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The military-intel foundations of social media

Admittedly i am terribly late to the party and none of the following is original research. Nevertheless i thought it was worthwhile to assemble for my readers a small fraction of the evidence which details the creation of today's mainstream social media platforms by the U.S. military (DARPA) and intelligence community, of which Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook played a crucial role, though the full story extends beyond U.S. borders.

Some of the key players in this story include Michael McKibben, CEO of Leader Technologies, Doug Gage, former manager of DARPA's LifeLog surveillance program, Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University, Peter Thiel, political activist and billionaire founder of PayPal, Sheryl Sandberg, a technology executive and COO of Meta (Facebook) and former Harvard student, and James Chandler, former Harvard Law Professor.Some of the organizations involved include In-Q-Tel, a CIA investment company, Palantir, a revenue-bleeding data analysis company whose sole client was the CIA for some time, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), The Highlands Group, the Naval Intelligence Net Assessment Office, and Accel, a venture capital firm.

Recreation of insignia discovered on the inside of Mark Zuckerberg's hoodie during an interview by D8. The insignia is not known to be used by Facebook, nor could it be found on the web at the time stated SF Weekly.

Michael McKibben, the founder and CEO of Leader Technologies, claims that his company invented the technology in the late 90s that would allow collaboration on a large scale unlike the groupware technology in use at the time. This technology, estimated to be worth trillions of dollars, McKibben says, was stolen from Leader and used to power many of the mainstream social media platforms we know today including Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, YouTube, Instagram, etc.. He further asserts that the stolen software source code, for which Leader was awarded three patents, was weaponized and essentially treated as though it were open-source software so that it could be illegally distributed by IBM's Eclipse Foundation in 2001, at no cost to "anybody that wanted to have it which was, in fact, the whole of Silicon Valley". The technology was then used to build various social media platforms for the specific purpose of mass surveillance and the perception management of those using them by the U.S. government, the military and the intelligence community, according to McKibben.

That Silicon Valley, social media and the intelligence community are all intimate bedfellows is largely self-evident today, due in no small part to one Edward Snowden, the whistle-blower who exposed this mess and who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton which contracted him out to the NSA. Among the plethora of documents Snowden released to journalists were those detailing intimate relationships between Big Tech and the intelligence community, such as those illustrating the NSA's patently unconstitutional PRISM domestic surveillance and data collection program which stands in gross violation of American's 4th amendment rights.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote the following in a 2017 article titled Upstream vs. PRISM:

After Edward Snowden leaked NSA slides in 2013, two names became synonymous with the agency's vast online spying powers: Upstream and PRISM.

Those two types of surveillance work in different ways but pose similar threats to the privacy of Internet users around the world, including innocent Americans. Both also fall under a surveillance authority known as Section 702 , a provision of law that was enacted by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 and is set to expire at the end of 2017.

In early 2017, the intelligence community rebranded these two kinds of surveillance, referring to them as "upstream" and "downstream."

The names may have changed, but the surveillance is the same. Upstream surveillance involves collecting communications as they travel over the Internet backbone, and downstream surveillance (formerly PRISM) involves collection of communications from companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo.

In the article PRISM, Snowden and Government Surveillance: 6 Things You Need To Know, Lavanya Rathnam writes:

Documents leaked by Snowden show that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple give the NSA direct access to its users' information. According to the documents, Dropbox also joined this list (one of the many reasons we recommend our readers stick with secure alternatives to this service).

PRISM was launched from the ashes of President George W. Bush's domestic surveillance programs, which were abandoned due to lawsuits, disclosures in the media and widespread protest.

Due to past controversies, this program was given the legal go-ahead by the U.S. Congress when it passed the Protect America Act in 2007. Also, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 gave legal immunity to private companies that cooperated voluntarily with U.S Intelligence agencies.

Microsoft became PRISM's first partner in 2007 and the NSA began collecting vast amounts of data from its servers. Other companies joined the program in due course. In 2008, Congress gave the Justice Department authority to compel a reluctant company to "comply" with the needs of PRISM. This means that even companies that were not willing to join the program voluntarily had to do so at the behest of a court order.

This gave the NSA access to even more information. Soon, PRISM became a leading source of raw material for the NSA, as it accounted for one in every seven intelligence reports.

