Tag Archives: Surveillance

Darktrace and Cybereason: The Intelligence Front Companies Seeking to Subjugate the World with the A.I. Singularity

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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.

~ Full article…

The Evolution of the Militarized Data Broker

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“…A Brief History of Weaponized Financial Intelligence

Long before the USSR spooked the United States into formalizing ARPA due to fears of militarized satellite applications post-Sputnik launch, data brokers have played a significant role in warfare and specifically the markets surrounding military conflict. One well-known yet early example occurred during the Napoleonic wars in the 19th century, when the banking stalwart Rothschild family used carrier pigeons and horseback couriers to gain an information settlement edge related to battle outcomes, while speedily communicating with their traders back in London. These animal-driven technological exploits allowed Rothschild-affiliated brokers to place well-informed bets on the outcome of France’s warmongering to position themselves on the winning sides of large currency and commodity bets. This similar but modernized technique would later be employed by figures like commodity trader (and Mossad asset) Marc Rich in the 1980s, who used satellite phones and optical imagery techniques to track and relay oil tanker flows between nations, giving his trades an asymmetric advantage when dealing within the active petrodollar system. Similarly, Louis Bacon’s Moore Capital achieved 86% gains in its first year largely due to correctly anticipating Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait due to astute intelligence sharing from military sources, and correctly going long on oil prices while shorting stocks.
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In 2003, a year after PayPal was sold to eBay, Thiel approached Alex Karp, a fellow alumnus of Stanford with a new venture concept: “Why not use Igor to track terrorist networks through their financial transactions?” Thiel took funds from the PayPal sale to seed the company, and after a few years of pitching investors, the newly-formed Palantir received an estimated $2 million investment from the CIA’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel. Palantir’s co-founders consulted with John Poindexter during his tenure as head of DARPA’s then-embattled Total Information Awareness in efforts to privatize the controversial surveillance program. In 2020, Intelligencer spoke with a former intelligence official who was involved in the investment who claimed the CIA had hoped that “tapping the tech expertise of Silicon Valley” would allow it to “integrate widely disparate sources of data regardless of format.”

As of 2013, Palantir’s client list included “the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Centre for Disease Control, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point and the IRS” with around “50% of its business” coming from public sector contracts. Palantir is closely connected to the U.S. government, but its financial spin-off, Palantir Metropolis, is focused on providing “analytical tools” for “hedge funds, banks and financial services firms” to outsmart each other. As The Guardian reports: “Palantir does not just provide the Pentagon with a machine for global surveillance and the data-efficient fighting of war, it runs Wall Street, too.”

Facebook, not unlike Palantir, was one of the vehicles used to privatize controversial U.S. military surveillance projects after 9/11, having also been birthed out of one of the MDDS partners, Harvard University. PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel became Facebook’s first significant investor at the behest of file-sharing pioneer Sean Parker, whose first contact with the CIA took place at age 16. What Facebook became after the involvement of Thiel and Parker bore such an uncanny resemblance to another shuttered DARPA project of the same era, known as LifeLog, that LifeLog’s architect and project manager at DARPA has even noted the direct parallels. One of these parallels, though left unmentioned by former DARPA project managers, is the fact that Facebook launched the very same day that LifeLog was shut down. Facebook’s long-standing ties to the military and intelligence communities go far beyond its origins, including revelations about its collaboration with spy agencies as part of the Snowden leaks and its role in influence operations – some have even directly involved Google and Palantir…”

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2025/01/investigative-reports/the-evolution-of-the-militarized-data-broker/