Silicon Valley.
Nestled in the southern San Francisco Bay Area of Northern
California, the Valley is not just a geographical location. It's
an idea.
It's an expression of the urge to digitize all of the
information in the world, and to database, track and store that
information.
And as we are now beginning to learn, the result of
that digitization of everything is
a world without privacy. A
world where our ability to participate in public debate is
subject to the whims of big tech billionaires. A world where
freedom is a thing of the past and no one is outside the reach
of
Big Brother.
For many, this is just a happy coincidence for the intelligence
agencies that are seeking to capture and store every detail
about every moment of our lives. It is just happenstance that
the information-industrial complex now has enough information to
track our every move, listen in on our every conversation, map
our social networks, and, increasingly, predict our future
plans.
It is just a series of random events that led to the
world of today.
But what the masses do not know is that Silicon Valley has a
very special history. One that explains how we came to our
current predicament, and one that speaks to the future that we
are sleepwalking into. A future of total surveillance and total
control by the Big Tech billionaires and their shadowy backers.
These are The Secrets of Silicon Valley: What Big Tech Doesn't
Want You to Know...
You're tuned into The Corbett Report.
Once known as "The Valley of Heart's Delight," the Santa Clara
Valley was a bucolic, agrarian area known for its mild climate
and blooming fruit trees. Until the 1960s, it was the largest
fruit-producing-and-packing region in the world.
Today there are few reminders of the valley's sleepy farming
past. Now dubbed "Silicon Valley," it is home to many of the
world's largest technology and social media companies, from
Google and
Facebook to Apple and Oracle, from Netflix and Cisco
Systems to PayPal and Hewlett-Packard.
It is the hub of a global
industry that is transforming the economy, shaping our political
discourse, and changing the very nature of our society.
So what happened?
How did this remarkable change take place?
Why
is Silicon Valley the epicenter of this transformation?
The answer is surprisingly simple: WWII happened...
The influx of high-tech research and industry to the region is
the direct result of the advent of WWII and the actions of one
man:
Frederick Terman.
Frederick was the son of Lewis Terman, a pioneer of educational
psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.
An
avowed eugenicist, Lewis Terman popularized IQ testing in
America, helping to conduct the first mass administration of an
IQ test for the US Army during America's entry into the First
World War.
Frederick Terman attended Stanford, earning an undergraduate
degree in chemistry and a master's degree in electrical
engineering before heading to MIT to earn his doctorate in
electrical engineering under Vannevar Bush.
This connection came
into play at the outbreak of World War II, when Bush - now
heading up the US Office of Research and Development, which
managed nearly all research and development for the US military
during wartime - asked Terman to run the top-secret Radio
Research Laboratory at Harvard University.
There, Terman
directed 800 of the country's top researchers in the emerging
field of electronic warfare.
Their work included the development
of some of the earliest signals intelligence and electronic
intelligence equipment, including radar detectors, radar jammers
and aluminum chaff to be used as countermeasures against German
anti-air defenses.
The Valley as we know it today was born in the post-World War II
era when Terman returned to Stanford as dean of the School of
Engineering and set about transforming the school into the "MIT
of the West."
STEVE BLANK: Terman, with his war experience, decided to build
Stanford into a center of excellence on microwaves and
electronics, and he was the guy to do it.
The Harvard Radio
Research Lab was the pinnacle in the United States of every
advanced microwave transmitter and receiver you could think of.
And what he does is he recruits eleven former members of the
radio research lab and says,
"You know, we really don't have a
lab, but congratulations! You're all now Stanford faculty!"
"Oh
great, thanks."
They joined Stanford and they set up their own
lab: the Electronics Research Lab for basic and unclassified
research.
And they get the Office of Naval Research to give them
their first contract - to actually fund in the post-war Stanford
research into microwaves.
By 1950, Terman turns Stanford's
engineering department into the MIT of the West, basically by
taking all the war innovative R&D in microwaves, by moving it to
Stanford, by taking the department heads and key staff.
SOURCE:
Secret History of Silicon Valley
With the military research funds flowing into the region, Terman
began transforming the San Francisco Bay Area into a high-tech
research hot spot.
