U.S. Approved Business With Blacklisted Nations

Despite sanctions and trade embargoes, over the past decade the United States government has allowed American companies to do billions of dollars in business with Iran and other countries blacklisted as state sponsors of terrorism, an examination by The New York Times has found. 

At the behest of a host of companies — from Kraft Food and Pepsi to some of the nation’s largest banks — a little-known office of the Treasury Department has granted nearly 10,000 licenses for deals involving countries that have been cast into economic purgatory, beyond the reach of American business.

Most of the licenses were approved under a decade-old law mandating that agricultural and medical humanitarian aid be exempted from sanctions. But the law, pushed by the farm lobby and other industry groups, was written so broadly that allowable humanitarian aid has included cigarettes, Wrigley’s gum, Louisiana hot sauce, weight-loss remedies, body-building supplements and sports rehabilitation equipment sold to the institute that trains Iran’s Olympic athletes.

Hundreds of other licenses were approved because they passed a litmus test: They were deemed to serve American foreign policy goals. And many clearly do, among them deals to provide famine relief in North Korea or to improve Internet connections — and nurture democracy — in Iran. But the examination also found cases in which the foreign-policy benefits were considerably less clear.

In one instance, an American company was permitted to bid on a pipeline job that would have helped Iran sell natural gas to Europe, even though the United States opposes such projects. Several other American businesses were permitted to deal with foreign companies believed to be involved in terrorism or weapons proliferation. In one such case, involving equipment bought by a medical waste disposal plant in Hawaii, the government was preparing to deny the license until an influential politician intervened.

In an interview, the Obama administration’s point man on sanctions, Stuart A. Levey, said that focusing on the exceptions “misses the forest for the trees.” Indeed, the exceptions represent only a small counterweight to the overall force of America’s trade sanctions, which are among the toughest in the world. Now they are particularly focused on Iran, where on top of a broad embargo that prohibits most trade, the United States and its allies this year adopted a new round of sanctions that have effectively shut Iran off from much of the international financial system.

“No one can doubt that we are serious about this,” Mr. Levey said.

But as the administration tries to press Iran even harder to abandon its nuclear program — officials this week announced several new sanctions measures — some diplomats and foreign affairs experts worry that by allowing the sale of even small-ticket items with no military application, the United States muddies its moral and diplomatic authority.

“It’s not a bad thing to grant exceptions if it represents a conscious policy decision to give countries an incentive,” said Stuart Eizenstat, who oversaw sanctions policy for the Clinton administration when the humanitarian-aid law was passed. “But when you create loopholes like this that you can drive a Mack truck through, you are giving countries something for nothing, and they just laugh in their teeth. I think there have been abuses.”

What’s more, in countries like Iran where elements of the government have assumed control over large portions of the economy, it is increasingly difficult to separate exceptions that help the people from those that enrich the state. Indeed, records show that the United States has approved the sale of luxury food items to chain stores owned by blacklisted banks, despite requirements that potential purchasers be scrutinized for just such connections.

Enforcement of America’s sanctions rests with Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which can make exceptions with guidance from the State Department. The Treasury office resisted disclosing information about the licenses, but after The Times filed a federal Freedom of Information lawsuit, the government agreed to turn over a list of companies granted exceptions and, in a little more than 100 cases, underlying files explaining the nature and details of the deals. The process took three years, and the government heavily redacted many documents, saying they contained trade secrets and personal information. Still, the files offer a snapshot — albeit a piecemeal one — of a system that at times appears out of sync with its own licensing policies and America’s goals abroad.

In some cases, licensing rules failed to keep pace with changing diplomatic circumstances. For instance, American companies were able to import cheap blouses and raw material for steel from North Korea because restrictions loosened when that government promised to renounce its nuclear weapons program and were not recalibrated after the agreement fell apart. 

Mr. Levey, a Treasury under secretary who held the same job in the Bush administration, pointed out that the United States did far less business with Iran than did China or Europe; in the first quarter of this year, 0.02 percent of American exports went to Iran. And while it is “a fair policy question” to ask whether Congress’s definition of humanitarian aid is overly broad, he said, the exception has helped the United States argue that it opposes Iran’s government, not its people. That, in turn, has helped build international support for the tightly focused financial sanctions.  

Beyond that, he and the licensing office’s director, Adam Szubin, said the agency’s other, case-by-case, determinations often reflected a desire to balance sanctions policy against the realities of the business world, where companies may unwittingly find themselves in transactions involving blacklisted entities.

“I haven’t seen any licenses that I thought we should have done differently,” Mr. Szubin said.

Behind a 2000 Law

For all the speechifying about humanitarian aid that attended its passage, the 2000 law allowing agricultural and medical exceptions to sanctions was ultimately the product of economic stress and political pressure. American farmers, facing sharp declines in commodity prices and exports, hoped to offset their losses with sales to blacklisted countries.

The law defined allowable agricultural exports as any product on a list maintained by the Agriculture Department, which went beyond traditional humanitarian aid like seed and grain and included products like beer, soda, utility poles and more loosely defined categories of “food commodities” and “food additives.”

Even before the law’s final passage, companies and their lobbyists inundated the licensing office with claims that their products fit the bill.

Take, for instance, chewing gum, sold in a number of blacklisted countries by Mars Inc., which owns Wrigley’s. “We debated that one for a month. Was it food? Did it have nutritional value? We concluded it did,” Hal Eren, a former senior sanctions adviser at the licensing office, recalled before pausing and conceding, “We were probably rolled on that issue by outside forces.”

While Cuba was the primary focus of the initial legislative push, Iran, with its relative wealth and large population, was also a promising prospect. American exports, virtually nonexistent before the law’s passage, have totaled more than $1.7 billion since.

In response to questions for this article, companies argued that they were operating in full accordance with American law.

Henry Lapidos, export manager for the American Pop Corn Company, acknowledged that calling the Jolly Time popcorn he sold in Sudan and Iran a humanitarian good was “pushing the envelope,” though he did give it a try. “It depends on how you look at it — popcorn has fibers, which are helpful to the digestive system,” he explained, before switching to a different tack. “What’s the harm?” he asked, adding that he didn’t think Iranian soldiers “would be taking microwavable popcorn” to war.

Even the sale of benign goods can benefit bad actors, though, which is why the licensing office and State Department are required to check the purchasers of humanitarian aid products for links to terrorism. But that does not always happen.

In its application to sell salt substitutes, marinades, food colorings and cake sprinkles in Iran, McCormick & Co. listed a number of chain stores that planned to buy its products. A quick check of the Web site of one store, Refah, revealed that its major investors were banks on an American blacklist. The government of Tehran owns Shahrvand, another store listed in the license. A third chain store, Ghods, draws many top officials from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which the United States considers a terrorist organization.

The licensing office’s director, Mr. Szubin, said that given his limited resources, they were better spent on stopping weapons technology from reaching Iran. Even if the connections in the McCormick case had come to light, he said, he still might have had to approve the license: the law requires him to do so unless he can prove that the investors engaged in terrorist activities own more than half of a company.

“Are we checking end users? Yes,” he said. “But are we doing corporate due diligence on every Iranian importer? No.”

A McCormick spokesman, Jim Lynn, said, “We were not aware of the information you shared with us and are looking into it.”

Political Influence

Beyond the humanitarian umbrella, the agency has wide discretion to make case-by-case exceptions. Sometimes, political influence plays a role in those deliberations, as in a case involving Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and a medical-waste disposal plant in Honolulu. 

On July 28, 2003, the plant’s owner, Samuel Liu, ordered 200 graphite electrodes from a Chinese government-owned company, China Precision Machinery Import Export Corporation. In an interview, Mr. Liu said he had chosen the company because the electrodes available in the United States were harder to find and more expensive. Two days later, the Bush administration barred American citizens from doing business with the Chinese company, which had already been penalized repeatedly for providing missile technology to Pakistan and Iran.  

By the time Customs seized the electrodes on Nov. 5, waste was piling up in the sun. Nor did prospects look good for Mr. Liu’s application to the licensing office seeking to do an end run around the sanctions. On Nov. 21, a State Department official, Ralph Palmiero, recommended that the agency deny the request since the sanctions explicitly mandated the “termination of existing contracts” like Mr. Liu’s.

That is when Senator Inouye’s office stepped in. While his electrodes were at sea, Mr. Liu had made his first ever political contribution, giving the senator’s campaign $2,000. Mr. Liu says the timing was coincidental, that he was simply feeling more politically inclined. Records show that an Inouye aide called the licensing office on Mr. Liu’s behalf the same day that Mr. Palmiero recommended denying the application. The senator himself wrote two days later.

Mr. Inouye’s spokesman, Peter Boylan, said the contribution had “no impact whatsoever” on the senator’s actions, which he said were motivated solely by concern for the community’s health and welfare.

The pressure appears to have worked. The following day, the licensing office’s director at the time asked the State Department to reconsider in an e-mail that prominently noted the senator’s interest. A few days later, the State Department found that the purchase qualified for a special “medical and humanitarian” exception.

The license was issued Dec. 10. Two months later, Mr. Liu sent the senator another $2,000 contribution, the maximum allowable. Mr. Levey said he could not comment on the details of a decision predating his tenure. But he noted that sanctions against the Chinese company had since been toughened, and added, “Certainly this transaction wouldn’t be authorized today.”

Curious Exemptions

Mr. Liu’s license is hardly the only one to raise questions about how the government determines that a license serves American foreign policy.

There is also, for instance, the case of Irisl, an Iranian government-owned shipping line that the United States blacklisted in 2008, charging that because it routinely used front companies and misleading terms to shroud shipments of banned arms and other technology with military uses, it was impossible to tell whether its shipments were “licit or illicit.”

Less than nine months earlier, the licensing office had permitted a Japanese subsidiary of Citibank to carry out the very type of transaction it was now warning against. Records show that the bank had agreed to confirm a letter of credit guaranteeing payment to a Malaysian exporter upon delivery of what were described as split-system air-conditioners to a Turkish importer. Though the government had yet to blacklist Irisl, sanctions rules already prohibited dealings with Iranian companies. So when the bank learned that the goods were to be shipped aboard the Irisl-owned Iran Ilam, it sought a license.

