Behind Facebook

Truth About Facebook -  CIA, U.S. government - Everything Related ! : The Hacker News ~ http://thehackernews.com/2011/04/truth-about-facebook-cia-us-government.html



 The social networking website Facebook launched February 2004 and rose to the number one social networking spot in competition with Myspace. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Facebook had 138.9 million monthly unique U.S. visitors in May 2011. And, over 50% of Americans have a Facebook Account. The next largest block of accounts are in Western Europe. As of January 2011 there are over 600 million Facebook users.
It doesn’t take much forethought to realize that there are countless privacy pitfalls in a world where a near-endless stream of personal bits is indiscriminately posted, indefinitely stored, and quietly collected and analyzed by marketers, identity thieves, and professional government snoops in America and abroad. The public controversies that have erupted to date—Facebook’s drastic terms of service changes and Google Buzz’s forced sharing of email contacts are only the first snares in a rapidly growing thicket of social networking privacy issues.
In 2007 the success story of Facebook spread across the blogosphere. A complex but riveting Big Brother-type conspiracy theory which links Facebook to the CIA and the US Department of Defense.

When a website, movie, news article, book, or any media element that excels and rises to a number one spot, you can be assured that there is illuminati/governmental influence and funding behind the success!

Controversial Changes on Facebook:

April 2011: Facebook quietly switches on facial recognition tech by default. Facebook has rolled out its facial recognition technology, but has switched the feature on by default without telling its users first. The Mark Zuckerberg-run company started using its facial recognition software in December last year for its Stateside users in a move to automatically provide tags for the photos uploaded by Facebook users.

• November 6, 2007, Facebook launched Facebook Beacon, which was an ultimately failed attempt to advertise to friends of users using the knowledge of what purchases friends made.
• May 2011: Facebook Beacon Returns… New & “Improved”
• February 2009: Facebook Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.”
• December 2009: Privacy Group Files Complaint on Facebook Changes
• May 2010: Facebook Rolls Back Some Key Privacy Changes
• December 2010: Controversial Changes @ Facebook
• January 2011: Facebook reverses controversial privacy changes
• The voting system for Privacy Changes for Facebook

Writers for The Wall Street Journal found in 2010 that Facebook apps were transmitting identifying information to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies. The apps used an HTTP referrer which exposed the user’s identity and sometimes their friends’. Facebook said, “We have taken immediate action to disable all applications that violate our terms”
The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook created by Matt McKeon illustrating the progression of changing the default settings. For current updates of the chart below click on the image.

“Most Facebook users still don’t know how to set their privacy options safely, finding the whole system confusing. It’s even harder though to keep control when Facebook changes the settings without your knowledge.”

Facebook shouldn’t require its users to constantly check their privacy settings to see what the company has changed since their last visit to the site. The onus should not be on Facebook users having to ‘opt-out’ of the facial recognition feature, but instead on users having to ‘opt-in’. The tech works by scanning newly uploaded pics and then identifies faces from previously tagged photos already stored in Zuckerberg’s internet silo. Is Facebook eroding the online privacy of its users by stealth?

Facebook is CIA-Funded Data-Mining Project:

The prime question to ask is if Facebook is not being used for Intelligence agencies such as the CIA and Mossad? And, why is Chris Hughes on the guest list of the Bilderberg meeting of 2011? Do you really believe the boys from collage are not Zionists and tie themselves with the New World Order agenda considering the history of controversial changes that they were forced to withdraw and change because of public opinion.

Facebook.com has become a One World Global Database under the guise of “social networking” where deluded people put their most personal information OPENLY and VOLUNTARILY…forget using loyalty cards, they can be tracked directly

Facebook’s first round of venture capital funding ($500,000) came from former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel. Author of anti-multicultural tome ‘The Diversity Myth’, he is also on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC. The second round of funding into Facebook ($12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company’s key areas of expertise are in “data mining technologies”.
Breyer also served on the board of R&D firm BBN Technologies, which was one of those companies responsible for the rise of the internet. Dr Anita Jones joined the firm, which included Gilman Louie. She had also served on the In-Q-Tel’s board, and had been director of Defense Research and Engineering for the US Department of Defense. She was also an adviser to the Secretary of Defense and overseeing the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is responsible for high-tech, high-end development.

