rooms aren't laid out in cinder-block-cube style: Mark's room had a narrow hallway connecting it to his neighbor's. As Cameron and Tyler sat down on a couch in Mark's room, Cameron spotted something in the hallway. On top of a bookshelf there was a white board. It was the kind Web developers and product managers everywhere use to map out their ideas.
On it, Cameron read two words, "Harvard Connection." He got up to go look at it. Immediately, Mark asked Cameron to stay out of the hallway.
Eventually Divya arrived and the four of them talked about plans for Harvard Connection. One feature Mark brought up was designed to keep more popular and sought-after Harvard Connection users from being stalked and harassed by crowds of people.
In this second meeting, Mark still appeared to be actively engaged in developing Harvard Connection. But he never showed the HarvardConnection folks any site prototypes or code. And they didn't insist on seeing them.
During the weeks in which Mark was juggling the two projects in tandem, he also had a series of IM exchanges with a friend named Adam D'Angelo (above).
Adam and Mark went to boarding school together at Phillips Exeter Academy. There, the pair became friends and coding partners. Together they built a program called Synapse, a music player that supposedly learned the listener's taste and then adapted to it. Then, in 2002 Mark went to Harvard and Adam went to Cal Tech. But the pair stayed in close touch, especially through AOL instant messenger. Eventually, Adam became Facebook's CTO.
Through the Harvard Connection-Facebook saga and its aftermath, Mark kept Adam apprised of his plans and thoughts.
One purported IM exchange seems particularly relevant on the question of how Mark distinguished between the two projects--the "facebook thing" and "the dating site"--as well as how he was considering handling the latter:
Zuck: So you know how I'm making that dating site
Zuck: I wonder how similar that is to the Facebook thing
Zuck: Because they're probably going to be released around the same time
Zuck: Unless I fuck the dating site people over and quit on them right before I told them I'd have it done.
D'Angelo: haha
Zuck: Like I don't think people would sign up for the facebook thing if they knew it was for dating
Zuck: and I think people are skeptical about joining dating things too.
Zuck: But the guy doing the dating thing is going to promote it pretty well.
Zuck: I wonder what the ideal solution is.
Zuck: I think the Facebook thing by itself would draw many people, unless it were released at the same time as the dating thing.
Zuck: In which case both things would cancel each other out and nothing would win. Any ideas? Like is there a good way to consolidate the two.
D'Angelo: We could make it into a whole network like a friendster. haha. Stanford has something like that internally
Zuck: Well I was thinking of doing that for the facebook. The only thing that's different about theirs is that you like request dates with people or connections with the facebook you don't do that via the system.
D'Angelo: Yeah
Zuck: I also hate the fact that I'm doing it for other people haha. Like I hate working under other people. I feel like the right thing to do is finish the facebook and wait until the last day before I'm supposed to have their thing ready and then be like "look yours isn't as good as this so if you want to join mine you can…otherwise I can help you with yours later." Or do you think that's too dick?
D'Angelo: I think you should just ditch them
Zuck: The thing is they have a programmer who could finish their thing and they have money to pour into advertising and stuff. Oh wait I have money too. My friend who wants to sponsor this is head of the investment society. Apparently insider trading isn't illegal in Brazil so he's rich lol.
D'Angelo: lol
Eduardo Saverin and Adam D'Angelo were not the only people Mark discussed his Harvard Connection - Facebook situation with. We believe he also had many IM exchanges about it with relatives and a close female Harvard friend.
In January 2004, Mark met with the Winklevoss brothers and Divya Narendra for what would be the last time. The meeting was on January 14, 2004, and it was held at the same place Mark met with the HarvardConnection team for the first time -- in the dining hall of Mark's residence, Kirkland House.
By this point, Mark's site, thefacebook.com, wasn't complete, but he was working hard on it. He'd arranged for Eduardo Saverin to pay for his servers. He had already told Adam that "the right thing to do" was to not complete Harvard Connection and build TheFacebook.com instead. He had registered the domain name.
He therefore had a choice to make: Tell Cameron, Tyler and Divya that he wanted out of their project, or string them along until he was ready to launch thefacebook.com.
Mark sought advice on this decision from his confidants. One friend told him, in so many words, you know me. I don't ever think anyone should do anything bad to anybody.