The license was granted, even though the Treasury Department’s investigation of Irisl was well under way and the United States had reason to be suspicious of the Iran Ilam in particular; that summer, the ship had attracted the attention of the intelligence community when it delivered a lathe used to make nuclear centrifuge parts from China to Iran, according to government officials who requested anonymity to speak about a previously unpublicized intelligence matter.

Mr. Szubin said that since the blacklisting of Irisl, his agency had forced banks to extricate themselves from such transactions. But at the time the Citibank license was issued, his agency regularly issued licenses in cases like this one, where at the time of the transaction, the bank had no way of knowing that Irisl was involved and where the shipping line would be paid by a foreign third party anyway. To depart from the norm, he said, risked facing a lawsuit charging unfair treatment and tipping Irisl off that it was under investigation.

But if the government has sometimes been willing to grant American businesses a break, some companies have recently decided that the cost to their reputations outweighs the potential profit.

General Electric, which has been one of the leading recipients of licenses, says it has stopped all but humanitarian business in countries listed as sponsors of terrorism and has promised to donate its profits from Iran to charity.

As Joshua Kamens, the head of a company called Anndorll, put it, he knew from almost the minute he applied for a license to sell sugar in Iran that “it would come back to haunt me.” Although he received the go-ahead, he decided to back out of the deal.

“I’m an American,” he said. “Even though it’s legal to sell that type of product, I didn’t want to have any trade with a country like Iran.”

Mourinho: I'd appreciate more support

Jose Mourinho wants Real Madrid to do more to defend his team regarding refereeing performances.

He commented after seeing nine players booked and Ricardo Carvalho questionably sent off in Sunday night's fiery clash with Sevilla.
Mourinho also lauded his players for claiming the three points despite playing with a man less for almost half-an-hour, but it was once again the subject of the officiating that dominated the Portuguese's post-match press conference.
Mourinho vented his ire towards the match officials following last weekend's game at Real Zaragoza, complaining his side were not being treated in the same way as others after Xabi Alonso and Marcelo picked up bookings which ruled them out of the Sevilla game.
And following Sunday night's 1-0 win at the Bernabeu, Mourinho held up a piece of paper which he said listed the mistakes that referee Carlos Clos Gomez had made in the match.
"There were 13 serious errors from the referee. If I talk about them, I won't be at the next game," said Mourinho, who has served two separate touchline bans recently for different offences.
"In the last press conference you asked me if I was tired. I don't feel under pressure when I'm doing what I like, and I like to coach.
"I'm tired of this. My team deserves to be defended. If I say what I think, tomorrow I'm on the front pages and suspended.
"There is a club, with a structure, and I want them to defend my team, not only me.
"I want to talk with the president (Florentino Perez). I have a good personal relationship with the club, even though we think different things.
"Today I prefer to say that I have a fantastic team."
The match itself was a largely forgettable one, with Clos Gomez taking centre stage after dishing out 12 yellow cards in all as well as dismissing Carvalho and Sevilla's Mouhamadou Dabo, who was shown a straight red card in injury-time.
Madrid had looked in danger of conceding more ground to leaders Barcelona after struggling to break down the Sevilla defence and then losing Carvalho to a second yellow card in the 63rd minute following a clash of heads with visiting striker Alvaro Negredo.
However, that dismissal seemed to galvanise the home side into action and they would end up taking the spoils thanks to Angel Di Maria's 77th minute strike.
That goal saw Madrid close the gap on Barca back to two points, and increased the capital club's winning streak at the Bernabeu to 15 games.
Mourinho hailed his players but also admitted the match was far from pretty, saying: "My team's character is out of this world. With important players missing, they've achieved what seemed impossible.
"Tonight's victory will be very frustrating for those who wanted us to fall four or five points behind Barcelona. This makes us stronger. Everything was set up for us to drop points, but we didn't."
He added: "There wasn't any sort of game. It was too ugly. I wouldn't have paid to see this game. At home I would have put on Eurosport to see a game from the Vietnam league."

Vietnam, Mongolia talk enhancement of ties

Mongolia wants Vietnam to support its efforts to enhance ties with ASEAN and to join in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Forum.

This was mentioned at talks between Chairman of the Vietnamese National Assembly Nguyen Phu Trong and his Mongolian counterpart Demberel Damdin in Hanoi on Dec. 14, immediately after the official welcome ceremony.

The Mongolian leader said he felt honoured to visit and witness the immense achievements Vietnam had made in building and developing the country.

“The Mongolian State and people always highly value Vietnam ’s important role and position in Southeast Asia and wish to boost and expand their friendship and multi-dimensional cooperation with Vietnam ,” he said.

He emphasised the two law-making bodies’ important role in enhancing and promoting friendship and cooperation between Mongolia and Vietnam and suggested these bodies pay more attention to increasing bilateral cooperation in the fields of health, culture, information, education, mining, electricity and fisheries.

Demberel Damdin also delivered his country’s wish to learn from Vietnam ’s successes in attracting foreign investment.

For his part, NA Chairman Trong stressed that Vietnam has consistently attached importance to and wished to work together with Mongolia to promote their friendship and traditional cooperation.

He said he was delighted that besides the fine political ties, the two countries’ economic ties have been strengthened by relevant ministries and sectors, although they still remained modest.

Trong also spoke about potential for the Vietnamese and Mongolian law-making bodies to bolster their relations.

Trong suggested the two countries maintain high-level visits and contacts to promote mutual understanding and trust in order to elevate bilateral ties to a new height.

He also suggested relevant ministries, sectors and localities increase their exchange of visits and seek specific measures to step up their cooperation in a wide range of areas.

The NA leader said Vietnam and Mongolia share many similarities, and also have many competitive advantages to develop for mutual benefit. The two governments should continue to encourage and create favourable conditions for their enterprises to do business and raise the operation efficiency of the Inter-governmental Committee of the two countries, he said.

In addition, the two sides need to actively study the feasibility of exchange delegations for culture and arts and tourism cooperation, to enhance friendship and mutual understanding between the two peoples.

Chairman Trong also said that in the future, the two parliaments need to boost exchanges of delegations and friendship parliamentarians groups to share experiences in law making, supervision and strengthen the implementation of signed agreements between the two countries.

The Vietnamese NA leader urged the two parliaments to closely coordinate at regional and international inter-parliamentary fora, affirming that Vietnam supports and is ready to be a bridge for Mongolia to boost ties with other ASEAN countries and help it join APEC.

At the talks, the two parliamentary leaders informed each other about the situation in their respective countries and the activities of parliament as well as agreed on measures to bolster friendship and cooperation between the two countries and parliaments for peace, stability and development in the region and the world.

After the talks, Chairman Trong and Speaker Demberel Damdin signed a cooperation agreement between the two parliaments and witnessed the signing of cooperation deals between the two parliamentary offices and agriculture ministries of the two countries./.

Russian province looks for VN investment

Riazan province of Russia held a presentation day on Dec. 16 to promote economic investment in trade and tourism from Vietnam.

Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Dinh Dinh said although Vietnam and Russia have set up a strategic partnership, bilateral trade and investment remained modest.

“The two economies have the potential of mutual assistance instead of competition that would bring in huge interest for both sides in several sectors, including industry, tourism, technology and human resources, especially at the local level,” said the Vietnamese diplomat.

For his part, Deputy Governor of Riazan Alexander Reviakin blamed modest bilateral trade on poor understanding.

He expected that the presentation day would improve Vietnamese partners’ understanding of advantages offered by the central Russian province.

Executives from industry, tourism and trade sectors, with supporting documentaries, leaflets and posters, took turns to brief Vietnamese investors on their sectors’ strengths and stimuli offered in taxes and land leases, especially for those investors interested in special economic zones based in Rizan province.

The presentation day in Riazan took place after a Vietnamese diplomatic and business mission conducted a market survey in the central Russian province in June./.

VN looks to increased cooperation with Mongolia

Vietnam wishes to strengthen cooperation with Mongolia in the direction of exploring each country’s potential and strengths as the two countries have had a close relationship for many years.

State President Nguyen Minh Triet made this statement while receiving the Speaker of the Mongolian Parliament, Demberel Damdin in Hanoi on Dec. 15.

Vietnam was also willing to act as a bridge for Mongolia to expand its cooperation with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), he said.

In the spirit of the meeting, President Triet asked ministries and relevant agencies of both countries to increase exchange of measures that could be taken to boost cooperation, especially in trade and mining.

The Mongolian legislative leader affirmed that Mongolia highly valued Vietnam’s role in the Southeast Asia and expected to increase and expand traditional friendship and multi-sided cooperation with Vietnam.

In its foreign policy, Mongolia was determined to boost cooperation with Vietnam with the aim of expanding relations with ASEAN, he said, adding that with its potential in minerals, Mongolia was also ready to work with Vietnam in mining.

The same day, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung welcomed Speaker Demberel Damdin and his entourage, affirming that Vietnam wished to further promote multifaceted cooperation with Mongolia for mutual benefit.

Vietnam and Mongolia should support each other at multilateral and international forums, PM Dung said, adding that the two countries should also increase high-ranking visits to boost mutual understanding and trade cooperation.

Vietnam backs Mongolia ’s hosting of APEC 2011, PM Dung said.

Sharing Speaker Demberel Damdin’s view on the two countries’ cooperation potential, especially in agriculture and fisheries, PM Dung asked both countries to consider cooperation possibilities in oil and gas exploration and mining.

In his opinion, bilateral trade value of 10 million USD at present did not match the two countries’ potential and the level should be higher in the near future.

Vietnam also wants to increase cooperation in education and training, defence and security with Mongolia, the PM said, asking the inter-governmental committee of the two countries to continue to realise agreements reached between Vietnam and Mongolia to further consolidate and develop bilateral ties.

Speaker Demberel Damdin said Mongolia wants to expand new cooperation fields with Vietnam./.

After 25 Years, Larry King Signs Off

Joined by a dozen of his favorite guests over the decades, Larry King hosted his final edition of “Larry King Live” on Thursday, ending a 25-year chapter at CNN.

The suspenders will remain, he said, but his nightly forum for newsmakers and noisemakers will not. He said at the beginning of the program, “Welcome to the last ‘Larry King Live.’ It’s hard to say that. I knew this day was coming. These words are not easy to say.”

