{"id":152348,"date":"2022-12-10T01:22:36","date_gmt":"2022-12-10T07:22:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/12\/cia-venture-capital-arm-partners-with-ex-googlers-startup-to-safeguard-the-internet"},"modified":"2022-12-10T01:22:36","modified_gmt":"2022-12-10T07:22:36","slug":"cia-venture-capital-arm-partners-with-ex-googlers-startup-to-safeguard-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/12\/cia-venture-capital-arm-partners-with-ex-googlers-startup-to-safeguard-the-internet","title":{"rendered":"CIA Venture Capital Arm Partners With Ex-Googler\u2019s Startup to \u201cSafeguard the Internet\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/cia-venture-capital-arm-partners-with-ex-googlers-startup-to-safeguard-the-internet2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The quiet October 29 announcement of the partnership is light on details, stating that Trust Lab and In-Q-Tel \u2014 which invests in and collaborates with firms it believes will advance the mission of the CIA \u2014 will work on \u201ca long-term project that will help identify harmful content and actors in order to safeguard the internet.\u201d Key terms like \u201charmful\u201d and \u201csafeguard\u201d are unexplained, but the press release goes on to say that the company will work toward \u201cpinpointing many types of online harmful content, including toxicity and misinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Though Trust Lab\u2019s stated mission is sympathetic and grounded in reality \u2014 online content moderation is genuinely broken \u2014 it\u2019s difficult to imagine how aligning the startup with the CIA is compatible with Siegel\u2019s goal of bringing greater transparency and integrity to internet governance. What would it mean, for instance, to incubate counter-misinformation technology for an agency with a vast history of perpetuating misinformation? Placing the company within the CIA\u2019s tech pipeline also raises questions about Trust Lab\u2019s view of who or what might be a \u201charmful\u201d online, a nebulous concept that will no doubt mean something very different to the U.S. intelligence community than it means elsewhere in the internet-using world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The quiet October 29 announcement of the partnership is light on details, stating that Trust Lab and In-Q-Tel \u2014 which invests in and collaborates with firms it believes will advance the mission of the CIA \u2014 will work on \u201ca long-term project that will help identify harmful content and actors in order to safeguard the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,1759,418],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-finance","category-governance","category-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}