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The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.

It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.

This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.

America’s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining “open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.

“Secret information isn’t always the brass ring in our profession,” then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. “In fact, there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.”

U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called “unstructured text” of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units.

Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.

“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres’ accusations.

That’s one of several hypothetical cases Recorded Future runs in its blog devoted to intelligence analysis. But it’s safe to assume that the company already has at least one spy agency’s attention. In-Q-Tel doesn’t make investments in firms without an “end customer” ready to test out that company’s products.

Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel made their investments in 2009, shortly after the company was founded. The exact amounts weren’t disclosed, but were under $10 million each. Google’s investment came to light earlier this year online. In-Q-Tel, which often announces its new holdings in press releases, quietly uploaded a brief mention of its investment a few weeks ago.

Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Future’s board. Ahlberg says those board members have been “very helpful,” providing business and technology advice, as well as introducing him to potential customers. Both organizations, it’s safe to say, will profit handsomely if Recorded Future is ever sold or taken public. Ahlberg’s last company, the corporate intelligence firm Spotfire, was acquired in 2007 for $195 million in cash.

Google Ventures did not return requests to comment for this article. In-Q-Tel Chief of Staff Lisbeth Poulos e-mailed a one-line statement: “We are pleased that Recorded Future is now part of IQT’s portfolio of innovative startup companies who support the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community.”

Just because Google and In-Q-Tel have both invested in Recorded Future doesn’t mean Google is suddenly in bed with the government. Of course, to Google’s critics — including conservative legal groups, and Republican congressmen — the Obama Administration and the Mountain View, California, company slipped between the sheets a long time ago.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt hosted a town hall at company headquarters in the early days of Obama’s presidential campaign. Senior White House officials like economic chief Larry Summers give speeches at the New America Foundation, the left-of-center think tank chaired by Schmidt. Former Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin is now the White House’s deputy CTO, and was publicly (if mildly) reprimanded by the administration for continuing to hash out issues with his former colleagues.

In some corners, the scrutiny of the company’s political ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of their products, and because of Google’s pledges not to misuse the information still ring true to many.

But unease has been growing. Thirty seven state Attorneys General are demanding answers from the company after Google hoovered up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks as it snapped pictures for its Street View project. (The company swears the incident was an accident.)

“Assurances from the likes of Google that the company can be trusted to respect consumers’ privacy because its corporate motto is ‘don’t be evil’ have been shown by recent events such as the ‘Wi-Spy’ debacle to be unwarranted,” long-time corporate gadfly John M. Simpson told a Congressional hearing in a prepared statement. Any business dealings with the CIA’s investment arm are unlikely to make critics like him more comfortable.

But Steven Aftergood, a critical observer of the intelligence community from his perch at the Federation of American Scientists, isn’t worried about the Recorded Future deal. Yet.

“To me, whether this is troublesome or not depends on the degree of transparency involved. If everything is aboveboard — from contracts to deliverables — I don’t see a problem with it,” he told Danger Room by e-mail. “But if there are blank spots in the record, then they will be filled with public skepticism or worse, both here and abroad, and not without reason.”

The Pentagon did not return phone calls Thursday. A spokeswoman for the base confirmed that Manning “received non-judicial punishment for violating rules while an advanced individual training student here,” but would not discuss the details, citing Army privacy policies.

“In a training environment, where we’re dealing with young people who aren’t used to the Army, we deal with a wide variety of folks doing inappropriate things,” says spokeswoman Tanja Linton. “They have issues, and it’s dealt with, and they go on to do great things for the Army and the country.”

Manning, who was 20 years old at the time, was ordered to remove the videos, but did not lose his then-provisional Top Secret security clearance, says the Army official. The official and spokeswoman Linton both say Manning graduated from the class in mid-August 2008.

After his graduation, Manning wound up in the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York, where he was stationed until his deployment to Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq in November 2009. There, he served as an intelligence analyst with a Top Secret/SCI clearance and access to classified networks, including SIPRnet, the Army’s secret-level wide area network linked to WikiLeaks’ most high-profile releases.

Sometime after Thanksgiving 2009, Manning reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, after WikiLeaks published 500,000 pager messages from the 24-hour period surrounding the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to Manning’s chats with ex-hacker Adrian Lamo, who ultimately turned Manning in to authorities.

”I immediately recognized that they were from an NSA database, and I felt comfortable enough to come forward,” Manning wrote.

