Summary
➡ Lifelog, a project by DARPA, aimed to record and process daily activities like walking, standing, and riding, similar to how our phones predict our actions today. However, it faced backlash due to privacy concerns, similar to another DARPA program, Total Information Awareness (TIA), which aimed to cross-reference personal data to identify potential threats. Despite assurances that Lifelog was intended for voluntary users, the project was cancelled in January 2004 due to privacy implications. Interestingly, Facebook, a platform with similar data collection capabilities, was launched on February 4, 2004, the same day a Wired article announced Lifelog’s cancellation.
➡ The Lifelog project, a program aimed at tracking people’s lives digitally, was reportedly cancelled around the same time Facebook was launched, leading to conspiracy theories suggesting the government continued Lifelog through Facebook. While there’s no direct evidence, connections between DARPA (the agency behind Lifelog) and Facebook exist, such as Peter Thiel, a co-founder of Palantir (a company specializing in data analysis) becoming Facebook’s first outside investor shortly after Lifelog’s cancellation. Additionally, Palantir was linked to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where Facebook user data was used for political advertising without consent. These connections fuel the theory that the government may have privatized its controversial data tracking activities through companies like Facebook and Palantir.
➡ The article discusses the connections between Facebook, Palantir, and DARPA, focusing on data usage and privacy concerns. It mentions that Palantir employees helped Cambridge Analytica with data models and were interested in Facebook data. The article also talks about Facebook’s unsuccessful attempts to create a physical product with the help of DARPA. Lastly, it raises questions about privacy, suggesting that while we criticized DARPA for collecting our data, we willingly give it to social media platforms like Facebook.
Transcript
Lets be honest, at one point or another, we probably all thought about whether or not the government is actually behind Facebook. Companies like Facebook have literally changed society. How we interact with each other and how we share information. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not so much. And there are definitely some privacy concerns when it comes to how companies like Facebook are using our personal information. But did you know that the US Government had a plan to make the timeline before Facebook even existed? It’s true. DARPA was in charge of it. They called it Lifelog. And they say that DARPA’s lifelog ended on the exact same day that Facebook started.
Surely that’s just one of those things people say on the Internet, right? Well, here’s how today’s project goes. It’s a two parter. First, DARPA’s lifelog project, which set out to collect individuals personal information, ended on the same day that Facebook started. Second, Facebook is a continuation of DARPA’s LifeLog project on Twitter now x.com DARPA denied any connection with Facebook. But I don’t trust DARPA farther than I can throw it. And I can’t throw a government agency. Let’s see what the evidence says. My name is Face, and welcome to Project Conspiracy. To get a feel for why the US Government might start a program like Lifelog, let’s get to know DARPA a little bit.
DARPA stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. What a mouthful. And DARPA’s history goes pretty far back. As usual, the Soviets are involved. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 into an elliptical low Earth orbit. This was the world’s first artificial Earth satellite. And it kind of took everyone by surprise, including the United States. Dwight D. Eisenhower was president at the time. And part of the U.S. response to Sputnik 1 was was starting the Advanced Research Project Agency, or ARPA, on February 7, 1958, just a few months after Sputnik was launched. Basically, the US had to figure out what the heck to do about these Soviets because we didn’t want to be surprised like that again.
To that end, ARPA had a clear mission. Prevent technological surprise. And in their 2003 strategic plan, which will be the one that’s relevant for our purposes today, preventing technological surprise remained part of that mission. ARPA was placed within the office of the Secretary of Defense and started out working on space projects. But then NASA was created and took most of its work and funding. So during the late 1960s, Arpa changed course and started working on exploratory research programs. And in 1972 ARPA became DARPA. For better or worse, DARPA’s pivot worked out. It ended up contributing to technology like gps, stealth aircraft and the Internet, or at least a precursor to what would eventually become the Internet.