With facebook on GPS/smart phones, possibly someday you can Google a Facebook user, and it will tell you their exact precise location…possibly the CIA has this technology available to them now

Wikipedia’s IAO page says: “the IAO has the stated mission to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralized location, for easy perusal by the United States government, including (though not limited to) internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver’s licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and any other available data.”. Not surprisingly, the backlash from civil libertarians led to a Congressional investigation into DARPA’s activity, the Information Awareness Office lost its funding.
It would be understandable to view Facebook as the IAO’s new mask considering there are 138 million users as of 2011. Parts of the IAO’s technology round-up included ‘human network analysis and behavior model building engines’, which Facebook’s massive volume of neatly-targeted data gathering indeed allows a convenient replacement.

The Progressional Change Privacy Policy on Facebook

Facebook has become a platform where you have no choice but to make certain information public, and this public information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to target ads.
Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2005:
No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.
Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2006:
We understand you may not want everyone in the world to have the information you share on Facebook; that is why we give you control of your information. Our default privacy settings limit the information displayed in your profile to your school, your specified local area, and other reasonable community limitations that we tell you about.
Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2007:
Profile information you submit to Facebook will be available to users of Facebook who belong to at least one of the networks you allow to access the information through your privacy settings (e.g., school, geography, friends of friends). Your name, school name, and profile picture thumbnail will be available in search results across the Facebook network unless you alter your privacy settings.
Facebook Privacy Policy circa November 2009:

Based on ConsumersReports.org on May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts violating the Facebook’s Terms

Facebook is designed to make it easy for you to share your information with anyone you want. You decide how much information you feel comfortable sharing on Facebook and you control how it is distributed through your privacy settings. You should review the default privacy settings and change them if necessary to reflect your preferences. You should also consider your settings whenever you share information.
Information set to “everyone” is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of Facebook (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations. The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings.
Facebook Privacy Policy circa December 2009:
Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can, however, limit the ability of others to find this information through search using your search privacy settings.
 
Facebook Privacy Policy circa April 2010:
When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. … The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” … Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.
Facebook’s own Terms of use state, 2011:
“For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”
Viewed together, the successive policies tell a clear story. Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it’s slowly but surely helped itself, and its advertising business partners and possibly intelligence agencies to more of its users’ information, while limiting the users’ options to control their own information.
Source IFF 

How to Delete Your Facebook Account:

Before you permanently delete your account, there is an option to download all of your data. I recommend doing that first, but it may take a few hours to complete. Once your download is done and you complete the deletion process. Be sure not to return to Facebook in any form for at least 14 days or your account will be transitioned from the Deletion queue to Deactivated status.
The links below will take you directly to the “Delete” account button, which is generally difficult to find (by design no doubt).
https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703
http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account
The Deactivation link is easy to find within your Account settings. That is FB’s preference because they’re “banking” on the expectation that you’ll be back.
The working of an alternative to Facebook: Altly
An informative site to browse: Inside Facebook

Update: This news article is worth reading!

Calif. man gets 4 years for stalking on Facebook
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) – A California man who trolled women’s Facebook pages searching for clues that allowed him to take over their email accounts was sentenced Friday to more than four years in state prison after a judge rejected a plea for a lighter sentence and likened the man to a peeping Tom.
Once he took over women’s email accounts, George Bronk searched their folders for nude or semi-nude photographs or videos sent to their husbands or boyfriends and distributed the images to their contact list, prosecutors said…
The case illustrates the vulnerability of all Internet users, said prosecuting attorney Robert Morgester of the state attorney general’s office.
“The victims we went to said ‘I had very robust passwords.’ But it didn’t matter how robust the password was if the recovery question is easy,” he said. “Lost your password? What’s your favorite color or what high school did you go to? Or what’s your dog’s name? And he was able to glean that information from social media.”
Investigators used information from Bronk’s confiscated computer to email questionnaires to 3,200 of his Internet contacts, asking if they had been victimized. Forty-six women said they had.
Investigators also said they found 172 email files with explicit photographs on Bronk’s computer.

