Social Media and Social Control: how Silicon Valley serves the US State Department

Facebook isn’t the only Silicon Valley firm with partisan oversight of what we see: the bipartisan billionaire class and their security state have partnered with tech firms since the dawn of the internet to control the parameters of users’ thinking.

by Morgan Artyukhina 

Part 7 - FireEye and DRFL

FireEye isn’t just some well-meaning cybersecurity startup, though: since 2009, FireEye has collected venture capital funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment arm. In a statement at the time, In-Q-Tel said it would maintain a “strategic partnership” with FireEye, calling it a “critical addition to our strategic investment portfolio for security technologies.”

Started as In-Q-It in 1999 with CIA seed money, In-Q-Tel’s investment has poured money into firms judged useful to the U.S. intelligence service, such as the failing company Keyhole, which it bought in 2003. Spun off from a video game outfit, Keyhole aimed to stitch together satellite images and aerial photographs of the planet to form a 3-D digital world that users could navigate.

Buttressed with CIA funds, Keyhole partnered with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to provide essential services for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Google bought the company the following year, redubbing it as Google Earth, and acquiring with it In-Q-Tel executive Rob Painter, who sat on Keyhole’s board of directors and provided a new link between Google and the U.S. intelligence and defense contracting spheres.

The other tip source, the Digital Forensic Research Lab, is a division of the Atlantic Council which, while a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit, is only proforma independent of the U.S. state as one of the preeminent Washington think tanks influencing foreign policy.

In its About Us section, DFRL says its mission is to “identify, expose, and explain disinformation where and when it occurs using open source research; to promote objective truth as a foundation of government for and by people; to protect democratic institutions and norms from those who would seek to undermine them in the digital engagement space.” Lofty goals, were they not voiced by a think tank that’s funded by a bevy of defense contractors, Gulf monarchies, and even the NATO alliance itself.

Facebook has also buttressed its State Department line-towing credentials by adding to their staff figures like Gleicher, Facebook’s chief of Cybersecurity Policy, who is also a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), another hawkish think tank with major influence on U.S. foreign policy that’s funded by many of the same actors as the Atlantic Council. Likewise, Facebook’s new Public Policy Manager for Ukraine, Kateryna Kruk, is a rabid Russophobe who participated in the 2014 U.S.-backed coup d’etat that brought the fascist Svoboda party to power in Ukraine, turning that country’s government against not only Moscow but their own Russian-speaking Ukrainian minorities.

Source, links:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/social-media-control-how-silicon-valley-serves-us-state-department/263267/

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