Mark and this friend also had the following IM exchange about how Mark planned to resolve the competing projects:
Friend: So have you decided what you're going to do about the websites?
Zuck: Yeah, I'm going to fuck them
Zuck: Probably in the year
Zuck: *ear
And so, it appears, he did. (In a manner of speaking).
On January 14, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg met with Cameron, Tyler, and Divya for the last time. During the meeting at Kirkland House, Mark expressed doubts about the viability of HarvardConnection.com. He said he was very busy with personal projects and school work and that he wouldn't be able to work on the site for a while. He blamed others for the site's delays.
He did not say that he was working on his own project and that he was not planning to complete the HarvardConnection site.
After the meeting, Mark had another IM exchange with the friend above. He told her, in effect, that he had wimped out. He hadn't been able to break the news to Cameron and Tyler, in part, he said, because he was "intimidated" by them. He called them "poor bastards."
So then what happened?
Three days earlier, on January 11, 2004, Mark had registered the domain THEFACEBOOK.COM.
On February 4, he opened the site to Harvard students.
On February 10, Cameron Winklevoss sent Mark a letter accusing him of breaching their agreement and stealing their idea.
In late May, after going through two more developers, Cameron, Tyler and Divya launched HarvardConnection as ConnectU, a social network for 15 schools.
On June 10, 2004, a commencement speaker mentioned the amazing popularity of Mark's site, thefacebook.com.
In the summer of 2004, Mark moved to Palo Alto to work on Facebook full time and soon received a $500,000 investment from Peter Thiel.
In September 2004, HarvardConnection, now called ConnectU, sued Mark Zuckerberg and the now-incorporated "Facebook" for allegedly breaching their agreement and stealing their idea.
In February 2008, Facebook and ConnectU agreed to settle the lawsuit.
In June 2008, ConnectU appealed the settlement in California's ninth district, accusing Facebook of trading its stock without disclosing material information. This appeal is on-going.
When we described the specifics of this story to Facebook, the company had the following comment:
"We’re not going to debate the disgruntled litigants and anonymous sources who seek to rewrite Facebook’s early history or embarrass Mark Zuckerberg with dated allegations. The unquestioned fact is that since leaving Harvard for Silicon Valley nearly six years ago, Mark has led Facebook's growth from a college website to a global service playing an important role in the lives of over 400 million people."
On the latter point, we agree. What Mark Zuckerberg has accomplished with Facebook over the past six years has been nothing short of amazing.
So, having revisited the founding of Facebook with additional information, what do we conclude?
First, we have seen no evidence of any formal contract between Mark Zuckerberg and the Winklevosses in which Mark agreed to develop Harvard Connection.
Second, any agreement the parties may have had--as well as most of the purported IMs and emails we have reviewed from the period--appear to have been at the level of, as Judge Ware described them, "dorm-room chit-chat." (Albeit interesting and entertaining chit-chat.)
Third, only a week after beginning development of Harvard Connection, which he referred to as "the dating site," Mark had begun work on a separate project -- "the facebook thing." Mark appears to have considered the products as competing for the attention of the same users, but he also appears to have regarded them as different in some key ways.
Fourth -- and because of this foreseen competition -- Mark does appear to have intentionally strung along the Harvard Connection folks with the goal of making his project, thefacebook.com, have a more successful launch.
Bottom line, we haven't seen anything that makes us think that, whatever Mark did to the Harvard Connection folks, it was worth more than the $65 million they received in the lawsuit settlement. In fact, this seems like a huge sum of money considering that the entire dispute took place over two months in 2004 and that, in the six years since, Mark has built Facebook into a massive global enterprise.
That said, in the course of our investigation, we also uncovered two additional anecdotes about Mark's behavior in Facebook's early days that are more troubling. These episodes -- an apparent hacking into the email accounts of Harvard Crimson editors using data obtained from Facebook logins, as well as a later hacking into ConnectU -- are described in detail here.
How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked The Harvard Crimson Using Data From TheFacebook.com
How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked Into Rival ConnectU In The Summer Of 2004
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Some Interesting Insights Into Facebook
**For some of the backstory about my thoughts on facebook click here.
From day one I have been anti social networking, even before I found out Zuckerberg was a jew who stole the idea of facebook. If you think those are just claims then just listen to some of Zuckerbergs speeches, the specific one that comes to mind is the one he gave at Stanford which can be found on Itunes U. He is so vague about the creation of facebook, and doesn't really seem to have a good grasp on the site or the business. When you listen to speeches of other founders of various companies they are very detailed and meticulous since their very life is so tightly woven into a startup.
