Ripple’s ‘pro-privacy’ Larsen on surveillance mogul Thiel’s Dialog list

Chris Larsen, the Ripple co-founder and apparent privacy champion who wired San Francisco with thousands of police cameras, has appeared on a leaked guest list for Dialog, surveillance mogul Peter Thiel’s invitation-only network.

Investigative journalist Dave Troy published previously unreported names yesterday.

He tagged Larsen as both a participant and a founding fellow of the organization, which has been described as “Bilderberg (an off-the-record gathering of political and business elite) meets Silicon Valley salon.”

Dialog, meanwhile, positions itself as a hush-hush place where leaders from various fields and ideological backgrounds can come together and build relationships.

As part of this, it runs annual in-person retreats featuring highly secretive sessions, which have included “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?”

Larsen, who branded himself a privacy champion, co-founded the coalition Californians for Privacy Now, served on the board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and made his fortune from the cryptographically secure XRP Ledger, now appears on a roster at the highest echelons of the surveillance state.

His name wasn’t generally associated with surveillance until his police camera initiative, the Real-Time Investigation Center that operated out of the same building as Ripple’s former headquarters in San Francisco.

In stark contrast, Thiel is one of the most recognizable leaders in the surveillance state.

He co-founded the citizen monitoring giant Palantir and invested in face-scanner Clearview AI, license plate reader Flock Safety, and movement monitor SafeGraph.

EXCLUSIVE: Here's our list of previously unreported Dialog participants and Founding Fellows. pic.twitter.com/6UMX567GLL

Larsen tried to make a name for himself as a consumer advocate. In addition to the two privacy-focused organizations listed above, he co-founded E-Loan, the first company to advocate for consumer access to FICO credit scores.

He then built the democratized lending marketplace Prosper, before co-founding Ripple.

Bloomberg estimates his net worth above $12 billion, most of it tied to Ripple stock and XRP tokens.

His privacy branding has aged somewhat poorly, however. He now appears on a list of Dialog participants, founded in 2006 by Thiel and data broker Auren Hoffman whose movement monitoring company SafeGraph tracks phone location data.

The Dialog roster only became public this week. Swiss hacktivist Maia Arson Crimew found an internal directory inside the group’s website code. Wired verified the leak.

The new records have exposed an upcoming 222-person retreat near Dublin, originally scheduled for August. Internal documents describe over 1,000 paying members to Dialog overall, and Wired reported that leaders might grade attendees on a hidden scale by wealth and fame.

Of course, if anyone were curious about Larsen’s ties to the surveillance state, Thiel’s relationship with Ripple actually predates Larsen’s participation in Dialog. 

Indeed, Thiel’s Founders Fund was an early investor in OpenCoin, the startup that became Larsen’s Ripple. Therefore, it was public knowledge that surveillance leader Thiel and Larsen were on the same cap table long before this week’s Dialog leak.

There’s disagreement about whether Dialog is a particularly secret society.

Troy, who revealed the names, cautioned that Dialog is “more of a convening than secret society,” and noted that many participants claimed to have never met Thiel.

Moreover, the leaked file “looks like a list of attendees for the upcoming [meeting] and not ‘members’ per se,” he clarified.

As an additional indication that Dialog isn’t particularly secretive, another member of Ripple’s leadership has publicly acknowledged it.

Specifically, Brad Garlinghouse said in 2021, “You know, I attended a conference hosted by a gentleman named Auren Hoffman and Peter Thiel called Dialog.”

Elsewhere in that interview, Garlinghouse admitted that Dialog was his first exposure to the Bitcoin network.

Read more: Ripple’s Chris Larsen to fund police surveillance, drones in San Francisco

Larsen once personally bankrolled the largest private surveillance buildout in San Francisco’s history.

New York Magazine counted roughly 2,700 cameras, 93 police drones, and a $9.4 million Real-Time Investigation Center that shared a location with Ripple’s former headquarters.

At the time, Larsen insisted that the system was tightly restricted. “The police can’t monitor it live,” he told ABC7 in 2020. “That’s actually against the law in San Francisco.”

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