Mr. King, a television icon, announced in June that he had decided to step down from the program, which defined a generation of cable news and inspired a generation of interviewers. The ratings for “Larry King Live” had fallen sharply in recent years. In about a month “Piers Morgan Tonight” will take over the 9 p.m. time slot on CNN.

Mr. King, 77, will host specials four times a year for CNN, and he is exploring other on- and off-air opportunities. Said Bill Maher, a longtime friend of Mr. King’s, on the program, “This is the end of the show, not the end of a man.”

All sorts of stars came on “Larry King Live” on Thursday to praise Mr. King. The “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams said the program had been “America’s kind of confessional,” and the “American Idol”Ryan Seacrest said Mr. King is “such a tremendous guy with a great heart.” Some guests also mentioned the longtime executive producer of Mr. King’s show, Wendy Walker. host

Mr. Seacrest hinted at a possible production collaboration with Mr. King, saying, “We’re in talks.”

Later, he introduced a taped message for Mr. King from President Obama.

“Larry, for 25 years, you’ve hosted a conversation between newsmakers, celebrities and the American people,” Mr. Obama said in the message. “From presidents and generals to Kermit the frog and Joe from Tacoma. You say that all you do is ask questions but for generations of Americans, the answers to those questions have surprised us, they have informed us, and they have opened our eyes to the world beyond our living rooms.”

Mr. King invited his wife and his children on the set, and here’s what he said as the program closed at 9:59 p.m.:

It’s not very often in my life I’ve been without words. I want to thank everybody associated with this program, all the people behind the scenes. As I’ve mentioned, Wendy and the staff, the floor people, everybody that makes it possible, even the suits at the top. Love them too.
When I started 25 years ago at a little studio in Washington, D.C., I never thought it would ever last this long or come to this. So I’m going to go on — do a lot of other things. We’re going to do specials here on CNN. I’m going to be seen in other places, do some radio work, be around baseball.
So you’re not going to see me go away. But you’re not going to see me here on this set anymore. For two weeks, they’re going to be playing highlight shows. I — I am — I don’t know what to say except to you, my audience: thank you. And instead of goodbye, how about so long?

Then the studio lights dimmed, and only Mr. King’s iconic microphone stayed lit.

Larry King Prepares to Sign Off, and Everybody’s Talking

Famous people liked talking to Larry King, and for many of them, there was one reason: His program was the place to go for unhurried, agendaless conversation. 

“I consider Larry one of a kind, absolutely one of a kind,” said Ross Perot, one of the many subjects from politics whom Mr. King has interviewed during his 25 years on CNN. Unlike other television hosts, Mr. Perot said, “who will interrupt you if you’re not saying what they want you to say,” Mr. King will “let you finish what you’re saying.”

After about 50,000 interviews — between his radio career and his stint on television — Mr. King will end his run as the 9 p.m. fixture on CNN this week, and perhaps take with him the hourlong conversational form of interview on cable news television. It’s not certain how his replacement, Piers Morgan, will lead his program, but some change from the King format is likely.

Though he professed no regrets, Mr. King did point to what he identified as “the saddest part” of leaving the nightly interview arena, where programs that have hurt CNN and Mr. King in the ratings are led by hosts advocating a political point of view.

“If you look at media now,” he said in a telephone interview, “all the hosts of these other shows are interviewing themselves. The guests are a prop for the hosts on these cable networks. The guest to me was always paramount.”

As he leaves this week, many of those guests are returning for a last ride in the chair: Naomi and Wynonna Judd on Tuesday, Barbra Streisand on Wednesday and a host of old favorites on Thursday’s finale.

And as he counts down to the last of his almost 7,000 programs for the network, those guests and a cadre of other famous people want to talk about Mr. King and their appreciation for his distinctive brand of interviewing, a style summed up by one frequent guest, the comic Bill Maher: “Larry was the ultimate minimalist: ‘Al Gore; your thoughts!’ ”

Some critics translated the minimalist approach as the equivalent of tosses from a weekend softball hurler. Mr. King said that criticism always rankled him.

“I don’t know what a softball question is,” he said. “All I know is I have no agenda. I ask short questions, and I listen to the answer.”

Greta Van Susteren, the Fox News Channel host who became a well-known legal commentator on CNN during the O. J. Simpson trial, said the critics who lament what they see as softball questions are “grossly naïve.”

“He makes his guests feel very comfortable and want to talk, and they do,” she said.

Mr. King interviewed Mr. Gore — most famously as host of the news-making 1993 debate with Mr. Perot on the North American Free Trade Agreement. The Perot-Gore debate was a defining moment for the program. It drew CNN’s biggest audience for a regularly scheduled program, about 20 million viewers. By then Mr. King was already closely associated with Mr. Perot, who had surprised him and much of the nation by declaring for president on the program in 1992.

“I found him a fascinating little character,” Mr. King said. “At the debate, Gore showed up with an army from the White House. Perot brought a friend from Dallas.” Perot took Gore lightly, he said. “Gore just jumped him, and he owned the hour.”

The pair were part of a long list of subjects from politics, including every president since Richard M. Nixon. (When Mr. King asked Nixon if he had ever been inside the Watergate building, the former president said with a rueful laugh, “Not me, myself.”)

One president, George H. W. Bush, acknowledged feeling “very close to Larry.” Mr. Bush, in an e-mail, said, “I have a very high regard for Larry King,” calling him “a straight-forward interviewer and a thoroughgoing professional.”

Another leader who felt moved to express his admiration is still in office, though far from Washington. On Dec. 1, the Russian prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, told Mr. King in an appearance on the program that in the United States, “there are many talented and interesting people, but still there is just one King.”

Over the past several months, the crowded farewell roster of King guests has included other presidents (among them, Jimmy Carter), a horde of show business stars (George Clooney, Stevie Wonder, Jon Stewart, Jeff Bridges) and the usual assortment of celebrities and newsmakers of every description: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran; Oksana Grigorieva (Mel Gibson’s ex); Ricky Martin (declaring his sexuality); Steven Slater, the rebel JetBlue flight attendant.

The range of subjects touched by “Larry King Live” has always amazed and amused outside commentators. “Not many people could interview Putin and then Snooki,” said Katie Couric, the CBS News anchor. Mr. Maher cited a memorable example: “One night it was Margaret Thatcher, the next night it was a Lawrence Welk reunion.”

Jeffrey Toobin, CNN’s senior legal analyst, said that the long-running O. J. Simpson trial, which played out nightly on “Larry King Live,” was in some ways the perfect story for Mr. King “because it combined high and low; you had important issues about justice and race, and the sleaziest celebrities in Los Angeles.”

Mr. King himself had no trouble recalling some favorite highlights, like a lunch with Nelson Mandela in South Africa and a 1963 first interview, on radio, with Ms. Streisand, then a young, barely known singer from Brooklyn. The Eden Roc Hotel in Miami Beach, where she was appearing at the time, requested the interview to try to get her some exposure, Mr. King said.

“At the end she says to me: ‘You don’t know me now, but someday you’re going to know me.’ ”

Then there was Marlon Brando, in the memorable appearance that ended with the actor’s planting a thank-you smack on the host’s lips. As Mr. King recalled it, Brando had asked to have an introductory lunch and picked up Mr. King, driving a Chevy.

In Mr. King’s account, the two men drove around Beverly Hills singing songs. “He’d sing one line, I’d sing the next: ‘Tell me why you keep foolin,’ little coquette.’ ”

Donald Trump, the mogul of real estate and reality television, said, “Larry was able to get more information out of you than anybody else — and you didn’t even realize you were giving it.”

As Ms. Couric put it: “There’s something about being very direct, no frills. It’s never about Larry. It’s always about the person with whom he’s speaking.”

That Mr. King wound up eliciting information from just about every notable figure of his lifetime (the two he most regrets missing are, in typical mixed-bag fashion, Fidel Castro and Jack Nicholson) he attributed to being “insanely curious” as well as to a talent “I take no credit for: people respond to me.”

He confessed, “I’ll miss it.” But, he said: “I’m 53 years in this business. It’s all I ever wanted to do. I’ve had a great ride. I’ve got no complaints.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 16, 2010
An article on Tuesday about prominent guests who have been appearing on “Larry King Live” as the CNN program comes to an end misstated the title of Vladimir V. Putin, one of many political figures interviewed by Mr. King. Mr. Putin is now the prime minister of Russia, not the president. (Dmitry Medvedev is the president.)