I had heard about his dismal performance Zuckerberg gave at the D8 conference this year, but only today did I see part of the video. For those that aren't familiar D8 is a conference where various tech figures are interviewed by a jew and a dyke, the draw of course is that they have very popular people on to interview so even though the jew is obnoxious and constantly interrupts and talks over people, people still want to watch just for the interviewee.
Watch in the video as Zuckerberg gives an incoherent answer when asked about privacy issues but also make note at the end where you see what is inside the facebooks company jackets.
Did you notice it? The so called Star of David? Here are a few pictures in case you missed it.
So as you can see facebook is clearly a very jew centric company. What other company has the star of david on their company clothes? I'll leave you with this video and you can begin to see the real purpose of facebook.
From day one I have been anti social networking, even before I found out Zuckerberg was a jew who stole the idea of facebook. If you think those are just claims then just listen to some of Zuckerbergs speeches, the specific one that comes to mind is the one he gave at Stanford which can be found on Itunes U. He is so vague about the creation of facebook, and doesn't really seem to have a good grasp on the site or the business. When you listen to speeches of other founders of various companies they are very detailed and meticulous since their very life is so tightly woven into a startup.
I had heard about his dismal performance Zuckerberg gave at the D8 conference this year, but only today did I see part of the video. For those that aren't familiar D8 is a conference where various tech figures are interviewed by a jew and a dyke, the draw of course is that they have very popular people on to interview so even though the jew is obnoxious and constantly interrupts and talks over people, people still want to watch just for the interviewee.
Watch in the video as Zuckerberg gives an incoherent answer when asked about privacy issues but also make note at the end where you see what is inside the facebooks company jackets.
Did you notice it? The so called Star of David? Here are a few pictures in case you missed it.
So as you can see facebook is clearly a very jew centric company. What other company has the star of david on their company clothes? I'll leave you with this video and you can begin to see the real purpose of facebook.
Some Interesting Insights Into Facebook
**For some of the backstory about my thoughts on facebook click here.
From day one I have been anti social networking, even before I found out Zuckerberg was a jew who stole the idea of facebook. If you think those are just claims then just listen to some of Zuckerbergs speeches, the specific one that comes to mind is the one he gave at Stanford which can be found on Itunes U. He is so vague about the creation of facebook, and doesn't really seem to have a good grasp on the site or the business. When you listen to speeches of other founders of various companies they are very detailed and meticulous since their very life is so tightly woven into a startup.
I had heard about his dismal performance Zuckerberg gave at the D8 conference this year, but only today did I see part of the video. For those that aren't familiar D8 is a conference where various tech figures are interviewed by a jew and a dyke,
From day one I have been anti social networking, even before I found out Zuckerberg was a jew who stole the idea of facebook. If you think those are just claims then just listen to some of Zuckerbergs speeches, the specific one that comes to mind is the one he gave at Stanford which can be found on Itunes U. He is so vague about the creation of facebook, and doesn't really seem to have a good grasp on the site or the business. When you listen to speeches of other founders of various companies they are very detailed and meticulous since their very life is so tightly woven into a startup.
I had heard about his dismal performance Zuckerberg gave at the D8 conference this year, but only today did I see part of the video. For those that aren't familiar D8 is a conference where various tech figures are interviewed by a jew and a dyke,
Friday, April 30, 2010
The NSA And CIA Want To Be Your Friend On Facebook
I am one of the few people (especially in my age group) that has never had a myspace/facebook/twitter. Frankly aside from serious privacy concerns which I have discussed here I fail to see the purpose of these utilities. I see how they are extremely valuable from a government or corporations point of view but from and end user it makes little sense to me.
I keep in touch with people I want to keep in touch with and have no desire to read endless streams of minutiae about people daily lives. I could rant for some time about how gay I think social networking is but I want to get to this article from Cryptogon which lays out some very disconcerting things about facebook.
