SURVEILLANCE VALLEY: THE SECRET MILITARY HISTORY OF THE INTERNET - YASHA LEVINE

Back on my bullshit. I thought I was taking a break from the CIA stuff but here we are. Actually, one of the things that’s most chilling about the shit in this book is how much further it goes than just the CIA. By tracing the military involvement with the Internet, Levine paints a really dark picture of some of the forces that have shaped our world, especially the last 30 years. I’ll try to outline the broader history part. Levine traces this desire to use computers to both network, coordinate and manage immense databases with technology to at least the 1890 Census which H. Hollerith (the man who founded what became IBM) helped run with primitive punch cards. Eventually, this technology would make it quite easy to, say, get a list of all the Japanese people on the West Coast. Fast forward to after WWII (the first US supercomputer ENIAC, was operational during the war but this book concentrates on the post 1945 world) and the military realizes they need to network computers together to share data and to manage the enormous military that we have after the end of WWII. The pentagon dumps money into this, usually through things like universities and private companies like the Rand Corporation, and eventually it begins to take shape around Vietnam where they develop ARPANET, which is the precursor to most of the underlying tech used by the internet today. The goal in Vietnam seemed to be two fold, first they wanted to collect data, using sensors and tips and recon, that they could manage in real time to show them movement along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It looks like the Vietcong were able to figure out ways around this pretty easily so that aspect of the project wasn’t super successful. The other thing they tried to do was to create profiles of individuals and villages and use algorithms to determine who was working with the communists and/or who was susceptible to communist influence (at which point some Phoenix Program assassins would kill them). Surprise, surprise, they did not just use that tech in Vietnam, they also immediately used it here in the US in a program called Camelot, (full name: Methods for Prediction and Influencing Social Change and Internal War Potential) and CONUS, which are basically military versions of CHAOS and COINTELPRO. This idea, of the internet as surveillance, is driven home by the business model of things like Facebook and Google, which are much more sophisticated versions of what the government was trying to do in Vietnam, namely, to create profiles of people so accurate they can predict behavior. Only, instead of hiring tons of data scientists and profilers to create these profiles, we do it ourselves. This thread is now present in things like PredPol, a company that Google bought that is based on Army tech used to identify potential insurgents in Iraq and used by the evil LAPD starting in 2012.  The second major thread has to do with the funding of these huge tech companies. We’re deep in neoliberalism, who’s paradigmatic figure is the Entrepreneur, who creates wealth and innovation out of his (tho, now we have a newer girlboss version of this) brilliant mind, apart from government oversights, regulations or interference. The truth, of course, is that we paid for all this stuff with our taxes and the government slowly sold these parts off to private companies which now, functionally, control the internet and work hand in glove with the government. To simplify, in 1986 Stephen Wolff helps expand the network of army supercomputers (first one is ENIAC from WWII) to include “civilian” supercomputers at large universities. This system is called NSFNET (National Science foundation) and the receipts are told they must fund some of this themselves by seeking out commercial clients who could use this sort of network. “With public funds the federal government created a dozen network providers out of thin air and then spun the off to the private sector, building companies that in the space of a decade would become integral parts of the media and telecommunications conglomerates we all know and use today- Verizon, Time-Warner, AT&T, Comcast.” By 1995 NSFNET was retired and the net, as we know it, was totally private. In 1996 Clinton signs the Telecommunications Act which allows large conglomerates to control everything. It doesn’t stop there. Programs like Google Earth also come out of government funding. In that case the CIA’s venture capitalist arm, In-Q-Tel, bought a company called Keyhole which was going to use satellite images to create quick 3-D models (an idea with clear military potential) which was then sold to Google. Amazon runs the CIA servers, Blue Origin and SpaceX are both basically missile companies funded by the Pentagon (which means paid for by us), the list truly goes on and on. These examples help put to bed that the tech world is full of brilliant brain-genius, super-inventors and instead that it’s simply a flashy arm of the military-industrial complex. The final big takeaway has to do with TOR and Signal. I’m not a tech-guy and I don’t pretend to really understand how that stuff works (the book does a good job explaining it) but I do remember the enthusiasm with which TOR was introduced to us, as a tool that was going to take down tyrants. Turns out the tech was created by the Navy/DARPA as a secure way to let agents check in with the government and they needed more popularity to make the cloaking effective (again, read the book for the technical explanation). They funded TOR and pushed it on activists, funding many of its loudest apostles, all the while knowing they could get around it. We’ve discovered there’s a whole branch of the CIA called the Mobile Device Branch that builds in backdoors and entries into the devices themselves, making anonymity basically impossible. Levin does a good job showing how they can toggle between using the internet as a liberatory tool in other countries, when that aligns with their goals, and here he connect efforts stretching from Radio Free Europe to more current actions like the Arab Spring activists and other the CIA gave tools and training to get around government censorship and surveillance, to using it as an almost unescapable, global panopticon when they want to. I found this book really well-written and informative. I’ve always held a distrust and suspension of computers, probably, if I’m being honest, because I find the tone the techno-utopians use to be grating and I’m bad at computer stuff. It’s good to see the proof of my suspicion that the Net itself was conceived and birthed in evil, that it started as a way to streamline the death-squads in Vietnam, and has delivered 100x on its dark promise. 1890 dark webs