SafeWeb. This Oakland-based company offers an app called Triangle Boy which promises to provide users with anonymity as they surf the internet. Trouble is, they receive funding from In-Q-Tel, a CIA front. Here's Wikipedia:
In-Q-Tel of Arlington, Virginia, United States is a not-for-profit venture capital firm that invests in high-tech companies for the sole purpose of keeping the Central Intelligence Agency equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United States intelligence capability.Although In-Q-Tel is an independent firm for legal purposes, the company's only client is the Agency -- in other words, the company is the Company.
SafeWeb already provides an online anonymizer, of the sort you've probably used at one time or another. People use anonymizers to prevent websites from scooping up their IP addresses and other should-be-private info. Triangle Boy will go one step further, since it will allow third party usage.
If the CIA connection becomes well-known, will anyone trust SafeWeb?
I'll soon have a follow-up post about surfin' with the spooks. SafeWeb is hardly the only example: We also have Zone Alarm, Facebook, Safe-Mail and a little company called Google...
2 comments:
i've been suspicious of google ever since they brought on dan senor, right after his disastrous run with bremer at the cpa. here's an early assessment of his background from wash. monthly, via josh et al:
"Before attending Harvard Business School from 1999 to 2001, Senor was a staffer for then-Sen. Spencer Abraham of Michigan. After receiving his MBA, he went to the Carlyle Group, where he was a venture capitalist from 2001 to 2003. Senor left Carlyle in 2003 for a brief stint as White House Press Secretary Scott McLellan's deputy before shipping off to Iraq. Though he showed up in Iraq as a junior press handler, Senor is now Bremer's senior advisor and for most of last summer he was in charge of organizing Iraq's post-Saddam media, an effort which most have rated as little short of a disaster. More examples can be found at the Ministry of Education, often cited by the White House as one of the CPA's signal successes."
there was a rumor he had been hired as global communications and strategy director, but that was nixed, tho he's on as a 'contracted' advisor.
then there's alan davidson, hired as its lobbyist. tho they talk a good net neutrality game, pushing democracy etc., it's hard to square that with many of their decisions, such as conforming to china's demands to filter sites from citizen access there.
messy business, this electronic transmission stuff. just like any other powerful thing, the down sides are often as big as the positives.
Google—and what role it plays in helping our national security overlords 'keep the peace'—is murky, if you ask me. I'd love to read more about that topic, here.
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