Surveillance State, Skype, Google, Netflix, and the Internet of Things all Predicted over 55 Years Ago
Though invented by the government for the military, the internet would end up being useful to the US military, but it didn’t really take off until it became civilianized and commercialized – a phenomenon that the Arpa researchers of the 1970s could never have anticipated. “Quite honestly, if anyone would have said they could have imagined the internet of today in those days, they’re lying,” says Don Nielson who was at the Rossotti’s in ’76. What surprised him most was how “willing people were to spend money to put themselves on the internet”. “Everybody wanted to be there,” he says. “That was absolutely startling to me: the clamor of wanting to be present in this new world.”
Perhaps to Neilson’s surprise, someone came close to imagining todays internet. An article in a 1965 edition of Eagle, a British comic book, predicted the arrival of the Internet with stunning accuracy, including services similar to Skype, Netflix, Kindle, Google, and even the “Internet of things” where every home appliance is linked to the world wide web. The article, entitled Computers for Everyone, predicted “world knowledge at your fingertips….as early as the 1990’s. …How would you like to be able to solve any mathematical problem in a fraction of a second: summon any page of any book or newspaper instantly before your eyes: have all factual information known to man at your own fingertips – all without leaving your own living room? This fantastic dream of scientific achievement may come true by the 1990s if a plan now being worked on by top scientists in this country and the U.S.A. is successful,” states the article.
“Your TV set, your telephone, your electricity and gas meters, and your typewriter, tape-recorder and record player. All these things will be as out of date as the gas-lamp is today, for the computer will control all power supplies to your house, your videophone link and multi-channel TV signal,” states the article. The piece goes on to assert that the miniaturization process will solve the problem of computers being the size of rooms, while the “installation of the complex nationwide network of connections between the computers” will be the biggest challenge. The arrival of high speed fiber optic connections is even predicted when the article speaks of a new system that, “carries thousands of times more information than a cable at close to the speed of light.”
The article predicted at least seven fundamental aspects of the Internet, some of which are still only in their early stages today, a full four years before the very first arcane Internet-style communications were even tested, three decades before the Internet became accessible for the general public, and four decades before we saw services like Skype, Netflix and so-called ‘smart’ products.
- “World knowledge at your fingertips” (the search engine).
- “Summon any page of any book or newspaper instantly before your eyes” (Kindle).
- “The computer will control all power supplies to your house” (smart home, Internet of things).
- “Videophone” (Skype).
- “Multi-channel TV signal” (Netflix, Internet TVs).
- Computers/Internet to replace “Tape recorder and record player” (Spotify, iTunes).
- Network to operate at speed of light (fiber optic).
All of these were predicted more than 50 years ago by a children’s comic book! Weird, but true.
Back in 1967, the ARPANET was still another two years away from making its first connection. But Arthur Miller (a law professor at the University of Michigan, not the playwright) foresaw the dangers of networked computing, an irresistible temptation for the development of a surveillance state by any tech-savvy government left unchecked by its people.
Miller describes a dystopian world where computers can store vast amounts of personal, medical and financial data. He warns that while this information could prove incredibly useful, it could easily become vulnerable to nefarious entities in the government, private industry, or even individuals. “Even the most innocuous of centers,” Miller writes, “could provide the ‘foot in the door’ for the development of an individualized computer-based federal snooping system.”
There are further dangers. The very existence of a National Data Center may encourage certain federal officials to engage in questionable surveillance tactics. For example, optical scanners — devices with the capacity to read a variety of type fonts or handwriting at fantastic rates of speed — could be used to monitor our mail. By linking scanners with a computer system, the information drawn in by the scanner would be converted into machine-readable form and transferred into the subject’s file in the National Data Center.
Then, with sophisticated programming, the dossiers of all of the surveillance subject’s correspondents could be produced at the touch of a button, and an appropriate entry — perhaps “associates with known criminals” — could be added to all of them. As a result, someone who simply exchanges Christmas cards with a person whose mail is being monitored might find himself under surveillance or might be turned down when he applies for a job with the government or requests a government grant or applies for some other governmental benefit. An untested, impersonal, and erroneous computer entry such as “associates with known criminals” has marked him, and he is helpless to rectify the situation. Indeed, it is likely that he would not even be aware that the entry existed.
