https://web.archive.org/web/20240131135909/https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/09/us/threats-responses-intelligence-pentagon-plans-computer-system-that-would-peek.html?searchResultPosition=1

THREATS AND RESPONSES: INTELLIGENCE; Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans (NYTimes WAYBACK link)

By John Markoff

Nov. 9, 2002

The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe – including the United States.

As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant.

Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.

Admiral Poindexter, who has described the plan in public documents and speeches but declined to be interviewed, has said that the government needs to break down the stovepipes that separate commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence agency analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.

We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, generate information, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge, and create actionable options, he said in a speech in California earlier this year.

Admiral Poindexter quietly returned to the government in January to take charge of the Office of Information Awareness at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa. The office is responsible for developing new surveillance technologies in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

In order to deploy such a system, known as Total Information Awareness, new legislation would be needed, some of which has been proposed by the Bush administration in the Homeland Security Act that is now before Congress. That legislation would amend the Privacy Act of 1974, which was intended to limit what government agencies could do with private information.

The possibility that the system might be deployed domestically to let intelligence officials look into commercial transactions worries civil liberties proponents.

This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America, said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the technology is Darpa and the agency is the F.B.I. The outcome is a system of national surveillance of the American public.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has been briefed on the project by Admiral Poindexter and the two had a lunch to discuss it, according to a Pentagon spokesman.

As part of our development process, we hope to coordinate with a variety of organizations, to include the law enforcement community, a Pentagon spokeswoman said.

An F.B.I. official, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, said the bureau had had preliminary discussions with the Pentagon about the project but that no final decision had been made about what information the F.B.I. might add to the system.

A spokesman for the White House Office of Homeland Security, Gordon Johndroe, said officials in the office were not familiar with the computer project and he declined to discuss concerns raised by the project's critics without knowing more about it.

He referred all questions to the Defense Department, where officials said they could not address civil liberties concerns because they too were not familiar enough with the project.

Some members of a panel of computer scientists and policy experts who were asked by the Pentagon to review the privacy implications this summer said terrorists might find ways to avoid detection and that the system might be easily abused.

A lot of my colleagues are uncomfortable about this and worry about the potential uses that this technology might be put, if not by this administration then by a future one, said Barbara Simon, a computer scientist who is past president of the Association of Computing Machinery. Once you've got it in place you can't control it.

Other technology policy experts dispute that assessment and support Admiral Poindexter's position that linking of databases is necessary to track potential enemies operating inside the United States.

They're conceptualizing the problem in the way we've suggested it needs to be understood, said Philip Zelikow, a historian who is executive director of the Markle Foundation task force on National Security in the Information Age. They have a pretty good vision of the need to make the tradeoffs in favor of more sharing and openness.

On Wednesday morning, the panel reported its findings to Dr. Tony Tether, the director of the defense research agency, urging development of technologies to protect privacy as well as surveillance, according to several people who attended the meeting.

If deployed, civil libertarians argue, the computer system would rapidly bring a surveillance state. They assert that potential terrorists would soon learn how to avoid detection in any case.

The new system will rely on a set of computer-based pattern recognition techniques known as data mining, a set of statistical techniques used by scientists as well as by marketers searching for potential customers.

The system would permit a team of intelligence analysts to gather and view information from databases, pursue links between individuals and groups, respond to automatic alerts, and share information efficiently, all from their individual computers.

The project calls for the development of a prototype based on test data that would be deployed at the Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir, Va. Officials would not say when the system would be put into operation.

The system is one of a number of projects now under way inside the government to lash together both commercial and government data to hunt for patterns of terrorist activities.

What we are doing is developing technologies and a prototype system to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists, and decipher their plans, and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully pre-empt and defeat terrorist acts, said Jan Walker, the spokeswoman for the defense research agency.

Before taking the position at the Pentagon, Admiral Poindexter, who was convicted in 1990 for his role in the Iran-contra affair, had worked as a contractor on one of the projects he now controls. Admiral Poindexter's conviction was reversed in 1991 by a federal appeals court because he had been granted immunity for his testimony before Congress about the case.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240129144218/https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/10/us/america-under-surveillance-privacy-security-new-tools-for-domestic-spying-qualms.html?searchResultPosition=12

AMERICA UNDER SURVEILLANCE: Privacy and Security; New Tools for Domestic Spying, and Qualms(NYTimes Wayback Link)

By Michael Moss and Ford Fessenden

Dec. 10, 2002

See the article in its original context from December 10, 2002, Section A, Page 1Buy Reprints

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When the Federal Bureau of Investigation grew concerned this spring that terrorists might attack using scuba gear, it set out to identify every person who had taken diving lessons in the previous three years.

Hundreds of dive shops and organizations gladly turned over their records, giving agents contact information for several million people.

It certainly made sense to help them out, said Alison Matherly, marketing manager for the National Association of Underwater Instructors Worldwide. We're all in this together.

But just as the effort was wrapping up in July, the F.B.I. ran into a two-man revolt. The owners of the Reef Seekers Dive Company in Beverly Hills, Calif., balked at turning over the records of their clients, who include Tom Cruise and Tommy Lee Jones – even when officials came back with a subpoena asking for any and all documents and other records relating to all noncertified divers and referrals from July 1, 1999, through July 16, 2002.

Faced with defending the request before a judge, the prosecutor handling the matter notified Reef Seekers' lawyer that he was withdrawing the subpoena. The company's records stayed put.

We're just a small business trying to make a living, and I do not relish the idea of standing up against the F.B.I., said Ken Kurtis, one of the owners of Reef Seekers. But I think somebody's got to do it.

In this case, the government took a tiny step back. But across the country, sometimes to the dismay of civil libertarians, law enforcement officials are maneuvering to seize the information-gathering weapons they say they desperately need to thwart terrorist attacks.

From New York City to Seattle, police officials are looking to do away with rules that block them from spying on people and groups without evidence that a crime has been committed. They say these rules, forced on them in the 1970's and 80's to halt abuses, now prevent them from infiltrating mosques and other settings where terrorists might plot.

At the same time, federal and local police agencies are looking for systematic, high-tech ways to root out terrorists before they strike. In a sense, the scuba dragnet was cumbersome, old-fashioned police work, albeit on a vast scale. Now officials are hatching elaborate plans for dumping gigabytes of delicate information into big computers, where it would be blended with public records and stirred with sophisticated software.

In recent days, federal law enforcement officials have spoken ambitiously and often about their plans to remake the F.B.I. as a domestic counterterrorism agency. But the spy story has been unfolding, quietly and sometimes haltingly, for more than a year now, since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Some people in law enforcement remain unconvinced that all these new tools are needed, and some experts are skeptical that high-tech data mining will bring much of value to light.

Still, civil libertarians increasingly worry about how law enforcement might wield its new powers. They say the nation is putting at risk the very thing it is fighting for: the personal freedoms and rights embodied in the Constitution. Moreover, they say, authorities with powerful technology will inevitably blunder, as became evident in October when an audit revealed that the Navy had lost nearly two dozen computers authorized to process classified information.

What perhaps angers the privacy advocates most is that so much of this revolution in police work is taking place in secret, said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represented Reef Seekers.

If we are going to decide as a country that because of our worry about terrorism that we are willing to give up our basic privacy, we need an open and full debate on whether we want to make such a fundamental change, Ms. Cohn said.

But some intelligence experts say that in a changed world, the game is already up for those who would value civil liberties over the war on terrorism. It's the end of a nice, comfortable set of assumptions that allowed us to keep ourselves protected from some kinds of intrusions, said Stewart A. Baker, the National Security Agency's general counsel under President Bill Clinton.

Tearing Down a Wall

The most aggressive effort to give local police departments unfettered spying powers is taking place in New York City.

It was there 22 years ago that the police, stung by revelations of widespread abuse, agreed to stop spying on people not suspected of a crime. The agreement was part of a containment wall of laws, regulations, court decisions and ordinances erected federally and in many parts of the country in the 70's and 80's.

The F.B.I.'s spying authority was restricted, and the United States' foreign intelligence agencies got out of the business of domestic spying altogether. States passed their own laws. On the local level, ordinances and consent decrees were enacted not just in New York but also in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle. In the years since, these strictures have become part of the culture, Mr. Baker said.