Remembering Bruce Lee

Remembering Bruce Lee

Julian Assange

On Dec. 9, 2006, an unsolicited e-mail arrived for Daniel Ellsberg, the whistle-blower of Vietnam War renown. The return address said only "WikiLeaks," and the signature at bottom, "WL." In the orotund prose of a manifesto, the message invited Ellsberg to become the public face of a project "to place a new star in the firmament of man." Ellsberg knew nothing of the group, which had yet to make its debut. Nor had he heard of its leader, a then 35-year-old Australian named Julian Assange, best known in his own circles as a teenage hacker turned "cypherpunk" — a prolific coder with visions of technology as a tool for political change.
The audacity of the e-mail kept Ellsberg reading. WikiLeaks aimed at nothing less than the decline and fall of oppression by organized exposure of its secrets. "Governance by conspiracy and fear," the author wrote, depended on concealment. "We have come to the conclusion that fomenting a world wide movement of mass leaking is the most cost effective political intervention." So fanciful did the proposal appear that Ellsberg saw only two ways to read it, he told TIME: as either "a little ploy by the CIA or NSA to draw in leaks" or "a very naive venture to think that they can really get away with it." Ellsberg made no reply. (See TIME's 2008 Person of the Year: Barack Obama.)
Four years later, a great deal can be said about Assange, much of it unpleasant. He is inclined to the grandiose. Contempt for nearly every authority drives his work, and unguarded e-mails — leaked, naturally — reveal hopes that transparency will bring "total annihilation of the current U.S. regime." In London, he is fighting extradition to face allegations in Sweden that he sexually assaulted two WikiLeaks supporters.
What no one can say about the man, any longer, is that his boasts are empty. In 2010, WikiLeaks became a revolutionary force, wresting secrets into the public domain on a scale without precedent. Assange and company wrought deep disruptions in the marketplace of state power, much as tech-savvy insurgents before them had disrupted markets in music, film and publishing. The currency of information, scattered to the four corners of the globe, is roiling not only U.S. foreign relations but also the alliances and internal politics of other nations.
WikiLeaks has established itself, too, as a competitor to news media and intelligence agencies. By posting documents in their entirety, the site "disintermediates" the market, as economists say, weakening the old prerogatives of editors and analysts to filter information for their audiences. "This is not just a threat to those who would want to keep their own secrets," says a former member of the site's steering committee, who declined to be named. "WikiLeaks is a threat to those who would like to have other people's secrets too."
Not the least of Assange's achievements is a technological one. WikiLeaks brought to life what one of its early advisers described as "a recurring idea in hacker culture — a digital safe haven that is anonymous, massively collaborative and highly resistant to attack or penetration by intelligence services." Redundant hardware and Web servers span international borders. Participants in its design say WikiLeaks has made novel use of an alphabet soup of existing geek tools, such as mutually anonymous file sharing, decoy ciphering to flood eavesdroppers with empty data, and encryption of files in transit and in storage.
The results are impressive. In Ellsberg's day, it took nearly a year to photocopy the 7,000-page Pentagon papers and most of another year to get excerpts published. The push-button model of WikiLeaks compresses the timeline radically and permits the universal broadcast of voluminous archives in full, so much so that leak hardly seems to suffice as a metaphor. This year's breach of containment spilled nearly half a million documents, including 76,607 military reports from Afghanistan, 391,832 from Iraq and, beginning Nov. 28, a stream of diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks says will eventually number 251,287. (See a profile of 2010 Person of the Year runner-up: Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai.)
The Obama Administration responded with new floodgates. "The government has recognized that WikiLeaks is not an event — it is a capability — and anybody who can get material out of a classified system can now publish it worldwide in a way that can't be redacted or removed," says Clay Shirky, a New York University Internet scholar. "The idea of a widely shared but secure secret is over." So in the U.S. national-security establishment, the scale of the loss induced a retreat from the "need to share" culture that emerged after Sept. 11, 2001, and that pressed rival agencies to exchange information instead of hoarding it. In the run-up to the WikiLeaks dump, the State Department cut the link from its Net-Centric Diplomacy database, which stores cable traffic, to the Pentagon's classified SIPRNet. Today, three shifts of officers and analysts are working around the clock in separate State and Defense Department crisis teams, sending alerts about fresh disclosures in real time.

Yet for all the efforts to bar the stable door, there has been little agreement on what has happened. Had the world just witnessed an act of journalism? Theft? Public service? Espionage? As talk turned to action, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had little doubt, announcing a "very serious, active, ongoing" criminal investigation, and sources said the FBI sought foreign-intelligence warrants to search for evidence of contact between WikiLeaks and Army Private First Class Bradley Manning before the soldier allegedly sent his trove of documents on a compact disc.
An important legal precedent loomed. If Assange did nothing more than accept the disc and publish its contents, lawyers in and out of government said, criminal charges against him would put the New York Times(See portraits of TIME's 2010 Person of the Year: Mark Zuckerberg.) and other news organizations in equal jeopardy. The Espionage Act of 1917 is so vaguely drafted, according to Louis Klarevas of New York University's Center for Global Affairs, that it could be "interpreted as making it illegal to post a link to WikiLeaks on your Facebook page." Conspiracy to steal government property, another charge under consideration, faces much the same objection if it is defined as asking a source for information to be published.
Nor was the threat of legal action the only way authorities responded. A sustained assault on the economic and structural foundations of WikiLeaks soon followed. The Swiss bank PostFinance closed WikiLeaks' account because Assange is not a full-time resident of Switzerland (as if that always mattered to Switzerland's famously discreet banking industry). Visa and MasterCard, which process payments for the Ku Klux Klan, cut off WikiLeaks — "pending further investigation," Visa said, "into the nature of its business." PayPal ejected WikiLeaks for promoting illegal activity, which has yet to be alleged in court. Amazon, a major Web-hosting provider, removed WikiLeaks from its servers after a telephone call from Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee.
Because public access to the Internet relies on private companies, these precedents were alarming. "This is absolutely a tipping point," says Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "This should be a very clear call to anyone who takes freedom of speech online seriously." Many foreign leaders, even U.S. allies, agree. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva pledged support for Assange and accused Washington of mounting a "siege on freedom of expression." Bolivian Vice President Alvaro García Linera responded by hosting WikiLeaks cables on his official government website.
Assessing the real-world impact of WikiLeaks will take some time. On the one hand, with far richer access to the workings of their governments, citizens and scholars were able to assess the performance of elected leaders and take part in the direction of policy. But mainstream advocates of open government were prepared to acknowledge the costs. Steven Aftergood, a relentless campaigner against excessive secrecy and director of the Federation of American Scientists, says Assange "fails to comprehend that some uses of secrecy serve to strengthen and defend an open society against attack from without or subversion from within."
And in that connection, the costs of the WikiLeaks affair were hard to predict. Would Iran, for example, slow its nuclear-enrichment program after reading Saudi King Abdullah's plea for U.S. forces to destroy it, or would the Saudis rush to mollify their powerful neighbor? Would Italian voters tolerate a Prime Minister who, by the U.S. ambassador's account, appeared to be "profiting personally and handsomely" from sweetheart energy deals with Russia? Would bruising personal observations about the Russian Prime Minister, the British royal family, the French President, the German Chancellor and — oh, my — the First Lady of Azerbaijan ("poorly informed"; "substantial cosmetic surgery") hurt delicate relationships?
These secrets were not, by any measure, the crown jewels of U.S. classified archives. None of the diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks were top secret, and none bore the NODIS stamp to indicate restricted distribution of close-hold material. The U.S. government has suffered graver losses. American spies sold their Soviet handlers the design of the hydrogen bomb, the names of double agents, the keys to American cipher codes and locations of U.S. eavesdropping equipment.

Yet the sheer scale of the recent breach transcended the impact of any one leak. Government officials often joke that they should write nothing down that they do not want to read on the next day's front page, but they do not usually behave as though they believe it. Now, says former U.S. ambassador Christopher Hill, several of whose cables from Baghdad were published, "the hazard is so broad, so systemic, it will have an effect on the communications system in and of itself." The broadcast of a cable in which Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki spelled out his fears about Iran, Hill says, ensures that "Maliki will not want to talk quite as loquaciously to the next ambassador."
Assange's declared efforts at "harm minimization," which involved removing some names from the documents, left many identifying details intact. Helmut Metzner, fired from his role as chief of staff to the German Foreign Minister, was the first known career casualty, after a leaked cable from the U.S. embassy attributed confidential information about German political talks to "a young, up-and-coming party loyalist who was taking notes." Though unnamed, an Iranian businessman, an Algerian journalist and a Chinese academic who gave sensitive information to U.S. officials were also thought to be identifiable and at risk of retribution. The Obama Administration, a senior official says, has quietly begun relocating vulnerable sources as well as intelligence officers who may be identifiable by rival services. (See TIME's 2008 Person of the Year: Barack Obama.)
Assange, for his part, has generally dismissed assertions that lives are at risk, though he told the New Yorker he is prepared to accept "blood on our hands." When Aftergood asked him, in an e-mail exchange, whether he would publish the names and schools of children of U.S. officials, Assange replied in the abstract. Harms to innocents "tend to affect isolated individuals," he said, while the benefits of disclosure "affect systems of policy, planning [and] governance and through them the lives of all."
The worst — or best, in the view of advocates for radical transparency — could be yet to come. John Young, a New York City architect who left the WikiLeaks steering committee after clashing with Assange, says the group members are storing "a lot more information underground than they are publishing on the surface." Some of it comes from a hacker-on-hacker sting in 2006, when data jockeys at WikiLeaks detected what they believed to be a large-scale intelligence operation to steal data from computers around the world. The intruders were using TOR, an anonymous browsing technology invented by the U.S. Navy, to tunnel into their targets and extract information. The WikiLeaks team piggybacked on the operation, recording the data stream in real time as the intruders stole it.
In an encrypted e-mail dated Jan. 7, 2007, decrypted and made available to TIME by its recipient, one of the participants boasted, "Hackers monitor chinese and other intel as they burrow into their targets, when they pull, so do we. Inxhaustible supply of material?... We have all of pre 2005 afghanistan. Almost all of india fed. Half a dozen foreign ministries. Dozens of political parties and consulates, worldbank, apec, UN sections, trade groups." (See a profile of Person of the Year 2010 runner-up: Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai.)
The theft scandalized some WikiLeaks insiders, and Assange has held back from publishing most of its fruits. But shortly before his arrest in London, he issued a veiled threat that "comes straight out of cypherpunk fiction," according to Christopher Soghoian, a well-known security researcher.
Last July, it turns out, as controversy erupted over its release of the Afghanistan war logs, WikiLeaks had posted, without explanation, a 1.4-gigabyte encrypted file called "insurance.aes256." Some 100,000 people around the world have downloaded it. On Dec. 3, Assange said in an online chat with readers of the Guardian newspaper that the file contains the entire diplomatic archive, most of which has yet to be released, and additional "significant material from the U.S. and other countries." He added, "If something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically."
That cryptographic dead man's switch, poised to launch a missile of payload unknown, made for a fitting close to Julian Assange's year. Whatever his fate in courts British, Swedish or American, he had built a machine that no one knew how to stop and loosed it on the world. "I don't think this is a practice or a culture that will change," says Jennifer Robinson, one of his lawyers. "Julian has really started something. By taking him out, they're not going to stop it."
— With reporting by Eben Harrell / Stockholm