And in an excellent piece titled The Military Origins of Facebook, Whitney Webb provides the following:

Part 1 of this two-part series on Facebook and the US national-security state explores the social media network's origins and the timing and nature of its rise as it relates to a controversial military program that was shut down the same day that Facebook launched. The program, known as LifeLog, was one of several controversial post-9/11 surveillance programs pursued by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that threatened to destroy privacy and civil liberties in the United States while also seeking to harvest data for producing "humanized" artificial intelligence (AI).

As this report will show, Facebook is not the only Silicon Valley giant whose origins coincide closely with this same series of DARPA initiatives and whose current activities are providing both the engine and the fuel for a hi-tech war on domestic dissent.

Michael McKibben appears to be an ethical man who had honorable intentions when his company created the technical foundation required to run large-scale, high-volume, collaborative websites. In 2006 Leader Technologies was awarded the first of three patents for their invention, patent number 7139761, Dynamic association of electronically stored information with iterative workflow changes:

A data management tool. The tool is a unified, horizontal system for communications, organization, information processing, and data storage. The tool operates seamlessly with existing platforms, and is a common workflow layer that is automated with a scalable, relational database. The tool uses one or both of a relational and object database engine that facilitates at least many-to-many relationships among data elements. The highest contextual assumption is that there exists an entity that consists of one or more users. The data storage model first assumes that files are associated with the user. Thus, data generated by applications is associated with an individual, group of individuals, and topical content and not simply with a folder, as in traditional systems.

In the following interview of McKibben by Ann Vandersteel in 2019, McKibben discusses some of the details regarding the technology invented by Leader Technologies and how it was stolen by Mark Zuckerberg and others and then weaponized by U.S. government entities and other intelligence related assets for the explicit purpose of creating a "world-wide mass surveillance program for the intelligence community". He deliberately refers to Zuckerberg as a "cut-out" which is a term associated with the the intelligence community and espionage and, in this case, is perhaps not so different than a patsy since it seems Zuckerberg may be nothing more than a greedy and willing front-man for a company he has little or no control over. McKibben also discusses the legal actions Leader took against Facebook which culminated in a seemingly odd ruling in favor of Facebook despite that Facebook was found guilty of 11 out of 11 patent claims and the fact that Leader held the patent for the technology which Facebook was clearly using.

The video,Michael McKibben EXPOSES the swamp, in which Ann Vandersteel interviews McKibben, is required viewing in order to get a more detailed understanding of this whole affair.

More details regarding the Leader verses Facebook case are provided in the 2012 article, Leader v. Facebook to the U.S. Supreme Court? by Send2Press:

COLUMBUS, Ohio, May 8, 2012 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) - Today a Federal court denied the appeal of Leader Technologies in the Leader v. Facebook patent infringement case. "This is suspiciously convenient timing for Facebook, coming hours after the Facebook roadshow commenced in New York," said CEO Mike McKibben, referring to Facebook's IPO kickoff yesterday.

According to McKibben, a lower court held that Facebook violated Leader's patent on 11 of 11 claims, but then invalidated Leader's patent by finding that Leader had tried to sell its technology too soon ("on-sale bar," in legal parlance.)

"Leader asked the Federal Circuit to overrule this verdict, because the company's patent interests were protected by a 'no-reliance' agreement that negated any possibility of making offers before we had signed contracts," said McKibben. "But the court ignored these agreements, accepted Facebook-doctored evidence, and misquoted my testimony to justify their decision."

"We are extremely disappointed," McKibben added. "The appeals process is supposed to correct legal errors by juries, not simply root around for new evidence to justify not overturning a jury that was fooled by Facebook tricks."

McKibben may appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. "We firmly believe that the jury erred in their one finding against Leader," he says. "Facebook is using our invention, as the jury agreed, without our permission. This court just condoned hacking of intellectual property and fabrication of evidence as acceptable business practices."

The case is Leader Technologies Inc. v. Facebook Inc., 2011-1366, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Washington). The lower court case is Leader Technologies Inc. v. Facebook Inc., 08-cv-862, U.S. District Court, District of Delaware (Wilmington).