These tactics, as well as the possibility of coupling wiretapping and computer processing, undoubtedly will be extremely attractive to overzealous law-enforcement officers. Similarly, the ability to transfer into the National Data Center quantities of information maintained in nonfederal files — credit ratings, educational information from schools and universities, local and state tax information, and medical records — will enable governmental snoopers to obtain data that they have no authority to secure on their own.
By the end of his article, Miller calls for legislation to protect the data of American citizens. Miller wasn’t the only one calling for privacy legislation around this time. The following year, Paul Armer of the RAND Corporation would testify in front of a Senate subcommittee raising some of the very same concerns about the emergence of a snooper society. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Armer read Miller’s article. Miller’s article appeared in the November 1967 issue of The Atlantic, over 50 years ago! But needless to say, that art would fit in nicely with the newsstands of today. Just check out the latest issue of The New Yorker.
Wired Networks are Still Better Than Wi-Fi
I’m sure everyone has had issues trying to connect to a wireless network. And when (not if, when) you have an issue, it’s nigh impossible to troubleshoot. And that’s just connecting to a wireless network, trying to set one up can cause all sorts of headaches. Not to mention the constantly changing standards for network encryption.
Wireless networks are prone to a variety of connection issues, particularly if you try to access the network at the edge of its wireless range. It’s also not uncommon for the router to crash and need to be reset. Wired networks hardly ever go down unless the power goes out in the entire building. Wireless networks also have issues when things like walls get in the way of the signal.
With modern Ethernet connections you can get speeds of up to 1 Gigabit per second. That’s more than three times the speed of the fastest Wi-Fi connections out there. And let’s face it, wireless networks aren’t very safe. That’s why we have to keep changing the encryption standards. Even when companies and schools pay exorbitant prices to secure their wireless networks up to high heaven, they can still get hacked, and the average person’s security doesn’t come anywhere close to those institutions.
The more you participate in the automatic information fed directly to your devices that are personalizing your news, entertainment, business, and “life-patterns”, the more you will think you are free and fully informed. Actually, you will become more and more limited by what your pattern-of-life generates as your individualized algorithms. A mechanical virtual world will be created around you that becomes your personalized digital prison that, at first, may seem like digital heaven, but later rear its ugly head of control and enslavement. By then, it will be too late for any of us to break free.
Your new digital prison is being created every time you do an internet search, click a ‘like’ button on Facebook, type a phrase into your computer, choose something to watch on television, or speak a word into your phone. Every speck of “information” that you participate in is used to make your personalized digital life-pattern profile.
Even your bank account and everything you spend is being gathered in an NSA program called Marina [1] that knows so much about you that when you get into your car on a day you have a weekly appointment, your phone automatically pings the route and distance to your destination.
Your phone can also activate all your devices that are connected to the Internet of Things. As you approach your house with your phone, your garage door opens automatically as the lights in the house come on and the house alarm is turned off while your coffee maker starts and your TV comes on with your usual show as the heating pad in your easy chair turns on to your favorite setting.
There is no end to the “machine intelligence” support you can get from mechanically augmented reality. And now Facebook and its fake, phoney, stooge inventor Mark Zuckerberg wants you to put on a 3-D visor and enter a self-created virtual reality world where it feels you are free to do as you please.
We have created this world by being lazy and not asking the hard questions—who owns and controls this technology, what is the ultimate goal of the Internet of Things, does this technology serve or enslave humanity? Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Alphabet has bragged about this new system that claims it is ‘ready to go’.
Google, somehow, morphed into a “mother company” that is named Alphabet which owns all 26 subsidiaries of Google, including the only AI on the planet called Google Deep Mind. Alphabet seems to have unlimited money and unlimited technology patents that are supported wholesale by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
Essentially, Google has always been owned and operated by the dark side of our military-industrial complex. Like Cisco Systems, Inc. before them, Google (Alphabet) was incubated through the U.S. Defense Advance Research Project Agency (DARPA) and the CIA’s private corporate venture capital company called In-Q-Tel. (Ask yourself how it is that a government entity can hold private companies and enjoy private profits outside of Congressional oversight, but we digress.)
