A Brief History of LifeLog, Facebook, DARPA’s, Information Awareness Office (IAO), and Why You Should Care About Any of It
Understanding the history and implications of developing ever-evolving technology to shape the future of culture.
Before the social media site Facebook was open to the general public, it was marketed to college students as a type of directory under the name Facemash, and later Thefacebook.com. According to USA Today, “The social media juggernaut cut "the" from the name in 2005 and lifted its college students-only restriction in 2006.”
Facebook’s original mission statement was, “To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” This mission statement was later changed in 2017 to focus more on building a community through connectivity, rather than the emphasis being on sharing, "To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."
“TheFacebook” was launched Feb 4, 2004, by the now famous Mark Zuckerberg, who at the time was attending Harvard University. According to a 2008 article published in Rolling Stone, “Sitting alone in his dorm room that night in 2003, Zuckerberg had just been jilted by a girl. He started drinking and once again sought solace in the realm that never let him down. Logging on to his blog, he created an entry titled ‘Harvard Face Mash: The Process.’ His plan was as simple as it was vindictive: create a site called Facemash.com, hack into Harvard’s directory, download photographs of his classmates and post them online next to photos of farm animals to rate who was more desirable.”
Zuckerberg spent the better part of 2003 hiring other students to help code his new baby, Facemash, and by January 2004, he had started writing code for TheFacebook.com. Less than a month later Facebook was launched.
When Facebook was first rolled out on the World Wide Web on February 4, 2004, very few were aware of the “coincidental” switchover from DARPA’s LifeLog to this new social media site where users posted highlights from their day-to-day happenings and special events, usually in the form of images or videos. While most claims online say there is no relation to LifeLog being canceled on the same day Facebook rolled out, it’s hard to not question their connections when it appears their end goals were very much the same, collecting personal data and training facial recognition software in the name of “precrime” or “predictive policing” post 9/11.
Just prior to the events of September 11, 2001, DARPATech had their annual conference where the then-deputy director of the Office of Information Systems Management, Brian Sharkey coined the term “total information awareness” in his presentation.
The basic idea was to surveil the entire U.S. population using an “all-seeing” online military program to prevent incoming foreign terror attacks on the nation. Former United States National Security Advisor to President Regan Admiral John Poindexter designed what was named the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program in 2002, under DARPA. Poindexter referred to the program as a “Manhattan Project for counter-terrorism.”
