Darktrace is not just one man working alone. The company boasts that over 4000 organisations worldwide now rely on Darktrace’s A.I. technologies. With headquarters in San Francisco, US, and Cambridge, UK, Darktrace has over 1300 employees spread across 44 countries and their numbers are rising. And although the connections to the state intelligence agencies are clear and obvious, Darktrace is officially a completely private enterprise with big investors including KKR, Summit Partners, Vitruvian Partners, Samsung Ventures, TenEleven Ventures, Hoxton Ventures, Talis Capital, Invoke Capital and Insight Venture Partners. Sitting alongside the controversial Dr. Mike Lynch OBE on the advisory board for Darktrace are some seriously influential people deeply connected to US and UK intelligence agencies.
One of the first members appointed to Darktrace’s advisory board was Jonathan Evans, also referred to as Baron Evans of Weardale. Evans was previously the Director General of MI5, taking over from Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller in 2007 and staying in the most senior intelligence role that the UK has to offer until 2013. After his time as head of MI5, Evans initially joined HSBC Holdings as a non-executive Director, a role he also took up at Ark, a highly secure UK data centre.
If you were to walk into the advisory boardroom at Darktrace, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were actually attending a U.K. Home Office meeting from the past. The former Home Secretary under Prime Minister Theresa May, Amber Rudd, became part of Darktrace after her time in government ended in 2019. She is also on the advisory team of Teneo, a consulting firm co-founded and led by Doug Band, the former advisor to Bill Clinton and close friend of the infamous Jeffrey Epstein. As always, when investigating the murky world of intelligence, many connections to Epstein and his partner Ghislaine Maxwell are revealed.
With that being said, yet another member of Darktrace’s advisory board also has Epstein/Maxwell links. The C.I.A. stalwart, Alan Wade, is one of the most interesting members of the Darktrace advisory team. He was announced as joining their growing advisory board on 10 May 2016 and had been the former Chief Information Officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. His thirty- five year career at the top echelons of the C.I.A. ended in 2006 and afterwards he would dedicate his time to assisting companies with C.I.A. links from the private sector.
While he had been at one of the top posts in the entire U.S. intelligence community, Wade co-founded Chiliad alongside Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister, Christine Maxwell. As Unlimited Hangout reported earlier this year, Christine Maxwell was personally involved in leading the opeartions of the front company used by Robert Maxwell to market the PROMIS software, which had a backdoor for Israeli intelligence, to both the U.S.’ public and private sectors. Given this history, it is certainly telling that Wade would choose to co-found a major software company with Christine Maxwell of all people.
When it was still active as a company, Chiliad described itself as “the leader in data analysis across clouds, agencies, departments and other stovepipes” and it ran on the computers and databases of nearly every major national security system in the U.S. government. But nowadays, its defunct website gives us just the standard error message.h
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Darktrace, Cybereason and Carbyne911 aren’t simply pioneers in a fast moving tech sector. Rather, they are intrinsically linked to the same old intelligence agencies who are attempting to reinvent themselves under a different, more acceptable guise. They are creating the infrastructure designed to subvert our current systems. An unsupervised A.I. behemoth that will require as much data as possible to power and our governments have already agreed to give away everything they can.