But the wall is under attack. Last month, a special appeals court ruled that the sweeping antiterrorism legislation known as the U.S.A. Patriot Act, enacted shortly after the September 2001 attacks to give the government expanded terror-fighting capacity, freed federal prosecutors to seek wiretap and surveillance authority in the absence of criminal activity. In Chicago last year, a federal appeals court threw out the agreement that restricted police surveillance. Some officials in Seattle would like to follow suit, saying they are effectively sidelined in the terrorism war.

In New York, the Police Department has sued in federal court in Manhattan to end the consent decree the department signed in 1980 to end a civil rights lawsuit over the infiltration of political groups.

Attorney General John Ashcroft and New York's police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, say the wall is a relic – unnecessary and, worse, dangerous. David Cohen, the former deputy director of central intelligence who is now the Police Department's deputy commissioner for intelligence, argues that the consent decree's requirement of a suspicion of criminal activity prevents officers from infiltrating mosques.

In the last decade, we have seen how the mosque and Islamic institutes have been used to shield the work of terrorists from law enforcement scrutiny by taking advantage of restrictions on the investigation of First Amendment activity, Mr. Cohen said in an affidavit.

The police in other cities cite the same need. We're prohibited from collecting things that will make us a safer city, said Lt. Ron Leavell, commander of the criminal intelligence division of the Seattle police.

Mr. Cohen did not argue in his affidavit that the authorities, if unshackled, could have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks. But he did suggest that the F.B.I.'s failure to dig more deeply into the information it had before the attacks turned on agents' fears that they could not climb the wall.

The recent disclosure that F.B.I. field agents were blocked from pursuing an investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui because officials in Washington did not believe there was sufficient evidence of criminal activity to support a warrant points out how one person's judgment in applying an imprecise test may result in the costly loss of critical intelligence, Mr. Cohen said.

Mr. Cohen has also asked that his testimony before the federal court be given in secret, unheard even by opposing lawyers. Last week, a judge told New York City that it needed to present better arguments to justify such extraordinary secrecy.

Civil libertarians, frustrated that they cannot draw the other side into a debate, argue that questions about the need for such expanded powers are critical, and far from answered. Who said you have to destroy a village in order to save it? asked Jethro Eisenstein, one of the lawyers who negotiated the original consent decree. We're protecting freedom and democracy, but unfortunately freedom and democracy have to be sacrificed.

Even the police are far from unanimous about how intrusive they must be. The Chicago police, who have been free from their consent decree for nearly two years, say they have yet to use the new power. The Los Angeles police have made no effort to change their guidelines.

I have not heard complaints that the antiterrorist division has been inhibited in its work, said Joe Gunn, executive director of the Los Angeles Police Commission.

A joint Congressional inquiry into intelligence failures before Sept. 11 concluded that the failures had less to do with the inability of authorities to gather information than with their inability to analyze, understand, share and act on it.

The lesson of Moussaoui was that F.B.I. headquarters was telling the field office the wrong advice, said Eleanor Hill, staff director of the inquiry. Fixing what happened in this case is not inconsistent with preserving civil liberties.

'It Smacks of Big Brother'

The Congressional inquiry's lingering criticism has added impetus to a movement within government to equip terror fighters with better computer technology. If humans missed the clues, the reasoning goes, perhaps a computer will not.

Clearly, the F.B.I. is operating in the dark ages of technology. For instance, when agents in San Diego want to check out new leads, they walk across the street to the Joint Terrorism Task Force offices, where suspect names must be run through two dozen federal and local databases.

Using filters from the Navy's space warfare project, Spawar, the agents are now dumping all that data into one big computer so that with one mouse click they can find everything from traffic fines to immigration law violations. A test run is expected early next year. Similar efforts to consolidate and share information are under way in Baltimore; Seattle; St. Louis; Portland, Ore.; and Norfolk, Va.

It smacks of Big Brother, and I understand people's concern, said William D. Gore, a special agent in charge at the San Diego office. But somehow I'd rather have the F.B.I. have access to this data than some telemarketer who is intent on ripping you off.

Civil libertarians worry that centralized data will be more susceptible to theft. But they are scared even more by the next step officials want to take: mining that data to divine the next terrorist strike.

The Defense Department has embarked on a five-year effort to create a superprogram called Total Information Awareness, led by Adm. John M. Poindexter, who was national security adviser in the Reagan administration. But as soon as next year, the new Transportation Security Administration hopes to begin using a more sophisticated system of profiling airline passengers to identify high-risk fliers. The system in place on Sept. 11, 2001, flagged only a handful of unusual behaviors, like buying one-way tickets with cash.

Like Admiral Poindexter, the transportation agency is drawing from companies that help private industry better market their products. Among them is the Acxiom Corporation of Little Rock, Ark., whose tool, Personicx, sorts consumers into 70 categories like Group 16M, or Aging Upscale based on an array of financial data and behavioral factors.

Experts on consumer profiling say law enforcement officials face two big problems. Some commercial databases have high error rates, and so little is known about terrorists that it could be very difficult to distinguish them from other people.

The idea that data mining of some vast collection of databases of consumer activity is going to deliver usable alerts of terrorist activities is sheer credulity on a massive scale, said Jason Catlett of the Junkbusters Corporation, a privacy advocacy business. The data mining companies, Mr. Catlett added, are mostly selling good old-fashioned snake oil.

Libraries and Scuba Schools

As it waits for the future, the F.B.I. is being pressed to gather and share much more intelligence, and that has left some potential informants uneasy and confused about their legal rights and obligations.

Just how far the F.B.I. has gone is not clear. The Justice Department told a House panel in June that it had used its new antiterrorism powers in 40 instances to share terror information from grand jury investigations with other government authorities. It said it had twice handed over terror leads from wiretaps.

But that was as far as Justice officials were willing to go, declining to answer publicly most of the committee's questions about terror-related inquiries. Civil libertarians have sued under the Freedom of Information Act to get the withheld information, including how often prosecutors have used Section 215 of the 2001 antiterror law to require bookstores or librarians to turn over patron records.

The secrecy enshrouding the counterterrorism campaign runs so deep that Section 215 makes it a crime for people merely to divulge whether the F.B.I. has demanded their records, deepening the mystery – and the uneasiness among groups that could be required to turn over information they had considered private.

I've been on panel discussions since the Patriot Act, and I don't think I've been to one without someone willing to stand up and say, 'Isn't the F.B.I. checking up on everything we do?' said John A. Danaher III, deputy United States attorney in Connecticut.

Several weeks ago, the F.B.I. in Connecticut took the unusual step of revealing information about an investigation to dispute a newspaper report that it had bugged the Hartford Public Library's computers.

Michael J. Wolf, the special agent in charge, said the agency had taken only information from the hard drive of a computer at the library that had been used to hack into a California business. The computer was never removed from the library, nor was any software installed on this or any other computer in the Hartford Public Library by the F.B.I. to monitor computer use, Mr. Wolf said in a letter to The Hartford Courant, which retracted its report.

Nevertheless, Connecticut librarians have been in an uproar over the possibility that their computers with Internet access would be monitored without their being able to say anything. They have considered posting signs warning patrons that the F.B.I. could be snooping on their keystrokes.

I want people to know under what legal provisions they are living, said Louise Blalock, the chief librarian in Hartford.

In Fairfield, the town librarian, Tom Geoffino, turned over computer log-in sheets to the F.B.I. last January after information emerged that some of the Sept. 11 hijackers had visited the area, but he said he would demand a court order before turning over anything else. Agents have not been back asking for more, Mr. Geoffino said.

We're not just librarians, we're Americans, and we want to see the people who did this caught, he said. But we also have a role in protecting the institution and the attitudes people have about it.

The F.B.I.'s interest in scuba divers began shortly before Memorial Day, when United States officials received information from Afghan war detainees that suggested an interest in underwater attacks.

An F.B.I. spokesman said the agency would not confirm even that it had sought any diver names, and would not say how it might use any such information.

The owners of Reef Seekers say they had lots of reasons to turn down the F.B.I. The name-gathering made little sense to begin with, they say, because terrorists would need training far beyond recreational scuba lessons. They also worried that the new law would allow the F.B.I. to pass its client records to other agencies.

When word of their revolt got around, said Bill Wright, one of the owners, one man called Reef Seekers to applaud it, saying, My 15-year-old daughter has taken diving lessons, and I don't want her records going to the F.B.I.