Although Al Gore may have something to say about this, I took the initiative and creating the Internet in that strategic plan we looked at. DARPA says that a large organization like the DOD needs a place like darpa, whose only charter is radical innovation. I agree it makes sense, but it seems like we could have made it sound a little less creepy. Maybe stick with the old preventing technological surprise phrase. They basically say that so much of the military is focused on the day to day stuff. Someone needs to be looking at the big picture and imagining technologies that don’t even exist yet.
So we’re never surprised. Like the Sputnik situation again. So that’s a little background on darpa, but let’s switch gears and talk some about Lifelog. You know how they say that government technology is about 20 years ahead of what the consuming public gets access to? Well, this Lifelog project involved artificial intelligence, or AI, and it was going on around 2003 and I’m recording this in 2023. About 20 years later in 2023, I would say there was sort of an AI boom on the consumer side. This year it seems like just about every software developer released some iteration of AI to the public to play with.
I’m not ashamed to say we use AI on the show, trying to show appreciation to our future AI overlords. I kind of wish humans would just stop developing AI so that it doesn’t kill us all, but if it’s going to be here, might as well use it, right? In any event, the saying about government technology being about 20 years ahead of what the public gets access to seems to ring true in the case of AI. In late 2002, DARPA launched a wide ranging effort to develop a new, more sophisticated AI. DARPA was working on a cognitive computer initiative and a pretty aggressive AI program, including what you could call an AI assistant.
To replicate human decision making, the AI assistant would need data on human behavior. How would they get that kind of data in the early 2000s? That’s where LifeLog comes in. One of the main characters of today’s story is Douglas Gage. Gage was working at DARPA at this time and apparently heard about a project at Microsoft involving an individual named Gordon Bell. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say Bell decided to record his whole life. Rabbit hole warning. Mylifebits was a Microsoft Research program. Here’s how they describe it on their website. My Life Bits is a lifetime store of everything.
It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush’s 1945 memex vision, including full text, search text and audio annotations and Hyperlinks. In late 2001, Gordon Bell, who was a computer scientist consultant, volunteered to be the subject of My Life Bits. He captured, well, pretty much everything and stored it digitally. Hopefully it wasn’t everything. Right. And Doug Gage, can I call him Doug Gage, thought this would be useful for the AI project that DARPA was working on. In an interview with Vice, Gage said if enough people recorded enough of their lives, the combined information would mount to the ontology of of a human life.
Well, this idea was radical enough for DARPA, so they let him run with it. In 2003, DARPA put out a proposer information pamphlet for lifelong. It’s basically a request for bid proposals. You can still find it online. The point of contact for the project was listed as Dr. Doug Gage. Okay, I guess I can call him Dr. Doug. Well, Doug PhD. But this 2003 pamphlet gets a pretty detailed description of what they were looking to do with lifelong. The bid was solicited by the Information Processing Technology Office of darpa. That’s the same office that worked on what would become the Internet.
It used to be called arpanet, by the way, the more you know, the beginning of the pamphlet gives a broad overview of the project. The Information Processing Technology Office of DARPA is soliciting proposals to develop an ontology based subsystem that captures, stores and makes accessible the flow of one person’s experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates, assistants and other system capabilities. The objective of this lifelog concept is to be able to trace the threads of an individual’s life in terms of events, states and relationships. How are they going to do that? The input data streams are abstracted into sequences of events and states which are aggregated into threads and episodes to produce a timeline that constitutes an episodic memory for the individual.
A timeline? Sound familiar? But how would they get the information for this project? Pretty much how they got it from Gordon Bell. They wanted to capture data anywhere, anytime, including by wearables. It sounds like basically everything your senses take in. Gps, body monitoring and computer activity. They wanted to take in all the information from all the places, all the time. The pamphlet says that the lifelog technology would support the cognitive systems that they were developing. Here’s how they phrase it. Application of The Lifelog abstraction structure in a synthesizing mode will eventually allow synthetic game characters and humanoid robots to lead more realistic lives.