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Don’t break out the foil, the U.S. News & World Report article states, because the spooks are telling you up front, here we are. Oh sure. What this shit-for-brains article doesn’t explore is how many hundreds or thousands of full time, professionally run honeypots, black propaganda outlets, sock puppets/trolls/shills etc. are operational on Facebook.
See: EFF Sues CIA, DOJ, Others Over Facebook Surveillance:
At minimum, the answer is more than zero. As an upper end estimate, I would venture a guess that, because of compartmentalization, the executive echelons of spookdom don’t even know how many Facebook pages and users their various divisions, special access programs and cutouts are running.
Of course, one might argue that Facebook IS an intelligence asset, a giant sensor, that distributes analysis and archival tasks to remote nodes. In, Feds Push for Tracking Cell Phones, I wrote:
But, no need for tinfoil, gentle citizen. Move along. These are just recruiting tools. Nothing to see here.
Via: U.S. News & World Report:
The online social-networking service Facebook works for finding old classmates or arranging happy hours, so why not use it to help recruit the next generation of spies? That’s what’s happening now in cyberspace, as the country’s intelligence community turns to such sites to attract a wider range of résumés.
The CIA now has its own Facebook page, as does the hush-hush National Security Agency, which vacuums up the world’s communications for analysis. Both invite Facebook members to register and read information about employment opportunities. It’s part of a larger, multiyear hiring push to boost the size of the U.S. intelligence community.
But should the country’s secret spy agency be encouraging potential hires to publicize their interest in the intelligence field? Apparently, it’s not a concern. In the first place, since the groups are not directly moderated, it is impossible to control who registers as a member. Some may enroll on the site out of curiosity. And, of course, none of those who show interest are yet officers in the clandestine service.
Even so, once they are on the CIA payroll, employees face no prohibition against keeping social-networking accounts or pages. “While agency officers are not, as a rule, prohibited from maintaining a page on Facebook, they are made aware of precautions to take if they choose to do so,” says CIA spokesman George Little.
But the Facebook posting shouldn’t necessarily cause a run on tinfoil hats. The pages aren’t designed to surreptitiously gather information about those who visit the site, as fearful skeptics allege. In reality, says the CIA, they are flashy recruiting posters, “used strictly for informational purposes.”
I keep in touch with people I want to keep in touch with and have no desire to read endless streams of minutiae about people daily lives. I could rant for some time about how gay I think social networking is but I want to get to this article from Cryptogon which lays out some very disconcerting things about facebook.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don’t break out the foil, the U.S. News & World Report article states, because the spooks are telling you up front, here we are. Oh sure. What this shit-for-brains article doesn’t explore is how many hundreds or thousands of full time, professionally run honeypots, black propaganda outlets, sock puppets/trolls/shills etc. are operational on Facebook.
See: EFF Sues CIA, DOJ, Others Over Facebook Surveillance:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the CIA, the US Department of Defense, Department of Justice and three other government agencies on Tuesday for allegedly refusing to release information about how they are using social networks in surveillance and investigations.So, how many intelligence assets are operating in a covert capacity on Facebook?
The not-for-profit internet rights watchdog group formally asked more than a dozen agencies or departments in early October to provide records about federal guidelines on the use of sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr for investigative or data-gathering purposes, according to the lawsuit.
The requests were prompted by published news reports about how authorities are using social networks to monitor citizen activities and aid in investigations. For example, according to the lawsuit, government officials have: used Facebook to hunt for fugitives and search for evidence of underage drinking; researched the activities of an activist on Facebook and LinkedIn; watched YouTube to identify riot suspects; searched the home of a social worker because of Twitter messages regarding police actions he sent during the G-20 summit; and used fake identities to trick Facebook users into accepting friend requests.
At minimum, the answer is more than zero. As an upper end estimate, I would venture a guess that, because of compartmentalization, the executive echelons of spookdom don’t even know how many Facebook pages and users their various divisions, special access programs and cutouts are running.
Of course, one might argue that Facebook IS an intelligence asset, a giant sensor, that distributes analysis and archival tasks to remote nodes. In, Feds Push for Tracking Cell Phones, I wrote:
Focusing on the network operators misses the point. The beam splitters don’t discriminate; they send a copy of everything, every single bit, to Uncle. So, sure, the carriers don’t want to spend money on archiving all of that surveillance data, but what is the state doing with its copy of the stream?What proof do I have that beam splitters are installed—on Facebook fiber—that are sending a copy of everything to Uncle? None. But consider this, from the Guardian:
The answer is: We have almost no idea, and the Obama regime is determined to make sure that it stays that way.
