DARPA LifeLog was a Pentagon research program designed to track every email, photo, location and purchase a person made, all in one place. John Kiriakou notes it was killed on February 4, 2004 — one day before Mark Zuckerberg filed the LLC for Facebook — and treats the timing as more than coincidence, observing that senior CIA, FBI and NSA officials later went to work for Facebook, Instagram and their peers. He believes someone picked up what LifeLog dropped in order to monetize it. Kiriakou separately recounts the Mark Zuckerberg–Angela Merkel meeting, in which Zuckerberg flew to Germany not long afterward to help define what would count as hate speech on the platform he had just filed.[1][2][3]
DARPA’s extreme compartmentalization
Kiriakou describes DARPA itself, the agency behind LifeLog, as “the biggest collection of geniuses anywhere in government,” working on technology generations ahead of what the public sees. Its work is so highly classified, he says, that one DARPA scientist sitting next to another has no idea what the other is working on — and even at the CIA, officers were not cleared to know what DARPA was doing.[4][5] Kiriakou illustrates the general secrecy around nuclear and DARPA-adjacent matters with his own experience: he once had to obtain a Q clearance to visit the Department of Energy about a nuclear issue, and the clearance was revoked the same day, after a single meeting, because DOE did not want him retaining it.[5]