Yasha Levine

Usually the news stories fretting about how much power tech companies have over our lives that appear every day are framed as the cost of doing business: for example, the reason why Google makes it so hard to turn off location tracking is that they just really want to serve you targeted ads. But while those privacy concerns can and often do boil down to simple greed, one reason why problems of tracking and control are so endemic is that Silicon Valley is intimately connected to the national security state/military-industrial complex, and though most popular histories of computers and the internet emphasize the free-spirited glamour of the hacker culture, one might as well think of the suite of apps on a typical phone as a voluntary counter-insurgency program that we carry out on ourselves. As Levine chronicles, much is made of the power of technology to aid people's fight for freedom, as in coverage of how the organizers of the Arab Spring revolutions used Twitter and Facebook, but less attention is paid to how governments use that same technology to monitor dissidents, control demonstrations, and prevent unrest before it ever occurs.

The connections between tech companies and law enforcement go much deeper than that police departments sometimes also use Gmail. Levine relates many seminal historical events like IBM's collaboration with Nazi Germany, the internet's origins in ARPA, the funding of many supposedly liberatory technologies like Tor by the government, the activities of figures like Peter Thiel who bridge PayPal and Palantir, and the CALEA mandate for telecom companies, showing that for every starry-eyed visionary who saw computers as "bicycles for the mind", in Steve Jobs' phrase, there was another steely-eyed capitalist with no qualms about furnishing governments with whatever they needed to keep tabs on restive populations. It's not that people don't care about privacy, as periodically NSA programs like PRISM become big news for a while, but anyone truly interested in issues like internet freedom has to pay attention to Silicon Valley as well as Washington. It may be that the idea that anyone could use the internet without being watched was always a fantasy, but while Levine doesn't present quite as bleak of a world as, say, Adam Curtis, who he cites a few times, anyone who's seen a few of Curtis' documentaries ("They had a vision of a new world, free from politics... but then something strange happened") will find much that's unhappily familiar here.… (altro)

Conventional wisdom says that, in the 1960's, a group of universities started what became the Internet with help from the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency. The reality is very different.

William Godel, a military intelligence officer, thought that a better way to win in Vietnam was to use new technology to anticipate the movements and understand the motives of the enemy. Such new technology was also used on domestic war opposition. That is what led ARPA to create the Internet; using computers to spy on Americans.

Today, all of the major Internet firms, like Google, Facebook and Amazon, all collect private information for profit. They also let agencies like the National Security Agency scoop up their activity for its own purposes. Silicon Valley and the military are generally one and the same; a sort of military/digital complex.

The Tor browser was supposed to be The Answer: a method of communication that the government could not read. But, Tor got most of its original funding from the Broadcasting Board of Governors (the people behind Voice of America and Radio Free Europe). For most of its existence, it has subsisted on large government contracts. Why is one part of the government, the BBG, supporting Tor, and another part of the government, the FBI, trying to shut it down? It keeps all the activists and other anti-government types in one place. Tor's credibility is certainly helped by an endorsement from Edward Snowden.

This is an excellent book. For some people, this book might be common knowledge. For the vast majority of people, this book is full of revelations about how ubiquitous surveillance has become in America. Nobody comes out clean in this book, which is highly recommended.… (altro)

Fascinating history showing the interconnectedness of military intelligence and the development of the internet and the companies that are so dominant today. Good journalism, great footnotes. The chapter on Tor and Signal left me scratching my head a bit, but I think I get his general gist - don't put total faith in crypto that is funded by spooks, even if the reason spooks want good crytpo is so that dissidents can cause mischief for our enemies. The cultural analysis of how we forgot the origins of the internet and began to equate it with freedom is especially interesting.… (altro)