The third board member of Facebook is Jim Breyer. He is a partner in the venture capital firm Accel Partners, who put $12.7m into Facebook in April 2005. On the board of such US giants as Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment, he is also a former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). Now these are the people who are really making things happen in America, because they invest in the new young talent, the Zuckerbergs and the like. Facebook’s most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock’s senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What’s In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA. After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which “identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions”.Now, consider the network analysis of Facebook that a researcher was able to carry out from the outside:
The US defence department and the CIA love technology because it makes spying easier. “We need to find new ways to deter new adversaries,” defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2003. “We need to make the leap into the information age, which is the critical foundation of our transformation efforts.” In-Q-Tel’s first chairman was Gilman Louie, who served on the board of the NVCA with Breyer. Another key figure in the In-Q-Tel team is Anita K Jones, former director of defence research and engineering for the US department of defence, and – with Breyer – board member of BBN Technologies. When she left the US department of defence, Senator Chuck Robb paid her the following tribute: “She brought the technology and operational military communities together to design detailed plans to sustain US dominance on the battlefield into the next century.”
As I’ve been digging deeper into the data I’ve gathered on 210 million public Facebook profiles, I’ve been fascinated by some of the patterns that have emerged. My latest visualization shows the information by location, with connections drawn between places that share friends. For example, a lot of people in LA have friends in San Francisco, so there’s a line between them.I’m not even capable of thinking up the kinds of analysis that would be possible by having total access to Facebook data. However, again, while I’m just guessing, if U.S. Intelligence didn’t have entire divisions, roomfuls of people, dedicated datacenters and other infrastructure, etc. for dealing exclusively with network (and other types of) analysis of Facebook data, I would be very, very surprised.
Looking at the network of US cities, it’s been remarkable to see how groups of them form clusters, with strong connections locally but few contacts outside the cluster.
But, no need for tinfoil, gentle citizen. Move along. These are just recruiting tools. Nothing to see here.
Via: U.S. News & World Report:
The online social-networking service Facebook works for finding old classmates or arranging happy hours, so why not use it to help recruit the next generation of spies? That’s what’s happening now in cyberspace, as the country’s intelligence community turns to such sites to attract a wider range of résumés.
The CIA now has its own Facebook page, as does the hush-hush National Security Agency, which vacuums up the world’s communications for analysis. Both invite Facebook members to register and read information about employment opportunities. It’s part of a larger, multiyear hiring push to boost the size of the U.S. intelligence community.
But should the country’s secret spy agency be encouraging potential hires to publicize their interest in the intelligence field? Apparently, it’s not a concern. In the first place, since the groups are not directly moderated, it is impossible to control who registers as a member. Some may enroll on the site out of curiosity. And, of course, none of those who show interest are yet officers in the clandestine service.
Even so, once they are on the CIA payroll, employees face no prohibition against keeping social-networking accounts or pages. “While agency officers are not, as a rule, prohibited from maintaining a page on Facebook, they are made aware of precautions to take if they choose to do so,” says CIA spokesman George Little.
But the Facebook posting shouldn’t necessarily cause a run on tinfoil hats. The pages aren’t designed to surreptitiously gather information about those who visit the site, as fearful skeptics allege. In reality, says the CIA, they are flashy recruiting posters, “used strictly for informational purposes.”
Friday, April 23, 2010
Facebook Steps Up Lobbying, Deepens Ties with Intelligence Agencies, FTC
Source: Cryptogon
Here’s my (one sentence) guess about what this is actually about:
Facebook is a CIA cutout that’s frantically lobbying for privacy legislation to remain lax so that it can continue to run its various intelligence operations on the platform.
Via: Venture Beat:
Facebook has been gradually boosting its profile in Washington D.C. over the past year and is on the hunt for a second senior lobbyist to add to its office of four. Disclosures released a few days ago show that, on top of lobbying the usual suspects Internet companies reach out to like the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. senators and representatives, the fast-growing social network has also been busy deepening ties to government intelligence and homeland security agencies.
