Of course they aren't. All I'm saying is if you have a company that has a routine acquisition deal flow from the CIA's venture capital arm, that there's probably healthy working relationships there.
I think you just can't read anything into In-Q-Tel involvement with a company.
Perhaps the plan with In-Q-Tel was partly to achieve pervasive private sector influence, and it was somewhat successful.
While I appreciate the conceited scare quotes there, I'm not saying that working relationships directly translate to backdoors, just that it translates to influence, and that can indirectly lead to bad things over time.
>I think you just can't read anything into In-Q-Tel involvement with a company.
As a thought experiment, say Open Whisper Systems took money from In-Q-Tel, or even acqui-hired a team from one of their portfolio companies. Right or wrong, people would very much read into it, and probably lose their minds in short order. Signal's user base would plummet overnight.
I'm not sticking up for In-Q-Tel. I wouldn't take money from IQT. But it is, for the most part, just what it says it is: an investment firm that funds things that the CIA believes will be helpful to its mission, which includes virtually all network security, database, networking, and RF technology.
Wasn't my intention for that comment to be deceptive in its implication. After seeing how some of the replies were going, I did try to amend it in a more balanced fashion—then ended up having to move that further down the thread due to the edit window expiring.
Funny enough the original comment's karma continued to skyrocket while the more measured words teetered on the brink of downvote for some time. It was surprising, since usually HN is pretty good at punishing anything that even has the slightest perception of hyperbole.
That said, I think we can agree that the 2-hour edit window represents a grave threat to civil discourse, freedom of expression, also freedom itself, probably national security, and nothing less than the future of Hacker News. It must be extended. :)
Perhaps a bit OT, but you're dead wrong about Che. He was a mass murderer, and I'd treat someone with a framed picture of him with the same suspicion I'd reserve for someone with a Stalin or Hitler portrait.
I doubt ThreatGrid is the only IQT company Cisco has bought. I am as certain they're not a CIA plant inside Cisco as I am of anything else in my perceived reality; I know several of their key people, one of whom has a framed Che poster. They're not the type. :)
You're going to drive yourself seriously crazy if you try to trace every IQT investment that's been acquired by any company and then game them out as "compromised by the CIA".