Google, Cisco, Facebook, Twitter, and most other search engines and social networks all run on allegedly “open source” code given out by DARPA/In-Q-Tel to universities and corporations to develop. Open source means free to the user without the need to pay royalties or fees to the inventor or creator. Basically, whoever is able to take this weaponized open source code (with encryption back door keys already built in) and develop it for the consumer wins the military contracts.
Then Wall Street (Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase usually) sweep in with venture capital, and within a few years values the new tech company in the tens and hundreds of billions. After that, the banks then loan whatever money these companies need to buy out all their competition. These newly acquired “Silicon Valley corporate stooges” then become even more front-men for even more weaponized military systems. This now includes Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Tumblr and Amazon.
Whether you know it or not, what is described above is already happening on a commercial level and soon will escalate to an overt military level while the innocent internet user is lulled into believing that he is simply having fun. Since most American and global businesses have some component on the internet, the militarization of the internet can be as powerful as the threat of global nuclear annihilation. Just imagine if the internet was turned off tomorrow – permanently, never to return.
Most of what we think of as modern life would end, and many people would never recover. Economies would collapse, wars would rage, and many of us wouldn’t know what to do or what to think. Modern life would collapse because the weapon of the internet already controls modern life. The life of the pygmy in Indonesia would go on uninterrupted, but American life would screech to a halt. We might not be able to “reboot” for years. This thought begs the question, “How did we let this happen?”
“We”, the users of the Internet and all things digital, were happy to use the new technology without asking basic questions like: Who actually owns the cables the Internet travels through? Can “they” turn it off? Why was so much power given over to the internet? At this point, is there an alternative or way out of this digital?
The answers to the questions above can be given, and there is a solution to this looming problem. But first we must see the internet and all of its “wonders” for exactly what they are – weapons of mass social manipulation. When we can see the evil plans of those who have advanced this technology without the moral compass necessary to guide such powerful tools, then perhaps we can change these innovations from weapons into the information tools that they were intended to be. Information was supposed to free humanity, not imprison it in a virtual world where education is replaced by nonsensical entertainment, religion is replaced by consumerism, and the real world by virtual reality.
Patent Theft and Weaponization of the Internet
Not counting the social networking technology that was stolen, taxpayers of the United States, through the CIA’s private venture capital company In-Q-tel, largely funded the open source program that became Facebook, Google, Intel, Apple, and Microsoft. These companies have weaponized these devices and systems against the citizens of the world.
‘WE THE PEOPLE’ DEMAND THAT THESE COMPANIES, AND ANY OTHER LIKE THEM THAT HAVE BEEN FINANCIALLY SEEDED AND FUNDED BY U.S. TAXPAYERS, BE GIVEN TO THE PEOPLE AS A PUBLIC UTILITY AND THAT THE FICTITIOUS OWNERS OF THESE COMPANIES BE PROSECUTED FOR PATENT INFRINGEMENT AND/OR THEFT.
In numerous articles from Americans for Innovation, the Anonymous Patriots have found unequivocal evidence that IBM’s Eclipse Foundation stole the original ideas and source code for Google and Facebook from Columbus, OH innovator Leader Technologies, Inc. through their patent attorney James P. Chandler III. Chandler was mentor of Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Robert Mueller, James Comey and John Podesta, to name but a few.
Chandler represented Leader Technologies, Inc. from the moment Leader realized their innovations were patentable in early 2000. But rather than file the patents immediately, Chandler suspiciously advised Leader to “reduce to practice” the invention before he would file them.
Hindsight shows that Chandler gave that advice in order to steal the actual source code when it was ready. Chandler bamboozled Leader into taking custody of a copy of the source code in 2002 which he immediately gave to the IBM Eclipse Foundation which then disseminated it to Zuckerberg/Facebook and other companies.
David J. Kappos, IBM’s attorney (who also served later as Obama’s Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office from 2009 to 2013) was also a student of Chandler at the time of the theft. This theft is one of if not the largest theft of intellectual property and trade secrets in history. It was clearly part of the the weaponization of these digital platforms.
