America Online: CIA front

I was surfing around the internet and came across a link in a comment section alluding to CIA control over AOL. Immediately I rolled my eyes and clicked the link. Looking at the source, a blog named "Friends of Liberty," I rolled my eyes a second time. Then I read the content:

This can be easily verified by a visit to AOL's corporate website, where visitors learn - among other things - that the company is headquartered in Dulles, Virginia.

Curious as to where this might be, I attempted to locate the city of Dulles on a couple of maps, to no avail. This, I learned, was because Dulles is actually an offshoot of Langley, Virginia.

Langley is also rather difficult to locate on a map. For the uninitiated, this is because Langley, Virginia is the home of the Central Intelligence Agency. In fact, there isn't much else in Langley, Virginia, which exists almost exclusively to provide residence to the thousands of employees of the CIA's headquarters.

And it is precisely there that you will find the home of AOL. Apparently recognizing the negative connotations of a Langley mailing address, the company essentially created a 'suburb' and named it Dulles. Dulles, by the way, is named in honor of the notorious Dulles siblings, Allen and John Foster, whose names were virtually synonymous with the U.S. intelligence infrastructure through both World Wars and much of the Cold War.

Another fact about AOL that belies its true function is the composition of its Board of Directors

Here you will find such high-level military/intelligence assets as General Colin Powell and General Alexander Haig. All of which gives a whole new meaning to that all-seeing eye that comprises the company's logo...

sianews.com...

It actually was a fairly sober argument. What are your thoughts on this?

I don't doubt it but they must also be involved with other... what does AOL do again?

I heard somewhere a couple years ago that 60% or so of AOL's business comes from people that don't understand that they don't need AOL.

Not much to be done about it. Interesting though.

....its AOL. what would the C.I.A be doing with them? spying on grandmothers that still have dialup and their aol 5.0 cd?

Having lived in the area for years and having far too many friends to count that were there from the beginning or came on board shortly thereafter; most of them doing very high tech stuff and now having mostly moved on to other things I can tell you that I don't believe it.
1. None of them (none of them) are CIA types. Purple hair, pink hair, green hair, tattoos, etc. They were all gamer geek wiz kids who got rich fast because they had the right skills at the right time and before other people had them.
2. None of them have security clearances of any type. This is a big deal because about a 1/4 of the DC area has some kind of security clearance. If AOL was a front for the CIA these guys would have had clearances.

There are also a ton of other places in Dulles. Restaurants, etc. Not CIA.

That's pretty interesting. I never heard of this before. I found this looking into it:

AOL and George Bush have lots in common. Regarding the tasks in front of them, they are both inexperienced and they are both, relatively speaking, usurpers. It's a fluke that they are in charge. What's more, with its headquarters deep inside CIA country, AOL has always made the most of its Reagan-Bush connections. Colin Powell, until days ago, was on the AOL board (with $8 million in options); before him, there was Alexander Haig.

nymag.com...
and this:

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell has resigned from AOL Inc.'s nominating and governance committee, according to a regulatory filing Friday.

articles.marketwatch.com...

I don't know what it means, but I would laugh my # off if the CIA uses AOL Maybe certain people have been leaving over the years because no one uses AOL anymore. They probably moved on to find better soil, so to speak.

reply to post by MastaShake


that wouldn't amount to just grandma's and the likes here in the states.

YES ... there's still a crap ton of folks using/on 'dialup' here in the states.

Originally posted by MastaShake
....its AOL. what would the C.I.A be doing with them? spying on grandmothers that still have dialup and their aol 5.0 cd?

On August 4, 2006, AOL released a compressed text file on one of its websites containing 20 million search keywords for over 650,000 users over a 3-month period between March 1, 2006 and May 31, intended for research purposes. AOL pulled the file from public access by August 7, but not before its wide distribution on the Internet by others. Derivative research, titled A Picture of Search[31] was published by authors Pass, Chowdhury and Torgeson for The First International Conference on Scalable Information Systems.[32]
The data were used by Web sites such as AOLstalker[33] for entertainment purposes, where users of AOLstalker are encouraged to judge AOL clients based on the humorousness of personal details revealed by search behavior.

en.wikipedia.org...

Originally posted by watcher3339
Having lived in the area for years and having far too many friends to count that were there from the beginning or came on board shortly thereafter; most of them doing very high tech stuff and now having mostly moved on to other things I can tell you that I don't believe it.
1. None of them (none of them) are CIA types. Purple hair, pink hair, green hair, tattoos, etc. They were all gamer geek wiz kids who got rich fast because they had the right skills at the right time and before other people had them.
2. None of them have security clearances of any type. This is a big deal because about a 1/4 of the DC area has some kind of security clearance. If AOL was a front for the CIA these guys would have had clearances.

There are also a ton of other places in Dulles. Restaurants, etc. Not CIA.