In late 2009, by Manning’s account, he discovered the classified video of a deadly 2007 Army helicopter attack in Iraq that claimed the lives of a number of civilians. He leaked the video in February, and WikiLeaks released it under the title “Collateral Murder” in April 2010.

Manning was charged early this month with leaking the Iraq video and improperly downloading more than 150,000 State Department cables from SIPRnet onto his unclassified personal computer. He’s charged with leaking more than 50 of them.

The Army announced Thursday night that Manning had been transported from Kuwait to the Marine Corps Base Quantico Brig in Quantico, Virginia, where he continues to be held in pre-trial custody. His case will now be handled in Washington D.C. The investigation, led by the Army with support from the FBI, is ongoing.

Other leaks Manning claimed credit for in his chats with Lamo include a database of 260,000 State Department diplomatic cables and a classified Army event log from the war in Iraq covering 500,000 events from 2004 through 2009. WikiLeaks hasn’t published those purported leaks, and has denied receiving the diplomatic cables.

On Sunday, WikiLeaks published a different event log of 77,000 reports from the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. Manning did not discuss leaking an Afghan war log in his chats with Lamo. But on Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Pentagon investigators have found evidence on his computer hard drive tying Manning to the leak of that log.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, speaking at a press conference Thursday, blasted Wikileaks and its founder for releasing the logs, following news reports that some Afghan citizens who assisted U.S troops might now face reprisal from the Taliban because they’re identified in the leaked database.

The Army official who knew Manning at Fort Huachuca during the training says Manning was something of an outsider, who was often needled by fellow soldiers for his slight build: 5-foot-2 and 105 pounds. “He’s kind of a scrappy kid, I guess. He was always on the defense because he was such a small guy…. He didn’t seem to have a lot of friends.”

“I hope you don’t portray this as a failure of the command at Fort Huachuca,” adds the Army official. “They did everything they could, but you can’t really identify that someone’s going to do what he’s accused of at that level. You can never tell what somebody’s going to do.”

As Pentagon leaders go, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen are fairly mild-mannered — prone to quiet, careful assessments, not table-pounding bluster. But they could barely contain their anger on Thursday at WikiLeaks for publishing tens of thousands of secret documents about the Afghanistan war. Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went so far as to say that the transparency activists “might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier” or an Afghan partner during a Pentagon press briefing, his voice elevating slightly.

Neither Mullen nor Gates considered the documents WikiLeaks obtained to have strategic value or even particular utility to understanding the war. But that didn’t diminish their anger at WikiLeaks’s huge disclosure on Sunday, which they described as having consequences on the battlefield and beyond. The consequences of the leak are “potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and our Afghan partners,” said Gates, a former CIA director with a famous penchant for secrecy. “Tactics, techniques and procedures will become known to our adversaries.” An internal department investigation into who leaked is already underway, aided by the FBI.

Ever since the first Gulf War, there’s been an effort to broaden and flatten access to information within the military in order to foster an ethic of small-unit initiative. Beyond the inquiry’s narrow question of who leaked, Gates said that the “massive breach” will force department leaders to reconsider whether that information needs to be stovepiped again.

“We want those soldiers at a forward operating base to have all the information necessary, not just for their own security, but to accomplish their mission,” Gates said. “Should we change the way we approach that or do we continue to take the risk” of more exposures? (So long, SIPRNET access?) Gates added that he couldn’t confirm whether there have been new leaks waiting to come to light since WikiLeaks obtained its tranche of documents, some thousands of which it has yet to release.

Then there’s the consequence to America’s partners, particularly Afghans who put their lives at risk working with U.S. troops and whose identities are now exposed in the WikiLeaks documents. Gates said there was a “moral obligation” for the United States to “take some responsibility for their security,” but didn’t elaborate what measures the military might take. “Will people whose lives are on the line trust us to keep their identities secret?” Gates asked. “Will other governments trust us to keep their documents secret?”

Reporters challenged Mullen’s comment about WikiLeaks having blood on its hands, but the usually soft-spoken chairman didn’t back away. While he said he didn’t know that anyone has died because of the leaks, Mullen said that people who don’t handle battlefield reports of the sort that WikiLeaks published “can’t appreciate, in my opinion, how this information is networked together…. The potential threat is there to risk the lives of soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines,” as well as U.S. foreign allies in Afghanistan, “as well as Afghan citizens. And there’s no doubt in my mind about that.”

