[Air-L] and now for *the dark side* of facebook

[Alex Halavais]

On Feb 20, 2008 12:12 AM, Kimberly De Vries <cuuixsilver at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anyway, has anyone from Facebook ever commented on the whole intelligence
> community connection?
>

Is it just me, or is this a serious association fallacy. No doubt,
network visualizations can help to root out conspiracies, criminal or
not. But the mere fact that people associate with one another means
little more than that: they associate with one another. Given the
degree to which corporate boards interlock, I would be surprised if
most companies could not be similarly associated with the intelligence
community.

Let's take one of the claims in plain English:

Facebook is a site that collects a lot of information in order to
create profiles of individuals;
ACCELL is a VC company that invested in Facebook;
James Breyer is on the board of ACCELL;
James Breyer is also on the board of BBN Technologies;
Dr. Anita Jones is on the board of BBN Technologies;
Dr. Anita Jones at one point "oversaw" DARPA (among others);
DARPA funded the Information Awareness Office,
The IAO aimed to data mine profiles of individuals;
Kevin Bacon started the IAO!

(OK, I added the last one.)

It's worth being critical of the overlapping membership networks of
corporate boards, but to my mind, the above chain of connections is
not particularly interesting.

Alex


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