Only Connect

"On or about December 1910, human character changed."
— Virginia Woolf, 1924
She was exaggerating — but only a little. Woolf saw a fundamental shift in human relations taking place at the beginning of the 20th century "between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children." Those changes, she predicted, would bring about transformations in every sphere of life, from religion to politics to human behavior. Few would say she got it wrong.
A century later, we are living through another transition. The way we connect with one another and with the institutions in our lives is evolving. There is an erosion of trust in authority, a decentralizing of power and at the same time, perhaps, a greater faith in one another. Our sense of identity is more variable, while our sense of privacy is expanding. What was once considered intimate is now shared among millions with a keystroke.
More than anyone else on the world stage, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is at the center of these changes. Born in 1984, the same year the Macintosh computer was launched, he is both a product of his generation and an architect of it. The social-networking platform he invented is closing in on 600 million users. In a single day, about a billion new pieces of content are posted on Facebook. It is the connective tissue for nearly a tenth of the planet. Facebook is now the third largest country on earth and surely has more information about its citizens than any government does. Zuckerberg, a Harvard dropout, is its T-shirt-wearing head of state. (See portraits of TIME's 2010 Person of the Year: Mark Zuckerberg.)
Evolutionary biologists suggest there is a correlation between the size of the cerebral neocortex and the number of social relationships a primate species can have. Humans have the largest neocortex and the widest social circle — about 150, according to the scientist Robin Dunbar. Dunbar's number — 150 — also happens to mirror the average number of friends people have on Facebook. Because of airplanes and telephones and now social media, human beings touch the lives of vastly more people than did our ancestors, who might have encountered only 150 people in their lifetime. Now the possibility of connection is accelerating at an extraordinary pace. As the great biologist E.O. Wilson says, "We're in uncharted territory."
All social media involve a mixture of narcissism and voyeurism. Most of us display a combination of the two, which is why social media are flourishing faster and penetrating deeper than any other social development in memory. Social media play into the parts of human character that don't change, even while changing the nature of what once seemed immutable. (See pictures of Facebook's overseas offices.)
Like two of our runners-up this year, Julian Assange and the Tea Party, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have a whole lot of veneration for traditional authority. In a sense, Zuckerberg and Assange are two sides of the same coin. Both express a desire for openness and transparency. While Assange attacks big institutions and governments through involuntary transparency with the goal of disempowering them, Zuckerberg enables individuals to voluntarily share information with the idea of empowering them. Assange sees the world as filled with real and imagined enemies; Zuckerberg sees the world as filled with potential friends. Both have a certain disdain for privacy: in Assange's case because he feels it allows malevolence to flourish; in Zuckerberg's case because he sees it as a cultural anachronism, an impediment to a more efficient and open connection between people.
At 26, Zuckerberg is a year older than our first Person of the Year, Charles Lindbergh — another young man who used technology to bridge continents. He is the same age as Queen Elizabeth when she was Person of the Year, for 1952. But unlike the Queen, he did not inherit an empire; he created one. (The Queen, by the way, launched a Facebook page this year.) Person of the Year is not and never has been an honor. It is a recognition of the power of individuals to shape our world. For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them (something that has never been done before); for creating a new system of exchanging information that has become both indispensable and sometimes a little scary; and finally, for changing how we all live our lives in ways that are innovative and even optimistic, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME's 2010 Person of the Year.

Mark Zuckerberg

On the afternoon of Nov. 16, 2010, Mark Zuckerberg was leading a meeting in the Aquarium, one of Facebook's conference rooms, so named because it's in the middle of a huge work space and has glass walls on three sides so everybody can see in. Conference rooms are a big deal at Facebook because they're the only places anybody has any privacy at all, even the bare minimum of privacy the Aquarium gets you. Otherwise the space is open plan: no cubicles, no offices, no walls, just a rolling tundra of office furniture. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO, who used to be Lawrence Summers' chief of staff at the Treasury Department, doesn't have an office. Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO and co-founder and presiding visionary, doesn't have an office.
The team was going over the launch of Facebook's revamped Messages service, which had happened the day before and gone off without a hitch or rather without more than the usual number of hitches. Zuckerberg kept the meeting on track, pushing briskly through his points — no notes or whiteboard, just talking with his hands — but the tone was relaxed. Much has been made of Zuckerberg's legendarily awkward social manner, but in a room like this, he's the Silicon Valley equivalent of George Plimpton. He bantered with Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, a director of engineering who ran the project. (Boz was Zuckerberg's instructor in a course on artificial intelligence when they were at Harvard. He says his future boss didn't do very well. Though, in fairness, Zuckerberg did invent Facebook that semester.) Apart from a journalist sitting in the corner, no one in the room looked over 30, and apart from the journalist's public relations escort, it was boys only. (See pictures inside Mark Zuckerberg's inner circle.)
The door opened, and a distinguished-looking gray-haired man burst in — it's the only way to describe his entrance — trailed by a couple of deputies. He was both the oldest person in the room by 20 years and the only one wearing a suit. He was in the building, he explained with the delighted air of a man about to secure ironclad bragging rights forever, and he just had to stop in and introduce himself to Zuckerberg: Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, pleased to meet you.
They shook hands and chatted about nothing for a couple of minutes, and then Mueller left. There was a giddy silence while everybody just looked at one another as if to say, What the hell just happened?
It's a fair question. Almost seven years ago, in February 2004, when Zuckerberg was a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard, he started a Web service from his dorm. It was called Thefacebook.com, and it was billed as "an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges." This year, Facebook — now minus the the — added its 550 millionth member. One out of every dozen people on the planet has a Facebook account. They speak 75 languages and collectively lavish more than 700 billion minutes on Facebook every month. Last month the site accounted for 1 out of 4 American page views. Its membership is currently growing at a rate of about 700,000 people a day. (See a Zuckerberg family photo album.)
What just happened? In less than seven years, Zuckerberg wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network, thereby creating a social entity almost twice as large as the U.S. If Facebook were a country it would be the third largest, behind only China and India. It started out as a lark, a diversion, but it has turned into something real, something that has changed the way human beings relate to one another on a species-wide scale. We are now running our social lives through a for-profit network that, on paper at least, has made Zuckerberg a billionaire six times over.
Facebook has merged with the social fabric of American life, and not just American but human life: nearly half of all Americans have a Facebook account, but 70% of Facebook users live outside the U.S. It's a permanent fact of our global social reality. We have entered the Facebook age, and Mark Zuckerberg is the man who brought us here. (See pictures of Facebook's overseas offices.)
Zuckerberg is part of the last generation of human beings who will remember life before the Internet, though only just. He was born in 1984 and grew up in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., the son of a dentist — Painless Dr. Z's slogan was, and is, "We cater to cowards." Mark has three sisters, the eldest of whom, Randi, is now Facebook's head of consumer marketing and social-good initiatives. It was a supportive household that produced confident children. The young Mark was "strong-willed and relentless," according to his father Ed. "For some kids, their questions could be answered with a simple yes or no," he says. "For Mark, if he asked for something, yes by itself would work, but no required much more. If you were going to say no to him, you had better be prepared with a strong argument backed by facts, experiences, logic, reasons. We envisioned him becoming a lawyer one day, with a near 100% success rate of convincing juries."

The Zuckerberg children were much given to pranks: on New Year's Eve 1999 their parents were worried about the Y2K bug, so that night Mark and Randi waited till the stroke of midnight, then shut off the power. They were also great undertakers of projects. One year, over winter vacation, they decided to film a complete Star Wars parody called The Star Wars Sill-ogy. "We took our job very seriously," Randi says. "Every morning we'd wake up and have production meetings. Mark's voice hadn't changed yet, so he played Luke Skywalker with a really high, squeaky voice, and then my little sister, who I think was 2, we stuck her in a garbage can as R2D2 and had her walk around."
It will not amaze you to learn that Mark had a Star Wars–themed bar mitzvah, or that he was a precocious computer programmer, beginning on a Quantex 486DX running Windows 3.1. When he was 12, he created a network for the family home that he called ZuckNet; this was at a time when home networks didn't come in a box. (He clarifies, out of both modesty and a compulsion for accuracy, that they brought in a professional to do the wiring.) He also wrote computer games: a version of Monopoly set at his middle school and a version of Risk based on the Roman Empire. (See pictures inside a Facebook server farm.)
Zuckerberg went to a local high school and then to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he showed an aptitude for two incongruously old-fashioned pursuits: ancient languages and fencing. He also co-wrote with a classmate a music-recommendation program called Synapse that both AOL and Microsoft tried to buy for around a million dollars. But Zuckerberg would have had to drop out of school to develop it. He decided to go to Harvard instead.
Zuckerberg's life at Harvard and afterward was the subject of a movie released in October called The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher. The Social Network is a rich, dramatic portrait of a furious, socially handicapped genius who spits corrosive monologues in a monotone to hide his inner pain. This character bears almost no resemblance to the actual Mark Zuckerberg. The reality is much more complicated.
He's not a physically imposing presence: maybe 5 ft. 8 in. (173 cm), with a Roman nose, a bantam-rooster chest and a close-fitting cap of curly brown hair. He dresses like a frat boy, in T-shirts and jeans, though his fingernails are fastidiously neat. His most notable physical feature is his chin, which he holds at a slightly elevated angle. In the movie, this played as him looking down his nose at you, but in real life it's more like he's standing on his tiptoes, trying to see over something. (See pictures of life inside Facebook headquarters.)
Zuckerberg has often — possibly always — been described as remote and socially awkward, but that's not quite right. True: holding a conversation with him can be challenging. He approaches conversation as a way of exchanging data as rapidly and efficiently as possible, rather than as a recreational activity undertaken for its own sake. He is formidably quick and talks rapidly and precisely, and if he has no data to transmit, he abruptly falls silent. ("I usually don't like things that are too much about me" was how he began our first interview.) He cannot be relied on to throw the ball back or give you encouraging facial cues. His default expression is a direct and slightly wide-eyed stare that makes you wonder if you've got a spider on your forehead.
Most alarmingly, if your signal-to-noise ratio drops below a critical threshold, Zuckerberg will turn his head and look off to one side as if he's hearing noises offstage, presenting you with his Roman-emperor profile. "If you're not making compelling points, he kind of just tunes out," Bosworth says. "He's not trying to be rude. He's just like, 'O.K., you're not the best use of this time anymore.' He's going to find a better use of his time, even if you're sitting right there."
In spite of all that — and this is what generally gets left out — Zuckerberg is a warm presence, not a cold one. He has a quick smile and doesn't shy away from eye contact. He thinks fast and talks fast, but he wants you to keep up. He exudes not anger or social anxiety but a weird calm. When you talk to his co-workers, they're so adamant in their avowals of affection for him and in their insistence that you not misconstrue his oddness that you get the impression it's not just because they want to keep their jobs. People really like him.
The Zuckerberg of the movie is a simple creature of clear motivations: he uses his outsize gifts as a programmer to acquire girls, money and party invitations. This is a fiction. In reality, Zuckerberg already had the girl: Priscilla Chan, who is now a third-year med student at University of California, San Francisco. They met at Harvard seven years ago, before he started Facebook. Now they live together in Palo Alto.

