The CIA has a venture capital fund named In-Q-Tel. Four years ago, it handled $327 million in assets. At one time or another since being started in 1999, the fund has invested in about 167 companies. Their names and businesses are public. These are not social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, but CIA interest in social media companies is growing and its investments in one or another facet of social media are accelerating.
A huge amount of brain power is going into new technologies of information, with incalculable ramifications. Merely to look through the list of companies that the CIA has a hand in and to see what they’re working on is scary.
Social media didn’t cause the color revolutions a few years back, but they were instrumental in their organization. The State Department and the CIA both are players in this area too. If they foster revolutionary or destabilizing sentiments in foreign countries, the latter can do the same in America.
Our current defense system centralizes national defense. One outcome is that the CIA, charged with collecting and analyzing foreign intelligence, wants to be at the cutting edge of technology. Its mission leads to In-Q-Tel. Eisenhower’s warning needs to be revised and expanded. This kind of CIA operation threatens to absorb more and more money while financing more and more companies, while creating a secret government within the government and making elected officials subservient to the intelligence operations. The core of immense power and total control of the citizenry is present in this system. The CIA has already influenced code and backdoors in widely used applications, and the NSA already has built up huge storehouses of communications.
A system of total control is being constructed, even if no mastermind intends it. That system’s growth results from and accompanies the imperative to defend the country. In the name of defense, nothing lies beyond the attempted control of the centralized forces that claim the defense monopoly. The system has the incentive to grow without limit. That means that it will be turned against Americans.
The Facebook censorship episode is a minor ripple brought on by Congressional pressure, popular left-wing sentiments in the companies, and the soft coup efforts against Trump that have elevated the idea of Russian election interference. There is no evidence that the CIA controls the media giants or is pervasively entangled in their businesses such that they have become government operations. That suspicion arises because the CIA has had such influence on the Washington Post and has had publicity campaigns in the past that influenced public opinion.
This case doesn’t follow those earlier patterns. That doesn’t mean that all is well. It is far from that, as the existence of In-Q-Tel suggests.
What this means is that the focal point of concern needs to be elsewhere than the First Amendment and its application. Competition and open markets will resolve private censorship issues. The critically important issue is how America does national defense.
7:28 pm on August 25, 2018 Email Michael S. Rozeff