He was in a distinct minority, Mr. Wright said. Several other callers said they hoped the shop would be the next target of a terrorist bombing.

https://steemit.com/discussion/@boodles17/is-facebook-dervived-from-darpas-lifelog-project

Is Facebook Dervived from DARPAs Lifelog Project?(Steemit.com)

boodles17 (49)in #discussion • 6 years ago

I think that most of us knows how intrusive Facebook has become especially after the information that has come out over the past several weeks. What I didn't know was that the idea for Facebook may have been originally been derived from the DARPA Lifelog project.

And by DARPA I mean the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency which is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.

Not only is that creepy, but the date of the Lifelog project being shelved is same date that Facebook was "born": February 4th, 2004

My question is: why pay for data mining of personal information through a military project when you can open a social networking app where the users give their information for "FREE".

I don't know about you but I wouldn't pay for information when people would just give it to me through my app.

Also, the other two members of Facebook's Board of Directors in addition to Zuckerberg (Peter Thiel and James Beyer) have ties to datamining and DARPA as well.

IMG_20180412_215108.jpg

Does this mean that Facebook is just one huge global psych op disguised as a social media site? Other than making masses of money off their users by providing data to advertisers, what did they hope to gain from a military standpoint?

These are questions that will need further research.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbqdb8/15-years-ago-the-military-tried-to-record-whole-human-lives-it-ended-badly

15 Years Ago, the Military Tried to Record Whole Human Lives. It Ended Badly(Vice.com)

In mid-2003, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched an ambitious program aimed at recording essentially all of a person's movements and conversations and everything they listened to, watched, read and bought.

The idea behind the LifeLog initiative was to create a permanent, searchable, electronic diary of entire lives. Not only would a lifelog immortalize users, in a sense, it would also contribute to a growing body of data that military researchers hoped would contribute to the development of artificial intelligence capable of thinking like a human being does.

LifeLog was an iPhone before there were iPhones, social media before there was social media. It was potential all-seeing government surveillance before anyone worried about the NSA or had heard of Edward Snowden.

LifeLog arguably was years ahead of its time. But today, it's just a footnote in tech history. Barely a year after it began, the LifeLog program abruptly ended, effectively shamed out of existence by privacy-advocates and the media.

And then, over the following decade, much of what LifeLog aimed to achieve happened, anyway. A failed military cyber-diary from 15 years ago was, in a way, a preview of our smartphone-addicted, Facebooking, government-surveilled present.

At the same time, LifeLog was "a cautionary tale regarding privacy controversies,” its creator Douglas Gage told me during a series of phone and email interviews.

The ideas behind LifeLog are much, much older than the program itself. In 1945, a government scientist named Vannevar Bush described an idea he termed "Memex." It was, in some ways, a prescient flash forward to smartphones.

Read more: The Army Is Working on Brain Hacks to Help Soldiers Deal With Information Overload

Memex, Bush wrote in The Atlantic in 1945, would be a "device in which an individual stores all his books, records and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility."

Of course, 1940s technology wasn't up to the task of recording a person's every conversation and everything they read. It took nearly 70 years for the tech to catch up to Bush's vision. In late 2001, Gordon Bell, a computer scientist consultant, volunteered to be the subject of MyLifeBits, a life-logging experiment run by computer scientists Jim Gemmell and Roger Lueder for Microsoft.

For 17 years running, Bell has digitized and saved, well, everything. "A lifetime’s worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures and voice recordings," according to the project's website.

In later years Bell added phone calls, instant-messaging transcripts, television and radio to his record. Meanwhile, Gemmel and Lueder wrote software for indexing and searching Bell's log.

To the experiment's architects, its value was self-evident. "Given only one thing that could be saved as their house burns down, many people would grab their photo albums or such memorabilia," the three men wrote in a 2002 paper.

DARPA, however, saw the military value in a comprehensive record of a person's life. In late 2002 the agency had launched a wide-ranging effort to develop new, more sophisticated artificial intelligence. The $7.3 million Cognitive Computing initiative included an "enduring personalized cognitive assistant"—basically, an artificial intelligence secretary that could learn by watching.

To replicate human decision-making, the AI assistant would need data on human behavior. Lots of it. Gage, a former Navy researcher with more than 25 years' experience, had recently joined DARPA. He had a plan for gathering that data.

>>196626

"I hate to say 'Orwellian,' but I think that's what my reaction was."

Drawing inspiration from Bush and Bell, Gage proposed LifeLog. If enough people recorded enough of their lives, the combined information would amount to "the ontology of a human life," Gage told me.

His bosses liked the idea. "DARPA clearly saw how increasing digitization of human experience would make the data needed to model everyday life accessible in machine-readable form," Lee Tien, a privacy lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me.

Gage got initial approval for his project and, in December 2002, began workshopping the idea with fellow scientists and engineers. "The research community was very enthusiastic," Gage told me.

"My father was a stroke victim, and he lost the ability to record short-term memories," Howard Shrobe, an MIT computer scientist, told Wired in defense of LifeLog. "If you ever saw the movie Memento, he had that. So I'm interested in seeing how memory works after seeing a broken one. LifeLog is a chance to do that."

Privacy advocates, by contrast, reacted with revulsion. "I hate to say 'Orwellian,' but I think that's what my reaction was," Steven Aftergood, an analyst with the Federation of American Scientists, told me. "It seemed like a massively intrusive initiative that went far beyond what an ordinary person would willingly and knowingly consent to."

In 2003, Aftergood, Lee and other experts were on high alert for new, potentially intrusive surveillance technologies. In February of that year, DARPA had launched a new surveillance effort it called "Total Information Awareness." TIA's sophisticated software cross-referenced phone calls, internet traffic, bank records, and other personal data in an effort to identify potential terrorists.

Congress shut down TIA after just a few months. But for Gage and DARPA, the damage was done. "LifeLog has the potential to become something like 'TIA cubed,'" Aftergood told Wired at the time.

Gage told me the criticism took him by surprise. "[Journalist Noah] Shachtman’s Wired article was the full flowering of paranoia," he told me. Gage said he never intended for LifeLog to spy on people. "The critics completely mischaracterized LifeLog as a collection system, when the focus was the classification and fusion of low-level multidimensional data to infer higher level 'knowledge' of the course of a single person’s life."

Gage insisted that LifeLog users would be able to choose which facets of their lives the system recorded, and who had access to the resulting data.

But the pamphlet DARPA handed out to researchers who might want to join the LifeLog program did point to LifeLog's potential as a surveillance tool. "LifeLog will be able … to infer the user’s routines, habits and relationships with other people, organizations, places, and objects," the pamphlet explained, "and to exploit these patterns to ease its task."

*

News of the program spread.

In June 2003, The New York Times' William Safire blasted LifeLog as an "all-remembering cyberdiary" with insidious side-effects as people became walking government data-collectors. "Everybody would be snooping on everybody else," Safire warned.

LifeLog's problems multiplied. In July 2003, DARPA began offering grants in support of Gage's work. The grant guidelines seemed to underscore the privacy concerns. "Researchers who receive LifeLog grants will be required to test the system on themselves," Shachtman explained in a July 2003 follow-up Wired article.

"Cameras will record everything they do during a trip to Washington, DC, and global-positioning satellite locators will track where they go," Shachtman wrote. "Biomedical sensors will monitor their health. All the e-mail they send, all the magazines they read, all the credit card payments they make will be indexed and made searchable."

The writing was on the wall. In February 2004, then-DARPA director Tony Tether cancelled LifeLog. "Change in priorities," agency spokesperson Jan Walker explained.

Gage was in the middle of evaluating proposals and preparing to hire researchers when Tether pulled the plug. "I think he had been burnt so badly with TIA that he didn’t want to deal with any further controversy with LifeLog," Gage told me. "The death of LifeLog was collateral damage tied to the death of TIA."

"Canceling it was the path of least resistance," Aftergood added.

Not long after LifeLog's demise, Gage's contract came up for renewal. "Tony elected not to extend my appointment," said Gage, now retired from government service. In the time since, he's done some part-time consulting and taken up sailing and choral singing.

Absent Gage, aspects of LifeLog might have survived, albeit under a different name. "It would not surprise me to learn that the government continued to fund research that pushed this area forward without calling it LifeLog," Lee said. As far as we know, nothing came of DARPA’s AI secretary.

It was the private sector, not the government, that is coming close to turning Gage's LifeLog, Bell's MyLifeBits, and Bush's Memex into reality for millions of people. And ironically for privacy advocates, we practically beg for it.