In 1951, he spearheaded the creation of
Stanford Industrial Park - now known as Stanford Research Park -
a joint venture between Stanford and the City of Palo Alto to
attract big technology corporations to the area.
The park was a
huge success, eventually luring Hewlett-Packard, General
Electric, Kodak and other important technology firms, and
cementing Silicon Valley as a nexus between Stanford, big tech
and government-sponsored research.
And this connection was not tangential.
As researcher Steve
Blank writes
in his own history of Silicon Valley's military
roots:
"During the 1950s Fred Terman was an advisor to every major
branch of the US military.
He was on the Army Signal Corps R&D
Advisory Council, the Air Force Electronic Countermeasures
Scientific Advisory Board, a Trustee of the Institute of Defense
Analysis, the Naval Research Advisory Committee, the Defense
Science Board, and a consultant to the President's Science
Advisory Committee.
His commercial activities had him on the
board of directors of HP, Watkins-Johnson, Ampex, and Director
and Vice Chairman of SRI. It's amazing this guy ever slept.
Terman was the ultimate networking machine for Stanford and its
military contracts."
It is no secret that Silicon Valley has thrived since the very
beginning on Pentagon research dollars and DoD connections.
From William
Shockley (a
rabid eugenicist who spent WWII
as a director of Columbia University's Anti-Submarine Warfare
Operations Group and who is sometimes cited as Silicon Valley's
other founding father for his work on silicon semiconductors) to
the Stanford Research Institute (a key military contractor that
had close ties to the Advanced Research Projects Agency - ARPA)
the US Defense Department has had a key role in shaping the
development of the region.
The Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was spearheaded by Terman
and created by the trustees of Stanford University in 1946. From
its inception, the SRI was instructed to avoid pursuing federal
contracts that might embroil Stanford in political matters.
But
within six months it had already broken this directive, pursuing
contracts with the Office of Naval Intelligence.
In the 1960s,
at the same time that the institute's Artificial Intelligence
Center was creating "Shakey," the "first mobile robot that could
reason about its surroundings," SRI was targeted by Vietnam War
protesters for its contract work with ARPA, the Pentagon arm
devoted to developing cutting edge technology.
The pressure
caused Stanford University to formally cut its ties with SRI in
the 1970s, but the institute's military-funded research did not
stop there.
The Stanford Research Institute was to become the second node in
the ARPANET, the Pentagon-created packet-switching network that
gave birth to the modern-day internet. The
first message ever
sent between two computers was sent on the ARPANET between a
computer at UCLA and one at SRI.
It was the head of ARPA's command and control division, Robert
Kahn, who set up the first experimental mobile network (known as
"PRNET") around Silicon Valley and formed the initial satellite
network ("SATNET") that connected the early internet
internationally.
In 1973, Kahn enlisted the help of
Vint Cerf,
an assistant professor at Stanford University, to develop - as a
Department of Defense project - the TCP/IP protocol suite that
would help make the internet possible.
In a recent panel discussion hosted by DARPA, the latest moniker
for what was originally ARPA, Vint Cerf admitted that the entire
ARPANET project was dictated by the Pentagon's needs for a
command and control system that would be responsive to military
requirements:
VINT CERF: The internet was motivated by a belief that command
and control could make use of computers in order to enable the
Defense Department to use its resources better than an opponent.
In that particular case - Bob in particular started the program
at DARPA in the early 1970s - [we] realized that we had to have
the computers in ships at sea, and in aircraft, and in mobile
vehicles, and the ARPANET had only done dedicated, fixed...
You
know, machines that were in air-conditioned rooms connected
together - you know, roughly speaking, dedicated telephone
circuits. So you can't connect the tanks together with wires
because they run over them and they break, and the airplanes,
they'll never make it off the ground, you know, you can see
all...
So this led to the need for mobile radio communication
and satellite communication in a networked environment.
The question about global nature here is easily answered. At
least I thought we were doing this for the Defense Department,
which would have to operate everywhere in the world. And so it
could not be as a design that in some way was limited to CONUS,
for example.