Now, I’m not a theoretical physicist or a scientist, but from what I can gather, it sounds like they wanted to use the information to sort of train the systems. Kind of like how software developers train AI now. But in the pamphlet they also describe that they think that Lifelog has other uses. Lifelog can be used as a standalone system to serve as a powerful automated multimedia diary and scrapbook. By using a search engine interface, the user can easily retrieve a specific thread of past transactions, or recall an experience from a few seconds ago or from many years earlier in as much detail as is desired, including imagery, audio or video replay of the event.
Do I need to keep asking if this stuff sounds familiar? Also, with the timeline that Lifelog would create using the information, it would be able to find patterns or habits of the user by looking at that information. The pamphlet had what it called task areas. One of these task areas involved being able to make sense of multiple input transactions and sorting it, and being able to identify and label them, and DARPA gave some pretty specific examples of what it was talking about. I took the 8:30am flight from Washington’s Reagan National Airport to Boston’s Logan Airport. The representational path from the raw physical sensor inputs to this high level description includes concepts of walking, standing and riding, being indoors and outdoors, being at home, taking a taxi, and going through airport security.
The task can be made considerably easier because Lifelog can also process a going to Boston entry in the calendar program, email from the airline telling that the flight is on time and a phone call ordering the taxi, and can correlate GPS readings to a COTS street map. You know, kind of like how when you get in your vehicle on Sunday afternoon to go to the grocery store to do some shopping, your phone already knows what you’re up to and starts telling you about the traffic on the way, even though you didn’t ask it to. Well, Lifelog thought of that in 2003.
The pamphlet says a lot more about the project, but that’s pretty much the nuts and bolts of what we need for today’s purposes. However, there is one thing noticeably absent from the Lifelog pamphlet. A Like button. We’ve got one here on YouTube though, so if you’re watching on YouTube and enjoying the episode, make sure to hit the like button. Unfortunately, after Lifelog published this pamphlet, the media gave it a big old dislike. I’m going to be honest with you, we’re about to talk about a Darva project that isn’t LifeLog or Facebook. I don’t want to hear anything about clickbait.
It’s called laying the foundation because it’s going to be relevant both for LifeLog’s demise and a connection between Facebook and DARPA. So stick with me here. To understand the fate of Lifelog, we need to also understand the fate of another DARPA program. And that program’s name isn’t creepy at all. Total Information Awareness, or tia. If you haven’t heard of this program, you’re not alone. Have you heard of Total Information Awareness? Do you know what I’m talking about? No, I do not. Okay. TIA was proposed as a program shortly after 911 by Rear Admiral John Poindexter. If you don’t know who John Poindexter is, he served as National Security Advisor in the Reagan administration.
On April 7, 1990, he was convicted of five counts of lying to Congress and obstructing the Congressional committees investigating the Iran Contra affair. These were later reversed on appeal due to a moderately complex legal issue. And since the convictions were technically reversed, Poindexter was technically still employable. Or at least George W. Bush thought so. In January 2002, Poindexter was appointed Director of the newly created Information Awareness Office division of DARPA, which managed TIA’s development. That’s a different office than the office that was in charge of lifelong. It’s still relevant, though. We’re gonna get there. By the way, if you don’t want people to think you’re doing creepy stuff, maybe don’t have such a creepy seal.
This thing is borderline terrifying. And maybe don’t pick someone who is technically convicted of felonies to run it. We’ll come back to Poindexter in just a few minutes. But TIA was officially commissioned in 2002. In DARPA’s 2003 strategic plan, DARPA described what the Office was doing with tia. Information Awareness Office is developing and integrating information technology that largely consists of three advanced collaborative and decision support tools, language translation technologies, data search, and pattern recognition technologies. Together, these three parts effectively comprise the Total Information Awareness Project. They made sure to preface it by saying that IAO is not building a supercomputer to snoop into the private lives or track the everyday activities of American citizens.
