Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet by Yasha Levine. This book is an amazing and enlightening deep dive into the history of the US military-driven internet. Google and Facebook have become today the major players of a corporate DARPA.
The message of Surveillance Valley is twofold: the US military has held the key, foundational role of today’s internet. After all, ARPANet, the initial ‘internet’ went into production in 1966.
The second message is the evolution of counterinsurgency from signals intelligence to Google Chrome. This will surprise many. This can be a very interesting read for our times.
At first glance this story is about Google and law enforcement surveillance within the City of Oakland. Yet, Yasha takes the reader all the way back to the Vietnam War. For instance, he lays the foundation for today’s internet to Project AGILE, an early clandestine effort to aid the French to recolonize Indochina after World War II. Likewise we did not learn from their failures.
This highly secret project launched under Truman as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and rebranded Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Those early cyclical electronic counterinsurgency efforts in the mid-1950s failed.
In other words, the opening chapters actually provide a very detailed history lesson regarding Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. Data harvesting, aka “counterinsurgency” was flourishing in the Cold War. The impact of Sputnik and French defeats in Vietnam drove counterinsurgency efforts.
Surprisingly, the new role of US Marine General Erkin to begin counterinsurgency efforts with Australia against the Viet Minh in 1950 reveal the beginning of electronic “data harvesting” across post World War II Asia. However, Godel, Erskine and their team were targets of an assassin’s bomb upon their arrival in Saigon:
In 1950, Godel joined General Erskine on a clandestine mission to Vietnam. The objective was to evaluate the effectiveness of military tactics the French were using to pacify a growing anticolonial insurgency and to determine what kind of support the United States should provide. The trip got off to a bad start when his team narrowly escaped an assassination attempt: three bombs ripped through the lobby of their hotel in Saigon. It was a nice welcoming ceremony—and no one knew whether the bombs had been placed by the North Vietnamese or by their French hosts to serve as kind of warning that they should mind their own business.
Page 33
US Marine General Erkin began counterinsurgency efforts in the 1950s. This reveals the deep efforts of America in post World War II Asia. These efforts are three years prior to Dwight Eisenhower as President and Dien Bien Phu.
Also interesting to see this compliment the work of Gregory Daddis in No Sure Victory, another must read regarding computer data to predict Vietcong attacks. Godel ended up serving five years in jail after embezzling money from his trip to Vietnam.
Throughout the book Yasha recognizes Google’s involvement in US military contracts and data harvesting. For instance, Google purchased the CIA’s satellite mapping technology and branded the app as Google Maps. Meanwhile, Google’s old sales pitch ‘Do No Evil’ that became legendary, intentional or not, is no longer relevant.
On the other hand, the story of IBM’s formation to process census data is also relevant. IBM opened an office in Berlin to manage and track Germany’s Jewish citizens in 1939.
Meanwhile the story of Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider according to Yasha, can be considered the father of the internet. Licklider happened to just create the graphical user interface, and ARPANET, the direct predecessor to the internet. There is an amazing story in the book of Licklider’s life both at the Pentagon and at home. Secondly, the invention by Norbert Wiener of cybernetics are just as impressive.
The most surprising element of the book for many is Chapter 3: Spying on Americans. Outcomes from Project AGILE and related counterinsurgency efforts turned against American citizens – especially the civil rights movement. Rather stunning to see technologies built for war deployed across our country in the 1960s.
However, Christopher Pyle a PhD student at Columbia University taught at the US Army Intelligence School in Baltimore. He was concerned by his experience and access to publish an article regarding domestic spying:
In early 1970, he published an exposé in the Washington Monthly that revealed a massive domestic surveillance and counterinsurgency operation run by the US Army Intelligence Command. Known as “CONUS Intel”—Continental United States Intelligence—the program involved thousands of undercover agents. They infiltrated domestic antiwar political groups and movements, spied on left-wing activists, and filed reports in a centralized intelligence database on millions of Americans. “When this program began in the summer of 1965, its purpose was to provide early warning of civil disorders which the Army might be called upon to quell in the summer of 1967,” reported Pyle. “Today, the Army maintains files on the membership, ideology, programs, and practices of virtually every activist political group in the country.”
CONUS Intel was masterminded in part by General William P. Yarborough, the army’s top intelligence officer at the time. He had a long, distinguished career in counterinsurgency and psychological operations, from World War II to the Korea and Vietnam conflicts. In 1962, General Yarborough took part in the influential US Army “limited war” counterinsurgency symposium held in Washington, DC, which J. C. R. Licklider also attended. Fear of a domestic insurgency was swirling in military circles, and the general was not immune. He came to believe that there existed a growing communist conspiracy to foment unrest and to overthrow the United States government from within. His evidence? The burgeoning civil rights movement and the surging popularity of Martin Luther King Jr.
Pages 119-120
For instance, this included using electronics to tap phones and infiltrate organizations across the country with fine-tuned spying tools. Surveillance Valley reveals how a future Christopher Pyle would serve similar notice.
Tor is the popular anonymous router Edward Snowden came to rely upon. Must have been a very painful sting to many to realize they were being tracked while using Tor. Yasha shared that Tor was a US naval signals intelligence project. Tor continued receiving funding by the Pentagon until at least 2015 according to the book. The same rule applies to the popular mobile app Signal. For example, Signal requires users to submit phone number and contact data into the app — all for the harvesting.
In conclusion, there is no anonymity on the internet. The US military and modern internet companies are harvesting your data. In short, there is much to consider for privacy advocates to realize the true playing field they engage and potentially a need to replan their advocacy.
British Army Book of the Year 2020 Shortlist
NewYorker Magazine Briefly Noted April 2, 2018
NoblisNetwork | Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
Ed Mays | Yasha Levine: Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet
University of Richmond | Jepson Leadership Forum presents Yasha Levine