And it also could not be a design that depended at
all on the cooperation of other countries allocating, for
example, address space. I mean, the sort of silly model of this
is if we use country codes to indicate different networks...
different network identifiers.
Imagine that you've got to invade
country B and before you do that you have to go and say,
"Hi,
we're gonna invade your country in a couple of weeks and we need
some address space to run another call system."
Yeah, you know,
it probably wasn't gonna work.
So we knew it had to be global in
scope.
SOURCE:
From ARPAnet to the Internet, Web, Cloud, and Beyond:
What's Next?
One of the first demonstrations of the protocol - a 1977 test
involving a van equipped with radio gear by SRI that is now
dubbed
the birth of the modern internet - even simulated,
"a
mobile unit in the field, let's say in Europe, in the middle of
some kind of action trying to communicate through a satellite
network to the United States."
But while direct investment in this technological revolution
suited the purposes of the Pentagon, the US intelligence
community was pursuing other, more covert avenues for harnessing
the incredible potential of Silicon Valley and its surveillance
technologies.
With the advent of the Cold War and the increased
tensions between the US and the USSR in a new, highly
technological game of "spy vs. spy," the funding for research
and development of cutting edge technology was placed under a
cover of national security and classified.
BLANK: But in the early 1950s, the Korean War changes the game.
Post-World War II - those who know your history - we basically
demobilized our troops, mothballed our bombers and our fighters,
and said,
"We're going to enjoy the post-war benefits."
1949,
the Soviets explode their first nuclear weapon. The Cold War,
with the Korean War, becomes hot. All of a sudden, the United
States realizes that the world's changed again, and spook work
comes to Stanford.
The military approaches Terman and asks him to set up the
Applied Electronics Lab to do classified military programs, and
doubles the size of the electronics program at Stanford.
They
said,
"Well, we'll keep this separate from the unclassified
Electronics Research Lab."
But for the first time it made
Stanford University a full partner with the military in
government R&D.
SOURCE:
Secret History of Silicon Valley
The arrival of intelligence agency investment money created a
new relationship between the government and the researchers in
the Valley.
Rather than directly hiring the technology companies
to produce the technology, consumer electronics would
increasingly be regulated, directed, overseen and infiltrated by
government workers, who could then use that technology as the
basis for a worldwide signals intelligence operation, directed
not only at the militaries of foreign countries, but at the
population of the world as a whole.
Now cloaked in a shroud of national security, the government's
role in the development of Big Tech has been largely obscured.
But, if you know where to look, the fingerprints of the
intelligence agencies are still visible on nearly every major
company and technology to emerge from Silicon Valley.
Take Oracle Corporation, for instance. The third-largest
software corporation in the world, Oracle is famed for its
eponymous database software. What many do not know is that the
"Oracle" name itself comes from the firm's first customer:
the
CIA.
"Project Oracle" was the CIA codename for a giant
relational database that was being constructed on contract by Ampex, a Silicon Valley firm.
Assigned to the project were Larry
Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates.
Although Project Oracle "was
something of a disaster" it did lead Ellison and his partners to
spin off Oracle Corporation, which to this day gets 25% of its
business from government contracts.
Or take Sun Microsystems. Founded in 1982, the Silicon Valley
software and hardware giant's flagship Unix workstation, the
"Sun-1", as ComputerWorld
explains,
"owes its origins rather
directly to a half-dozen major technologies developed at
multiple universities and companies, all funded by ARPA."
Sun
was acquired by Oracle in 2010 for $7.4 billion.
But to an entire generation growing up today, this is ancient
history. Sure, the intelligence agencies and the Defense
Department were involved in the founding of these Silicon Valley
stalwarts.
But what about the Silicon Valley of today? What does
this have to do with Google or Facebook or PayPal or the Big
Tech giants that have become synonymous with computing in the
age of the internet?
The modern era of Silicon Valley began in the 1990s, when the
advent of the World Wide Web brought the full potential of the
computing revolution into homes across America and around the
globe. This was the era of the dotcom bubble, when small
start-ups with no business plan and no revenue could become
million-dollar companies overnight.