Definitely not. A snooping supercomputer. A snooper computer. Definitely not. Believe me. Believe me. As part of this project, TIA’s sophisticated software cross referenced phone calls, Internet traffic, bank records, and other personal data in an effort to identify potential Terrorists, Basically a predictive policing type of thing. Unfortunately for DARPA, the Internet figured out what TIA was and people hated it. In April 2003, an ACLU Q&A set said that TIA may be the closest thing to a true Big Brother program that has ever been seriously contemplated in the United States. They also said that it would kill privacy in America.
It got so bad that DARPA actually changed the program’s name to Terrorism Information Awareness so it didn’t creep out US citizens so much. So they changed Tia’s name in May 2003. Remember that date? It’s where the potentially sketchy part comes in, so we’ll circle back around to it later. According to US government officials, LifeLog is not connected with DARPA’s Total Information Awareness. But how do you think the media would react to Lifelog? Well, we don’t have to guess. Soon after the media found TIA, they found LifeLog too, and people hated it. In a May 20, 2003 Wired article, Stephen Aftergood, a defense analyst with the Federation of American Scientists, was quoted as saying, lifelog has the potential to become something like TIA cubed.
In a June 2, 2003 article, John pike of globalsecurity.org was quoted as saying, I have a much easier time understanding how Big Brother would want this than how Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would use it. They have not identified a military application. A few days later, on June 5, 2003, William Safire wrote an article in the New York Times called Dear DARPA Diary. And he blasted the program for potential privacy intrusions. He called it the All Remembering Cyber Diary. He also painted a picture that everyone would be snooping on everybody else, taping and sharing that data with the government and the last media conglomerate left standing.
And he might have been onto something, because almost every state has a cyber stalking law now. And I didn’t do a chronological 50 state survey in my research, but I doubt that was the case in 2003. DARPA spokesperson Jan Walker responded and said that Lifelog was intended for those who agreed to be monitored. Each Lifelog user could decide when to turn the sensors on and off and who would share the data. You know, kind of like how you can just decide to turn off your cell phone and not use it for days at a time. You do that, right? But DARPA advised contractors that ultimately, with proper anonymity, data from many Lifelogs could facilitate early detection of an emerging epidemic.
In my mind, this potentially shows at least some desire to use it on the public later, as opposed to just using it to train AI. DARPA also changed the proposal request after the bad pub. They basically said don’t record other people without their permission, and they prefer you to not record other people at all. Doug Gage also denied that the program was being used for surveillance, and even said he was surprised at the privacy concerns. It feels like they just don’t get the point, doesn’t it? I think the real concern is that if you perfect the technology for tracking an individual’s private information, it’s only a matter of time until it’s used for something nefarious.
Just because one tyrant is kind doesn’t mean the next one will be. To be clear, the government is the tyrant in this diatribe, not Doug Gage. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, and if he was actually surprised by this, maybe even a little naive. Nonetheless, in July 2003, DARPA started offering grants for Lifelog, but it didn’t last too much longer. And this is where we get to the first claim posed by today’s project. DARPA’s lifelog project ended on the same day that Facebook started. So did Lifelog end on the same day that Facebook started? Well, Facebook launched on February 4, 2004.
It was actually still called the Facebook back then. Such humble beginnings of a hard working Harvard student just trying to conquer the world. But when did Lifelog end? Well, it was actually cancelled. Wikipedia says that the LifeLog program was canceled in January 2004 after criticism concerning the privacy implications of the system. One of the articles Wikipedia cites to is a Wired article called Pentagon Kills Lifelog Project. Guess what day this article was written? February 4, 2004. I’m pretty sure the fact that this article was written on the same day that Facebook started is where this conspiracy originates from, mainly because of all the meme ish pictures posted by conspiracy theorists that highlight the date of this article.
