Absolutely. But wait, there's more....
(DARPA = Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
Why did DARPA cancel LifeLog on the same day Facebook was launched?
(excerpt)
A close friend of Poindexter, DARPA's program manager Douglas Gage, created LifeLog, which sought to “build a database tracking a person’s entire existence” that included peoples relationships, communications, thoughts, media consumption habits, purchases, behaviour, and much more, in order to build a digital record of “everything an individual says, sees, or does.”
This was the first phase, and the data entry method was self-reporting (essentially getting people to spy on themselves). The second phase was take this unstructured data and organise it into "discreet episodes" and use it for "mapping out relationships, memories, events and experiences".
LifeLog creates a permanent and searchable electronic diary of a person’s entire life. It seems AI was to be applied to this data, developed by Howard Shrobe and others. While DARPA publicly denied clandestine surveillance, DARPA’s own documentation on LifeLog noted that the project “will be able . . . to infer the user’s routines, habits and relationships with other people, organizations, places and objects, and to exploit these patterns to ease its task,”
which acknowledged its potential use as a tool of mass surveillance. The application of these two steps is to completely model and predict human behaviour. And for network modelling, enabling an unimaginably powerful and broad set of possibilities for control of populations on every conceivable level.
Among critics, Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told VICE at the time of LifeLog’s cancellation, “It would not surprise me to learn that the government continued to fund research that pushed this area forward without calling it LifeLog.” MIT’s David Karger was also certain that the DARPA project would continue in a repackaged form. He told Wired that “I am sure such research will continue to be funded under some other title . . . I can’t imagine DARPA dropping out of a such a key research area.”
LifeLog was officially closed on February 4th, 2004. DARPA never provided an explanation for its quiet move to shutter LifeLog, with a spokesperson stating only that it was related to “a change in priorities” for the agency.
On February 4th, 2004 - the exact same day - Facebook was officially launched.
#ThingsThatAreGoodToKnow
#MarkZuckerbergMyAss