In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin founded Facebook. Three years later, Apple introduced the iPhone. Aftergood described smartphones and social media as "LifeLog equivalents."

More recently, wearable devices and smart-home systems like Alexa have accelerated our acceptance of digital life logs, according to Lee.

“I think that Facebook is the real face of pseudo-LifeLog at this point,” Gage said. But LifeLog’s creator said he avoids the all-seeing social network. "I generally avoid using Facebook, only occasionally logging in to see what everyone is up to, and have never 'liked' anything."

His caution is understandable. Both Facebook and Apple have come under fire for gathering users' data and passing it along to the government. "We have ended up providing the same kind of detailed personal information to advertisers and data brokers and without arousing the kind of opposition that LifeLog provoked," Aftergood said.

Gage, for his part, said he's devised his own LifeLog surrogate using Apple's iCalendar. "I mis-use iCal as my diary, and have waded through my travel records and copious piles of personal and professional memorabilia to fill in my past timeline—but, of course, it gets ever more sparse the farther back I go," Gage told me.

"I would like to tie all my photos into this in a coherent fashion, but I really don’t know how,” Gage added. “I want my LifeLog!"

LifeLog reflected people’s growing willingness and ability to keep a comprehensive digital record of their lives.

But the public has rejected military-developed, government run digital life records in favor of similar systems developed and run by corporations. It doesn’t seem to matter to most people that the corporate social media watch them arguably as much as a government system would have.

And the government mines social media for people’s data, anyway. In October 2016 the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that police had been working with a company called Geofeedia to track peaceful protesters on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Meanwhile, Silicon Valley firm Palantir set up a "predictive policing" system in New Orleans that helped authorities anticipate potential gang ties between social media users and predict when those suspected gang members might perpetrate crimes.

Apps from Geofeedia and Palantir and other surveillance tools largely tap into data that people voluntarily share on social media. LifeLog reflected people’s growing willingness and ability to keep a comprehensive digital record of their lives—and the government willingness and ability to capture those records—more than it drove those trends.

"The growing digitization of all kinds of personal transactions, combined with the feasibility of collecting and interpreting the resulting data," Aftergood said, "made something like LifeLog conceivable if not inevitable."

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http://www.shrinkrap.net/2006/11/flogging-gordon-bells-memory.html

Flogging Gordon Bell's Memory

I forget where and when I've heard his name before, but when I got to the airport and picked up something to read on the plane, my thalamus filtered down onto Fast Company's cover article (What If You Never Forgot Anything? [use acces code FCNOVENG]) on Microsoft's Gordon Bell, ringing a bell in my head.

The bell ringing was attached to other dimly recalled bits – Xanadu (or something like that… [ed:it's Memex]), a guy from the 1950's (what is his name [ed:Vannevar Bush]? I wish BWI had free internet access so I could google it), and past articles I've read about neurocomputer interfaces). The article is about this brilliant Microsoft researcher who has spent the last 7 years recording every single interaction he has. Conversations, phone calls, emails, faxes, paper documents… you name it. He accumulates an average or over a megabyte per hour, a gigabyte per month. He's obviously not keeping any video (but he does snap a photo every 60 seconds).

Why? It's an experiment in computer-assisted human memory, or maybe call it "memory augmentation". It's a log of your life, or a lifelog. Editor Mark Vamos would miss the ability to forget those memories which evoke embarrassment or regret, but the delete key (or hard drive failure) could take care of that.

Okay… it came back to me as I read the article. I've been to his website before MyLifeBits when I saw something about this a few years ago. I can see the utility of something like this.

Well, the challenge with this sort of thing (which, I must say, is pretty cool) is not in doing it. It lies in the ability to search the info… searching text (easy), audio (harder), and images (harder still) … while also being about to easily access and efficiently use associated data and metadata.

If you want to start your own MyLifeBits experiment, writer Clive Thompson includes a 7-item shopping list [use acces code FCNOVENG]

So, I'm thinking about the impact this would have on Psychiatry. Now I'm putting myself in the patient's place. Recorders blaring, I could easily review my therapy session and get more bang for my emotional buck. If my therapist flogged too (flog=lifelog… I'm still on the plane so I cannot google "flog", but I'm sure that I can't be the first to coin this term), I could tap into her system and see my reactions from her perspective, maybe in a picture-in-picture sorta deal.

Some quotes…

"Frank Nack: 'I'm a big fan of forgetting. I don't want to be reminded of everything I said.' Forgetting … is key to cultural concepts like forgiveness and nostalgia."

"…knowing that everything is being logged might actually turn us into different people. We might be less flamboyant, less funny, less willing to say risky but potentially useful things…"

"If you lose your keys, you can scroll back and figure out where you put 'em."

"But the real goal is to 'discover things that even you didn't know that you knew.' "

"In spring 2004, Gemmel lost a chunk of his memory… [His] hard drive crashed, and he hadn't backed up in four months. When he got his MyLifeBits back up and running, the hole that had been punched in his memories was palpable, even painful."

The article also reviews experimental software which mines the data in Gordon's LifeBits. It associates unexpected ideas based on past memories, recalls long-forgotten bits at just the right time, and creates new information, connections, and ideas buried in your flogs.

Like a good therapist.

This could put quite a few therapists out of business. But it would also open up a whole new area of psychotherapy – lifelog-assisted psychotherapy ("flog therapy"?). This could only develop after folks have flogged quite a bit of their life, I would think. So the therapist would become a sort of guide, teaching folks new, psychodynamically-informed methods of mining their flogs and tapping into their "unconscious."

Well, I guess I've gone out on a limb here. But probably not much further than I did in Reality Therapy Vlog.

The flight attendant is making us put our portable electronic devices away and place our tray tables in their upright, locked, position. If I had my flogging equipment, I'd show you all her picture (looks kinda like Bjork, very cute) and you could hear her admonish the guy in front of me who was refusing to turn off his iPod. Alas, it will all be a dim memory in a few weeks. Gotta go.

Blogged with Flock

https://web.archive.org/web/20120314184545/http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mylifebits/default.aspx

MyLifeBits(WayBack Link)

MylifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks.

Total Recall is coming out this September. This book is the culimation of our thoughts regarding MyLifebits and the larger CARPE research agenda. Stay up to date at the Total Recall blog.

There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort.

The experiment:Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime's worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio.

The software research:Jim Gemmell and Roger Lueder have developed the MyLifeBits software, which leverages SQL server to support: hyperlinks, annotations, reports, saved queries, pivoting, clustering, and fast search. MyLifeBits is designed to make annotation easy, including gang annotation on right click, voice annotation, and web browser integration. It includes tools to record web pages, IM transcripts, radio and television. The MyLifeBits screensaver supports annotation and rating. We are beginning to explore features such as document similarity ranking and faceted classification. We have collaborated with the WWMX team to get a mapped UI, and with the SenseCam team to digest and display SenseCam output.

Support for academic research: Our team led the 2005 Digital Memories (Memex) RFP, which supported 14 univerities and led to an impressive list of publications. We also established the ACM CARPE Workshops: CARPE 2004 CARPE 2005 CARPE 2006

Watch our demo videos

Papers

Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, A Digital Life, Scientific American, March 2007. German version in Spektrum der Wissenschaft (April, 2007)

Wang, Zhe, and Gemmell, Jim, Clean Living: Eliminating Near-Duplicates in Lifetime Personal Storage, Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2006-30, March 2006.

