Nextdoor Was Karen's Confidential Informant Deaddrop From The Word Go!

You should never forget the political orientation of the Amy Coopers and Jean Quans of this world.  Former director Cooper will be looking for a dance gig at a local backwoods pole, her net worth having plummeted into the deep two piece and a biscuit range,  while former Mayor Quan will be opening a marijuana dispensary to prey upon and enlarge the suffering of supposed constituents in San Francisco. 

columbusfreepress |  Neighborhoods are small communities. Communities have bonds. They also have rivalries. They also have gossip and intrigue, albeit on a petty scale. Through the efforts of Mayor Jean Quan and NextDoor.com, the intelligence community and the Oakland Police Department (OPD) are now privy to these tiny pieces of personal information and the larger patters they reveal. Under the auspices of community building and public safety, the public's participation is can now be freely enlisted in the creation of a database of that information.

Through the new partnership, the OPD and the CIA now know what Oakland residents had for breakfast, who their children have a playdate with, and if their dog wanders around the block. NextDoor.com is Oakland's social media surveillance experiment.

Time will tell what the results of that experiment will be. A metropolitan police department can easily fail at social media as the New York Police Department recently showed with their social media debacle with the #myNYPD twitter campaign.

At its core, San Francisco-based Nextdoor.com is a social networking site for neighborhoods. The model pairs a social media neighborhood community center, with law enforcement and existing neighborhood watch programs. Tailored to individual neighborhoods, it allows people to virtually post lost pet notices, rate babysitters, share news and become more in touch with their immediate real world lives. Nextdoor as a company has a focus on crime, safety and virtual block watches within the neighborhood setting – a crossover between a Myspace of neighborhood associations and a Facebook for George Zimmerman groupies.

The partnership comes on the heels of the defeat of the Quan administration’s proposal to create the Domain Awareness Center intended to provide OPD with a city-wide system of real time intelligence and comprehensive city wide surveillance. That project, which draws on a grant for domestic port security, was scaled back by Oakland City Council after public outcry and was limited to the port of Oakland.

Nadia Kayyali, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, expressed concerns about Nextdoor having potential links to the scaled back Domain Awareness Center and the program’s implications for racial profiling.

At a press event featuring Mayor Jean Quan on April 24 this year, Nextdoor announced their new partnership with OPD.

The OPD's part of the Nextdoor partnership is not just public relations or community policing. As participants in the program, they take an active role in promoting the site and building the social network. On a fully integrated level, Nextdoor has created a platform that combined social media outreach with intelligence gathering.

Oakland is not the first major city to form a partnership with Nextdoor.com. Austin, Houston and Dallas, Texas all preceded it. The company is well-funded, with a string of Menlo Park venture capital firms lined up behind hopes of its success.

According to NextDoor.com's press statements, they are backed by Google Ventures, Bezos Expedition, Allen and Company, Greylock Capital Partners, and Benchmark Capital Partners. All of these firms have ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. None of these ties are secret. Nearly all are published openly by the companies themselves. As a group, these investment companies put their venture capital into tech companies and technologies that the intelligence community wishes to succeed. They profit by doing so.