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“Now you can chat with Barbie!” says the product page for Mattel’s upcoming Hello Barbie Doll. But is this new, chattier Barbie sharing your conversations with anyone else? Could it even turn over recorded conversations to the CIA or NSA? This particular conspiracy theory is a little more plausible than you might think.

The new Hello Barbie will be released just in time for Black Friday (only $74.99!). A potential hot holiday toy from an iconic toy line in the midst of a comeback, Hello Barbie contains a Wi-Fi connected microphone that will send snippets of conversation to an external server and reply with “more than 8,000 lines of recorded content.”

Hello Barbie Doll Talks and Listens

The Hello Barbie Doll is designed to grow with your child. Hello Barbie “listens and remembers the user’s likes and dislikes, giving everyone their own unique experience.” 

Hello Barbie Doll’s mic isn’t always listening (you push a button in Barbie’s belt) and it takes a lot of consenting app downloading and account sign-ups before Hello Barbie starts firing conversations into the cloud. Still, conspiracy theorists like The Vigilant Citizen see it as “yet another mind-boggling way of turning our society into an insidious, Big-Brotherish nightmare.”

But is Hello Barbie an intentional ploy to hoover up data for either market research or intelligence efforts?

ToyTalk – Creator of Hello Barbie Doll’s Software

It all comes down to ToyTalk, the company behind the conversation software that records Hello Barbie chatter and designs her responses. Founded by Oren Jacobs, formerly of Pixar, ToyTalk’s goal is “pioneering the art of conversation with characters,” with Barbie just the latest in a line of interactive toys that include Thomas the Tank Engine and their own SpeakaZoo and SpeakaLegend interactive, speech recognition stories.

Perhaps anticipating outrage at a Barbie that records children, ToyTalk offers a robust privacy policy, with some notable loopholes. As expected, ToyTalk will use Hello Barbie recordings to “develop, test or improve speech recognition technology and artificial intelligence algorithms.” ToyTalk also can send recorded data to “other service providers,” offering Microsoft as an example. And yes, there’s also a stipulation allowing ToyTalk to send Hello Barbie data to intelligence agencies: what they call “lawful requests or legal authorities” with “lawful subpoenas, warrants, or court orders.”

Still, this is a far thing from a Hello Barbie Doll designed with intelligence services in mind. It would be paranoid to imagine the CIA or NSA investing money in a children’s software company with the specific intent of gathering intelligence or building psychological profiles or to “compile and analyze behaviour, interests, speaking patterns and personality and character of the child,” as r/Conspiracy would have it.

However, it starts sounding a little less paranoid when looking at ToyTalk’s investors.

Howard Cox is a “Special Limited Partner” with Greylock Partners, one of the “seed round” venture capital funders for ToyTalk. Howard Cox is also on the board of the Brookings Institution and In-Q-Tel. Both organizations are hip deep in CIA connections.

In-Q-Tel “identifies, adapts, and delivers innovative technology solutions to support the mission of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and broader U.S. Intelligence Community.” According to former CIA director George Tenet, “While we pay the bills, In-Q-Tel is independent of the CIA.” And while that may be true, In-Q-Tel has definitely performed the CIA and the NSA’s dirty work in the past, including using their companies to conduct smear campaigns against Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald.

(more tenuous connections between CIA dirty work and In-Q-Tel is popular fodder for conspiracy sites)

But Greylock Partners is not the only Hello Barbie Doll software investor who has worked with the CIA’s In-Q-Tel. Khosla Ventures, another major investor in ToyTalk, invested in database company MemSQL with In-Q-Tel. So did ToyTalk investor First Round Capital.

In some ways this isn’t surprising, as the world of venture capital is incestuous, with big groups dominating the tech investment scene and holding diverse portfolios. But In-Q-Tel’s presence can’t help but distort investor expectations, essentially offering proxy government endorsement of certain companies. Working with In-Q-Tel means working with the CIA.

In-Q-Tel is not a direct investor in ToyTalk. But there are concrete connections between the CIA and multiple VC firms backing Hello Barbie’s tech. It should also be noted that Hello Barbie fits in well with the CIA’s goal of tapping the “Internet of Things” for ambient intelligence.

It remains unlikely that the CIA or NSA has a strong desire to hoover up the ramblings of little girls, but there’s just enough smoke to justify a modicum of paranoia surrounding Hello Barbie Doll. This particular conspiracy theory is not Flat Earth impossible. If the NSA spies on World of Warcraft, who’s to say Barbie dolls are off-limits? It would be trivial for intelligence services to demand access to Hello Barbie Doll recordings, just as the NSA demands access to Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, and Google.

The facts presented do not justify calling ToyTalk a CIA front or even advising people to be scared buying Hello Barbie for their daughter or son. Instead it’s a remind of the insidiousness of intelligence agencies and the Deep State they represent. There are no walls between the most secretive government agencies and private companies, only the hologram they’ve thrown up to suggest otherwise. From Operation Mockingbird to militarized comment field sockpuppetry, intelligence agencies have melded with every imaginable societal institution, unaccountably twisting our culture.

There’s no evidence that the new Hello Barbie Doll will spy on your kids, but the validity of suspecting Barbie can only lead us to uncomfortable truths about the way our surveillance state has subverted democracy, distorted capitalism, and infected our day-to-day lives.