As for money, his indifference to it is almost pathological. His lifestyle is modest by most standards but monastic for someone whose personal fortune was estimated by Forbes at $6.9 billion, a number that puts him ahead of his Palo Alto neighbor (and fellow college dropout) Steve Jobs. Zuckerberg lives near his office in a house that he rents. He works constantly; his only current hobby is studying Chinese. He drives a black Acura TSX, which for a billionaire is the automotive equivalent of a hair shirt. For Thanksgiving break, he took his family to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando. He bought a wand at Ollivander's.
One of the interests Zuckerberg lists on his Facebook page is "Eliminating Desire." "I just want to focus on what we're doing," Zuckerberg says. "When I put it in my profile, that's what I was focused on. I think it's probably Buddhist? To me it's just — I don't know, I think it would be very easy to get distracted and get caught up in short-term things or material things that don't matter. The phrase is actually 'Eliminating desire for all that doesn't really matter.' " (See college pictures of 2008 Person of the Year Barack Obama.)
This would all be so much dorm-room philosophizing if it weren't for the fact that Zuckerberg is a billionaire at an age when most people are vigorously maximizing their desires, and also for the fact that he appears to be making good on it. In July, Zuckerberg went to a conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, where he was seated at a dinner with Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, N.J. It must have been an interesting dinner, because in September, Zuckerberg announced that he would put up $100 million of his personal Facebook equity to help the Newark school system. He isn't even from Newark.
Zuckerberg has a personal connection to the teaching profession — Chan taught grade school after Harvard — but more than that, he finds the state of education in the U.S. mathematically inelegant. "It just strikes me as this huge issue that teaching isn't respected or compensated in our society for the economic value that it's actually probably producing for society," he says. On Dec. 9, as part of a campaign organized by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, he pledged to give away at least half his wealth over the course of his lifetime. (See pictures inside Mark Zuckerberg's inner circle.)
When The Social Network came out, Zuckerberg rented out a bunch of movie theaters and took the whole company to see it. Afterward they all went out for appletinis, his signature drink in the movie. He'd never had one before. "I found it funny what details they focused on getting right," he says. "I think I owned every single T-shirt that they had me wearing. But the biggest thing that thematically they missed is the concept that you would have to want to do something — date someone or get into some final club — in order to be motivated to do something like this. It just like completely misses the actual motivation for what we're doing, which is, we think it's an awesome thing to do."
The reality is that Zuckerberg isn't alienated, and he isn't a loner. He's the opposite. He's spent his whole life in tight, supportive, intensely connected social environments: first in the bosom of the Zuckerberg family, then in the dorms at Harvard and now at Facebook, where his best friends are his staff, there are no offices and work is awesome. Zuckerberg loves being around people. He didn't build Facebook so he could have a social life like the rest of us. He built it because he wanted the rest of us to have his.
Facebook is the realization of a dream. but it's also the death of a dream, one that began in the late 1960s. That's when the architecture of the Internet was first laid out, and it's a period piece. The Internet is designed the way it is to accommodate any number of practical considerations, but it's also an expression of 1960s counterculture. No single computer runs the network. No one is in charge. It's a paradise of equality and anonymity, an electronic commune. (See pictures of Facebook's overseas offices.)
In the 1970s the communes faded away, but the Internet only grew, and that countercultural attitude lingered. The presiding myth of the Internet through the 1980s and 1990s was that when you went online, you could shed your earthly baggage and be whoever you wanted. Your age, your gender, your race, your job, your marriage, where you lived, where you went to school — all that fell away. In effect, the social experiments of the 1960s were restaged online. Log on, tune in, drop out.
We all know how that ended. When the Web arrived in the early 1990s, it went mainstream. The number of people on the Internet exploded, from 2.6 million in 1990 to 385 million in 2000, and we messed up the scene. The equality and anonymity that made the Internet so liberating in its early days turned out to be disastrously disinhibiting. They made the Internet a haven for pornographers and hatemongers and a free-for-all for scammers, hackers and virus writers.

Zuckerberg is two generations removed from the 1960s. He has no sentimental feelings about equality and anonymity. He started Facebook as a way for people on college campuses to communicate with and keep track of one another — and occasionally poke each other and leer at each other's pictures — but in a broader sense he was firing the first shot in his generation's takeover of the Internet. Zuckerberg just wanted people to be themselves. On earlier social networks like Friendster and Myspace, identity was malleable and playful, but Facebook was and is different. "We're trying to map out what exists in the world," he says. "In the world, there's trust. I think as humans we fundamentally parse the world through the people and relationships we have around us. So at its core, what we're trying to do is map out all of those trust relationships, which you can call, colloquially, most of the time, friendships." He calls this map the social graph, and it's a network of an entirely new kind.
Facebook didn't stay on campus. Zuckerberg and his partners — including his roommate Dustin Moskovitz and Sean Parker, who had co-founded Napster — led Facebook on a Risk-style forced-march campaign to conquer the world. By the end of 2004, Facebook was on several hundred U.S. college campuses. In 2005 it expanded to high schools and foreign schools, in 2006 to workplaces and eventually to anybody over the age of 13. Its growth was astonishing. In December 2006 it had 12 million users. By December 2009 it had 350 million. (See pictures of life inside Facebook headquarters.)
It grew because it gave people something they wanted. All that stuff that the Internet enabled you to leave behind, all the trappings of ordinary bourgeois existence — your job, your family, your background? On Facebook, you take it with you. It's who you are.
Zuckerberg has retrofitted the Internet's idealistic 1960s-era infrastructure with a more pragmatic millennial sensibility. Anonymity may allow people to reveal their true selves, but maybe our true selves aren't our best selves. Facebook makes cyberspace more like the real world: dull but civilized. The masked-ball period of the Internet is ending. Where people led double lives, real and virtual, now they lead single ones again.
The fact that people yearned not to be liberated from their daily lives but to be more deeply embedded in them is an extraordinary insight, as basic and era-defining in its way as Jobs' realization that people prefer a graphical desktop to a command line or pretty computers to boring beige ones.
This is another area in which the angry-robot theory of Mark Zuckerberg doesn't really pan out: he understands a remarkable amount about other people. Sometimes it seems like the understanding of an alien anthropologist studying earthlings, but it's real. "In college I was a psychology major at the same time as being a computer-science major," he says. "I say that fairly frequently, and people can't understand it. It's like, obviously I'm a CS person! But I was always interested in how those two things combined. For me, computers were always just a way to build good stuff, not like an end in itself." (See pictures inside a Facebook server farm.)
There are other people who can write code as well as Zuckerberg — not many, but some — but none of them get the human psyche the way he does. "He has great EQ," says Naomi Gleit, Facebook's product manager for growth and internationalization. "I'll often ask him for advice about, like, a girl issue that I'm dealing with. And he'll very rationally give me his opinion on the situation." His mother Karen, a psychiatrist who left the profession to manage her husband's office, attributes what she calls Mark's "sensitivity" to the fact that he was raised with three sisters.
Wherever it comes from, this acute awareness of how other people's brains work characterizes all of Zuckerberg's projects, even the projects he did before Facebook. Facemash — the samizdat website he made his sophomore year, where Harvard students could compare the relative hotness of their peers — was crude, some said offensive, but it hooked people. They wanted it. (You can go even further back: one day in the ZuckNet era, Mark turned to Randi and said, "I bet I can make Donna come upstairs in five seconds." He'd rigged his sister's computer to announce that it was self-destructing in 5, 4, 3, 2 ... and up the stairs she came.) Whereas earlier entrepreneurs looked at the Internet and saw a network of computers, Zuckerberg saw a network of people.

This is not, on the face of it, a thunderously radical vision, but it's turning out to be an incredibly powerful one. Consider: in 2005 one of the most competitive markets on the Internet was photo sharing. Into this space charged Facebook, and it can truly be said that the company brought a knife to a gunfight. "It was possibly the least functional photos product on the Internet," says Bret Taylor, Facebook's chief technology officer. "The resolution of the photos was not good enough to print. There were no real organizing capabilities." Facebook had only one thing the others didn't: people. If you put up a photo of somebody, you could tag that photo with his or her name.
As it turned out, that, more than anything else, was what people wanted. They didn't want to organize their photos by folder; they wanted to organize them by who was in them. As Zuckerberg would say, that's how people parse the world. Facebook launched its crappy photo-sharing service in late October 2005. By 2007 it was getting more traffic than Photobucket, Flickr or Picasa. Now Facebook hosts over 15 billion photos on its site, and people upload 100 million more every day. (See a Zuckerberg family photo album.)
This is the modus operandi of Facebook and the ecosystem of developers who create applications for it: move into a market and take it over by making it social, as the in-house parlance has it. They have one big weapon, the social graph, and it's a category killer. Games are another good example. There's a company called Zynga that makes games designed to be played on Facebook. They're laughably simple by today's big-budget, high-concept standards, but they're social. In FarmVille, you can visit your friends' farms. In Mafia Wars you can take a hit out on your friends. Mafia Wars currently has 19 million players. FarmVille has 54 million. Investors value Zynga, which is only four years old, at $5.4 billion. That's more than Electronic Arts, which is the second largest games publisher in the world.
But Facebook is in the process of taking over something even bigger than a market. Even if you're not on Facebook, you may have noticed traces of it here and there across the Web, as if seeds from inside its walled garden had scattered in the wind and taken root. Websites entreat you to log onto them using your Facebook ID — the New York Times does, and so do Myspace and YouTube. Tiny cornflower-blue buttons invite you to Like things and Share them on Facebook. Your Facebook membership is becoming the Internet equivalent of a passport: a tool for verifying your identity. (See pictures of Facebook's overseas offices.)
Most people think of Facebook as a way to enviously ogle their co-workers' vacation pictures, but what Zuckerberg is doing is fundamentally changing the way the Internet works and, more importantly, the way it feels — which means, as the Internet permeates more and more aspects of our lives and hours of our day, how the world feels.
Right now the Internet is like an empty wasteland: you wander from page to page, and no one is there but you. Except where you have the opposite problem: places like Amazon.com product pages and YouTube videos, where everyone's there at once, reviewing and commenting at the top of their lungs, and it's a howling mob of strangers.
Zuckerberg's vision is that after the Facebookization of the Web, you'll get something in between: wherever you go online, you'll see your friends. On Amazon, you might see your friends' reviews. On YouTube, you might see what your friends watched or see their comments first. Those reviews and comments will be meaningful because you know who wrote them and what your relationship to those authors is. They have a social context. Not that long ago, a post-Google Web was unimaginable, but if there is one, this is what it will look like: a Web reorganized around people. "It's a shift from the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of friends," say Sandberg. "It doesn't matter if 100,000 people like x. If the three people closest to you like y, you want to see y." (See pictures inside a Facebook server farm.)
Now take it off the Web. Put it on TV. Imagine a slate of shows sorted by which of your friends likes them, instead of by network. Now put it on your phone. Take it mobile. "We have this concept of serendipity — humans do," Zuckerberg says. (The clarification is vintage Zuckerberg.) "A lucky coincidence. It's like you go to a restaurant and you bump into a friend that you haven't seen for a while. That's awesome. That's serendipitous. And a lot of the reason why that seems so magical is because it doesn't happen often. But I think the reality is that those circumstances aren't actually rare. It's just that we probably miss like 99% of it. How much of the time do you think you're actually at the same restaurant as that person but you're at opposite sides so you don't see them, or you missed each other by 10 minutes, or they're in the next restaurant over? When you have this kind of context of what's going on, it's just going to make people's lives richer, because instead of missing 99% of them, maybe now you'll start seeing a lot more of them."