Bottles of Vitaminwater at a New York City convenience store

Over the past few years, an increasing number of worn-out consumers have reached for a bottle of Vitaminwater after a workout. The sports drink has emerged as a serious competitor to Gatorade and other noncarbonated beverages, so much so that Coca-Coca forked over $4.2 billion in cash to buy the brand from Glaceau back in 2007. On its July 21 earnings call, Coke CEO Muhtar Kent was particularly bullish about Vitaminwater, which is now being sold in 15 markets worldwide, including France, China and South Africa.

But do some of these weekend warriors think they're just getting a healthy mix of vitamins and water, as the name of the product implies, when they chug that sweet drink? Probably so. But they're getting more: 33 grams of sugar and 125 calories, for every 20-ounce bottle. Hey, where's the sugar in the name?

Such mixed-message marketing has caused one food-health advocacy group, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), to lead a class-action suit that claims that Coca-Cola is violating consumer-protection laws with its Vitaminwater brand. According to CSPI nutritionists, Vitaminwater's sugar content more than offsets any advertised health benefits provided by the nutrients in the drink. "They added vitamins to crap," says Stephen Gardner, chief litigator for CSPI. "And it's still crap. Consumers shouldn't have to assume that the front of a label is a lie. You cannot deceive in the big print and tell the truth later."

The group achieved a victory last week, when a federal judge tossed out Coke's motion to dismiss the case. In a strongly worded 55-page opinion, Judge John Gleeson of the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn said that the health claims on some Vitaminwater bottles may be in violation of FDA regulations since the drink "achieves its nutritional content solely through fortification that violates FDA policy." The judge thinks Coke could be violating the so-called jellybean rule, which says that a food- or drinkmaker cannot load otherwise unhealthy products with vitamins or other nutrients in order to claim it is healthy. A sugar product is a sugar product: you can't say a jellybean fights heart disease because it contains no cholesterol.

Gleeson also ruled that the claim that the Vitaminwater name misleads consumers is potentially actionable, since that key third ingredient, sugar, is conveniently absent from the title. "The potential for confusion is heightened," Gleeson wrote, "by the presence of other statements in Vitaminwater's labeling, such as the description of the product as a 'vitamin enhanced water beverage' and the phrases 'vitamins + water + all you need' and 'vitamins + water = what's in your hand' which have the potential to reinforce a consumer's mistaken belief that the product is comprised of only vitamins and water." 

Coke responded to the judge's ruling in a statement. "Vitaminwater is a great tasting, hydrating beverage with essential vitamins and water — and labels clearly showing ingredients and calorie content," the company said. "The court's opinion was not a decision on the merits, but simply a determination that the case can proceed beyond the initial pleadings stage. We believe plaintiff's claims are without merit and will ultimately be rejected."

If the case goes to a full trial, the judge will ultimately decide whether the Vitaminwater name is legal. But is it ethical? "The inference is that the water contains vitamins," says Terry Childers, a marketing professor at Iowa State. "Vitamins are generally considered healthy so in the semantic network of connections in our brains, it would be natural for the buyer to associate Vitaminwater with healthy. Given the associations and that it contains that much sugar, I think it is misleading to portray it as a healthy drink." 

Marketers, however, get paid to move bottles off the shelf. And this brand managed to merge two words, vitamin and water, which epitomize good health. "From a marketing standpoint, it's brilliant," says Matt Goulding, an editor at Men's Health magazine and co-author of the Eat This, Not That! diet books. "From a corporate-responsibility standpoint, it's not exactly straight shooting."

But isn't the onus on the consumer, who can read about Vitaminwater's sugar supply in the small print, to pick up the bottle and examine what they're gulping? Yes, most people are too busy — or lazy — to read every food label. But should Vitaminwater be liable for that fact of life?

Coke is sure to make this argument as the case progresses. Still, all those exercise fiends might want to get their vitamins the old-fashioned way: a pill and a glass of water. After all, it's sugar-free.

You know those YouTube videos with that manly Old Spice guy and his hilarious responses to Twitter fans? Of course you do. So does everybody, it seems, because Old Spice body wash sales have increased 107% in the past month in part thanks to that social media marketing campaign.

Already published stats from video analytics company Visible Measures that made it clear that the Old Spice guy was a hugely successful initiative from marketing firm Wieden + Kennedy, achieving millions of viral video views quicker than past hits like Susan Boyle and U.S. President Barack Obama’s election victory speech.

