In San Francisco, city planners have long spoken of free or low-cost city-wide access to the internet. That dream may become a reality, thanks to a company called Meraki, run by a couple of youngsters from MIT, who have come up with a new wireless plan.
But where will Meraki get its funding? This piece is an eye-opener:
Some of Meraki’s new capital, for example, will come from DAG Ventures, a firm co-founded by former investment partners from Bechtel. Their division, formerly known as Bechtel Investments, is now partly owned by the bin Laden family. (The new investment firm, San Francisco-based Fremont Group, remains largely in the hands of the Bechtel family.)
DAG is also backing, along with the CIA, the San Francisco-based camera surveillance and intelligence gathering company, 3VR Security.I hope you did not skim: The piece is not saying that Woolsey runs DAG. Still, the links here form part of a pattern that we have seen before.
But DAG’s ties to the intel community run deeper than a handful of startups.
One of DAG’s co-founders, John M. Duff, Jr., sits on the executive committee of the World Affairs Council of Washington, D.C., along with former CIA chief R. James Woolsey, and many other prominent former spies and diplomats.
6 comments:
"Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the autority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer or Web search," author Lawrence Wright pens.
"Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation [...]"
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http://rawstory.com//printstory.php?story=8868
Private investment capital needs to be directed towards creating a completely un-hackable form of data encryption so that the CIA, NSA, and any other government agency that wants to know what its citizens (or others for that matter) are doing has to go through the appropriate legal channels to get that information.
Having the ability to just grab any and every message out of the ether without anyone looking over their shoulder is very troubling indeed.
The establishment needs to be buried alive.
Jamie in Boston
These posts continue to make me believe that my "crackpot" theory that the only real reason the Internets exist is to facilitate more accurate government monitoring of the citizenry is neither crackpot nor theoretical.
Oddly, the only two 'groups' of people who magnify (by a lot) actual per capita Internets use are Internets users and those who have never been online. From a Big Brother POV, the Internets is chump change in their PC (and iPhone) incarnations. All-digital TV biway interface mandated for 2009 w/remote onscreen Internets is Big Brother's wet dream cum true. Anyone remember telephone party lines? No? People who lived close to each other sometimes shared the same Bell Telephone lines but had different phone numbers. You could listen to other people's conversations. (OT: My dog can read lips, but the funny thing is he thinks he's reading minds.)
Here's an interesting piece from yesterday's Guardian, "With Friends Like These...", http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook, a scathing denunciation of "Facebook" and their founders by Tom Hodgkinson.
Needless to say, the "Facebook" geeks are nerds with a mission--a very scary mission. Here's what Hodgkinson has to say about one of the board members:
"The third board member of Facebook is Jim Breyer. He is a partner in the venture capital firm Accel Partners, who put $12.7m into Facebook in April 2005. On the board of such US giants as Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment, he is also a former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). ... Facebook's most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock's senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What's In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA."
Hey Tom -- could you write to me? The address is at the top of the page.
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