Facebook wants to populate the wilderness, tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly world, a serendipitous world. You'll be working and living inside a network of people, and you'll never have to be alone again. The Internet, and the whole world, will feel more like a family, or a college dorm, or an office where your co-workers are also your best friends.
Facebook occupies two Palo Alto office buildings that are a few minutes apart. On the outside, they're brutalist concrete bunkers. On the inside, they're decorated in a quirky, postindustrial Silicon Valley style you might call Flourishing Start-Up Chic — high ceilings, concrete floors, steel beams, lots of windows. There's a giant chessboard, and the word hack has been doodled and graffitied everywhere. The halls are littered with RipStiks, those two-wheeled skateboards that you move by wiggling, which Zuckerberg doesn't ride. (He tried once and fell off; that was enough.)
Silicon Valley companies squabble incessantly and viciously over personnel. Employees change hands like poker chips, and right now Facebook has the best hand at the table. Everyone at Facebook was a star somewhere else: Taylor, for example, led the team that created — maybe you've heard of it? — Google Maps. You don't get a lot of shy, retiring types at Facebook. These are the kinds of power nerds to whom the movies don't do justice: fast-talking, user-friendly, laser-focused and radiating the kind of confidence that gives you a sunburn. Sorkin did a much better job of representing Facebook when he wrote The West Wing. (See pictures of life inside Facebook headquarters.)
Facebook employees get treated well — three free, good meals a day; unlimited snacks; free dry cleaning — but make no mistake: the main attraction is Zuckerberg's vision. All the key engineers tell the same conversion story. "I was like, I'm not interested. I'm working on a serious problem. Facebook is a complete waste of time," says Chris Cox, Facebook's vice president of product, who was doing a master's in artificial intelligence at Stanford at the time. "And the interview completely changed my mind. I saw the vision. I came in, and I saw it on a whiteboard."
The company is on its seventh headquarters in almost as many years. It keeps outgrowing its offices, and pretty soon it will outgrow these. Zuckerberg is scouting for a Microsoft-style campus for Facebook. This is because, in addition to adding a lot of users, Facebook is starting to make a lot of money. The users are Zuckerberg's contribution, but the money is largely attributable to Sheryl Sandberg.
Coiffed, elegant and terrifyingly smart, Sandberg, 41, arrived at Facebook in early 2008. Before that, she ran Google's ad business, and before that, she was Lawrence Summers' chief of staff at the Treasury Department. She spent her time talking to Bono about curing leprosy. Now she is the first meeting Zuckerberg takes on Monday morning and the last on Friday afternoon. "I never thought I'd work in a private company," she says. "But from the outside in D.C., you watched what was going on out here, and it really felt like it was changing the world. And I always wanted to work in places that felt like they were going to have an impact on the world."
For all its technological, social and philosophical complexity, Facebook has only one major source of revenue: advertising. Before Sandberg arrived, Zuckerberg grew that part of the business slowly. He refused to sell banner ads. He felt that overly obtrusive ads would compromise the personal feel of the site, so he confined them to little rectangles on one side of the page.
Facebook still doesn't sell banner ads. But Sandberg has been able to attract a roster of A-list advertisers, such as Nike, Vitaminwater and Louis Vuitton, by pointing out things they hadn't noticed about Facebook, like how much it knows about its users. Google can serve ads to you on the basis of educated guesses about who you are and what you're interested in, which are based in turn on your search history. Facebook doesn't have to guess. It knows exactly who you are and what you're interested in, because you told it. So if Nike wants its ads shown only to people ages 19 to 26 who live in Arizona and like Nickelback, Facebook can make that happen. In the world of targeted advertising, Facebook has a high-powered sniper rifle.
It also has social. Facebook users have the option, should they choose to exercise it, to "like" certain advertisements. When you anoint an ad in this fashion, it moves out of its assigned place at the edge of the page and into your News Feed and therefore into the News Feeds of your friends. Suddenly the advertisement has a social context. It is presented to your friends, by you, carrying your personal endorsement. For marketers, this is a holy grail. "What marketers have always been looking for is trying to get you to sell things to your friends," Sandberg says. "And that's what you do on Facebook."

Facebook has a dual identity, as both a for-profit business and a medium for our personal lives, and those two identities don't always sit comfortably side by side. Looked at one way, when a friend likes a product, it's just more sharing, more data changing hands. Looked at another way, it's your personal relationships being monetized by a third party. People have to decide for themselves which way is their way. If "liking" an ad the same way you "like" a news article or a photo of your spouse seems creepy to you — it's more or less the definition of what Marx called commodity fetishism — you don't have to do it. Like everything on Facebook — like Facebook itself — it's voluntary. But plenty of people are willing, even eager, to make their social lives part of an advertising pageant staged by a major corporation. When Nike put up an ad last year during the World Cup, 6 million people clicked on it.
Facebook is a privately held company and doesn't release financial statements, but Sandberg sounds confident. "I think it's totally fair to say we are a very good business," she says. "Not 'we will be,' but 'we are.' " Zuckerberg confirms that Facebook is profitable, and not just technically: it's cash flow–positive. Analysts and journalists, who know less but can say more, estimate Facebook's 2010 revenue at anywhere from $1.1 billion to $2 billion.
Facebook is the way it is because of who Zuckerberg is. The color scheme is blue and white because Zuckerberg is red-green color-blind: there are a lot of colors he can't see, but blue he can see. Likewise, Zuckerberg has a metaphoric vision, a big-picture vision, for Facebook. And as with his literal vision, there are a few things he has trouble seeing. Take, for example, privacy. (See a Zuckerberg family photo album.)
There's a school of thought that goes something like, Mark Zuckerberg is a scheming profiteer who uses his control of Facebook to force people to share more and more of their personal lives publicly, sucking up their innermost thoughts like some kind of privacy vampire so he can feed their data to advertisers and increase traffic to his network, thereby adding to his massive personal fortune.
This is a red herring. Cynicism and greed are not character traits that appear in Zuckerberg's feature set. Facebook doesn't sell your data to advertisers. (It uses the aggregated statistics of its millions of users to more effectively target the ads it serves, but that's a long way from the same thing.) And he doesn't force anybody to share anything. The idea would genuinely, honestly horrify him.
But he does have a blind spot when it comes to personal privacy, which is why that issue keeps coming up. It came up in November 2007 when Facebook launched Beacon, an advertising system that told your friends about your buying habits. You could turn off the alerts, but it was tricky, and as a result, people lost control of their information. Girlfriends found out about surprise engagement rings. Family members found out about Christmas presents. You didn't have to be a computer genius to see that coming; in fact you pretty much had to be one to not see it coming. Users hated Beacon. A month after it launched, Zuckerberg apologized, and he eventually scrapped it. (See pictures of Facebook's overseas offices.)
Incredibly, the same thing happened all over again in 2009, when Facebook rolled out a complicated new set of privacy controls. Again, users saw their information going places they didn't want it to go. Again they revolted. Zuckerberg has a talent for understanding how people work, but one urge, the urge to conceal, seems to be foreign to him. Sometimes Facebook makes it harder than it should be. It is biased in favor of sharing. That is, after all, what Facebook is for. "The thing that I really care about is making the world more open and connected," Zuckerberg says. "What that stands for is something that I have believed in for a really long time." Pressed to define it, Zuckerberg gamely expands. "Open means having access to more information, right? More transparency, being able to share things and have a voice in the world. And connected is helping people stay in touch and maintain empathy for each other, and bandwidth." (See pictures inside a Facebook server farm.)
Empathy and bandwidth — you could inscribe the words on Zuckerberg's coat of arms. And they are without a doubt both good things. But are they good for everybody all the time? Sometimes Zuckerberg can sound like a wheedling spokesman for the secret police of some future totalitarian state. Why wouldn't you want to share? Why wouldn't you want to be open — unless you've got something to hide? "Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity," Zuckerberg said in a 2009 interview with David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect. This is a popular attitude among the Silicon Valley elite, summed up by a remark Google CEO Eric Schmidt made last year on CNBC: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