And behind it all, steering
the revolution from the shadows, were the intelligence agencies,
who helped fund the core technologies and platforms of the
modern internet.
One of the first problems confronting early users of the web was
how to search through the dizzying array of personal web sites,
corporate web pages, government sites and other content that was
coming online every day.
In order for the web to turn from a
playground for tech geeks and hobbyists into a ubiquitous
communication tool, there would need to be a way to quickly sort
through the vast amount of information available and return a
relevant list of websites to lead users to useful information.
Early iterations of online search, including personally curated
lists of interesting sites and primitive search engines that
relied on simple keyword matching, failed to live up to the
task.
By happy coincidence, the problem of cataloguing, indexing,
sorting and querying vast troves of information was one that the
intelligence agencies were also working on.
As the masses of
data flowing through the internet gave rise to the era of Big
Data,
the NSA,
the CIA and other members of the US intelligence
community recruited the best and the brightest young minds in
the country to help them store, search and analyze this
information... and those searching for it.
And, as usual, they
turned to Stanford University and the Silicon Valley whiz kids
for help.
Google - as the now familiar story goes - started out as a
research project of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two graduate
students at Stanford University. Unsurprisingly, one does not
have to dig very deep to find the connection to the Defense
Department.
DARPA - the current name of the oft-rebranded ARPA -
was one of the seven military, civilian and law enforcement
sponsors of the "Stanford Digital Libraries Project," which
helped fund Page and Brin's research.
DARPA was even thanked by
name in the white paper where the idea for Google was first laid
out:
"The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search
Engine."
Less well-known is the "Massive Digital Data Systems" project
spearheaded by the US intelligence community and funded through
unclassified agencies like the National Science Foundation.
As
an email introducing the project to researchers at major US
universities in 1993 explains, it was designed to help the
intelligence agencies take,
"a proactive role in stimulating
research in the efficient management of massive databases and
ensuring that I[ntelligence] C[ommunity] requirements can be
incorporated or adapted into commercial products."
As Jeff Nesbit - former director of legislative and public
affairs for the National Science Foundation - detailed in a
revealing 2017 article for qz.com on Google's true origin:
"The research arms of the CIA and NSA hoped that the best
computer-science minds in academia could identify what they
called 'birds of a feather:' [sic]
Just as geese fly together in
large V shapes, or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements
together in harmony, they predicted that like-minded groups of
humans would move together online. [...]
"Their research aim was to track digital fingerprints inside the
rapidly expanding global information network, which was then
known as the World Wide Web.
Could an entire world of digital
information be organized so that the requests humans made inside
such a network be tracked and sorted?
Could their queries be
linked and ranked in order of importance?
Could 'birds of a
feather' be identified inside this sea of information so that
communities and groups could be tracked in an organized way?"
The project dispersed more than a dozen grants of several
million dollars each to help realize this goal of tracking,
sorting and mining online behavior in order to identify and
categorize communities and track groups in real life.
And one of
the first recipients of this grant money? Sergey Brin's team at
Stanford and their research into
search query optimization.
From its very founding and continuing right through to the
present day, Google has maintained close ties to America's
intelligence, military and law enforcement apparatuses. As with
all matters of so-called "national security," however, we only
get a window into that relationship from the public and
declassified record of contracts and agreements that the tech
giant has left in its wake.
In 2003, Google signed a $2.1 million contract with the National
Security Agency, the US intelligence community's shadowy
surveillance arm that is responsible for collecting, storing and
analyzing signals intelligence in foreign intelligence and
counterintelligence operations.
Google built the agency a
customized search tool,
"capable of searching 15 million
documents in twenty-four languages."
So important was this
relationship to Google that when the contract expired in April
2004, they extended it for another year at no cost to the
government.
In 2005, it was revealed that In-Q-Tel - the CIA's venture
capital arm and itself the perfect encapsulation of the
intelligence agencies' relationship with Silicon Valley -
had
sold over 5,000 shares of Google stock.
