NashVegas

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Fri May-13-11 11:16 AM
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Just In Case You Weren't Already Sure Facebook Is CIA Pwned

We've been hearing about this for a while now, haven't we? About how Facebook was funding with money from a major CIA backer? Tim Hodgkinson wrote in 2008, in the Guardian:

Facebook�s most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock�s senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What�s In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA.

It's so in-your-face that Facebook is everything John Poindexter proposed with TIA ... and we just laugh and give it to them. Even the Onion laughs with their story, "CIA's 'Facebook' Program Dramatically Cut Agency's Costs"

Yesterday the news broke that recent stories in the news criticizing Google for privacy violations were planted by a PR firm working for Facebook

For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people�s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.

The plot backfired when the blogger turned down Burson�s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him. It got worse when USA Today broke a story accusing Burson of spreading a �whisper campaign� about Google �on behalf of an unnamed client.�

Confronted with evidence, a Facebook spokesman last night confirmed that Facebook hired Burson, citing two reasons: first, it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, Facebook resents Google�s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-12/facebook-busted-in-clumsy-smear-attempt-on-google/#

So ... what is this PR firm, Burson-Marsteller?

B-M came into being in the Post WW2 era that also gave us the Dulles Brothers & Friends. The Guardian gives us a peek at their client list:

The world's biggest PR company was employed by the Nigerian government to discredit reports of genocide during the Biafran war, the Argentinian junta after the disappearance of 35,000 civilians, and the Indonesian government after the massacres in East Timor. It also worked to improve the image of the late Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu and the Saudi royal family.

"Its corporate clients have included the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, which suffered a partial meltdown in 1979, Union Carbide after the Bhopal gas leak killed up to 15,000 people in India, BP after the sinking of the Torrey Canyon oil tanker in 1967 and the British government after BSE emerged..

Not fun enough? Try running company founder Harold Burson through Name Base and look what turns up:

Covert Action Information Bulletin began publishing in 1978, and currently issues a well-produced quarterly of about 70 pages with no advertising. Some themes include CIA in academia, the new world order, CIA in Eastern Europe, George Bush, domestic surveillance, CIA and drugs, AIDS, the religious right, and the Nazi-Vatican-CIA nexus. Most articles contain plenty of footnotes. Most names from almost every issue through 1992 (Number 42) are in NameBase; since Number 43 the magazine changed its name to Covert Action Quarterly (CAQ) and the indexing in NameBase has been more selective.

Parry, Robert. Fooling America: How Washington Insiders Twist the Truth and Manufacture the Conventional Wisdom. New York: William Morrow, 1992. 336 pages.
Robert Parry was an Associated Press reporter who, with Brian Barger, broke the story of contra drug-smuggling in 1985. Getting the facts for the story was considerably easier than getting it on the AP wire, which left Parry a bit disillusioned. So in 1987 he left AP and joined Newsweek. Forget you ever saw "All the President's Men." It's time for your reality check.

And another fun one:

Stauber, John C. and Rampton, Sheldon. Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry. Monroe ME: Common Courage Press, 1995. 236 pages.
As transnationals become more powerful than many governments, they discover that information control is the key to further expansion. Today the shock troops of the New World Order are neither the commandos with U.N. patches, nor the gray men from the CIA, but rather the flacks and hacks in the public relations industry. Some academicians estimate that about forty percent of all "news" is fed from PR firms to newsrooms. Journalists get two versions: a slick final version, and a raw one that they can edit. Most budget-conscious newsrooms simply present the slick version as hard news. PR practitioners in the U.S. now outnumber reporters, and some of the best journalism schools send more than half of their graduates into these firms.

Soo ... how're things in Farmville?

Just In Case You Weren't Already Sure Facebook Is CIA Pwned

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