The All-Seeing Eye

Ever wondered who is behind the internet’s all-seeing eye, Google? Who put the ‘face’ in Facebook? Who’s ‘pal’ you’ve become when you send or receive through PayPal?
Ever thought Big Brother might be logging every sale and purchase you make on its virtual auction website, eBay?
No? Well if you think the above notions are little more than paranoid conspiracy fears, you’d best think again. Evidence that the CIA, directly or by proxy, bankrolled at least some of these internet giants, is now beyond doubt.
Which means the world’s most powerful intelligence agency has more control over the internet than even the hardiest conspiracy theorist may wish to believe.
Back in 2006 former CIA case officer, Robert Steele (left), made headline news when he revealed that Google was ‘in bed with the CIA’, confirming fears that the internet’s all-seeing eye is more a US government spy tool than a user-friendly search engine.
Further rummaging at the murky end of venture capital investment deals seems to suggest Steele knew exactly what he was talking about, as we shall see.

The PayPal Mafia

In 1999, PayPal became the world’s first virtual banking system, making it possible for surfers everywhere to send and receive money via the internet. The idea was conceived, and the website founded, by US futurist, entrepreneur, and 2009 Bilderberg attendee, Peter Thiel.
These days Thiel is recognized as the godfather of what was recently dubbed by Fortune Magazine the ‘PayPal Mafia’, a group of super-wealthy Silicon Valley venture capitalists with alleged business ties to the CIA.
Indeed, according to some reports, it is largely via Silicon Valley’s venture capital boardrooms that the spy agency has taken control of the internet.
“The CIA is throwing caution (and several tens of millions of dollars) to the wind, joining the dot.com frenzy and investing in Silicon Valley,“ wrote Andrew Gumbel in The Independent way back in April 2000. “It is not looking for the next cool way to swap musical downloads, or place orders for organic groceries. What it wants is a super-smart search engine to marshal all the information on the internet – in secret if possible.”
As the evidence reveals, that “super-smart search engine” would manifest itself in the form of Google. But first, the seemingly ubiquitous Peter Thiel…
For the record, PayPal was not Thiel’s only internet success. He is also the ‘face’ behind Facebook.
While ostensibly true that Facebook is headed up by Harvard graduate Mark Zuckerberg, what is not so well publicized is that the internet’s phattest social networking empire was effectively the brainchild of Thiel and his entrepreneurial VC syndicate.
And that, via this syndicate, Facebook was early on picked up and deployed by the CIA as a social networking experiment.
“Facebook is a deliberate experiment in global manipulation,â” wrote Tom Hodgkinson in the Guardian. “The creators of the site need do very little bar fiddle with the programme. In the main, they simply sit back and watch as millions of Facebook addicts voluntarily upload their ID details, photographs and lists of their favourite consumer objects. Once in receipt of this vast database of human beings, Facebook then simply has to sell the information back to advertisers, or, as Zuckerberg puts it in a recent blog post, ‘to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web’.”
The Guardian article goes on to reveal Facebook’s surprisingly open connections to the CIA.
Aside from Thiel, major investors in Facebook include Silicon Valley’s Accel Partners (also major investors in eBay) and Greylock Venture Capital, both of whom, together with NVCA (National Venture Capital Association), share boardroom execs with an altogether more notorious outfit called In-Q-Tel.
And guess what? In-Q-Tel is the official venture capital wing of the CIA – check out the In-Q-Tel website.