The U.S. Supreme Court of course refused to hear the Leader v. Facebook case for reasons which McKibben says he discovered only later, they being serious conflicts of interest between certain judges and Facebook as well as other oddities. For instance Supreme Court Justice, John G. Roberts, not only had a substantial financial interest in Facebook, as well as a number of other technology companies connected to Facebook, but he apparently also mentored Facebook attorney, Thomas Hungar. What is quite revealing about the case is the length to which the U.S. government was willing to go to protect Facebook, a supposedly private company with no connection to U.S. intelligence. The Americans for Innovation (AFI) and American Intelligence Media (AIM) organizations have assembled a massive body of work largely related to the McKibben-Facebook affair, consisting of more than 11 thousand documents, recordings, videos, images and other files, all available on the AFI Research Archive website.

One interesting article published on the AIM website is The Zuckerberg Dossier. Anonymous Patriot's Conclave, an organization for which i could not readily find any information, claims it received a hand-delivered letter from a key Facebook insider and whistle-blower who wished to remain anonymous. This alleged whistle-blower claims to have been Zuckerberg's roommate and lover at some point during their residency at Kirkland House on the Harvard University campus and an integral part of Facebook from its very inception. The problem of course is that the authenticity of the letter cannot be verified, though AIM says it is confidant it is genuine, albeit with some caveats. With that understanding in mind, many statements in the letter dovetail with reality and logic. AIM prefaces the letter with the following (excerpt):

The following anonymous document claims to be written by a Facebook insider who was Mark Zuckerberg's lover from their freshman year at Harvard. Mark's continuing indiscretions with his ongoing government contract keep getting him in trouble to this day. Mark was supposed to simply be the fake "boy genius" of Larry Summers' (Harvard's president) social media project funded by DARPA/In-Q-Tel (CIA)/IBM and the secretive international "public-private" group called The Highlands Group organized with the DoD Office of Net Assessment.

It was Summers and a group of government officials who fabricated, produced and directed Mark throughout the entire fraudulent creation of the Facebook propaganda story at Harvard. These claims are explosive and allege that the entire fraudulent social media network called Facebook was always controlled by the government through the people who were at Harvard directing Mark. The anonymous author of the letter below, who we will call "John", also points out why Facebook was created, how Mark was controlled by Eric Schmidt, James Beyer, Larry Summers, Sheryl Sandberg and the evil intellectual property thief Professor James Chandler.

Admittedly, this Zuckerberg "Dossier" has enough information in it to put Mark Zuckerberg behind bars, and therefore would not be touched by the Main Stream Media - according to the person who hand-delivered this letter to a member of the Anonymous Patriot's Conclave a few days ago.

The letter opens with the following:

To Every Facebook User,

Mark Zuckerberg, and all of us who were there from the beginning, are lying to you and using your personal life as a government-controlled experiment in brain-washing and mind-control - basically a weaponized system of the military (CIA especially) that got out of control. At this point, Mark Zuckerberg has lost control of a company that he never really owned or operated. Truly, anyone who has ever worked with Mark knows that his mind is a blank and that he is nothing more than a parrot for the government handlers who created him. Mark is incapable of running a McDonald's, let alone one of the most powerful companies in the world.

The alleged whistle-blower later claims that Zuckerberg did not write a single line of code for Facebook and was basically an absentee CEO.

The letter continues with the following where "madman" refers to Zuckerberg:

You might think that a madman who could think he could become president - because he "said so" - would be discovered and accused as a fraud. Well, that has happened repeatedly with the other three teams that were working at Harvard, under Harvard president Larry Summers, to create what DARPA and In-Q-Tel wanted the most - a cyber-weapon that could control the minds of anyone that could be lured into it. Facebook was always a military weapon - just like Eric Schmidt's Google which was incubated in the same fashion that Facebook was. Mark was a patsy, but a ruthless, heartless, cold-blooded non-human patsy. He became this way through the brain-washing he received in his High School years by a DARPA program called TIA that needed a "boy-genius" to be the front man.

TIA is an abbreviation for Total Information Awareness, a program which was created by DARPA and the CIA. Whitney Webb writes about the program in her article, The Military Origins of Facebook:

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, DARPA, in close collaboration with the US intelligence community (specifically the CIA), began developing a "precrime" approach to combatting terrorism known as Total Information Awareness or TIA. The purpose of TIA was to develop an "all-seeing" military-surveillance apparatus. The official logic behind TIA was that invasive surveillance of the entire US population was necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, bioterrorism events, and even naturally occurring disease outbreaks.