But it’s very important to read past the headline, as painful as that can be sometimes, because the article itself says that researchers close to the project say they’re not sure why it was dropped late last month. In other words, Lifelog was canceled in January 2004. Wikipedia wins again. That one’s for all my college professors who wouldn’t let me cite to Wikipedia because it wasn’t reliable. Oddly, I couldn’t find any announcement from DARPA or any other government agency about Lifelog being canceled. It may exist. Just saying I couldn’t find it. And if you try to search lifelog on DARPA’s website, they correct it to lifelong and don’t give you the option to search for Lifelog instead.
In other words, I literally wasn’t physically able to search for lifelog on DARPA’s website. So am I tech illiterate or is this a convenient coincidence? By the way, go try to search George H.W. bush on Carlyle Group’s website, or even the word Bush. Similar results Back to Lifelog there’s two points from what we just discussed. First, as near as I can tell, that Wired article that we looked at a moment ago may have been the official announcement that Lifelog was being canceled because I couldn’t find anything from darpa. Second, honestly, I still don’t know the exact date that Lifelog was cancelled, but it looks like it was canceled in late January 2004, not on February 4, 2004 on the day that Facebook started.
So when people say that Lifelog was canceled on the same day that Facebook started, that is technically not correct down to the exact day. But it also looks like Lifelog was canceled within a month, maybe even a week of Facebook starting up. Remember the second part of the conspiracy? Whether the government essentially just continued the Lifelog project through Facebook? Well, that part of the conspiracy isn’t viable only if Facebook started on the exact same day Lifelog was canceled. But the theory might be viable if Lifelog was canceled close in time to when Facebook started, and it looks like that’s exactly what happened.
So if we’re looking to the spirit of the conspiracy, the tinfoil hatters might have been onto something with this one. Or at least we’re off to a pretty good start. Facebook started right after Lifelog was canceled. That’s the point with all of this. But surely DARPA cleared the air in its explanation of why Lifelog was canceled, right? Well, that February 4, 2004 Wired article said that DARPA hasn’t provided an explanation for Lifelog’s quiet cancellation. A change in priorities is the only rationale that Jan Walker gave to Wired News. Doug Gage certainly wasn’t expecting it. That Vice article said that Gage was in the middle of evaluating proposals and preparing to hire researchers when they pulled the plug.
Gage thought that DARPA got so burned by TIA that they didn’t want to deal with the controversy. So Lifelog was collateral damage. Not long after Lifelog was canceled, they decided not to renew Gage’s contract. So it looks like Gage was collateral damage too. One more quick thing from that Vice article we were talking about. Li Tien, a privacy lawyer with the Electronic Frontier foundation, said it would not surprise him to learn that the Government continued to fund research and push this area forward without calling it lifelong. Well, that brings us to the second part of the conspiracy.
Did the US Government just continue the lifelong project through Facebook? Let’s see if there’s any evidence for it. I’m going to shoot you straight. Figuratively. I couldn’t find the government document that said it was canceling Lifelog so it can clandestinely continue the work through Facebook. Those kind of documents can be tough to find, you know, that pesky Freedom of Information act and all. But there are some connections between DARPA and Facebook that form after Lifelog was canceled. For our first connection, we need to revisit the Total Information Awareness Program. Remember that John Poindexter was the brainchild and leader of TIA after 9 11? Well, in 2003, John Poindexter got a call from Richard Pearl.
Richard Pearl was an advisor to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the Bush administration and an architect of the Iraq war. Pearl wanted to introduce Poindexter to some entrepreneurs who were starting a software company. Those entrepreneurs were Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, the co founders of Palantir. You may recognize the name Peter Thiel. He was one of the co founders of PayPal in 1999. And that letter merged with Elon Musk’s online bank called x.com time is a flat circle. After that, Thiel started Palantir. A Wired article said that Palantir’s expertise is finding connections between people, places and events in large repositories of electronic data.
