“I’m suspicious of startups pitching the status quo as innovation.” The quiet October 29 announcement of the partnership is light on details, stating that Trust Lab and In-Q-Tel — which invests in and collaborates with firms it believes will advance the mission of the CIA — will work on “a long-term project that will help identify harmful content and actors in order to safeguard the internet.” Key terms like “harmful” and “safeguard” are unexplained, but the press release goes on to say that the company will work toward “pinpointing many types of online harmful content, including toxicity and misinformation.” Though Trust Lab’s stated mission is sympathetic and grounded in reality — online content moderation is genuinely broken — it’s difficult to imagine how aligning the startup with the CIA is compatible with Siegel’s goal of bringing greater transparency and integrity to internet governance.No matter how provocative an In-Q-Tel deal may be, much of what Trust Lab is peddling sounds similar to what the likes of Facebook and YouTube already attempt in-house: deploying a mix of human and unspecified “machine learning” capabilities to detect and counter whatever is determined to be “harmful” content.In his blog post, Siegel urges greater democratic oversight of online content: “Governments in the free world have side-stepped their responsibility to keep their citizens safe online.” Even if Siegel’s vision of something like an Environmental Protection Agency for the web remains a pipe dream, Trust Lab’s murky partnership with In-Q-Tel suggests a step toward greater governmental oversight of online speech, albeit very much not in the democratic vein outlined in his blog post.Unlike typical venture capital firms, In-Q-Tel’s “partners” are the CIA and the broader U.S. intelligence community — entities not historically known for exemplifying Trust Lab’s corporate tenets of transparency, democratization, and truthfulness.Former CIA Director George Tenet, who spearheaded the creation of In-Q-Tel in 1999, described the CIA’s direct relationship with In-Q-Tel in plain terms: “CIA identifies pressing problems, and In-Q-Tel provides the technology to address them.” An official history of In-Q-Tel published on the CIA website says, “In-Q-Tel’s mission is to foster the development of new and emerging information technologies and pursue research and development (R&D) that produce solutions to some of the most difficult IT problems facing the CIA.” Siegel has previously written that internet speech policy must be a “global priority,” but an In-Q-Tel partnership suggests some fealty to Western priorities, said Díaz — a fealty that could fail to take account of how these moderation policies affect billions of people in the non-Western world."