Book Review: Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet

Reviewed by paulml

Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet by Yasha Levine, 2018, ISBN: 978-1610398022

Conventional wisdom says that, in the 1960s, a group of universities started what became the Internet with help from the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).  The reality is quite 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 of the North Vietnamese and understand their motives.  Such new technology was quickly used on domestic war opposition.  That is what led ARPA to help create the Internet, using computers to spy on Americans.

Today, all of the major tech firms, like Google, Facebook, and Amazon collect private information for profit, while letting agencies like the NSA scoop up their online 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 can't 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), an offshoot of the CIA.  For most of its existence, it has subsisted on large government contracts.  Why is one part of the government, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), supporting Tor, and another part of the government, like the FBI, trying to shut it down?  It keeps all the activists and other anti-government types in one place, where they can be easily watched.  Tor's credibility is certainly helped by an endorsement from Edward Snowden.

This is an excellent book.  For a few 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.