It is not exactly clear
how the CIA's venture capital firm ended up with 5,000 shares of
Google stock, but it is believed to have come when Google bought
out Keyhole Inc., the developer of the software that later
become Google Earth.
The company's name, "Keyhole," is a
none-too-subtle reference to the Keyhole class of reconnaissance
satellites that the US intelligence agencies have been using for
decades to commit 3D imaging and mapping analysis.
Keyhole, Inc.
worked closely with the US intelligence community and even
bragged that its technology was being used by the Pentagon to
support the invasion of Iraq. To this day, the CIA itself
describes Google Earth as "CIA-assisted technology" on its own
page dedicated to "CIA's Impact on Technology."
In 2010,
details of a formal NSA-Google relationship began to
emerge, but both parties
refused to divulge any further
information about the relationship.
Subsequent reporting
suggested that Google had,
"agreed to provide information about
traffic on its networks in exchange for intelligence from the NSA about what it knew of foreign hackers."
More details emerged
from a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014, which
revealed that Sergey Brin and
Eric Schmidt were not only on a
first name basis with then-NSA chief General Keith Alexander,
but that Google was part of a,
"secretive government initiative
known as the Enduring Security Framework," and that this
initiative involved Silicon Valley partnering with the Pentagon
and the US intelligence community to share information "at
network speed."
The Enduring Security Freedom initiative is just one window into
how Big Tech can reap big dollars from their relationship with
the NSA.
In 2013, it emerged that the participants in the PRISM
program - the illegal surveillance program which allowed the NSA
backdoor access to all information and user data of all of the
Big Tech companies - were reimbursed for the program's expenses
by a shadowy arm of the agency known as "Special Source
Operations."
MARINA PORTNAYA: The entire process reportedly cost PRISM
participants millions of dollars to implement each successful
extension, and those costs, according to US documents, were
covered by an arm of the NSA known as "Special Source
Operations."
According to The Guardian newspaper, NSA
whistleblower
Edward Snowden has described Special Source
Operations as the "crown jewel" of the agency that handles all
surveillance programs that rely on corporate partnership with
telecoms and internet providers to access communication data.
Now, this revelation is being considered evidence that a
financial relationship between tech companies and the NSA has
existed.
And as The Guardian newspaper put it, the disclosure
that taxpayers money was used to cover the company's compliance
costs raises new questions surrounding the relationship between
Silicon Valley and the NSA.
SOURCE:
NSA Paid Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo To Spy On
You
The
PRISM program itself proves that the military and
intelligence agency ties to modern day Silicon Valley do not end
with Google.
In fact, every one of the Silicon Valley stalwarts
that dominate the web today have similar ties to the shadowy
world of spooks and spies.
In June 2003, the Information Processing Techniques Office - the
information technology wing of DARPA that had overseen the
original ARPANET project in the 1960s - quietly posted a "Broad
Agency Announcement" to its website to request proposals for an
ambitious new project.
Labeled "BAA # 03-30," this "proposer
information pamphlet" requested proposals from developers to
build an "an ontology-based (sub)system" called LifeLog that,
"captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person's
experience in and interactions with the world."
The idea, which seemed somewhat fantastic in 2003, was that
users of LifeLog would wear a device that would capture and
record all of their transactions and interactions, physical
movements, email and phone calls, and a variety of other
information.
The LifeLog would be presented to users,
"as a
stand-alone system to serve as a powerful automated multimedia
diary and scrapbook, but, as the announcement goes on to
reveal, the data collected would be used to help DARPA create a
new class of truly 'cognitive' systems that can reason in a
variety of ways."
If it had gone ahead, LifeLog would have been a virtual diary of
everywhere that its users went, everything they did, everyone
they talked to, what they talked about, what they bought, what
they saw and listened to, and what they planned to do in the
future.
It immediately drew criticism as an obvious attempt by
the government to create a tool for profiling enemies of the
state, and even supporters of the plan were
forced to admit that LifeLog,
"could raise eyebrows if [DARPA] didn't make it clear
how privacy concerns would be met."
But then, without explanation, the announcement was withdrawn
and the project was dropped.