For more information, please see our Citizens Intelligence Reports on these subjects:
Digital Prison Mechanisms
Once the Silicon Valley high-tech “dummy” companies are established by stooges who are pre-selected for their willingness to incorporate military “back doors” into all of their products, the NSA/CIA/FBI uses the information gleaned from those companies to surveil every American through every device that broadcasts a signal – phone, computer, or any device on the Internet of Things. Any intelligence agency can simply type in a query and access the metadata collected from every digital device on the internet or that uses Wi-Fi or cell phone towers.
Among these spying tools is the RIOT (Rapid Information Overlay Technology]) program by Raytheon which leaked to the public on Nov. 16, 2010.[2]
This information is used to target individuals for consumer behaviors as well as DoD intelligence collection. If an internet user is targeted, there are hundreds of ways to “attack” the user and manipulate his/her buying habits, personal life-pattern choices, and even the way the user thinks.
THE OBJECT OF THE INTELLIGENCE IS SIMPLE: CONTROL THE USER. SOCIAL NETWORKS ON THE INTERNET ARE MILITARY EXPERIMENTS IN SOCIAL MANIPULATION. THIS IS WHAT IS CALLED PSYOPS – OR PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS.
Another program used to gather the Internet metadata is XKeyscore, a secret computer system first used by the NSA for searching and analyzing global Internet data, which it collects on a daily basis. It enables almost unlimited surveillance of anyone anywhere in the world.
The NSA’s databank of collected communications allows its analysts to listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored. It can also access your browsing histories or Google search terms that you’ve entered, and can alert them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future. XKeyscore consists of over 700 servers at approximately 150 sites where the NSA collects ALL data, on EVERYBODY, ALL THE TIME.[3]
Another component of NSA data collection is a program called Marina, a database and analysis tool set for intercepted internet metadata. The database stores metadata up to a year. The Marina metadata application tracks a user’s browser experience, gathers contact information/content and develops summaries of the target. It also has the capability to look back on the last 365 days’ worth of metadata seen by the collection system, whether or not the target was tasked for collection. The stored metadata is mainly used for pattern-of-life analysis.
AMERICANS ARE NOT EXEMPT BECAUSE METADATA IS NOT CONSIDERED DATA BY U.S. LAW. (SEE SECTION 702 OF THE FISA AMENDMENTS ACT).
Once the data is collected and can be queried and targeted, the data is then stored in an NSA program called Sentient World Simulation (SWS). This program is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual nodes (prisons) to reflect every man, woman, and child.
SWS will be a synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information. It provides an environment for testing psychological operations so that military leaders can develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners, including U.S. citizens. SWS also mimics financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.
These four programs – XKeyscore, Marina, RIOT, and Sentient World Simulation – create some of the environments which intend to imprison and control those who willingly enter into the digital virtual reality of the internet. The internet is a WARZONE according to the people who created and weaponized it. Notice that the description of SWS says that even “neutrals” are the target of these systems.
No one is safe from the surveillance, monitoring, targeting, and attacks of Facebook, Twitter, Google and Alphabet. Just look how President Donald Trump uses Twitter as a weapon against the corporate media. There is a battle for information and every person is in the middle of the battle whether they like it or not.
The largest domestic military exercises in US history happened in 2015. They were entitled: “Jade Helm 2015 – Master the Human Domain.” Just the very name of the exercise should show you where the U.S. military is focusing its time and energy– on U.S. citizens. It also clearly tells us the intent of the U.S. military is – to Master the Human Domain. So much for America freedom and liberty.
SOME HISTORY ABOUT DARPA/IN-Q-TEL “FRONT MEN”
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has controlled technological innovation since 1958 when it was created by the military-driven Department of Defense. DARPA is the father of war-fighting, both conventional and digital. DARPA was controlled by a man they called “Yoda”, who leads a group called the Highlands Forum that directs all military research and development – the weaponization of every U.S. patent, over 4,000 of which have been stolen.
DARPA’s history is littered with death and destruction. DARPA and In-Q-Tel, through the Highlands Forum, have driven research and development for the military that has cost American taxpayers trillions. This same technology is also shared with countries throughout the world through open source sharing.