Jim Gemmell, Gordon Bell and Roger Lueder, MyLifeBits: a personal database for everything, Communications of the ACM, vol. 49, Issue 1 (Jan 2006), pp. 88.95. PDF (0.5 MB)

Extended version published as Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2006-23 Word (3MB)PDF (1MB) Abstract

Gemmell, Jim, Aris, Aleks, and Lueder, Roger, Telling Stories With MyLifeBits, ICME 2005, July 6-9 2005 PDF (1 MB)

Gemmell, Jim, Williams, Lyndsay, Wood, Ken, Bell, Gordon and Lueder, Roger, Passive Capture and Ensuing Issues for a Personal Lifetime Store, Proceedings of The First ACM Workshop on Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences (CARPE '04), Oct. 15, 2004, New York, NY, USA, pp. 48-55. Word (2 MB) PDF (1 MB)

Aris, Aleks, Gemmell, Jim and Lueder, Roger, Exploiting Location and Time for Photo Search and Storytelling in MyLifeBits, Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2004-102, October 2004 Word (1.5MB) PDF (0.8 MB) Abstract

Gemmell, Jim, Lueder, Roger, and Bell, Gordon, The MyLifeBits Lifetime Store, ACM SIGMM 2003 Workshop on Experiential Telepresence (ETP 2003), November 7, 2003, Berkeley, CA. Word (1.5 MB)PDF (1.5 MB)

Living With a Lifetime Store, Gemmell, Jim, Lueder, Roger, and Bell, Gordon, ATR Workshop on Ubiquitous Experience Media, Sept. 9-10, 2003, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto, Japan. Word (1.5MB)PDF (1.5MB)

MyLifeBits: Fulfilling the Memex Vision, Gemmell, Jim, Bell, Gordon, Lueder, Roger, Drucker, Steven, and Wong, Curtis, ACM Multimedia '02, December 1-6, 2002, Juan-les-Pins, France, pp. 235-238. Word (1.4 MB) PDF (297 KB)

Storage and Media in the Future When you Store Everything, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell

Presentations

Gordon Bell's SIGMOD Keynote (June 14, 2005): MyLifeBits, A Transaction Processing Database for Everything Personal. The talk included project history, demonstration screens, architecture, size and shape of the Bell database (200,000 items, 100 GBytes), and research challenges for the database community. PowerPoint (22 MB)

Jim Gemmell's MyLifeBits talk given at a number of universities: Feb 2005 version PowerPoint (10 MB)

Gordon Bell's talk, given at BayCHI, on 11 February 2003 at PARC, Palo Alto (4.8 MByte PPT) and U.S. Naval Post Graduate School, Monterey on 6 February 2003.

MyLifeBits: A lifetime personal store beginning at 1:22. Streaming webcast of Bell by Austrian Telecom at Austria's European (Technology) Forum Alpbach, Plenary Session speaker, "The World of Tomorrow", held Thursday 26 August 2004. See also the PowerPoint presentation (approx. 10 MB).

MyLifeBits In The News

Du sollst nicht vergessen, Der Spiegel, 4/14/2008

Total Recall: Storing every life memory in a surrogate brain, ComputerWorld, 4/2/2008

Don't forget to back up your brain, Fox News, 11/14/2007

Remember This?, The New Yorker, May 28, 2007

Total recall becomes a reality, The Telegraph, 4/21/2007

Your Whole Life is Going to Bits, Sydney Morning Herald 4/14/2007

Researcher Records His Life On Computer, CBS Evening News 4/9/2007

Perfect Memory,WATTnow, March 2007

Lifeblogging: Is a virtual brain good for the real one? Ars technica, 2/7/2007

On the Record, All the Time, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/4/2007

Digital Diary, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/28/2007

The Persistence of Memory, NPR Radio "On the Media" show, 1/5/2007

How Microsoft’s Gordon Bell is Reengineering Human Memory (and Soon, Your Life and Business), Fast Company, Nov 2006.

Digital age may bring total recall in future, CNN 10/16/2006.

El hombre que guarda todos los recuerdos de su vida en bits, La Crónica de Hoy (Mexico), 7/16/2006.

That's My Life, Aria Magazine April 2006.

The ultimate digital diary The Dominion Post 5/31/2006

In 2021 You'll Enjoy Total Recall Popular Science 5/18/2006

The Memory Machine, Varsity.co.uk, 3/2/2006

Life Bytes, NPR Radio "Living on Earth" show, 1/20/2006

The man with the perfect memory - just don't ask him to remember what's in it The Guardian, 12/28/2005

Bytes of my life, Hindustan Times, 11/17/2005

Total Recall, IEEE Spectrum, 11/1/2005 Podcast on IEEE Spectrum Radio (Choose arrow on October 2005 show and select "MyLifeBits – the digitized life of Gordon Bell")

Turning Your Life Into Bits, Indexed, Los Angeles Times 7/11/2005

Wouldn't It Be Nice The Wall Street Journal 5/23/2005

Life Bits IEEE Spectrum Online May 2005

How To Be A Pack Rat, Forbes.com 4/29/2005 - see also blog entry by Thomas Hawk at eHomeUpgrade

Computer sage cuts paperwork, converts his life to digital format The Seattle Time 4/9/2005

Channel 9 video interviews 8/21/2004 IntroGemmellLueder

Slices of Life Spiked-Online 8/19/2004

Next-generation search tools to refine results CNET 8/9/2004

Life in byte-sized pieces The Age, 7/18/2004

Removable Media For Our Minds TheFeature 3/25/2004

This is Your Life San Jose Mercury News 3/6/2004

Navigating Digital Home Networks New York Times 2/19/2004

Offloading Your Memories New York Times Magazine Year in Ideas issue 12/14/2003 "Bright notions, bold inventions, genius schemes and mad dreams that took off (or tried to) in 2003"

Logged on for life Toronto Star 9/8/2003

This is your life–in bits U.S. News & World Report 6/23/2003

My Life in a Terabyte IT-Analysis.com 5/14/2003

How MS will know ALL about you ZD AnchorDesk 4/18/2003

Memories as Heirlooms Logged Into a Database The New York Times 3/20/2003

Microsoft Fair Forecasts Future AP 2/27/2003 (This story ran on many newspapers and news sites, including USA Today, The Globe and Mail, The San Jose Mercury News, and ABC News)

This Is Your Brain on Digits ABC News 2/5/2003

A life in bits and bytes c|net News.com 1/6/2003 (run also by ZDNet)|

Your Life - On The Web Computer Research & Technology 12/20/2002

Saving Your Bits for Posterity Wired 12/6/2002

Microsoft works to create back-up brain Knowledge Management 11/25/2002

Microsoft Creating Virtual Brain NewsFactor Network 11/22/2002

Microsoft solves "giant shoebox problem" Geek.com 11/22/2002

Would you put your life in Microsoft's hands? Silicon.com (run also by ZDNet News) 11/21/2002

Microsoft Plans Digital Memory Box, a Step Toward "Surrogate Brain" BetterHumans 11/21/2002

E-hoard with Microsoft's life database vnunet.com IT Week 11/21/2002

Microsoft plans online life archive BBC News 11/20/2002

Software aims to put your life on a disk New Scientist 11/20/2002

Related links

As We May Think, by Vannevar Bush, The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), July 1945, 101-108.

Many more links can be found at the CARPE Research Community web site

https://cryptome.org/spy-dotnet.htm

USA PATRIOT Act Surveillance

By Daniel Brandt NameBase http://www.pir.org/

There have been suggestions recently that the FBI will be fairly aggressive in its use of the new Internet surveillance portions of the anti-terror law.

The source for this is Stewart Baker, a former NSA lawyer [ this was found on a newsgroup through Google Groups ]:

> From: "Baker, Stewart" <SBaker@steptoe.com>

> To: "declan@well.com" <declan@well.com>

> cc: "Albertazzie, Sally" <SAlbertazzie@steptoe.com>

> Subject: Fox News goes overboard

> Date: 29 Oct 2001 09:48:17 -0500

>

> Fox News recently reported that the FBI has a plan to change the

> architecture of the Internet, centralizing it and providing "a

> technical backdoor to the networks of Internet service providers."

> Like many others, I thought this was big news, and rather surprising.

> Until I realized that the reporter only cited one source and that

> it was, well, me. Fox News's claims go beyond the facts I provided

> to her, and beyond any that I know about.

>

> To be clear, I believe that the FBI is at work on an initiative to

> make Internet communications, indeed any packet data communications,

> more susceptible to intercept and more productive of non-content

> data about communications – the sort of "pen register" data that

> was expressly approved for Internet communications in the recent

> antiterrorism bill. This initiative will have architectural

> implications for packet data communications systems. The FBI is

> likely to press providers of those services to centralize communications

> in nodes where interception will be more convenient, and it is

> likely to call on packet data services to build systems that provide

> more information about the communications of their subscribers.

>

> The vehicle for this initiative is CALEA, the Communications

> Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, a 1994 enactment that actually

> requires telecom carriers to redesign their networks to provide

> better wiretap capabilities. The act is supposed to exempt

> information services, but the vagueness of that provision has

> encouraged the FBI to expand its mandate into packet-data

> communications. The Bureau is now preparing a general CALEA proposal

> for all packet-data systems. While I have not seen it, the Bureau's

> past interventions into packet-data and other communications

> architecture have had two characteristics – they have sought more

> centralization in order to simplify interception and they have

> asked providers to generate new data messages about their subscribers'

> activities – messages that are of value only to law enforcement.