Facebook spent $41,390 on lobbying in the first quarter of 2010. That’s on top of the $207,878 it spent last year — the first year Facebook began releasing such disclosures. Although these numbers are tiny compared to the $4.3 million Google spent on lobbying last year, expect them to grow with the company’s influence and ambitions.
What’s interesting about Facebook’s lobbying in D.C. is what it spends money on despite its small size. It was the only consumer Internet company out of Google, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple to reach out to intelligence agencies last year, according to lobbying disclosure forms. It has lobbied the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — an umbrella office founded in the wake of Sept. 11 that synthesizes intelligence from 17 agencies including the CIA and advises the President — for the last three quarters on privacy and federal cyber-security policy. It has reached out to the Defense Intelligence Agency too.
Andrew Noyes, the company’s manager of public policy communications, says most of Facebook’s work in D.C. consists of basic education — helping legislators and agencies understand how to use the social network for campaigning, reaching out to their constituencies and in their regular line of work. The U.S. Navy used Facebook to alert Hawaiians of a possible tsunami from the Chilean earthquake earlier this year, while the company says 35 government agencies are using social media for governance.
He said the meetings with intelligence agencies were similar. “We disclose this because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. (To be fair, Google and Microsoft also lobbied the Department of Defense last year although they did not reach out to intelligence agencies.)
At the very top of Facebook’s agenda in D.C. is privacy, he said. There’s much at stake. The ease of data collection and sharing on the web is on a collision course with privacy. The suite of projects the company unveiled yesterday at its f8 conference in San Francisco may spark further privacy concerns about the mass of data it will now be tracking on users as they traverse the web. To head off concerns that it is too cavalier with pushing users to be more public, Facebook made a savvy move when it brought longtime privacy advocate Tim Sparapani from the American Civil Liberties Union on-board last year.
Even though the company says its role in D.C. is about awareness for now, developing these relationships will help Facebook get ahead of and influence legislation that may curb its ad targeting abilities. For the last year, Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) has pledged that he would draft a web privacy bill, but little has come of it so far. Facebook’s competitor Google has already become a punching bag for privacy advocates; ten governments including France, Germany and the U.K. issued a letter to the search giant on Monday asking it to do more to protect consumer privacy, while legislators have asked the Federal Trade Commission to look into Google Buzz.
Here’s my (one sentence) guess about what this is actually about:
Facebook is a CIA cutout that’s frantically lobbying for privacy legislation to remain lax so that it can continue to run its various intelligence operations on the platform.
Via: Venture Beat:
Facebook has been gradually boosting its profile in Washington D.C. over the past year and is on the hunt for a second senior lobbyist to add to its office of four. Disclosures released a few days ago show that, on top of lobbying the usual suspects Internet companies reach out to like the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. senators and representatives, the fast-growing social network has also been busy deepening ties to government intelligence and homeland security agencies.
Facebook spent $41,390 on lobbying in the first quarter of 2010. That’s on top of the $207,878 it spent last year — the first year Facebook began releasing such disclosures. Although these numbers are tiny compared to the $4.3 million Google spent on lobbying last year, expect them to grow with the company’s influence and ambitions.
What’s interesting about Facebook’s lobbying in D.C. is what it spends money on despite its small size. It was the only consumer Internet company out of Google, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple to reach out to intelligence agencies last year, according to lobbying disclosure forms. It has lobbied the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — an umbrella office founded in the wake of Sept. 11 that synthesizes intelligence from 17 agencies including the CIA and advises the President — for the last three quarters on privacy and federal cyber-security policy. It has reached out to the Defense Intelligence Agency too.
Andrew Noyes, the company’s manager of public policy communications, says most of Facebook’s work in D.C. consists of basic education — helping legislators and agencies understand how to use the social network for campaigning, reaching out to their constituencies and in their regular line of work. The U.S. Navy used Facebook to alert Hawaiians of a possible tsunami from the Chilean earthquake earlier this year, while the company says 35 government agencies are using social media for governance.
He said the meetings with intelligence agencies were similar. “We disclose this because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. (To be fair, Google and Microsoft also lobbied the Department of Defense last year although they did not reach out to intelligence agencies.)