DARPA spokesman Jan Walker chalked
the cancellation up to "A change in priorities" at the agency,
but researchers close to the project admitted that they were
baffled by the sudden stopping of the program.
"I am sure that
such research will continue to be funded under some other
title,"
wrote one MIT researcher whose colleague had spent weeks
working on the proposal.
"I can't imagine DARPA 'dropping out'
of such a key research area."
The cancellation of LifeLog was
reported by Wired.com on
February 4, 2004.
That very same day, a Harvard undergrad named
Mark Zuckerberg officially launched "TheFacebook.com," the first
incarnation of Facebook, which collects vast amounts of data on
its users, offering them the promise of "a powerful automated
multimedia diary and scrapbook," but, as has become more and
more evident in recent years, using and selling that data for
ulterior motives.
But it is not just this interesting coincidence that connects
Facebook to DARPA.
Once again, the money that helped "TheFacebook"
go from a Harvard "student project" to a multi-billion user
internet giant involved a relocation to Silicon Valley and
copious injections of venture capital from
intelligence-connected insiders.
Facebook moved to Palo Alto,
California, in 2004 and received its first investment of
$500,000 from Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal.
But the real
money, and the real interest in Facebook, arrived in 2005, in
the form of a $12.7 million investment from Accel Partners and
an additional $1 million from Accel's Jim Breyer.
Breyer, it
turns out, had some interesting connections of his own.
NARRATOR: First venture capital money totaling $500,000 came to
The Facebook from venture capitalist Peter Thiel, founder and
former CEO of PayPal.
He also serves on the board of radical
conservative group Vanguard DAC. Further funding came in the
form of $12.7 million dollars from venture capital firm Accel
Partners.
Accel's manager, James Breyer, was former chair of the
National Venture Capital Association. Breyer served on the
National Venture Capital Association's board with Gilman Louie,
CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the
Central Intelligence Agency in 1999.
This firm works in various
aspects of information technology and intelligence, including,
most notably, nurturing data mining technologies.
Breyer has
also served on the board of BBN Technologies, a research and
development firm known for spearheading the ARPANET, or what we
know today as the internet.
In October of 2004, Dr. Anita Jones climbed on board BBN along
with Gilman Louie, but what is most interesting is Dr. Jones'
experience prior to joining BBN.
Jones herself served on the
board of directors for In-Q-Tel and was previously the director
of defense research and engineering for the US Department of
Defense. Her responsibilities included serving as an advisor to
the Secretary of Defense and overseeing the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency.
This goes farther than just the initial appearances.
DARPA shot
to national fame in 2002, when knowledge of the existence of the
Information Awareness Office (IAO) came to light.
The IAO stated
its mission was to gather as much information as possible about
everyone in a centralized location for easy perusal by the
United States government, including but not limited to:
SOURCE:
Facebook CIA connection
It should come as no surprise, then, that the ex-director of
DARPA, Regina Dugan, was hired by Google in 2012 to head its
Advanced Technology and Projects group, and that she was then
hired by Facebook in 2016 to head their "Building 8" research
group focusing on experimental technologies like brain sensors
and artificial intelligence.
Nor is it a surprise to learn that DARPA is already
working to weaponize Facebook's Oculus virtual
reality technology for fighting cyberwar.
Nor is it a surprise that Facebook seed money investor Peter
Thiel, co-founder of PayPal,
developed Palantir - a data-mining
and analysis tool used by the NSA, FBI, CIA and other
intelligence, counterterrorism and military agencies - from
PayPal's own fraud-detection algorithm.
Or that In-Q-Tel was one
of the first outside investors in the Palantir technology, which
has gained notoriety in recent years for,
"using War on Terror
tools to track American citizens."
Nor is it a surprise to learn that Eric Schmidt, the former CEO
of Google and current technical advisor to Google parent company
Alphabet, is now the
chairman of the Pentagon's "Defense
Innovation Board," which seeks to bring the efficiency and
vision of Silicon Valley to the Defense Department's high-tech
innovation initiatives.
