About Safeweb.com
ron
In-Q-Tel, the CIA venture fund, has licensed SafeWeb's Triangle Boy
technology for its own internal use. The CIA has no representation on
SafeWeb's board of directors, and does not currently hold any shares in the
company. They are simply one of several partners that have licensed our
software.
SafeWeb's free consumer consumer service will continue to be 100% private
and secure and is operated completely independently. We want to reassure all
of our users that our core business is the protection of their online
privacy. Our servers continue to be available to any privacy advocacy group
that wants to inspect them. We do not record any user content that passes
through our machines.
Sincerely,
Stephen Hsu
CEO and Chairman
Dear Ron,
Hope this helps a little. We are not backed by CIA, they don't own us. We
are an independent privately funded
company that sold them a version of Triangle Boy. If you've read about
Triangle Boy, you'll know that it is only
a product that redirects web traffic. It is not our core privacy
technology. We use Triangle Boy to help people
in countries that block our site to get access to www.safeweb.com. Triangle
Boy can't be reverse engineered
into our core server technology which we haven't sold.
Sincerely,
The SafeWeb Team
Extracts::::--------
CIA-backed venture eyes anonymity software
by Margret Johnston, IDG News Service\Washington Bureau
February 13, 2001, 12:28
Software that promises users anonymity on the Web has caught the eye of the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) nonprofit venture capital
company, In-Q-Tel Inc., which says the technology can help the spy agency
fulfill its mission.
The software is called Triangle Boy and it was developed by the Oakland,
California-based SafeWeb Inc., a startup in which In-Q-Tel has invested
about $1 million of its $30 million current fiscal year budget, said
Christopher Tucker, chief strategic officer at the Arlington, Virginia-based
company.
In-Q-Tel is one of several investors in SafeWeb, which has been around for
more than a year, but officially launched last October. Its product is one
of hundreds pitched to In-Q-Tel, which evaluates commercial tools looking
for "solutions that can address the agency's problems," Tucker said.
Triangle Boy, discovered by the CIA's venture capital company when one of
In-Q-Tel's officials met a SafeWeb official in a San Francisco-area bar,
fits the bill, Tucker said.
"The agency is interested in secure use of the Internet," he said. "SafeWeb
has one of the more novel and thoughtful approaches to providing solutions
to that problem."
SafeWeb's Web site currently provides free immediate access to an
"anonymizer" that lets anyone surf anonymously and securely by typing in a
Web address. It replaces the URL (universal resource locator) bar with a
Java script and establishes an encrypted connection from the user's desktop
using 128-bit SSL with cookies automatically disabled, Tucker said.
But Triangle Boy goes a step further, allowing users to get to SafeWeb's
anonymizer through a third party. The code will be open source, allowing
anyone to set up third-party access to the anonymizer, Tucker said.
The CIA will use the technology primarily to protect the anonymity of its
own employees as they go about their jobs, Tucker said, but he didn't deny
that Triangle Boy could be used in other aspects of the agency's mission,
such as gathering information on terrorist and other operations it deems
suspicious.
The agency "has thought through the security of its work," Tucker said.
"They are probably two steps ahead of everybody else."
SafeWeb is expected to provide information about its plans to release
Triangle Boy soon, Tucker added. A company spokeswoman could not immediately
be reached for comment.
In-Q-Tel can be found on the Web at http://www.in-q-tel.com;