At the very top of Facebook’s agenda in D.C. is privacy, he said. There’s much at stake. The ease of data collection and sharing on the web is on a collision course with privacy. The suite of projects the company unveiled yesterday at its f8 conference in San Francisco may spark further privacy concerns about the mass of data it will now be tracking on users as they traverse the web. To head off concerns that it is too cavalier with pushing users to be more public, Facebook made a savvy move when it brought longtime privacy advocate Tim Sparapani from the American Civil Liberties Union on-board last year.
Even though the company says its role in D.C. is about awareness for now, developing these relationships will help Facebook get ahead of and influence legislation that may curb its ad targeting abilities. For the last year, Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) has pledged that he would draft a web privacy bill, but little has come of it so far. Facebook’s competitor Google has already become a punching bag for privacy advocates; ten governments including France, Germany and the U.K. issued a letter to the search giant on Monday asking it to do more to protect consumer privacy, while legislators have asked the Federal Trade Commission to look into Google Buzz.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
EFF Sues The Feds For Info On Social Networking Surveillance
I have warned you about the dangers of "social networking" here here and here.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the CIA, the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Justice, and three other government agencies on Tuesday for allegedly refusing to release information about how they are using social networks in surveillance and investigations.
The nonprofit Internet rights watchdog group formally asked more than a dozen agencies or departments in early October to provide records about federal guidelines on the use of sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr for investigative or data gathering purposes, according to the lawsuit.
The requests were prompted by published news reports about how authorities are using social networks to monitor citizen activities and aid in investigations. For example, according to the lawsuit, government officials have: used Facebook to hunt for fugitives and search for evidence of underage drinking; researched the activities of an activist on Facebook and LinkedIn; watched YouTube to identify riot suspects; searched the home of a social worker because of Twitter messages regarding police actions he sent during the G-20 summit; and used fake identities to trick Facebook users into accepting friend requests.
The EFF needs access to the information to "help inform Congress and the public about the effect of such uses and purposes on citizens' privacy rights and associated legal protections," the lawsuit said.
None of the agencies contacted had complied with the EFF's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and only one, the IRS, had asked for an extension, according to the suit.
The suit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, names the defendants as the CIA, the office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the departments of Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, and Treasury.
The FOIA requests and the lawsuit were filed on behalf of the EFF by the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.
Government surveillance of citizens, particularly in areas they consider private, should have oversight, said Shane Witnov, a law student who worked on the case for the Samuelson Clinic.
"Social-networking sites are becoming a part of the way we communicate every day and everyone thinks they are sharing information [on the sites] with just their friends," he said. "Governments are using the sites but not in the way [citizens] expect when they sign up."
The government agencies could not be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon.
Source
The Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the CIA, the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Justice, and three other government agencies on Tuesday for allegedly refusing to release information about how they are using social networks in surveillance and investigations.
The nonprofit Internet rights watchdog group formally asked more than a dozen agencies or departments in early October to provide records about federal guidelines on the use of sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr for investigative or data gathering purposes, according to the lawsuit.
The requests were prompted by published news reports about how authorities are using social networks to monitor citizen activities and aid in investigations. For example, according to the lawsuit, government officials have: used Facebook to hunt for fugitives and search for evidence of underage drinking; researched the activities of an activist on Facebook and LinkedIn; watched YouTube to identify riot suspects; searched the home of a social worker because of Twitter messages regarding police actions he sent during the G-20 summit; and used fake identities to trick Facebook users into accepting friend requests.
The EFF needs access to the information to "help inform Congress and the public about the effect of such uses and purposes on citizens' privacy rights and associated legal protections," the lawsuit said.
None of the agencies contacted had complied with the EFF's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and only one, the IRS, had asked for an extension, according to the suit.
The suit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, names the defendants as the CIA, the office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the departments of Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, and Treasury.
The FOIA requests and the lawsuit were filed on behalf of the EFF by the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.
Government surveillance of citizens, particularly in areas they consider private, should have oversight, said Shane Witnov, a law student who worked on the case for the Samuelson Clinic.
"Social-networking sites are becoming a part of the way we communicate every day and everyone thinks they are sharing information [on the sites] with just their friends," he said. "Governments are using the sites but not in the way [citizens] expect when they sign up."
The government agencies could not be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon.