Nor is it surprising that Schmidt, in addition to being a member
of the elitist
Trilateral Commission, is on the steering
committee of
the Bilderberg Group, a cabal of financiers,
industrialists, high-ranking public officials, military brass
and royalty that has been meeting annually in nearly total
secrecy since 1954.
Nor is it surprising that the Bilderberg
Group now counts a number of Silicon Valley stalwarts among its
ranks, from Schmidt and Thiel to Palantir CEO Alex Karp and
former Electronic Frontiers Foundation chair Esther Dyson.
In fact, it would be more surprising to find a major Silicon
Valley company that was not connected to the US military or to
the US intelligence agencies one way or another. This is not an
accident of history or a mere coincidence.
The very origins of
the internet were in shadowy Pentagon programs for developing
the perfect command and control technologies.
From the earliest
attempts to form electronic databases of information on
counterinsurgents in Vietnam right through to today, this
technology - as Yasha Levine, author of
Surveillance Valley: The
Secret Military History of the Internet, explains - was intended
to be used as a tool of warfare against target populations.
YASHA LEVINE: To understand what the internet is and what the
internet has become, you have to go back to the very beginning.
Back to the 1960s, when the internet was being created by the
Pentagon. Back then, America was a relatively new global empire
facing an increasingly chaotic and violent world. There was the
Vietnam War - that was central - but the US was facing
insurgencies all around the world, from Latin America to
Southeast Asia.
It was also facing an increasingly volatile and
violent domestic environment. You had the anti-war movement.
You
had militant black activism. You had groups like The Weather
Underground that were setting off bombs seemingly daily in
cities all across the country. You had race riots in major
cities.
And America's paranoid generals looked at this, right, and they
saw a vast communist conspiracy, of course. They saw the Soviet
Union expanding globally, underwriting insurgencies all around
the world, backing countries that were opposed to America.
At
the same time they were underwriting opposition movements in
America, and they saw this as a new kind of war that was
happening. This is not a traditional war that you could fight
with traditional weapons.
This is not a war that you could drop
a nuke on. It was not a war that you could send a tank division
into, because the combatants did not wear uniforms and they did
not march in formation.
They were part of the civilian
population of the conflict that they were taking part in.
So it was as a new kind of war and new kind of global
insurgency.
And in certain rarefied circles in the military,
people who were familiar with the new kind of computer
technology being developed, they believe that the only way to
fight and win this new war was to develop new information
weapons - computer technology that could:
ingest data on people
and political movements; that could combine opinion surveys,
economic data, criminal histories, draft histories, photographs,
telephone conversations intercepted by security services; and
put that all into databases that could allow analysts to perform
sophisticated analysis on it and run predictive surveys.
The
idea was you have to find out who the enemy is and isolate it
from the general population, and then take that enemy out.
And
at the time some even dreamed of one day creating a global
system of management that could watch the world in real-time and
intercept threats before they happened in much the same way that
America's early warning radar defense system did for hostile
aircraft.
This is the general background from which the internet emerged.
Today the counterinsurgency origins of the internet have been
obscured.
They've been lost for the most part. Very few
histories even mention it, even in a little bit. But at the time
that it was being created in the 1960s, the origins of the
internet and the origins of this technology as a tool of
surveillance and as a tool of control were very obvious to
people back then.
At the time people did not see computers and
computer networks as tools of liberation or utopian
technologies, they saw them as tools of political and social
control - and that specifically included the ARPANET, the
network that would later grow into the internet.
SOURCE:
Yasha Levine: Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military
History of the Internet
The internet was never intended as a tool of liberation.
It was
from its very inception intended to be a tool for tracking, surveilling and, ultimately, controlling a target population.
And in the volatile environment of the 1960s, that "target
population" quickly morphed from the Viet Cong counterinsurgents
into the American public itself and anyone else who could pose a
threat to the Pentagon's ambitions at home or abroad.
Seen in the light of this history, recent developments on the
internet make more sense. Silicon Valley did not spring out of
the California soil by itself. It was carefully seeded there by
the military and intelligence agencies that require this
technology to fight the information warfare of the 21st century.
