Originally posted on Quora March 31, 2023
Far from its innocuous origin as a virtual means of connecting with like minds, rekindling old friendships, finding extended family or romance, social media might have always been intended as a tool of social engineering and dragnet surveillance; recording its user’s every waking moment and controlling consciousness itself. Suspiciously, a DARPA project called Lifelog set to create a digital scrapbook and multimedia library that would serve all of the same functions that are currently subsumed today by Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Google capturing, storing, and abstracting it’s user’s physical, transactional and media data in one place.
LifeLog is interested in three major data categories: physical data, transactional data, and context or media data. “Anywhere/anytime” capture of physical data might be provided by hardware worn by the LifeLog user. Visual, aural, and possibly even haptic sensors capture what the user sees, hears, and feels. GPS, digital compass, and inertial sensors capture the user’s orientation and movements. Biomedical sensors capture the user’s physical state. LifeLog also captures the user’s computer-based interactions and transactions throughout the day from email, calendar, instant messaging, web-based transactions, as well as other common computer applications, and stores the data (or, in some cases, pointers to the data) in appropriate formats. Voice transactions can be captured through recording of telephone calls and voice mail, with the called and calling numbers as metadata. FAX and hardcopy written material (such as postal mail) can be scanned. Finally, LifeLog also captures (or at least captures pointers to) the tremendous amounts of context data the user is exposed to every day from diverse media sources, including broadcast television and radio, hardcopy newspapers, magazines, books and other documents, and softcopy electronic books, web sites, and database access.
Think about how many of those things have come to pass; SMART watches, SMART phones, google maps/earth, google health, google memories, Facebook memories, Facebook events and pretty much all social media saves your search, view, transaction and location history. Curiously, Lifelog ended on the same day Facebook was launched; February 4, 2004. Lifelog was proposed to use a search engine interface for users to find past memories and transactions similar to how Facebook, Metapay, google and YouTube work.
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. In addition to operating in this stand-alone mode, LifeLog can also serve as a subsystem to support a wide variety of other applications, including personal, medical, financial, and other types of assistants, and various teaching and training tools.
It’s clear that the object of lifelog, total surveillance of a person’s entire existence, has already been served by a handful of “private” tech companies. Even the mockingbird media has admitted that social media is used as a surveillance tool by the CIA whose investment arm In-Q-Tel regularly invests in silicon valley startups. The CIA partnered with Google in 2004, the same year Facebook launched and Lifelog ended, when the latter bought an In-Q-Tel investment called Keyhole, which eventually became Google Earth. 2 years later their parent company Alphabet Inc. acquired a little known video sharing platform. 6 years later in 2010 they made a joint investment in Recorded Future, a company that supposedly uses web analytics to predict the future from information scoured from across the entire web. 2010 was the same year Google tapped the NSA to secure their networks after Operation Aurora that supposedly originated in China stole source code from the conglomerate. Just 3 years later it was revealed that despite assurance that the agency would not have access to Google users’ internal data they in fact did have access to user communications and cloud data.
“This is not traffic you would encounter outside of Google's internal network,” said one of the experts. The slide shows data in a format that is “only used on and between Google machines. And, also as far as I know, Google doesn't publish their binary RPC protocol, which is what this resembles.
In 2008, Facebook received financing from Greylock Venture Capital. One of their senior partners at the time, Howard Cox, is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. If this reference seems obscure it should be remembered that Facebook’s first outside investor and board of directors member until last year, Peter Thiel, has obvious intel connections most notably through his data analytics company Palantir, which is one of the many Silicon valley startups that received In-Q-Tel seed money in the early 2000s and specifically tailors its software for intel and LEO agencies. In 2018, a whistleblower confirmed that Palantir (or at least one high level employee) worked with Cambridge Analytica in an unofficial role in the Facebook user data breach, using a personality questionnaire on the Facebook app.
Even if these companies didn’t have their origins in the inventions (e.g. APARNET & GPS) and seed money of the military industrial complex, it is still undeniable that they provide the perfect medium for conducting dragnet surveillance and Psyops on unsuspecting normies. They are in fact the eyes and ears of the state giving them an unblemished record of your whereabouts and conversations.