Source
Monday, November 23, 2009
Facebook Friend Turns Out To Be Big Brother
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student Adam Bauer has nearly 400 friends on Facebook. He got an offer for a new one about a month ago. “She was a good-looking girl. I usually don’t accept friends I don’t know, but I randomly accepted this one for some reason,” the 19-year-old said.
He thinks that led to his invitation to come down to the La Crosse police station, where an officer laid out photos from Facebook of Bauer holding a beer — and then ticketed him for underage drinking.
The police report said Bauer admitted drinking, which he denies. But he did plead no contest in municipal court Wednesday and will pay a $227 fine.
He was among at least eight people who said Wednesday they had been cited for underage drinking based on photos on social networking sites.
“I just can’t believe it. I feel like I’m in a science fiction movie, like they are always watching. When does it end?” Bauer said after court Wednesday.
Social networking sites are among many new tools law enforcement has adopted to
find underage drinkers, said La Crosse police officer Al Iverson, who works in alcohol compliance and education.
“Law enforcement has to evolve with technology,” Iverson said. “It has to
happen. It is a necessity —not just for underage drinking.”
Social networking sites are used to catch sexual predators as well, he noted.
But Bauer said, “I think there are a lot worse things (police) could be spending their time on.”
The photos officers found were of him, his roommates and a couple friends hanging out at his house, Bauer said.
“We were actually trying to be safe and not go out on the town and get crazy,” he said.
Bauer’s friend, 20-year-old UW-L sophomore Tyrell Luebker, also was tagged for underage drinking based on Facebook photos. He, too, pleaded no contest Wednesday.
“I feel like it is shady police work and a waste of taxpayer money to have him (an officer) sit on the computer on Facebook when he could actually be doing police work,” said Luebker.
Iverson pointed out the students still were caught in an illegal act, one they felt comfortable and confident enough about to put photos of on the Internet. Posting those photos, he added, helps glamorize alcohol consumption and binge drinking.
Someone else posted photos on a Facebook site of UW-L sophomores Brianna Niesen and Cassie Stenholt holding beer, but they still ended up in court Wednesday pleading no contest and getting fined.
The practice ultimately could hurt the positive alliance law enforcement wants to build with students so they will report crimes, Niesen said.
“I feel like it is a breach of privacy,” Stenholt said. “You feel like you should be able to trust cops.”
He thinks that led to his invitation to come down to the La Crosse police station, where an officer laid out photos from Facebook of Bauer holding a beer — and then ticketed him for underage drinking.
The police report said Bauer admitted drinking, which he denies. But he did plead no contest in municipal court Wednesday and will pay a $227 fine.
He was among at least eight people who said Wednesday they had been cited for underage drinking based on photos on social networking sites.
“I just can’t believe it. I feel like I’m in a science fiction movie, like they are always watching. When does it end?” Bauer said after court Wednesday.
Social networking sites are among many new tools law enforcement has adopted to
find underage drinkers, said La Crosse police officer Al Iverson, who works in alcohol compliance and education.
“Law enforcement has to evolve with technology,” Iverson said. “It has to
happen. It is a necessity —not just for underage drinking.”
Social networking sites are used to catch sexual predators as well, he noted.
But Bauer said, “I think there are a lot worse things (police) could be spending their time on.”
The photos officers found were of him, his roommates and a couple friends hanging out at his house, Bauer said.
“We were actually trying to be safe and not go out on the town and get crazy,” he said.
Bauer’s friend, 20-year-old UW-L sophomore Tyrell Luebker, also was tagged for underage drinking based on Facebook photos. He, too, pleaded no contest Wednesday.
“I feel like it is shady police work and a waste of taxpayer money to have him (an officer) sit on the computer on Facebook when he could actually be doing police work,” said Luebker.
Iverson pointed out the students still were caught in an illegal act, one they felt comfortable and confident enough about to put photos of on the Internet. Posting those photos, he added, helps glamorize alcohol consumption and binge drinking.
Someone else posted photos on a Facebook site of UW-L sophomores Brianna Niesen and Cassie Stenholt holding beer, but they still ended up in court Wednesday pleading no contest and getting fined.
The practice ultimately could hurt the positive alliance law enforcement wants to build with students so they will report crimes, Niesen said.
“I feel like it is a breach of privacy,” Stenholt said. “You feel like you should be able to trust cops.”
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Thursday, April 23, 2009
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