The statistic of the 107% sales increase over the past month comes from Nielsen, which also revealed that sales increased 55% over the past three months. Individual products that were slipping in sales saw spikes after actor Isaiah Mustafa showed them off in the TV and Internet video ads. Those numbers were cited in an article at BrandWeek.

The campaign began with simple TV ads, which then went viral on YouTube. The follow-up program in which Mustafa recorded funny videos in response to fans, bloggers and Twitter influencers hit it out of the park in the zeitgeist. Adweek quotes Visible Measures’ Matt Cutler saying that the total web views for all Old Spice brand videos have reached 110 million, “surpassing the reach of traditional broadcast.”

Adweek also reports that Old Spice is working on a new campaign, but that it’s “unrelated” to the Mustafa videos. That’s a tough act to follow, but we don’t think anyone at Old Spice is complaining today.

Update: Some readers have pointed to news stories saying that sales for Old Spice went down. Not exactly.

The earlier reports of drops in sales referred to the Old Spice product Red Zone After Hours, which experienced a 7% drop. WARC, the source for that story, also acknowledges Nielsen’s data, saying, “Despite reports to the contrary, Nielsen data shows that sales of the Old Spice Body Wash range as a whole rose by 55% over the last three months, and by 107% in the last month alone.”

We will acknowledge the point that there is simply a timeframe correlation between the boosts in Old Spice sales and the ad campaign.

WikiLeaks is currently in the news because its Afghan War logs comprise one of the largest and most controversial intelligence leaks to date. But while WikiLeaks is relatively new to the public, it is actually a product of a long-established culture. That culture has already had a banner-bearer; a quintessential exemplification of its values — The Pirate Bay. WikiLeaks is akin to The Pirate Bay, but for another purpose.
 

WikiLeaks disregards the letter of the law and grants political analysts and citizens new information, then defends that choice with an argument for a higher virtue: Freedom of information and knowledge. The founding figures behind WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay each claim to place that value above all others — that, and a little bit of anti-establishment zeal.

At this point, its name is merely symbolic — a statement of philosophical association. WikiLeaks is not a wiki, but shares the same culture, along with The Pirate Bay, Linux, and the open-source movement. For decades, the members of this “hacker” community have espoused the free flow of information in a world without borders, where no institution, neither corporation nor government, could hinder independent thought and the democratization of knowledge.

The connections between WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay are not merely conceptual. There are also more direct correlations. Both WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay have been hosted by Swedish Internet service provider PRQ, which also hosted the website of insurgents in Chechnya who sought a publishing platform that would not represent any established state. It’s the Swiss bank of Internet providers, and a bastion of 21st century hacker values and individualism.

In The New Yorker’s detailed profile of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, it’s clear that he belongs to this tradition. He began his adult life as a computer hacker with no formal education. Though he did eventually attend college, he had nothing good to say of the experience. This was in part because his mother discouraged him from traditional education, fearing it might rob him of his individualism and will to learn. Today, it seems almost as if Assange is trying to live out the radical philosophies of Ayn Rand.

We all know the stories of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs — computer whizzes who dropped out of college because they had technological revolutions to tend to. Assange is in some ways cut from the same cloth, though his choice has not yet earned him dramatic wealth, and his commitment to openness is more radical.

But through his project, the tradition has reached the world stage in a whole new way. Computer hackers with this Internet-born, fundamentalist philosophy of information and individual entrepreneurship are not just dictating the terms of technology and digital entertainment, but of journalism, political discourse and military engagement.

WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay are also similar in this regard: You can say what you will of the ethics of it all, but you have to admit it’s remarkable.

This morning i had a chance to aee the "Old Spice Guy," otherwise known as Isaiah Mustafa, on "GMA." He has been responding to tweets with personalized YouTube videos. Last night I sent a tweet and asked how President Obama can gain back some of the female support he has lost.

Old Spice Guy had these suggestions:

--From now on Obama should only be seen in a towel.
--Obama should begin his State of the Union address with "Hellloo ladies" instead of "My fellow Americans."
--And finally, end the speech with a "presidential ab point."

WikiLeaks just published secret documents related to the war between the U.S. and the Taliban in Afghanistan. The documents detail deals, armed conflicts, strategies, politics, intelligence operations and some casualties from 2004 and 2010, painting the most complete, publicly available picture of the Afghan War yet.