The U. S. military wants our enemies to have the technology so that it can spy upon them and keep up with them in weaponry. If both sides have the same technology and weapons, then more money needs to be spent on bigger and better weapons continually and the military industrial complex thrives and gets richer.
THEIR BUSINESS PLAN IS SIMPLE: MAKE SURE THE CUSTOMER HAS A NEED FOR MILITARY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES BY SUPPLYING THEIR ENEMIES WITH COMPETING PRODUCTS AND SERVICES, A BUSINESS CYCLE THAT NEVER STOPS AND GUARANTEES THAT THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX WILL ALWAYS BE SELLING SOMETHING TO SOMEONE.
Every project of DARPA and In-Q-Tel have been weaponized before they are shared with the companies who then are the “front” for a DARPA sponsored company. DARPA and In-Q-Tel keep the encryption codes and build in backdoor keys so that they can always control the military weapons that have been released into the corporate world for public use. According to DARPA and In-Q-Tel, innovation and technological advances must first be a weapon that can be controlled by its makers – the military.
The Highland Forum directed the creation of weapons of every sort that have been released into the corporate world and now control your laptop, phone, computer, and every other device with a “bugged” microprocessor inside. Intel microprocessors are found in most of our “private” digital devices and are, in fact, collecting “intelligence” for the Department of Defense, CIA, and NSA.
DARPA/In-Q-Tel and the Highlands Forum drive the process of continuous war from creating the devices that control all nuclear weapons to incubating the technologies that created the Internet, Intel microprocessers, Cisco routers, Google search engines, Facebook social networks, the IBM Internet of Things, cellphones, Microsoft software, MacAfee security software, and all other commercial and military warfare devices using their source code.
The Highlands Forum has been the headquarters of weaponizing military patents, intellectual property and trade secrets for five decades. Andrew Marshall has the blood of millions on his hands, yet he is considered an America hero instead of a warlord criminal.
Though all manner of utopian myths surround the early Internet, and by extension its forerunner, Yasha Levine (‘Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet‘) highlights that “surveillance was baked in from the very beginning” (75). What is particularly noteworthy in Levine’s account is his emphasis on early pushback to ARPANET, an often forgotten series of occurrences that certainly deserves a book of its own. Levine describes students in the 1960s who saw in early ARPANET projects “a networked system of surveillance, political control, and military conquest being quietly assembled by diligent researchers and engineers at college campuses around the country,” and as Levine provocatively adds, “the college kids had a point” (64). Similarly, Levine highlights NBC reporting from 1975 on the CIA and NSA spying on Americans by utilizing ARPANET, and on the efforts of Senators to rein in these projects. Though Levine is not presenting, nor is he claiming to present, a comprehensive history of pushback and resistance, his account makes it clear that liberatory claims regarding technology were often met with skepticism. And much of that skepticism proved to be highly prescient.
Case in point, the largely forgotten CONUS Intel program that gathered information on millions of Americans. By encoding this information on IBM punch cards, which were then fed into a computer, law enforcement groups and the army were able to access information not only regarding criminal activity, but activities protected by the first amendment. As news of these databases reached the public they generated fears of a high-tech surveillance society, leading some Senators, such as Sam Ervin, to push back against the program. And in a foreshadowing of further things to come, “the army promised to destroy the surveillance files, but the Senate could not obtain definitive proof that the files were ever fully expunged,” (87). Though there were concerns about the surveillance potential of ARPANET, its growing power was hardly checked, and more government agencies began building their own subnetworks (PRNET, SATNET). Yet, as they relied on different protocols, these networks could not connect to each other, until TCP/IP “the same basic network language that powers the Internet today” (95), allowed them to do so.