>

> There are real legal and policy questions that should be raised

> about this effort. In my view, it goes beyond what Congress intended

> in 1994. And the implications for Internet users and technologies

> deserve to be debated. But making these points, as I did with Fox

> News, is not the same as saying that the FBI has a firm plan to

> centralize the Internet and build back doors into all ISP networks.

> If Fox News wants to break that story, it will need a source other

> than me.

>

> –

> Stewart Baker

> Steptoe & Johnson LLP

> 1330 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.

> Washington, DC 20036

I would like to add a dimension that has not been covered in this discussion of Internet surveillance. One item I brought up earlier was the possibility that the search terms added to the URL for Net searching are now fair game, because they can be considered part of the address as opposed to part of the content. I note with approval that the problem of search terms for engines such as Google has been mentioned both by the ACLU and by the EFF in their analysis of the new law.

But there's a further dimension that occurred to me more recently, that bears watching. That is the dimension of what's referred to generally as "traffic analysis." NameBase has a visualized "proximity search" that draws social network diagrams based on public information, and it was during the course of developing this several years ago that I became familiar with what the intelligence agencies are doing with traffic analysis and data visualization.

Federal agencies such as NSA, CIA, FinCEN, and DEA, have been doing a great deal of traffic analysis of telecommunications. Presumably this has involved circuits outside the U.S., for the most part, and is traffic that is non-Internet in nature, such as telephone toll records. This has been going on for at least ten years. It is a rather well-developed field by now.

There are a number of software vendors that write programs for traffic analysis. These are frequently termed "link analysis" or "cluster analysis" or "network analysis" software, which involves "data mining" and "visualization." These vendors often contract with the government. They don't talk much about their work, but you can search Google Groups and get hints of what's been happening in the field.

The new law allows data sharing between agencies. The FBI, which is now empowered to employ link analysis on the Internet, is in a position to obtain software expertise from those agencies that are more advanced in this field. They are also in a position to place a next-generation Carnivore close to some major Internet hubs, and mine most of the traffic for purposes of traffic analysis.

Pundits like to say that they're not worried, because the FBI couldn't possibly monitor all the data that flows over the Net.

That's not what the FBI wants to do with their Net surveillance, in my opinion. Rather, they want to be able to visualize clusters of cross-connect activity, perhaps based on some prior parameters, and see if the clusters suggest that certain IP addresses may be worthy of further investigation.

This is considered an excellent technique when you don't have any other clues or leads to work, because it at least allows you to get started by focusing on a subset of the data, based on patterns that look interesting.

The fact that nearly all search terms use query string information after the URL means that all these terms are very handy for use in traffic analysis. These terms are tightly focused already, because the user put some thought into which terms will deliver the desired data. It would be very easy to integrate these search terms into a traffic analysis software package. It would be much more interesting than telephone toll numbers, because there's much more data available for crunching in a software program.

When combined with email "to" and "from" addresses, and analyzed on a mainframe or distributed network of computers, you could zero in on anything suspicious happening on the net and target sub-populations of IP addresses for further scrutiny, or for past behavior if you have logs that go back in time. This is all very easy to do. Look what Google has been able to do with its 10,000 networked Linux boxes. It can crawl the entire Web once a month and handle over 110 million searches per day, all on $50 million or so per year, which isn't much by government standards.

There's no possibility of overload, despite the pundits. All you have to do is add more boxes, or scale down the parameters a bit on the front end so that less traffic gets analyzed.

This, I feel, is what the FBI plans to do with their new access to the Net. Essentially, it means the end of Internet privacy.

From: NameBase@cs.com

Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2001 12:19:56 EST

Subject: CIA and web surveillance

To: jya@pipeline.com

http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/opinion/termsheet/mm110801.htm

2001-11-07

Start-up helps CIA in terrorism fight

Agency's venture arm takes stake in Stratify

By Matt Marshall

Mercury News

The Central Intelligence Agency may seem a bizarre source of support for struggling Silicon Valley start-ups, but it may be a sure patron in a dour economy.

Ask Nimish Mehta, chief executive of Mountain View's Stratify, formerly known as Purple Yogi. His company combs through billions of Web pages to find answers to users' questions.

This week, it accepted millions in venture funding from the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. In return, In-Q-Tel wants Stratify's help in trawling through millions of Web and other electronic documents, including those written in Middle Eastern languages. "That would be nice to have,'' says Eric Kaufmann, a partner at In-Q-Tel's Menlo Park office.

Neither the CIA nor the company will disclose the exact amount of the funding, for fear of offending the CIA's other portfolio companies, which have gotten less. The amount was more than $1 million but less than $5 million.

The deal could be a good omen for Stratify, which wasn't pulling in much revenue under its dot-com business model. Indeed, if Mehta has his way, he'll be stealing a page from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's playbook.

Rewind about 25 years. Back in the late 1970s, the spy agency became Oracle's first customer. A happy camper with Oracle, the CIA helped open doors for Ellison at other government agencies and corporations.

This way, Ellison survived through the recession years of the early 1980s with no venture capital injections at all. And by not watering down ownership with VC investments, Ellison emerged with 39 percent of Oracle's shares – and since has become the nation's second- or third-richest man.

Mehta, a former Oracle executive himself, says he doesn't want venture capital, and didn't seek out the CIA's investment. He joined Stratify in February, when it was still Purple Yogi, a frugal company that still had $20 million of the $30 million venture funding it had received over the past two years.

But like Ellison, Mehta sees a good customer in the CIA, one that can open similar doors for his company. "I've seen Larry fight that battle, and I want to fight it the same way,'' says Mehta, who once reported directly to Ellison.

The parallels run deeper. Mehta wants Stratify to tap into what he believes is a huge potential market for mining, and then ordering, "unstructured data. Oracle and its early competitors discovered the database-software market – which orders "structured information.

Of the information that a typical company carries on its Web server and computers, 85 percent is unstructured, Mehta says. That's why Mehta says he can build Stratify into a giant that rivals Oracle.

That's also the reason why the CIA is interested. In-Q-Tel's Kaufmann says Stratify is better than its competitors because it creates a hierarchy for the information it seeks, has superior classification technology, and is nimble in the way it allows users to decide what research to conduct. The company is brainy. It has about 15 employees with doctorate degrees. Twenty of its 75 employees are engineers based in India.

Stratify recently won a deal with Infosys, a management-consulting company that uses Stratify's software in the products it offers to clients. Investors say Stratify is more advanced than Autonomy, a publicly traded U.K. competitor. "It can handle millions of documents and can crawl over everything looking for stuff,'' says Bill Burnham, a partner at Softbank Venture Capital and an earlier investor.

He and other investors encouraged Mehta to take up the relationship with the CIA. In times like this, any funding at all is "nothing but positive,'' says Purvi Gandhi, a venture capitalist with H&Q Asia Pacific, who also invested in the company.

The CIA deal was in the works before the Sept. 11 attack, and it was sought out by Gilman Louie, In-Q-Tel's chief executive. Louie, otherwise known as Q a reference to the technologist Q in James Bond movies who shows 007 the latest gadgets is a man who "pulses with energy,'' according to Mehta. That the CIA sought a deal that is relevant for the attack's aftermath is a coincidence, Mehta says.

Mehta has presided over a 21 percent reduction in workforce, preparing the company to survive through 2003 – even before the CIA's investment.

Mehta learned the hard way. His previous company, Sunnyvale's Impresse, went out of business early this year after burning through about $80 million in venture capital.

Purple Yogi was frugal, but Mehta says newly named Stratify is even cheaper now that he's arrived. Forget credit cards, free food, massages or big-budget outings. To have fun, the company created a 21-hole miniature-golf course on premises. Employees went to a baseball game on public transit.

And Mehta's cubicle is tiny. He recalls his senior vice president's digs at Oracle: a sprawling private office, a waiting room, a secretary, a training room and sauna. "My personal bathroom was as big as my cubicle,'' he says, pointing to his new humble digs.

He's not Ellison yet.

END

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3747202/Paul-Ceglia-supposed-Facebook-founder-disappeared-2015-says-s-running-CIA-want-kill-knowledge-involved-social-media-site.html

Fugitive 'Facebook founder' says he's alive and well but 'running for his life' from CIA because of its secret involvement in the social media site(DailyMail.com)

The self-styled co-founder of Facebook, who disappeared while on house arrest in March 2015, has said he and his family alive and well, but still fleeing a CIA plot to kill him.