The event is in some ways comparable to the leak of the Pentagon Papers, a set of documents that provided a behind-the-scenes look at the American war in Vietnam. Those papers reached the public via major media outlets in 1971. At more than 90,000 reports, WikiLeaks’s Afghan War Diary is even more substantial. By some measures it is the biggest intelligence leak to date.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assage told UK newspaper The Guardian that the size of the leak is only one dimension of its significance:

This situation is different in that it’s not just more material and being pushed to a bigger audience and much sooner … but rather that people can give back. So people around the world who are reading this are able to comment on it and put it in context and understand the full situation. That is not something that has previously occurred. And that is something that can only be brought about as a result of the Internet.

Two months ago, mashable put WikiLeaks first in a list of innovative websites that could reshape the news. The site accepts submissions of confidential political or corporate documents, reviews them to make sure they’re accurate, then publishes them on the web for anyone to see. WikiLeaks has previously leaked e-mails from vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and a video of U.S. soldiers killing civilians.

Assage was careful to point out that the Afghan War Diary is comprised of old reports, not future military plans, so its usefulness to NATO’s enemies in the battlefield should be limited. The people able to make the most informed decisions about whether or not the release of information can endanger American interests or lives are those working inside the Pentagon, but those are the very people WikiLeaks is trying to keep accountable. The controversy of values is clear.

WikiLeaks is able to solicit submissions from all over the world while avoiding jurisdiction by operating in several countries at once — or none at all, depending on your interpretation of the situation. This wasn’t possible before the web. Now it is, and the implications for society are significant.

How the Leak Happened

The Afghan War Diary was simultaneously given to reporters from The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel several weeks in advance so those reporters could study the documents and provide context with their public release. It was also given to those three publications so that no one national government could censor it.

WikiLeaks removed data that could implicate its sources, but the U.S. military already has an alleged WikiLeaks source in custody: 22-year-old intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, who The Guardian says is suspected as the source of the video that depicted U.S. soldiers killing civilians. So far we’ve seen no evidence for or against any connection between the Afghan War Diary and Manning.

Politico reports that the White House released a critical statement in response to the leak, saying the U.S. “strongly condemns” the disclosure. The statement criticized WikiLeaks for not approaching the White House for comment or verification, and claimed that the bleak logs record events that took place before the Obama administration’s change in strategy.

What the Leak Includes

The three publications given early access to the reports have made a few similar observations about what they say. Foremost is that the situation in Afghanistan is bleaker than any of the governments involved would have you believe, particularly when it comes to collaboration between the U.S. and Pakistan.

Several reports either directly or indirectly implicate the ISI, a Pakistani intelligence agency, in aiding Taliban fighters. There are some suggestions in the reports that current or former members of the ISI have actually met with Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders to collaboratively organize attacks on American troops.

However, The New York Times notes that some of the reports on that subject come from Afghanistan intelligence, which has a negative relationship with Pakistan and a potential interest in damaging its reputation. Other reports detail NATO-ordered civilian killings, specifics as to why NATO progress has been slow at best, and other bleak pictures of the activities in the war.

Apart from the WikiLeaks website, you can find report specifics in an interactive map The Guardian produced to highlight 300 critical reports found in the leak.

Tea Party Express leader and conservative talk-radio host Mark Williams addresses a crowd during a stop at the Utah state capitol in Salt Lake City

The Tea Party activist Mark Williams has denigrated Muslims for worshipping a "monkey god" and dubbed President Obama an "Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief." So when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) passed a resolution condemning "racist elements" within the Tea Party movement, his bilious response on July 15 wasn't terribly shocking. In a blog post he later described as "satire," Williams began, "Dear Mr. Lincoln, We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don't cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!" The screed only went downhill from there.

The surprising part about the Williams controversy has been the strife it triggered within the Tea Party movement, a tangled web of loosely affiliated groups that has mostly managed to sidestep public spats. But on July 17, as the uproar over the remarks grew, an umbrella group called the National Tea Party Federation announced it had expelled Williams' organization, the Tea Party Express, for its refusal to rebuke him. "Self-policing is the right and the responsibility of any movement or organization," federation spokesman David Webb said during an appearance on CBS News' Face the Nation.

