Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet
By Yasha Levine
4.5/5
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About this ebook
** Featured as a Guardian Long Read **
'[A] fast-paced, myth busting exposé' Max Blumenthal, author of The Management of Savagery
'Contentious... forceful... salutary' The New Yorker
EVERYTHING WE HAVE BEEN TOLD ABOUT THE DEMOCRATIC NATURE OF THE INTERNET IS A MARKETING PLOY.
As the Cambridge Analytica scandal has shown, private corporations consider it their right to use our data (and by extension, us) which ever way they see fit. Tempted by their appealing organisational and diagnostic tools, we have allowed private internet corporations access to the most intimate corners of our lives.
But the internet was developed, from the outset, as a weapon.
Looking at the hidden origins of many internet corporations and platforms, Levine shows that this is a function, not a bug of the online experience.
Conceived as a surveillance tool by ARPA to control insurgents in the Vietnam War, the internet is now essential to our lives. This book investigates the troubling and unavoidable truth of its history and the unfathomable power of the corporations who now more or less own it.
Without this book, your picture of contemporary society will be missing an essential piece of the puzzle.
'A masterful job of research and reporting about the military origins of the 'world wide web' and how its essential nature has not changed in the years since its creation during the Cold War.' - Tim Shorrock, author of Spies For Hire
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Reviews for Surveillance Valley
32 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5TOR is a government sting?TOR is the dark internet, where identity thieves, drug dealers and arms sellers hang out, safely hidden. It is home to Wikileaks and Silk Road. You can purchase anything from a billion stolen e-mail accounts to assassination services there. Turns out TOR is a service designed and built by the CIA, and even though TOR is now a non-profit organization, it is almost entirely funded by annual “donations” from a handful of US government agencies, mostly connected - to the CIA. The NSA sees TOR as “a honeypot”, where all kinds of people they’re after (dealers, jihadists, bombers) gather in one place. They can be tracked and found with little effort. So while the government bemoans the criminals hiding in plain sight on TOR, it also encourages their use of TOR with taxpayer money.How can this be? It seems that CIA operatives using TOR to hide their online identities were instantly recognizable as CIA operatives because their activity showed they came from TOR. So the user base had to be broadened in order to hide the spies – in plain sight.Yasha Levine obtained a carton full of documents from the Board of Broadcasting Governors, another offshoot of the CIA, using the Freedom Of Information Act. It is all spelled out clearly and plainly, including updates to the CIA on technical progress at the supposedly independent non-profit. Levine says TOR employees are essentially federal civil servants. This book is a warning that you never know who your friends are, and that everything can be fashioned into a weapon.Surveillance Valley, The Secret Military History of the Internet is a totally misleading title for this book. It wanders through internet history for two hundred pages, looking at the same developments we all know about. Mostly, it is not about surveillance. And there’s nothing new.We all know what an open sewer the internet is. And that Silicon Valley receives countless billions from the government for services gladly rendered, be they hosting, profiling or out and out spying. Also nothing new. So the book became a grating read, until quite suddenly and without warning, Levine turned to TOR. The paradox of the US government building, promoting and subsidizing the would-be secret world of the dark net is scary enough. That it is so fragile its managers attacked a university that hacked it, accusing the university of “ethical lapses“ is both laughable and shocking. (It turned out to be cheap and easy.) That anyone thinks they are safe anywhere must forever be out of the question.Even, or similarly, Signal is a dark net product of the US government. It encrypts communications over the internet, but first requires users to upload their cellphone number and their entire phonebooks. And everyone does. Like lambs to the slaughter. Signal uses Amazon servers, so any intelligence force can watch for the pings and quickly see who is using Signal to keep their conversations secret. Both Signal and TOR are forcefully and famously recommended by Edward Snowden and Julian Assange for their “privacy and safety”. They both must know better. So what does that mean?The CIA used its ops network to attack Levine for his investigation, in a co-ordinated campaign. He was suddenly accused of all kinds of crime and immorality, and subjected to threats including death to his family. Even Anonymous got after him as a wacko conspiracy theorist. All in an effort to discredit anything he might later publish. But Levine has the government’s own documents. He did the groundwork for the book on a Kickstarter campaign with 500 contributors. And now he is delivering - a real public service – at least in the last third of it.David Wineberg