The Department of Defense did not
announce in 2003 that they
were going to "fight the net" as if it were an enemy weapons
system because they were afraid the internet could be weaponized
by their enemies.
They knew it was already a weapon because they
themselves had weaponized it.
The US government is not afraid of the Russians and their
ability to "undermine American democracy" by purchasing
thousands of dollars of advertising on Facebook.
They were the
ones who envisioned a LifeLog system to observe and control the
population in the first place.
The Pentagon does not fret about the security vulnerabilities of
the internet. It exploits those vulnerabilities to develop some
of the most destructive cyberweapons yet unleashed, including
the US/Israeli-developed Stuxnet.
And, as the next generation of networking technologies threatens
to add not just our Facebook data and our Google searches and
our tweets and our purchases to the government's databases, but
actually to connect every object in the world directly to those
databases, the military is once again at the cutting edge of the
next internet revolution.
SEAN O'KEEFE: Internet of Things is penetrating an ever0wider
swath of daily life and the global economy.
Our good friends and
helpful proliferators of information at Wikipedia define the
Internet of Things as the network of physical objects - things
embedded with electronics (software sensors, network
connectivity) - which enables these objects to collect and
exchange data.
Essentially it allows objects to be sensed and
control remotely, creating an integration between physical world
and computer systems. Think smart grid: energy systems related
to each other to maximize efficiency and all tied to that
objective.
Internet of Things is transforming modern business,
leveraging embedded sensors, connectivity, digital analytics,
and the automation to deliver greater efficiency and
effectiveness on a wide range of market fronts.
The military has been a leader in developing many of the
Internet of Things component technologies, but can do more to
leverage the benefits of Internet of Things solutions.
The
broader national security establishment also faces unique
challenges in adopting Internet of Things technologies ranging
from security and mission assurance to infrastructure and cost
constraints and cultural hurdles.
Now, in September, just a
couple of months ago, the CSIS Strategic Technologies Program
released a report:
Leveraging the Internet of Things for a More
Efficient and Effective Military, which outlines how the
military can adopt lessons from the private sector to take
advantage of these broader benefits of Internet of Things.
SOURCE:
Leveraging the Internet of Things for a More Efficient
and Effective Military - Opening Keynote
From the earliest days of networked computing - when the ARPANET
was still just a twinkle in its engineers' eyes and famed ARPA
computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider was writing memos to his
colleagues in Palo Alto updating them on his vision for an
"Intergalactic Computer Network" - to today, when DARPA
scientists are plotting military uses for the Internet of
Things, the technology underpinning the US government's plans for
full-spectrum dominance of the cyber world has advanced by leaps
and bounds.
But the vision itself remains the same.
In this vision, every person is tracked, their conversations
recorded, their purchases monitored, their social networks
mapped, their habits studied, and, ultimately, their behaviors
predicted, so that the Pentagon and the spies of Silicon Valley
can better control the human population.
And, with the advent of
technologies that ensure that every item we own will be spying
on us and broadcasting that data through networks that are
compromised by the intelligence agencies, that vision is closer
than ever to a reality.
And there, helping that vision to come to reality, are the
giants of Big Tech who were founded, funded, aided and, when
needed, compromised by the spooks, spies and soldiers who desire
complete control over the cyber world.
This is the secret of Silicon Valley. In a key sense, the Big
Tech giants are the Pentagon and the intelligence community.
The DoD and the intelligence agencies are the Big Tech giants. It
was this way from the very dawn of modern computing, and it
remains this way today.
We should not be surprised that the world of the internet - the
world bequeathed to us by the ARPANET - is increasingly looking
like an always-on surveillance device. That was what it was
intended to be.
Yet the public, blissfully unaware of this reality (or willfully
ignorant of it) continues to record their every move in their
Facebook LifeLog, flock like birds of a feather to ask their
most intimate questions of Google, and feed their personal data
into the gaping maw of the PRISM beast.
It may be too late to pull back from the brink of this
always-on, always-surveilled, wireless networked precipice...
but until we look squarely at the facts showing that Big Tech is
a front for the US government, we will never hope to escape the
silicon trap that they have laid for us.