Paul Ceglia, 43, claimed in 2010 that he owned 84 per cent of Facebook per an alleged 2003 contract with Mark Zuckerberg. In 2012 he was charged with altering documents to bolster his claim.

Now he and his family - wife Iasia, two teen sons and dog Buddy - are on the run after they fled last year. And according to Bloomberg, Ceglia still fears for his life.

Fugitive: Paul Ceglia (pictured in 2012) claimed he paid for half of Facebook's development in 2003 and lent Mark Zuckerberg code. He is now fighting extradition from Ecuador

Fugitive: Paul Ceglia (pictured in 2012) claimed he paid for half of Facebook's development in 2003 and lent Mark Zuckerberg code. He sued Zuckerberg and Facebook in 2010

In emails sent to the site from August 3-8, Ceglia said he and his family had fled abroad and were now living under the radar, lest the CIA kill them.

Police entered his home in Wellsville, New York, on March 5 to find his ankle bracelet connected to a contraption that was designed to make it look like he was walking around his home.

Ceglia claims that he had a 'very credible' threat that he would be arrested on new charges, jailed and killed - and had to flee before that happened.

'I felt I had no one in government I could trust,' Ceglia wrote in one of four e-mails.

'An opportunity presented itself, so I MacGyver’d some things together and started running for my life.'

Denial: Zuckerberg denied claims. In 2012, Ceglia was accused of doctoring evidence and placed on house arrest. He and his family vanished in 2015, leaving ankle bracelet behind

Denial: Zuckerberg denied claims. In 2012, Ceglia was accused of doctoring evidence and placed on house arrest. He and his family vanished in 2015, leaving ankle bracelet behind

He says the reason for the supposed plot against his life is that his fraud trial might reveal involvement by the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, in Facebook.

Exactly what that alleged involvement was is not clear.

It's not known where Ceglia is, or even if he is truly abroad and applying for asylum, as he says he is.

He will only say that he is 'living on the air in Cincinnati,' a line from the theme tune of TV show 'WKRP in Cincinnati.'

On the run: Ceglia, his wife Iasia (left), his two sons and dog Buddy are all now abroad, he says, and seeking asylum. He says the CIA wants to kill him because of what he knows

On the run: Ceglia, his wife Iasia (left), his two sons and dog Buddy are all now abroad, he says, and seeking asylum. He says the CIA wants to kill him because of what he knows

But Robert Ross Fogg, one of Ceglia’s lawyers in the criminal case, said he is 'relieved' to discover that Ceglia is safe and well, and disappeared under his own volition.

He also asked Ceglia to return, pointing out that a judge in December said there was 'probable cause' for Ceglia's contract claim. 'To win this case, I need him home,' Fogg said.

Ceglia hired Zuckerberg to write code for his now-defunct website Streetfax.com in 2003.

He says he gave Zuckerberg money and access to the Streetfax search engine in an early build of what was then called 'The Face Book'.

Zuckerberg says that his contract was only for Streetfax.com and that he didn't think of Facebook until much later.

Family: Ceglia (pictured with his sons, who are now teens) says the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, had a hand in Facebook, but it's not clear exactly what that means

Family: Ceglia (pictured with his sons, who are now teens) says the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, had a hand in Facebook, but it's not clear exactly what that means

https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/nys/pressreleases/October12/CegliaPaulCharges/Ceglia,%20Paul%20Complaint.pdf

How Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt helped write A.I. laws in Washington without publicly disclosing investments in A.I. startups(SeeDNC.com)

PUBLISHED MON, OCT 24 2022 10:46 AM EDT

UPDATED MON, OCT 24 2022 1:14 PM EDT

Eamon Javers

@EAMONJAVERS

WATCH LIVE

KEY POINTS

Five months after Schmidt was appointed to the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, he made a little-noticed private investment in an initial seed round of financing for a start-up company called Beacon.

It was the first of a handful of direct investments he would make in AI start-up companies during his tenure as chairman of the AI commission.

While there is no indication that Schmidt broke any ethics rules or did anything unlawful, government ethics advisors say his investments presented a huge conflict of interest.

About four years ago, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was appointed to the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence by the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

It was a powerful perch. Congress tasked the new group with a broad mandate: to advise the U.S. government on how to advance the development of artificial intelligence, machine learning and other technologies to enhance the national security of the United States.

The mandate was simple: Congress directed the new body to advise on how to enhance American competitiveness on AI against its adversaries, build the AI workforce of the future, and develop data and ethical procedures.

In short, the commission, which Schmidt soon took charge of as chairman, was tasked with coming up with recommendations for almost every aspect of a vital and emerging industry. The panel did far more under his leadership. It wrote proposed legislation that later became law and steered billions of dollars of taxpayer funds to industry he helped build — and that he was actively investing in while running the group.

If you're going to be leading a commission that is steering the direction of government AI and making recommendations for how we should promote this sector and scientific exploration in this area, you really shouldn't also be dipping your hand in the pot and helping yourself to AI investments.

Walter Shaub

SENIOR ETHICS FELLOW, PROJECT ON GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT

His credentials, however, were impeccable given his deep experience in Silicon Valley, his experience advising the Defense Department, and a vast personal fortune estimated at about $20 billion.

Five months after his appointment, Schmidt made a little-noticed private investment in an initial seed round of financing for a startup company called Beacon, which uses AI in the company's supply chain products for shippers who manage freight logistics, according to CNBC's review of investment information in database Crunchbase.

There is no indication that Schmidt broke any ethics rules or did anything unlawful while chairing the commission. The commission was, by design, an outside advisory group of industry participants, and its other members included well-known tech executives including Oracle CEO Safra Catz, Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy and Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Eric Horvitz, among others.

'Conflict of interest'

Schmidt's investment was just the first of a handful of direct investments he would make in AI startup companies during his tenure as chairman of the AI commission.

"It's absolutely a conflict of interest," said Walter Shaub, a senior ethics fellow at the Project on Government Oversight, and a former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.

"That's technically legal for a variety of reasons, but it's not the right thing to do," Shaub said.

Venture capital firms financed, in part, by Schmidt and his private family foundation also made dozens of additional investments in AI companies during Schmidt's tenure, giving Schmidt an economic stake in the industry even as he developed new regulations and encouraged taxpayer financing for it. Altogether, Schmidt and entities connected to him made more than 50 investments in AI companies while he was chairman of the federal commission on AI. Information on his investments isn't publicly available.

All that activity meant that, at the same time Schmidt was wielding enormous influence over the future of federal AI policy, he was also potentially positioning himself to profit personally from the most promising young AI companies.

Institutional issues

Schmidt's conflict of interest is not unusual. The investments are an example of a broader issue identified by ethics reformers in Washington, D.C.: outside advisory committees that are given significant sway over industries without enough public disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. "The ethics enforcement process in the executive branch is broken, it does not work," said Craig Holman, a lobbyist on ethics, lobbying and campaign finance for Public Citizen, the consumer advocacy organization. "And so the process itself is partly to blame here."

The federal government counts a total of 57 active federal advisory commissions, with members offering input on everything from nuclear reactor safeguards to environmental rules and global commodities markets.

For years, reformers have tried to impose tougher ethics rules on Washington's sprawling network of outside advisory commissions. In 2010, then-President Barack Obama used an executive order to block federally registered lobbyists from serving on federal boards and commissions. But a group of Washington lobbyists fought back with a lawsuit arguing the new rule was unfair to them, and the ban was scaled back.

'Fifth arm of government'

The nonprofit Project on Government Oversight has called federal advisory committees the "fifth arm of government" and has pushed for changes including additional requirements for posting conflict-of-interest waivers and recusal statements, as well as giving the public more input in nominating committee members. Also in 2010, the House passed a bill that would prohibit the appointment of commission members with conflicts of interest, but the bill died in the Senate.

"It's always been this way," Holman said. "When Congress created the Office of Government Ethics to oversee the executive branch, you know, they didn't really want a strong ethics cop, they just wanted an advisory commission." Holman said each federal agency selects its own ethics officer, creating a vast system of more than 4,000 officials. But those officers aren't under the control of the Office of Government Ethics – there's "no one person in charge," he said.

Eric Schmidt during a news conference at the main office of Google Korea in Seoul on November 8, 2011.