A CIA Bed Partner

About the same time as Peter Thiel was busy setting up PayPal, just across the street the CIA was busy setting up In-Q-Tel, ostensibly an investment capital firm for the development of cutting-edge IT and communications technologies.
With the almost overnight global reach of the internet, the US intelligence community realized it was time to gain a length on this new electronic information highway, and in many ways PayPal was seen as an early social experiment in this regard.
As well as providing the means to unwittingly utilize the internet-connected public for intelligence gathering, it would also serve to shift vast sums of money around the globe regardless of national borders or currencies.
The experiment worked well enough. Thiel pocketed a handsome $55 million from the sale of PayPal to eBay in 2002, while the CIA went on to learn new ways of cyber-laundering vast sums of cash worldwide. Ingenious.
But the experiment did not end there. The CIA may have bought its way into PayPal and eBay. But it wanted more, and already had its sights on further, potential acquisitions – one in particular: Google.
What was to become the internet’s most successful “super-smart search engine”, Google, was founded in 1998 by two Stanford University students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, with seed funding from Sun Microsystems founder, Andy Bechtolsheim.
By the end of that same year the innovative search engine was already the web’s most visited domain, sufficient in itself to make America’s defence and intelligence community sit up and take note.
Indeed, just a few short months later, Google received a further $25 million development funding, primarily from Sequoia Capital (investors in Apple, Atari, eBay, PayPal, and now Google) and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who just happened to be bed partners with In-Q-Tel. From that point on Google and the CIA became lovers.
“Even while Google presents a public image of vigorously protecting its users’ privacy,“ wrote Michael Hampton for Homeland Stupidity, “it has quietly provided assistance to several U.S. intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency… In addition, Google may be providing assistance to the National Security Agency.”
In 2004 Google further expanded its cyber-empire by acquiring a company called Keyhole Inc., until then a strategic CIA-front satellite imaging firm funded by In-Q-Tel.
Within a year Keyhole’s cutting-edge ‘virtual satellite imaging’ software had become Google Earth, and In-Q-Tel’s Director of Technology Assessment, Rob Painter, had crossed the street and joined the Google board, becoming the internet spy firm’s Senior Federal Manager. Fait accompli.
The more recent addition of Google Street View and future plans to develop the 360-degree spy-cam service into a live-feed CCTV webcam service streaming directly back to CIA HQ, Virginia, is evidence enough that Orwellian Earth has finally arrived.
Big Brother is watching. His lens is Google. His name is the CIA…

The Birth Of Facebook

While Google was busy setting up the CIA’s public domain satellite spy-cam service, three Harvard University students were unwittingly preparing to present the CIA with yet another social experiment.
Indeed, they were already catching the eye of the CIA and its Silicon Valley business fronts.
In June 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskowitz met with PayPal founder Peter Thiel in San Francisco, who invested an initial $500,000 in their fledgling ‘Facebook’ idea. The following April (2005), Thiel’s investment was boosted by a staggering $12.7 million investment stumped up by Thiel’s buddy and former Chairman of NVCA, Jim Breyer.
It is NVCA remember, which shares company execs with the CIA’s In-Q-Tel. And Breyer himself shares CIA associations via his business relationships with Gilman Louie, former CEO of In-Q-Tel and NVCA board member.
Another former Chairman of NVCA, Howard Cox, would later head up a further investment in Facebook of some $27.5 million, this time on behalf of investment firm Greylock Venture Capital. As we have already noted, Greylock and the CIA are conjoined in their business ambitions via shared boardroom interests with In-Q-Tel.
Howard Cox, for one, senior partner in Greylock, is also on the board of the CIA’s In-Q-Tel.

An Unprecedented Success

Which brings us full circle. The CIA, via In-Q-Tel and other spy-front investment firms, effectively bankrolled many of the internet’s biggest success stories – no doubt the reason behind their unprecedented successes.
And speaking of unprecedented successes…
In October 2006, Google purchased YouTube for a staggering $1.65 billion. Not bad for a video-sharing website founded eighteen months earlier by three computer nerds with nothing better to do.
Indeed, given what we now know about the internet’s most omnipresent search engine, the question must surely be asked: who really bought YouTube – Google, or the CIA?
The PR story circulated at the time was that the nerds in question (YouTube’s founders) were former PayPal employees, itself sufficient to set sirens wailing.
But it’s the way the story is told that makes it sound so cosy and innocent, deflecting as it does all attention from the incestuous financial links now known to exist between PayPal, Google, Facebook, eBay, the US intelligence community… Oh, and YouTube.
So there we have it. Each in their own unique way, eBay, PayPal, YouTube, Facebook – not forgetting the trusty Google and a small host of others, including the web’s biggest online privacy protection firm, TRUSTe – would appear to be virtual eyes and data collectors for the world’s biggest and most powerful intelligence agency, the CIA.
Even Yahoo is suspected of being used by the CIA, as well as the NSA and other US intelligence agencies.
So the next time you log on to Facebook, or YouTube; or make a search via Google, or Yahoo; or a transaction via PayPal for something you just bought on EBay; take comfort in the knowledge that Big Brother has footprinted your every move.
And that those tracking cookies you’ve just picked up are hotwired back to Central Computer, Langley, Virginia – home of the CIA.