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Conventional 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.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5“Will—you want me to get you an invite to gMail?”“I’m not sure; I’m a little worried about the security implications.”The year is 2004, and my social studies teacher is trying to get me signed up with my first email account. I’m hesitant. Eventually, I give in, but only because I create the account under an alias, not linked to my actual identity, and only give out the address to my closest friends.Maybe I’m a little more paranoid than most (maybe that’s why I’m in crypto?), but I’ve always viewed the internet and the world of hi-tech with some degree of suspicion (I left Facebook in 2015 for political reasons).My suspicions were validated in Yasha Levine’s recent book, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet. Unfortunately, the answers aren’t as simple as buckling down on encryption, or at least, the broadly adopted encryption technologies.The story likely begins with Persia or Egypt, or some other ancient civilization that started employing technology to assist in racial profiling. Levine skips over this era and picks up with Herman Hollerith, the inventor of the Hollerith Electric Tabulating Machine, which enabled the US census in 1890 to go through extensive statistical analysis. Eventually IBM adopts this technology and the Nazi’s employ it in the Holocaust to orchestrate their genocide of the Jews.Aside from the development of SAGE, our Cold War missile defense system in the late 1950s, the next stop in our history is counter-insurgency in the Vietnam War and it’s adoption in the United States during the civil rights movement. These projects were directed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency—what is today known as DARPA. The first actual “internet” we encounter is ARPANET—which connected US universities. This was 1969, and students at Harvard and MIT caught on, and protested these developments. During this period, the US military developed a conspiracy that the USSR was going to orchestrate a communist overthrow of the US, and that hippies and civil rights activists would lead the charge. The protests led to senate hearings, and calls for ARPA to shutdown the network, and stop collecting records on civilians. At this point they had a database on 2 million Americans. ARPANET was deployed to transfer these records, and revelations again about this network—which had now grown to records on 5 million Americans—came through NBC in 1975, and there were another round of hearings and calls for these systems of surveillance to be shutdown. No such luck.At this point, Levine introduces a new thread: the utopian communalist movement, of which my parents’ generation was a part. Have you ever wondered how the Whole Earth Catalog evolved into Wired Magazine? What does the hippy movement have to do with computers. As it turns out—a lot!Moving on, we get to 1998, and DAPRA’s funding of Larry Page and Serge Brin’s PhD research at Stanford on data mining. Did you know that what became Google Earth was funded by the CIA? Did you know that TOR was developed with funding from DARPA and the US’ propaganda arm, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). Signal also received funding from the BBG.Why would the US government fund privacy tools? Levine’s theory is what he calls the weaponization of privacy. How will we get events like the Arab Spring without secure communications technology? This is a double-edged sword for the US government to walk, but it appears to be working alright so far. I’m reminded of some of the explorations in HyperNomalisation—a 2016 film by Adam Curtis, about the many layers of perception that stack up to compose reality.Now, is Levine claiming that all encrypted technologies have backdoors into them that give our government direct access? Well, not quite. But he’s pointing out that putting our trust in encrypted apps—when the dominant players in this field receive a significant portion of the funding from the US surveillance state—would be rash. As any good security consultant would tell you—if you really don’t want something to be recorded and leaked, don’t put it into your computer or phone!In any scenario involving security, analysis of the the threats involved is necessary. Take your credit card for example: are you more concerned about the fraudulent charges, or the government having an awareness of your transaction history? In other words, there are plenty of scenarios where encryption technology is useful—it’s just that, with the heavy involvement of the US government in the development of many of the commonplace encryption technologies today, we should take the security these applications offer with a grain of salt.This book is an invaluable addition to the literature, in that it spells out the paradox and hypocrisy of the crypto-libertarian movement prevalent Silicon Valley and dominant in the blockchain space. The utopian dream of technology enabling pure independence is a dangerous fallacy, propped up in a reliance on military empire. Coming from a journalist that lived through the downfall of Communist Russia, we would do well to heed his warnings that things in the US today are quite dire; and the solution will likely have more to do with political engagement than technological innovation.Levine touched only lightly on the deeply racist aspects of the surveillance machine, and the reader might be well served to continue to follow this thread.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great book on the history of the Internet, some really fascinating true accounts of how the Internet evolved and where it came from. Many points covered in this book are public knowledge yet much of the public simply does not know how why and when the Internet came about. Not just this but many are unfamiliar with the narratives behind surveillance, privacy, security and all things involving our connected societies. This book aims to cross those boundaries, and I feel it does that flawlessly. That being said, some points in this book are missing a full backstory, either due to the inevitably aging of the material inside and the release of new information, or simply because the author didn't delve as deep as when they delved into other subjects. Some information in here is missing several other perspectives, and because of that I'm rating this book a 4/5. Overall a fantastic read, interesting, captivating throughout, reliable and full of sources and citations you can pick off as you will and verify for yourself. This book takes the mainstream slant on the digital connected world and turns it on its head!