Since its inception, the Tea Party movement has struggled to shed the perception that its members' dislike of Obama is fueled by racism. Unveiling a new report on the movement's makeup on July 19, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg noted the survey's finding that 39% of people outside the movement suspect its contempt for the President "may be motivated by racial feelings." Frustration over the charges of racism bubbled over in a related incident this week, when, in an act of retaliation against the NAACP, conservative activist Andrew Breitbart posted to his website a truncated tape of Shirley Sherrod, a U.S. Department of Agriculture employee, recounting her reticence to assist a white farmer. Breitbart declared it proof that "the NAACP awards racism," and Sherrod was condemned by the NAACP and fired by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. (The full speech turned out to be an elegant parable about transcending prejudice, and both the White House and Vislack apologized on Wednesday, July 21.)

Many Tea Party leaders have disavowed the incendiary rhetoric and imagery that have surfaced at the movement's rallies, dismissing the incidents — as Webb did — as the work of the movement's "fringe." But Williams' invective, which came just days after the North Iowa Tea Party erected a billboard likening Obama to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, underscores a real organizational dilemma. The movement is bent on retaining the decentralized structure that fostered its growth, but its lack of formal leadership — and its confounding array of overlapping groups — means that when rogue members spout off, they can seem to be speaking for the movement as a whole. "Mind you, there is no tea party leadership or even a single tea party," Williams wrote on his blog in the wake of his expulsion. "There are millions of tea partiers involved in thousands of groups; every tea partier is a tea party leader." 

The National Tea Party Federation, a small, self-appointed organization, was formed in April in response to another ugly charge — that a trio of African-American Congressmen, including civil rights luminary John Lewis, were spat on and showered with racial epithets while wading through a crowd of activists protesting the health care reform bill. Christina Botteri, a spokeswoman for the federation, says the group's goal was to help facilitate message discipline among the movement's scattered factions. The decision to expel the Tea Party Express, she says, was hashed out over a series of conference calls among about a half-dozen committed volunteers. This core group, which she calls an "informal steering committee," includes Webb, Richmond Tea Party president Jamie Radtke and Nationwide Tea Party Coalition founder Michael Patrick Leahy. The vote to expel the Tea Party Express was "unanimous, but it wasn't an easy decision," says Botteri. "When people behave badly at Tea Party rallies, they're booed, asked to leave, ignored, shunned. This is another example of the Tea Party movement — and we are a small part of it — behaving in a way that seeks to uphold and protect the good name and reputation of the people in [it]."  

The Tea Party Express, which this spring staged a nationwide bus tour replete with appearances by Sarah Palin, Andrew Breitbart and other conservative firebrands, is among the movement's most controversial subsidiaries. Because of its ties to the GOP, one Tea Party organizer dubbed the political-action committee run by Republican strategists the "AstroTurf express" — a telling slur in a movement that claims grass-roots authenticity. Other Tea Party groups have long been leery of Williams' penchant for polarizing commentary, and on Monday, July 19, Idaho Representative Walt Minnick, the only Democrat backed by the Tea Party Express, repudiated the endorsement. The group issued a withering statement in response to the federation's decision to expel it. "Most rank-and-file Tea Party activists think we're talking about Star Trek when we try to explain who the 'Federation' is," said Joe Wierzbicki, the group's spokesman. "Circular firing squads of groups within the Tea Party movement attacking one another accomplish nothing, and on this issue the Tea Party Federation is wrong and has both enabled and empowered the NAACP's racist attacks."

The jab at the federation's low profile isn't necessarily an unfair characterization. The federation touts its link to about 60 local Tea Party groups and more than 20 affiliate organizations — including some of the conservative movement's leading advocacy groups, such as Americans for Prosperity, the Family Research Council and FreedomWorks. But these groups provide no money or material support to the all-volunteer federation. "What we've done has been mischaracterized as an attempt to kick this or that person out of the movement altogether," Botteri says. "We have absolutely zero authority to make that happen." Mark Lloyd, chairman of the Lynchburg, Va., Tea Party and another member of the federation's core of volunteers, says the group stakes no claim to its members' ideas. "We don't try to tell anybody what to do. We came together purely to discuss and get ourselves on the same page about how to deal with the media," he says. "Every Tea Party is autonomous." 

Though the gesture may be largely symbolic, the bout of backbiting rankled some movement members. "In the end, we felt that we didn't have a choice," Botteri says. "We can't allow what we feel is the positive momentum of what the movement is doing to be limited by allowing ourselves to be associated with someone like Mark Williams."