Zuckerberg will defend privacy to the death — and he relies on a fair amount of it himself — but there's still a level on which, for him and for a lot of other people driving the Web's evolution, it's a technical, economic and aesthetic inconvenience. Exchanging information at less than full power is just inefficient. ("People are very sensitive about privacy, and I think they're right to be," Zuckerberg says. "But we still just come to work every day and make the decisions that we think are best for the product.") As a result, technology has nudged us to the point where we're hemorrhaging data. Look at the flap over Google Maps Street View or the TSA scanners or WikiLeaks. Zuckerberg doesn't register on any particular political seismometer — hours after meeting the director of the FBI, he had to be reminded of Mueller's name — but he does remark about WikiLeaks that "technology usually wins with these things." And he's right: the Internet was built to move information around, not keep it in one place, and it tends to do what it was built to do.
But what makes life complicated in the postmodern technocratic aquarium we're collectively building is that there actually are good reasons to want to hide things. Just because you present a different face to your co-workers and your family doesn't mean you're leading a double life. That's just normal social functioning, psychology as usual. Identity isn't a simple thing; it's complex and dynamic and fluid. It needs to flex a little, the way a skyscraper does in a high wind, and your Facebook profile isn't built to flex. (See pictures of life inside Facebook headquarters.)
For all of Zuckerberg's EQ, Facebook runs on a very stiff, crude model of what people are like. It herds everybody — friends, co-workers, romantic partners, that guy who lived on your block but moved away after fifth grade — into the same big room. It smooshes together your work self and your home self, your past self and your present self, into a single generic extruded product. It suspends the natural process by which old friends fall away over time, allowing them to build up endlessly, producing the social equivalent of liver failure. On Facebook, there is one kind of relationship: friendship, and you have it with everybody. You're friends with your spouse, and you're friends with your plumber.
When it comes to privacy, it's entirely possible that Zuckerberg will turn out not to be wrong, just prescient. Social norms change. People hated Facebook's News Feed when it was introduced in 2006. They thought it was creepy and intrusive. Zuckerberg stood his ground, and now Facebook is unimaginable without it. He moved the chains, and we went with him, setting up our defense that much farther toward the end zone. "The world is changing," Cox says. "When caller ID came out, people went psycho. You know, because, Oh my God, now people are going to know I'm calling them! This is terrible! I'm going to end up being tracked, and Big Brother and Orwell and all that! The reality is now you won't pick up a call unless you know who's calling you."
But there is another danger, which is that instead of feeling forced to share, we won't be able to stop ourselves from sharing — that we will willingly, compulsively violate our own privacy. Relationships on Facebook have a seductive, addictive quality that can erode and even replace real-world relationships. Friendships multiply with gratifying speed, and the emotional stakes stay soothingly low; where there isn't much privacy, there can't be much intimacy either. It's like an emotional Ponzi scheme, where you keep putting energy in and getting it back tenfold, even though the dividends start to feel a little fake. (See a Zuckerberg family photo album.)
An article published earlier this year in European Psychiatry presented the case of a woman who lost her job to a Facebook addiction, and the authors suggested that it could become an actual diagnosable ailment. (The woman in question couldn't even make it through an examination without checking Facebook on her phone.) Facebook is supposed to build empathy, but since 2000, Americans have scored higher and higher on psychological tests designed to detect narcissism, and psychologists have suggested a link to social networking. According to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, 81% of its members have seen a rise in the number of divorce cases involving social networking; 66% cite Facebook as the primary source for online divorce evidence. Openness and connectedness are all well and good, but someone should give two cheers at least for being closed and disconnected too.
For all its industrial efficiency and scalability, its transhemispheric reach and its grand civil integrity, Facebook is still a painfully blunt instrument for doing the delicate work of transmitting human relationships. It's an excellent utility for sending and receiving data, but we are not data, and relationships cannot be reduced to the exchange of information or making binary decisions between liking and not liking, friending and unfriending. It's as if Zuckerberg read E.M. Forster's famous rallying cry in Howards End, "Only connect," and took it literally: only connect, do nothing else. (There's no chance that this actually happened. I asked Zuckerberg if he'd read Forster and got the spider stare. He'd never heard of him.)

However much more authentic the selves we present on Facebook are than they were in the anonymous Internet wilderness that came before it, they still fall far short of our true selves, and confusing our Facebook profiles with who we really are would be a terrible mistake. We are running our social lives over the Internet, an infrastructure that was not designed for that purpose, and we must be aware of the distortions it creates or we will be distorted by them. The standard cliché for describing viral technology like Facebook has always been, "The genie is out of the bottle." But Facebook inverts that. Now Facebook is the bottle, and we're the genie. How small are we willing to make ourselves to fit inside?
You don't hear these kinds of questions asked much at Facebook headquarters. The place hums with a sense of high purpose, a feeling that the world is changing for the better, and this is where the change is coming from. "It shocks me that people still think this is like a trivial thing," Bosworth says. "Like it's a distraction or it's a procrastination tool. I don't get it. This is so fundamentally human, to reach out and connect with people around us." Sam Lessin, Facebook's project manager, has known Zuckerberg since college. He left his own start-up to go to work for him. "You get at most one — if you're incredibly lucky, two — shots, maybe, in your lifetime to actually truly affect the course of a major piece of evolution. Which is what I see this as." (See pictures inside Mark Zuckerberg's inner circle.)
How big could Facebook get? It's big enough that it's starting to bump up against governments as well as other companies. Mueller's visit wasn't a one-off. He was there because Zuckerberg has a better database than he does. Facebook has a richer, more intimate hoard of information about its citizens than any nation has ever had, and the U.S. government sometimes comes knocking, subpoena in hand, looking to borrow some. "We feel like it's our responsibility to push back on that stuff," Zuckerberg says, "so oftentimes someone will come with a subpoena, and we'll go to court and say, 'We don't think this is enough.' Ultimately I think this stuff gets used for good."
Conversely, some governments fear Facebook's great database and the ease with which Facebook can be used to form networks and spread information. China has blocked the site since 2009. Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have all banned it at one point or another. Zuckerberg will be visiting China over the holidays — his girlfriend has family there — and you can't help but wonder if he'll be doing some stealth market research. That's almost a fifth of the world's population he's not reaching.
But even without China, there's a distinct feeling of manifest destiny about Facebook. Plot its current growth on a curve and it hits a billion members in 2012. There are 6.9 billion people in the world, 2 billion of whom are on the Internet. Is there a point at which all of them are on Facebook? "That's one reality that I think is totally possible," Cox says. "But Mark's vision is not that it's all happening in this blue-and-white zone that we built, but that it's happening everywhere. Literally everything you use could be a conduit between you and people around you. The television could. The GPS on your car could. Your phone could. iTunes could." (See pictures of Facebook's overseas offices.)
Zuckerberg is more cautious. He's noncommittal about how far Facebook can go. (Far, obviously, but to him it hinges on the ultimate extent of Internet penetration in the world, which in turn hinges on the adoption of smart phones in areas where Internet-connected computers are scarce.) Criticize Facebook and Zuck doesn't duck, exactly, though his positivity can be a bit relentless. For example: Isn't it possible that Facebook creates more interpersonal connections but that those connections are of a lower, less satisfying quality? "That's been a criticism that people have had for a while," he says. "But this isn't zero-sum. I think what we're doing is enabling you to stay in touch with people who you otherwise wouldn't. When I'm at home and I want to talk to my girlfriend, I don't IM her. I walk downstairs, and we talk." (Really? You don't IM in the house? "Only when you're in bed at the same time," he says. "Because then it's just ironic." And then he laughs in the easy, natural way he doesn't do much in public.)
All technologies come with trade-offs, but for now Zuckerberg just doesn't seem that interested in the other side of the trade, the downside. There are some eloquent, persuasive critiques of life on Facebook out there, including Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget and MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle's forthcoming Alone Together. But they don't fuss him, particularly. "They're just looking at it through a completely different lens," he says. "And I appreciate that. Because it would be impossible for me to dissociate myself to that extent, to get that perspective. I mean, people write all kinds of different things, from 'It's the greatest thing that's ever existed' to 'It's the worst thing that's ever existed.' "

Zuckerberg tries to put himself in the heads of people who don't have his weapons-grade mental hardware, his immunity to peer pressure, his absolute mastery of his privacy settings and his gift for inspiring loyalty. In other words, most of the people who use Facebook. But it's a stretch. His EQ has its limits. He'll play at fallibility — "Almost any mistake you can make in running a company, I've probably made," he says — and he readily owns up to miscalculations like Beacon. But this is a guy so sure of himself that he walked away from a million-dollar payday when he was barely out of high school, who turned down a billion-dollar offer for Facebook from Yahoo! when he was 22 and whose self-control is so total that he drives an Acura when he could afford a Bentley. No wonder he doesn't see how challenging Facebook can be for the rest of us. He's his own perfect customer.
And he's just getting started. What looks like a meteoric rise to the rest of us, he sees as an opening act. Because now that Facebook has scaled up to a species-level event, the real work can start: taking a 550 million–person network out on the highway and seeing what it can do. Zuckerberg could take the company public, but neither he nor Facebook needs the cash right now, so what's the point? Why give up control to a bunch of shareholders? This isn't the go-go '90s, when the goal was to sell up and cash out. It isn't, and never has been, about the money. "I think the next five years are going to be about building out this social platform," Zuckerberg says, on a long walk around Facebook's neighborhood in Palo Alto in December. "It's about the idea that most applications are going to become social, and most industries are going to be rethought in a way where social design and doing things with your friends is at the core of how these things work. If the last five years was the ramping up, I think that the next five years are going to be characterized by widespread acknowledgment by other industries that this is the way that stuff should be and will be better." (See a Zuckerberg family photo album.)
This won't make life any easier for people who aren't on Facebook. The bigger social networks get, the more pressure there is on everybody else to join them, which means that they tend to pick up speed as they grow, and to grow until they saturate their markets. It's going to get harder and harder to say no to Facebook and to the authentically wonderful things it brings, and the authentically awful things too.
But while this happens, Zuckerberg is going to be growing too. The Zuckerberg who built Facebook won't be the same person as the Zuckerberg who runs it. He'll be getting older, traveling, maybe getting married, having kids, and as his life outside Facebook gets more complicated, maybe Facebook, the world he built in his own image, will get more complicated too: more sensitive to the richness that exists outside it, in the real world, and to the richness that passes through it in such enormous volumes every second of every day.
But for all its flaws, there was no other way for Facebook to begin. Only someone like Zuckerberg, someone as brilliant and blinkered and self-confident and single-minded and social as he is, could have built it. "The craziest thing to me in all this," he says, "is that I remember having these conversations with my friends when I was in college. We would just sort of take it as an assumption that the world would get to the state where it is now. But, we figured, we're just college kids. Why were we the people who were most qualified to do that? I mean, that's crazy!" (See pictures of life inside Facebook headquarters.)
He shakes his head, with the same perplexed expression as when the director of the FBI crashed his meeting. Then he decides.
"I guess what it probably turns out is, other people didn't care as much as we did."