Yet surveillance of citizens, and public pushback against computerized control, is not the grand origin story that most people are familiar with when it comes to the Internet. Instead the story that gets told is one whereby a military technology is filtered through the sieve of a very selective segment of the 1960s counterculture to allow it to emerge with some rebellious credibility. This view, owing much to Stewart Brand, transformed the nascent Internet from a military technology into a technology for everybody “that just happened to be run by the Pentagon” (106). Brand played a prominent and public role in rebranding the computer, as well as those working on the computers – turning these cold calculating machines into doors to utopia, and portraying computer programmers and entrepreneurs as the real heroes of the counterculture. In the process the military nature of these machines disappeared behind a tie-dyed shirt, and the fears of a surveillance society were displaced by hip promises of total freedom. The government links to the network were further hidden as ARPANET slowly morphed into the privatized commercial system we know as the Internet. It may seem mind boggling that the Internet was simply given away with “no real public debate, no discussion, no dissension, and no oversight” (121), but it is worth remembering that this was not the Internet we know. Rather it was how the myth of the Internet we know was built. A myth that combined, as was best demonstrated by Wired magazine, “an unquestioning belief in the ultimate goodness and rightness of markets and decentralized computer technology, no matter how it was used” (133).
The shift from ARPANET to the early Internet to the Internet of today presents a steadily unfolding tale wherein the result is that, today, “the Internet is like a giant, unseen blob that engulfs the modern world” (169). And in terms of this “engulfing” it is difficult to not think of a handful of giant tech companies (Amazon, Facebook, Apple, eBay, Google) who are responsible for much of that. In the present Internet atmosphere people have become largely inured to the almost clichéd canard that “if you’re not paying, you are the product,” but what this represents is how people have, largely, come to accept that the Internet is one big surveillance machine. Of course, feeding information to the giants made a sort of sense, many people (at least early on) seem to have been genuinely taken in by Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” image, and they saw themselves as the beneficiaries of the fact that “the more Google knew about someone, the better its search results would be” (150). The key insight that firms like Google seem to have understood is that a lot can be learned about a person based on what they do online (especially when they think no one is watching) – what people search for, what sites people visit, what people buy. And most importantly, what these companies understand is that “everything that people do online leaves a trail of data” (169), and controlling that data is power. These companies “know us intimately, even the things that we hide from those closest to us” (171). ARPANET found itself embroiled in a major scandal, at its time, when it was revealed how it was being used to gather information on and monitor regular people going about their lives – and it may well be that “in a lot of ways” the Internet “hasn’t changed much from its ARPANET days. It’s just gotten more powerful” (168).
But even as people have come to gradually accept, by their actions if not necessarily by their beliefs, that the Internet is one big surveillance machine – periodically events still puncture this complacency. Case in point: Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA which splashed the scale of Internet assisted surveillance across the front pages of the world’s newspapers. Reporting linked to the documents Snowden leaked revealed how “the NSA had turned Silicon Valley’s globe-spanning platforms into a de facto intelligence collection apparatus” (193), and these documents exposed “the symbiotic relationship between Silicon Valley and the US government” (194). And yet, in the ensuing brouhaha, Silicon Valley was largely able to paint itself as the victim. Levine attributes some of this to Snowden’s own libertarian political bent, as he became a cult hero amongst technophiles, cypher-punks, and Internet advocates, “he swept Silicon Valley’s role in Internet surveillance under the rug” (199), while advancing a libertarian belief in “the utopian promise of computer networks” (200) similar to that professed by Steward Brand. In many ways Snowden appeared as the perfect heir apparent to the early techno-libertarians, especially as he (like them) focused less on mass political action and instead more on doubling-down on the idea that salvation would come through technology. And Snowden’s technology of choice was Tor.
While Tor may project itself as a solution to surveillance, and be touted as such by many of its staunchest advocates, Levine casts doubt on this. Noting that, “Tor works only if people are dedicated to maintaining a strict anonymous Internet routine,” one consisting of dummy e-mail accounts and all transactions carried out in Bitcoin, Levine suggests that what Tor offers is “a false sense of privacy” (213). Levine describes the roots of Tor in an original need to provide government operatives with an ability to access the Internet, in the field, without revealing their true identities; and in order for Tor to be effective (and not simply signal that all of its users are spies and soldiers) the platform needed to expand its user base: “Tor was like a public square—the bigger and more diverse the group assembled there, the better spies could hide in the crowd” (227).