Google and CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring - Pre Crime

Gee! If only they had something like this at DIA to monitor, or datamine, for suspected terrorists before 9/11 - I think I'd call it Able Danger. It has a nice Clancy-esque ring to it... It might even uncover well placed moles within the intelligence community and their patsies, DoD, US administration and politicians, Mossad/AIPAC, Saudi Arabia, wealthy banking/Wall Street/financial industries that intend to create false flag terrorist events out of ongoing war game exercises by making them "go live," creating real terrorist acts to blame on a group of innocent people to advance a war profiteering/security police state,  money-making-scheme for the shadowy power structure of wealthy elites.


Sounds a lot like the exposed super secret NATO stay-behind armies, Operation Gladio, of the Cold War used to blame European communist groups of bombings that NATO created to foment anger at these innocent political groups.


Oh, but I digress into my crazy conspiracy movie plots. I do apologize.

• By Noah Shachtman

• 
  

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.

It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.

This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.

America’s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining “open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.

“Secret information isn’t always the brass ring in our profession,” then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. “In fact, there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.”

U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called “unstructured text” of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units.

Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.

“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres’ accusations.

That’s one of several hypothetical cases Recorded Future runs in its blog devoted to intelligence analysis. But it’s safe to assume that the company already has at least one spy agency’s attention. In-Q-Tel doesn’t make investments in firms without an “end customer” ready to test out that company’s products.

Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel made their investments in 2009, shortly after the company was founded. The exact amounts weren’t disclosed, but were under $10 million each. Google’s investment came to light earlier this year online. In-Q-Tel, which often announces its new holdings in press releases, quietly uploaded a brief mention of its investment a few weeks ago.

Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Future’s board. Ahlberg says those board members have been “very helpful,” providing business and technology advice, as well as introducing him to potential customers. Both organizations, it’s safe to say, will profit handsomely if Recorded Future is ever sold or taken public. Ahlberg’s last company, the corporate intelligence firm Spotfire, was acquired in 2007 for $195 million in cash.

Google Ventures did not return requests to comment for this article. In-Q-Tel Chief of Staff Lisbeth Poulos e-mailed a one-line statement: “We are pleased that Recorded Future is now part of IQT’s portfolio of innovative startup companies who support the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community.”

Just because Google and In-Q-Tel have both invested in Recorded Future doesn’t mean Google is suddenly in bed with the government. Of course, to Google’s critics — including conservative legal groups, and Republican congressmen — the Obama Administration and the Mountain View, California, company slipped between the sheets a long time ago.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt hosted a town hall at company headquarters in the early days of Obama’s presidential campaign. Senior White House officials like economic chief Larry Summers give speeches at the New America Foundation, the left-of-center think tank chaired by Schmidt. Former Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin is now the White House’s deputy CTO, and was publicly (if mildly) reprimanded by the administration for continuing to hash out issues with his former colleagues.

In some corners, the scrutiny of the company’s political ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of their products, and because of Google’s pledges not to misuse the information still ring true to many.

But unease has been growing. Thirty seven state Attorneys General are demanding answers from the company after Google hoovered up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks as it snapped pictures for its Street View project. (The company swears the incident was an accident.)

“Assurances from the likes of Google that the company can be trusted to respect consumers’ privacy because its corporate motto is ‘don’t be evil’ have been shown by recent events such as the ‘Wi-Spy’ debacle to be unwarranted,” long-time corporate gadfly John M. Simpson told a Congressional hearing in a prepared statement. Any business dealings with the CIA’s investment arm are unlikely to make critics like him more comfortable.

But Steven Aftergood, a critical observer of the intelligence community from his perch at the Federation of American Scientists, isn’t worried about the Recorded Future deal. Yet.

“To me, whether this is troublesome or not depends on the degree of transparency involved. If everything is aboveboard — from contracts to deliverables — I don’t see a problem with it,” he told Danger Room by e-mail. “But if there are blank spots in the record, then they will be filled with public skepticism or worse, both here and abroad, and not without reason.”