Sound familiar? And remember how TIA changed its name in May 2003 from total information Awareness to Terrorism Information Awareness? One source says that Palantir was officially incorporated in May 2003. And though Thil apparently disputes this, I’ve seen it from multiple sources and it hasn’t been taken down yet. So right when TIA was rebranding Palantir, a company about connections between people was being formed. And a meeting between the head of the TIA project and the founders of Palantir took place in 2003. What a coincidence, huh? Hey, everybody. Face from the future here. Sorry about the beard. I just got back from vacation and was so relaxed that I just absolutely could not be bothered to shave.
So I was just editing this video and I got to this part, and when I rewatched the part you just saw, I realized how much I was hedging on when Palantir was formed because I didn’t have something to confirm it with, like the corporate formation documents. And then I had a much more Useful thought. Why don’t I just try to confirm it with the corporate formation documents? Duh. So I went to the Delaware Secretary of State website. Why Delaware? Well, Delaware is known for having pretty conservative and very predictable business law, which lets executives and boards know how much they can legally get away with.
And shareholders like that. So most big companies incorporate in Delaware. So on the Delaware Secretary of State website, I searched for Palantir and found Palantir Technologies Inc. I didn’t order the official documents, but I’m pretty sure that this was the correct entity. And sure enough, Palantir Technologies, Inc. Was formed on May 6, 2003. So that settles that. Now back to the younger, much less scraggly face. Back to the meeting. Poindexter apparently agreed to meet with Peter Thiel and Alex Karp at Pearl’s home. Poindexter told them that he thought they had an interesting idea. And Poindexter suggested to Carpent Thiel that they partner with one of the companies that worked on Total Information Awareness.
And they say that Poindexter helped open doors for Palantir and its owner, Peter Thiel. Palantir got its first major breakthrough in the national security world with an estimated $2 million investment from in Q Tel, a venture capital fund set up by the CIA. For fun fact, the Q in Inky Tail is a reference to Q, the fictional inventor who supplied technology to James Bond. Palantir would go on to sell its technology to folks like the CIA, the military Special Command, and the Marine Corps. In Mark Bowden’s book, the Finish that talks about the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Bowden writes that Palantir came up with a program that elegantly accomplished what TIA had set out to do.
And all of that is creepy enough. But then there’s the Facebook connection for Thiel. And the timing of it just couldn’t be more suspicious. In August 2004, after Thiel met with Poindexter, Thiel became Facebook’s first outside investor when he acquired a 10.2% stake for $500,000. So we’ve got a DARPA director running a program similar to Lifelog. At the same time as Lifelog, the DARPA director meets with Peter Thill. And Peter Thiel just happens to become the first ever outside investor in Facebook just a year later. Then Thiel goes on to sell all sorts of tech to the US Military.
Could all this be coinc? Of course it could be. But if you’ve seen our first episode on the Bushes and the bin Laden’s you’ll recall that when Bush Sr. Was CIA director, he allegedly wanted to privatize some CIA activities because of bad press. So could this be DARPA borrowing that playbook and privatizing its behavior that was getting slammed in the press? Well, if nothing else, you can see why the conspiracy that we’re talking about today exists in the first place. They rarely prepare the documents that link it all together. Again, that pesky foil. But one can imagine how there could be some undocumented dealings behind all these events that tie it all together.
It wouldn’t take much. Or maybe this was just the government giving Zuckerberg some help. You know, help like getting Peter Thiel to invest in Facebook to make sure it was financially stable and didn’t die knowing that they would later be able to use Facebook for the same purposes that they wanted to use lifelong. And Thiel was rewarded handsomely for his role. In 2012, Thiel sold his Facebook shares for over $1 billion. But there are a few other DARPA Facebook connections that are at least worth mentioning. The next connection worth mentioning is the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook user data was collected without consent by Cambridge Analytica to be used for political advertising.