Eric Schmidt during a news conference at the main office of Google Korea in Seoul on November 8, 2011.

Jung Yeon-je | Afp | Getty Images

People close to Schmidt say his investments were disclosed in a private filing to the U.S. government at the time. But the public and the news media had no access to that document, which was considered confidential. The investments were not revealed to the public by Schmidt or the commission. His biography on the commission's website detailed his experiences at Google, his efforts on climate change and his philanthropy, among other details. But it did not mention his active investments in artificial intelligence.

A spokesperson for Schmidt told CNBC that he followed all rules and procedures in his tenure on the commission, "Eric has given full compliance on everything," the spokesperson said.

But ethics experts say Schmidt simply should not have made private investments while leading a public policy effort on artificial intelligence.

"If you're going to be leading a commission that is steering the direction of government AI and making recommendations for how we should promote this sector and scientific exploration in this area, you really shouldn't also be dipping your hand in the pot and helping yourself to AI investments," said Shaub of the Project on Government Oversight.

Shaub said there were several ways Schmidt could have minimized this conflict of interest: He could have made the public aware of his AI investments, he could have released his entire financial disclosure report, or he could have made the decision not to invest in AI while he was chair of the AI commission.

Public interest

"It's extremely important to have experts in the government," Shaub said. "But it's, I think, even more important to make sure that you have experts who are putting the public's interests first."

The AI commission, which Schmidt chaired until it expired in the fall of 2021, was far from a stereotypical Washington blue-ribbon commission issuing white papers that few people actually read.

Instead, the commission delivered reports which contained actual legislative language for Congress to pass into law to finance and develop the artificial intelligence industry. And much of that recommended language was written into vast defense authorization bills. Sections of legislative language passed, word for word, from the commission into federal law.

The commission's efforts also sent millions of taxpayer dollars to priorities it identified. In just one case, the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act included $75 million "for implementing the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence recommendations."

At a commission event in September 2021, Schmidt touted the success of his team's approach. He said the commission staff "had this interesting idea that not only should we write down what we thought, which we did, but we would have a hundred pages of legislation that they could just pass." That, Schmidt said, was "an idea that had never occurred to me before but is actually working."

$200 billion modification

Schmidt said one piece of legislation moving on Capitol Hill was "modified by $200 billion." That, he said, was "essentially enabled by the work of the staff" of the commission.

At that same event, Schmidt suggested that his staff had wielded similar influence over the classified annexes to national security-related bills emanating from Congress. Those documents provide financing and direction to America's most sensitive intelligence agencies. To protect national security, the details of such annexes are not available to the American public.

"We don't talk much about our secret work," Schmidt said at the event. "But there's an analogous team that worked on the secret stuff that went through the secret process that has had similar impact."

Asked whether classified language in the annex proposed by the commission was adopted in legislation that passed into law, a person close to Schmidt responded, "due to the classified nature of the NSCAI annex, it is not possible to answer this question publicly. NSCAI provided its analysis and recommendations to Congress, to which members of Congress and their staff reviewed and determined what, if anything, could/should be included in a particular piece of legislation."

Beyond influencing classified language on Capitol Hill, Schmidt suggested that the key to success in Washington was being able to push the White House to take certain actions. "We said we need leadership from the White House," Schmidt said at the 2021 event. "If I've learned anything from my years of dealing with the government, is the government is not run like a tech company. It's run top down. So, whether you like it or not, you have to start at the top, you have to get the right words, either they say it, or you write it for them, and you make it happen. Right? And that's how it really, really works."

Industry friendly

The commission produced a final report with top-line conclusions and recommendations that were friendly to the industry, calling for vastly increased federal spending on AI research and a close working relationship between government and industry.

The final report waived away concerns about too much government intervention in the private sector or too much federal spending.

"This is not a time for abstract criticism of industrial policy or fears of deficit spending to stand in the way of progress," the commission concluded in its 2021 report. "In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower, a fiscally conservative Republican, worked with a Democratic Congress to commit $10 billion to build the Interstate Highway System. That is $96 billion in today's world."

The commission didn't go quite that big, though. In the end, it recommended $40 billion in federal spending on AI, and suggested it should be done hand in hand with tech companies.

"The federal government must partner with U.S. companies to preserve American leadership and to support development of diverse AI applications that advance the national interest in the broadest sense," the commission wrote. "If anything, this report underplays the investments America will need to make."

The urgency driving all of this, the commission said, is Chinese development of AI technology that rivals the software coming out of American labs: "China's plans, resources, and progress should concern all Americans."

China, the commission said, is an AI peer in many areas and a leader in others. "We take seriously China's ambition to surpass the United States as the world's AI leader within a decade," it wrote.

But Schmidt's critics see another ambition behind the commission's findings: steering more federal dollars toward research that can benefit the AI industry.

"If you put a tech billionaire in charge, any framing that you present them, the solution will be, 'give my investments more money,' and that's indeed what we see," said Jack Poulson, executive director of the nonprofit group Tech Inquiry. Poulson formerly worked as a research scientist at Google, but he resigned in 2018 in protest of what he said was Google bending to the censorship demands of the Chinese government.

Too much power?

To Poulson, Schmidt was simply given too much power over federal AI policy. "I think he had too much influence," Poulson said. "If we believe in a democracy, we should not have a couple of tech billionaires, or, in his case, one tech billionaire, that is essentially determining US government allocation of hundreds of billions of dollars."

The federal commission wound down its work on Oct. 1, 2021.

Four days later, on Oct. 5, Schmidt announced a new initiative called the Special Competitive Studies Project. The new entity would continue the work of the congressionally created federal commission, with many of the same goals and much of the same staff. But this would be an independent nonprofit and operate under the financing and control of Schmidt himself, not Congress or the taxpayer. The new project, he said, will "make recommendations to strengthen America's long-term global competitiveness for a future where artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies reshape our national security, economy, and society."

The CEO of Schmidt's latest initiative would be the same person who had served as the executive director of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. More than a dozen staffers from the federal commission followed Schmidt to the new private sector project. Other people from the federal commission came over to Schmidt's private effort, too: Vice Chair Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense, would serve on Schmidt's board of advisors. Mac Thornberry, the congressman who appointed Schmidt to the federal commission in the first place, was now out of office and would also join Schmidt's board of advisors.

They set up new office space just down the road from the federal commission's headquarters in Crystal City, Virginia, and began to build on their work at the federal commission.

The new Special Competitive Studies Project issued its first report on Sept. 12. The authors wrote, "Our new project is privately funded, but it remains publicly minded and staunchly nonpartisan in believing technology, rivalry, competition and organization remain enduring themes for national focus."

The report calls for the creation of a new government entity that would be responsible for organizing the government-private sector nexus. That new organization, the report says, could be based on the roles played by the National Economic Council or the National Security Council inside the White House.

It is not clear if the project will disclose Schmidt's personal holdings in AI companies. So far, it has not.

Asked if Schmidt's AI investments will be disclosed by the project in the future, a person close to Schmidt said, "SCSP is organized as a charitable entity, and has no relationship to any personal investment activities of Dr. Schmidt." The person also said the project is a not-for-profit research entity that will provide public reports and recommendations. "It openly discloses that it is solely funded by the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation."

In a way, Schmidt's approach to Washington is the culmination of a decade or more as a power player in Washington. Early on, he professed shock at the degree to which industry influenced policy and legislation in Washington. But since then, his work on AI suggests he has embraced that fact of life in the capital.

Obama donor

Schmidt first came to prominence on the Potomac as an early advisor and donor to the first presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Following the 2008 election, he served on Obama's presidential transition and as a presidential advisor on science and technology issues. Schmidt had risen to the heights of power and wealth in Silicon Valley, but what he saw in the nation's capital surprised him.

In a 2010 conversation with The Atlantic's then Editor-in Chief James Bennet, Schmidt told a conference audience what he had learned in his first years in the nation's capital. "The average American doesn't realize how much the laws are written by lobbyists," Schmidt said. "It's shocking now, having spent a fair amount of time inside the system, how the system actually works. It is obvious that if the system is organized around incumbencies writing the laws, the incumbencies will benefit from the laws that are written."

Bennet, pushing back, suggested that Google was already one of the greatest incumbent corporations in America.

"Well, perhaps," Schmidt replied in 2010. "But we don't write the laws."

— CNBC's Paige Tortorelli, Bria Cousins, Scott Zamost and Margaret Fleming contributed to this report.