I can't argue what your saying but what would be the point of being an undercover spy acting as a computer programmer if everyone knew you had some out of place high level security clearance? How would anyone but those that require the clearance know if they had one?

It would make sense that most employers of spies are not aware that they have employed a spy.

Although it did just occur to me that even if AOL was not functioning at the same level as its rivals it would still have good cover for indexing every single page available on the internet, and a hardline right to the CIA could be achieved as well because of close proximity in order to keep people from seeing who collecting the data.

Aol is even more ancient than myspace.
Its shocking to hear theyre linked with the CIA.

reply to post by FirstCasualty


In DC clearances get talked about. They are required for a lot of jobs. Even jobs that are not direct Federal Government jobs require them of many or all of their employees if they are have Federal Government contracts. There are interviews conducted when people go for their clearances. I have been interviewed more than once for clearances (for more than one person and not my own). People who have clearances often leave the room when various "questionable" topics come up. It's kind of a joke because if there really was a problem with the conversation leaving the room wouldn't really help someone to get or maintain their clearance but it's conditioned...it's an "I can't hear you lalalalalalala" kind of thing.

I have known and lived with people with clearances of various levels. There are various levels of pre clearance interview dependent upon the type of clearance sought and the interviewees relationship with the individual seeking the clearance. I am quite confident that the folks I have known at AOL do not have clearances. They do not get paid government pay scale (they at least used to do much better but that was in the good old days), and many of them made a killing on options when AOL was King. They have moved on to other (also non governmental) positions. At least one after the yearly pre Christmas layoffs in which after a decade of service their number was up lamented NOT having a clearance as there was a temp contract of six months at really good pay that they could have walked right into while looking but it required a clearance and they take a little bit of time to get.

It's an interesting thought but I really don't think AOL is now or ever was CIA.

Here is the article that piqued my interest:

Alto is a new web-based email client from AOL (yes, the folks best known for "You've got mail!"). In addition to syncing with Aol Mail, the service syncs with Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and even iCloud to make your inbox more attractive.

lifehacker.com...

It seems like they are launching a filter for your e-mail client that first routes all of your correspondence through their servers before making it visually more aesthetic..

Originally posted by clay2 baraka
Here is the article that piqued my interest:

Alto is a new web-based email client from AOL (yes, the folks best known for "You've got mail!"). In addition to syncing with Aol Mail, the service syncs with Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and even iCloud to make your inbox more attractive.

lifehacker.com...

It seems like they are launching a filter for your e-mail client that first routes all of your correspondence through their servers before making it visually more aesthetic..

Now... that is creepy and interesting.

reply to post by watcher3339


most of AOL would not have to have a clearance, it would only take one and it wouldn't have been a criteria necessary to get the cover job. AOL does not work for the CIA, but it is suspicious that 2 former high ranking military officials have sat on the board. Maybe to keep a close eye on the operation, maybe cause military men are an obvious fit the tech industry. Maybe that was the only job they could find... help me out here.

reply to post by FirstCasualty


As to why military men on the board? There could be a number of reasons. Usually boards are filled with prominent individuals, often from an area. There are a lot of prominent military men in D.C. Also, as the web began with infrastructure that grew out of a military project so there is a natural fit there and perhaps a who knew who kind of thing. Finally, I would think it was possible that the government, at a time when AOL was really THE way to access the web might have had some interest in terms of security for the new and increasingly important bit of infrastructure that AOL represented. But, again, given the way they are with clearances with anything that is even questionably government related in the D.C. area, it would be all of the techs that needed clearances. Knowing the reality of how one or two people could have impacted the security or operational capacity of AOL, and the type of information that they had access to and created themselves, if the CIA had any shadow over AOL all of them would have required clearances that they just didn't (and still don't) have.

A former employee looks to make a buck:

EMAIL TRACING BASIC SEMINAR
THE BOOK, THE CD OR BOTH!

Photos, Sreenshots, web pages
11 X 8 1/2, 279 pages

By Joseph Seanor
Former CIA Computer Expert And Senior Technical Security Investigator at America Online, AOL.

www.pimall.com...

Looked up 'AOL, Dulles, Virginia' on Google Maps. Looks like a pretty legit place except it says 'This place has closed or relocated'.

reply to post by clay2 baraka


I personally think if you believe any of us have any privacy online you are kidding yourself. AOL is irrelevant now. They archive every single thing that goes into the web, and every single response to it. Cel phone conversations as well as text messages. Maybe ten years ago we may have had freedom to do as we please online, now it is all on record, and they can pull up anything you ever put out there at their whim. Data storage has come a phenomenally long way since then. Big brother IS watching...

Langley is in Fairfax County and Dulles is in Loundoun County. Dulles is in the city of Sterling. The confusion seems to be that Dulles airport is party in Fairfax. So no Dulles is not part of Langley.