Though Tor had spun off as an independent non-profit, it remained reliant for much of its funding on the US government, a matter which Tor aimed to downplay through emphasizing its radical activist user base and by forming close working connections with organizations like WikiLeaks that often ran afoul of the US government. And in the figure of Snowden, Tor found a perfect public advocate, who seemed to be living proof of Tor’s power – after all, he had used it successfully. Yet, as the case of Ross Ulbricht (the “Dread Pirate Roberts” of Silk Road notoriety) demonstrated, Tor may not be as impervious as it seems – researchers at Carnegie Mellon University “had figured out a cheap and easy way to crack Tor’s super-secure network” (263). To further complicate matters Tor had come to be seen by the NSA “as a honeypot,” to the NSA “people with something to hide” were the ones using Tor and simply by using it they were “helping to mark themselves for further surveillance” (265). And much of the same story seems to be true for the encrypted messaging service Signal (it is government funded, and less secure than its fans like to believe). While these tools may be useful to highly technically literate individuals committed to maintaining constant anonymity, “for the average users, these tools provided a false sense of security and offered the opposite of privacy” (267).
The central myth of the Internet frames it as an anarchic utopia built by optimistic hippies hoping to save the world from intrusive governments through high-tech tools. Yet, as Surveillance Valley documents, “computer technology can’t be separated from the culture in which it is developed and used” (273). Surveillance is at the core of, and has always been at the core of, the Internet – whether the all-seeing eye be that of the government agency, or the corporation. And this is a problem that, alas, won’t be solved by crypto-fixes that present technological solutions to political problems. The libertarian ethos that undergirds the Internet works well for tech giants and cypher-punks, but a real alternative is not a set of tools that allow a small technically literate gaggle to play in the shadows, but a genuine democratization of the Internet.
Source:
- Mises Institute
- The Guardian
- Charles Shopsin’s Modern Mechanix blog
- Infowars
- https://www.whoishostingthis.com/blog/2014/11/11/arpanet/
- http://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=86703
- http://www.boundary2.org/2018/06/zachary-loeb-all-watched-over-by-machines-review-of-levine-surveillance-valley/
Recommended Reading:
In this fascinating book, investigative reporter Yasha Levine uncovers the secret origins of the internet, tracing it back to a Pentagon counterinsurgency surveillance project.
A visionary intelligence officer, William Godel, realized that the key to winning the war in Vietnam was not outgunning the enemy, but using new information technology to understand their motives and anticipate their movements. This idea–using computers to spy on people and groups perceived as a threat, both at home and abroad–drove ARPA to develop the internet in the 1960s, and continues to be at the heart of the modern internet we all know and use today. As Levine shows, surveillance wasn’t something that suddenly appeared on the internet; it was woven into the fabric of the technology.
But this isn’t just a story about the NSA or other domestic programs run by the government. As the book spins forward in time, Levine examines the private surveillance business that powers tech-industry giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, revealing how these companies spy on their users for profit, all while doing double duty as military and intelligence contractors. Levine shows that the military and Silicon Valley are effectively inseparable: a military-digital complex that permeates everything connected to the internet, even coopting and weaponizing the antigovernment privacy movement that sprang up in the wake of Edward Snowden.
With deep research, skilled storytelling, and provocative arguments, Surveillance Valley will change the way you think about the news–and the device on which you read it.
Chronological History of Internet Related Events
Google Suspends Engineer For Sounding Alarm On The Company’s Dangerous ‘Sentient’ AI LaMDA Robot
Missouri Attorney General Files Landmark Lawsuit Against Biden for Colluding with Big Tech
University Study Reveals Google’s Gmail System in 2020 Election Had Progressively Anti-Conservative Bias
The International Elitists Conclude Meeting at The World Government Summit in Dubai (Mar 28-30)
Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict: Not Guilty on All Charges
The German Club of Clear Words Report: Exposes the network of individuals and organizations responsible for the COVID scam
Whistleblower Provides Proof From Detroit TCF Center that Election Computers Were Connected Online
Government Elections Agency (EAC) Quietly Drops Language Banning Voting Equipment from Connecting to Internet
Trump Announces ‘Major’ Class-Action Lawsuits Against Twitter, Facebook, and Google