In March of 2018, the New York Times reported that as a startup called Cambridge Analytica sought to harvest the Facebook data of tens of millions of Americans in the summer of 2014, the company received help from at least one employee at Palantir Technologies. The Palantir employee’s name was Alfredas, and I’m not even going to disrespect him by trying to pronounce his last name. Apologies. Alfredas began corresponding with Christopher Wiley from his Gmail account. Christopher Wiley is the data expert type. He worked for the British defense and intelligence contractor SCL Group, which started Cambridge Analytica, and Wiley was affiliated in some way with Cambridge Analytica.
One source called him the director of research, another called him the co founder, and yet another called him an intern. Clear as mud. Alfredos and Wiley shared Google documents to brainstorm ideas about using big data to create sophisticated, complicated behavioral profiles. A product codenamed Big Daddy. Pretty good name. Wiley acknowledged that Palantir and Cambridge Analytica never signed a contract or entered into a formal business relationship, but he said some Palantir employees helped engineer Cambridge’s psychographic models. Wiley also said that Palantir employees were eager to learn more about using Facebook data in psychographics. I bet they were.
So what does Facebook say about all of this? Well, the U.S. senate asked Mark Zuckerberg about some of it. Do you think Palantir taught Cambridge Analytica, as press reports are saying, how to do these tactics? Senator, I don’t know. Do you think that Palantir has ever scraped data from Facebook? Senator I’m not aware of that. Just another coincidence, I guess. And there’s one more coincidence that we need to talk about, and I’ll introduce this last connection with a question. When you think about Apple, what do you think of probably the iPhone or MacBook, maybe an Apple Watch if you’re a real one? What do you think of whenever you hear Samsung, probably the Galaxy Phone? All of these things are physical products.
Ever notice that Facebook doesn’t really sell a physical product, or at least not a physical product that dominates the marketplace like the ones we just talked about. But it’s not for a lack of trying, and DARPA folks helped out with that effort. Mark Zuckerberg announced on April 14, 2016 that Regina Dugan would guide Building 8, a new research group developing hardware products that advance the company’s efforts in virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and global connectivity. Dugan served as the head of DARPA from 2009 to 2012. Then she went on to work for Google developing hardware and software products.
Again, this one by itself doesn’t really prove much, just another link between DARPA and Facebook that’s worth mentioning. And since you’ve probably never bought a physical product from Facebook, you can guess that this whole building aid endeavor didn’t go very well. The point of all of this was pretty well stated in that February 4, 2004 article that started this whole message. MIT’s David Carter was quoted as saying, I am sure that such research will continue to be funded under some other title. I can’t imagine DARPA dropping out of such a key research area. And whether or not that’s true, the privacy concerns that the media had when it discovered Lifelog have now become a reality through Facebook.
Doug Gage himself even said, I think that Facebook is the real face of pseudo Lifelog at this point, and there’s no dispute that Facebook gives the government information when Facebook is required to do so. I think DARPA probably has some really good people working for it. A lot of these people are scientists who want to use their time at DARPA to advance technology and society in general. And they are so true in their intentions that they wouldn’t even consider breaching someone’s privacy. Which would explain why Gage said he was surprised at the privacy concerns. But agencies like DARPA also have government lifers like John Poindexter who may have less than altruistic motives.
And these agencies sometimes operate on a morally slippery slope, so we definitely need to keep an eye on them. But think about this. After we got so upset with DARPA for even thinking about gathering our information, we then gave it freely to Facebook and other social media sites to basically do whatever they want to with it. And we probably didn’t even read the terms of service. I know I didn’t. And what does that say about us? So do you think the government continued lifelog through Facebook? Let me know down in the comments I thought about doing an episode just on DARPA in general, but way too much weird stuff has come out of DARPA just for one episode.
We’re going to have to be more specific in our topic selection. So if there’s a specific DARPA project or conspiracy that you think deserves its own episode, the best place to let me know that is down in the comments or in our discord. We’ve got an episode Ideas channel just for that. I appreciate you taking the time to join me on this project and we’ll see you on the next one. Until then, watch out for the lizard.
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