The architect of TIA, and the man who led it during its relatively brief existence, was John Poindexter, best known for being Ronald Reagan's National Security Advisor during the Iran-Contra affair and for being convicted of five felonies in relation to that scandal. A less well-known activity of Iran-Contra figures like Poindexter and Oliver North was their development of the Main Core database to be used in "continuity of government" protocols. Main Core was used to compile a list of US dissidents and "potential troublemakers" to be dealt with if the COG protocols were ever invoked. These protocols could be invoked for a variety of reasons, including widespread public opposition to a US military intervention abroad, widespread internal dissent, or a vaguely defined moment of "national crisis" or "time of panic." Americans were not informed if their name was placed on the list, and a person could be added to the list for merely having attended a protest in the past, for failing to pay taxes, or for other, "often trivial," behaviors deemed "unfriendly" by its architects in the Reagan administration.

[...]

Soon after TIA was initiated, a similar DARPA program was taking shape under the direction of a close friend of Poindexter's, DARPA program manager Douglas Gage. Gage's project, LifeLog, sought to "build a database tracking a person's entire existence" that included an individual's relationships and communications (phone calls, mail, etc.), their media-consumption habits, their purchases, and much more in order to build a digital record of "everything an individual says, sees, or does."

It is quite interesting the DARPA's LifeLog program, which was supposedly terminated, was killed on February 4, 2004, the very same day that Facebook was founded. This re-branding of programs like LifeLog which incur public resistance is quite typical.

Whitney continues with the following revelation:

After considerable controversy and criticism, in late 2003, TIA was shut down and defunded by Congress, just months after it was launched. It was only later revealed that that TIA was never actually shut down, with its various programs having been covertly divided up among the web of military and intelligence agencies that make up the US national-security state. Some of it was privatized.

The same month that TIA was pressured to change its name after growing backlash, Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir, which was, incidentally, developing the core panopticon software that TIA had hoped to wield.

The Facebook whistle-blower letter then continues with the following:

Though I will not tell you who the members of Mark Zuckerberg's "Fellowship" group were, I can point out that all of the original members of Facebook knew from the beginning that it was a military project for cyber warfare mind-control. Everything done from the beginning was an experiment to see just how far a social media platform could go to "conquer the enemy" through behavioral manipulation with electronic warfare. [...]

Free platforms like Google, Gmail, Facebook, and the rest were confidence tricks to get users to experiment on. My old buddy, Sean Parker, an early member of Facebook has "confessed all" to the media and specifically told the truth that Facebook was meant as a cyber-drug to create and control addicts - digital addicts. As Sean said, we knew from the beginning it was harming every user and that is why we never let our friends or our children use these systems - it harms them tremendously and was the original intent of the media. Mark and I were told by representatives of DARPA that that was the intent of Facebook from its inception.

[...]

One day, Mark was called to Summers office in Massachusetts Hall to meet a most unusual man. His name was Andrew Marshall and he was the head of the Naval Intelligence Net Assessment Office. Mark was terrified of Marshall from the beginning. Marshall had Mark sign a government secrecy agreement, and other security agreements before he told Mark the ultimate military nature of what the Harvard Facebook project entailed. Mark, and Harvard, were simply being used as incubation think tanks as a cover for a military project that needed a corporate face. Professor Chandler said he had discovered the source code that would accomplish the seemingly impossible task of making a social directory "scalable" to billions of people.

[...]

The Facebook operation also coordinated their activities with Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the group that gathered around Hillary Clinton's patent thefts. Every Facebook insider, who was there from the beginning, know these things to be true but would never speak of it for fear of retaliation and possible death. We are speaking about a theft of literally many trillions of dollars in intellectual property, trade secrets, patents, designs and stolen programming source code.

[...]

Then, one day Mark got terribly excited about hacking a fellow student at Harvard because he had some part of the Facebook program. The particular student was an upper classman named Max McKibben who lived next door in Winthrop House, literally 100 feet from our Kirkland House front door. Mark got the best hacker to come to our room and use a special "school" computer to hack into McKibben's personal Harvard email account to steal several white papers on an invention just like the one Chandler had described. This white paper described EXACTLY what Mark had been talking about for two years and now a Harvard student had a full description of a program that could do the same thing.

[...]

I now realize that Chandler took the stolen source code from Michael McKibben and Leader Technologies and gave it to the IBM Eclipse Foundation who turned around gave it out as "open source", the most lucrative intellectual property in history, to all of the social media giants as open source code without charging a penny.

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