Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet

by Yasha Levine

Overview

The internet is the most effective weapon the government has ever built.
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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610398022
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	02/06/2018
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	456,061
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Yasha Levine is an investigative journalist for Pando Daily, a San Francisco-based news magazine focused on covering the politics and power of big tech. He has been published in Wired Magazine, the Nation, Slate, Penthouse, the New York Observer, Playboy, Not Safe For Work Corp, Alternet, and many others. He has also appeared on network television, including MSNBC, and has had his work profiled by the New York Observer, Vanity Fair, and the Verge, among others.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Oakland, California 1

Part I Lost History

Chapter 1 A New Kind of War 13

Chapter 2 Command, Control, and Counterinsurgency 35

Chapter 3 Spying on Americans 73

Part II False Promises

Chapter 4 Utopia and Privatization 101

Chapter 5 Surveillance Inc. 139

Chapter 6 Edward Snowden's Arms Race 185

Chapter 7 Internet Privacy, Funded by Spies 219

Epilogue: Mauthausen, Austria 271

Acknowledgments 275

Notes 277

Index 357

Editorial Reviews

12/11/2017
The internet is a cesspool of military-industrial villainy according to this vehement but muddled jeremiad. Journalist Levine argues that since its creation in the 1960s by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency the internet has been an instrument of surveillance and control. But aside from a few familiar points—the NSA’s monitoring of internet traffic to catch terrorists; Google and other search engines’ use of their services to sell targeted ads back to their users—most of the “secret history” he pinpoints, such as the government’s sending of files over the internet in the 1970s, seems innocuous. The tangible harms Levine identifies aren’t that convincing: he attacks the encrypted browser Tor, which gets U.S. government funding, as a sinister American infringement of foreign nations’ “sovereign control” because it helps people evade government internet censorship. Levine’s suspicion of both the state and capitalism tangles him in contradictions as he castigates the government for ceding the internet to private companies and internet companies for working with the government. Meanwhile, his glib, omnidirectional paranoia—“The Internet is like a giant, unseen blob that engulfs the modern world. There is no escape”—tags even whistle-blower Edward Snowden as an unwitting tentacle of the surveillance octopus. The result reads as an incoherent, aimless indictment of every aspect of the internet. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"A real public service."—San Francisco Reviewof Books

"This polemical history argues that the U.S. military's role in the development of the Internet indelibly shaped the system into a powerful tool of government surveillance. ... amid increasing dismay about technology's influence on contemporary life, such forceful questioning is salutary."—New Yorker

"Provocative history of the internet-equipped security state, implicating key players in the digital economy in the game of espionage.... Levine, a tech-savvy investigative journalist, documents an army of them in his wide-ranging look at the way governments and companies alike spy on ordinary citizens."—Kirkus

"This engrossing investigation will find a large audience among those interested in the uses and abuses of technology."—Library Journal

"Yasha Levine's bold and sweeping history of the Internet-from its shadowy inception as a military contrivance for counterinsurgency and domestic surveillance, to its current incarnation as a commercialized tool for everyday communication that turns everyone's life into an open book-tells a gripping story of our algorithmic way of life in the making. Defying common Internet tropes that present a battle between valiant and independent rebels versus omnipresent state and corporate powers, no one comes out of this book looking clean. Whatever your thoughts about our digitized world, this book will challenge them."—Stuart Ewen, Distinguished Professor of History, Sociology and MediaStudies at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center

"The Internet will never be the same after you read Surveillance Valley. Yasha Levine has done 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. I especially applaud his courage in unraveling the connections between the so-called 'deep state' and its economic allies in Silicon Valley with the big guns of the 'privacy' movement, who have scoffed at virtually every attempt at making their operations transparent to the public."—Tim Shorrock, author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of IntelligenceOutsourcing

"In this fast-paced, myth busting expose, Yasha Levine documents how a collection of spooks, cybernetic fanatics, and libertarian oligarchs have exploited the internet to promote regime change abroad and establish a totalistic spying network at home. Surveillance Valley is an unprecedented journalistic achievement, revealing the untold history of the anti-democratic regime that rules our lives from behind a glossy LED screen."—Max Blumenthal, author of Goliath: Life and Loathingin Greater Israel, senioreditor of AlterNet's Grayzone Project

"An important history lesson."—TANK

"Surveillance Valley is a troubling book, but it is an important book. It smashes comforting myths."—Boundary 2

"Google employees rightfully balked recently when they found out their employer had a number of defense contracts; one wonders if they knew that the tech industry was quite literally founded on the back of the defense industry, such that there was a time when they were synonymous. Yasha Levine's wonderful historical tract shatters any illusion that the two industries were ever really that at odds with each other."—Salon

From the Publisher

2017-11-14
A sometimes-overwrought but provocative history of the internet-equipped security state, implicating key players in the digital economy in the game of espionage.Even paranoiacs have enemies, as some wag once observed. Levine (The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell, 2012, etc.), a tech-savvy investigative journalist who was born in Russia, documents an army of them in his wide-ranging look at the way governments and companies alike spy on ordinary citizens. That the internet grew from the defense industry and its dream of all-knowing supercomputers is old news; Levine looks at the malevolence behind it, writing about "America's belligerent nuclear policy." (It surely would have been belligerent had Curtis LeMay been successful in his drive to drop an atomic bomb on Hanoi, but he wasn't; the point is eminently debatable.) From defense-related research came the spread of cybernetics and cybernetic metaphors in all sorts of sciences, from economics to biology, and the idea that information could be linked to power to "create a controlled utopian society, where computers and people were integrated into a cohesive whole." That age may well have come, though whether it has reached the stage of "big data totalitarianism," as Levine puts it, is again debatable. Where the book reaches its pinnacle of interest is also where it threatens to become unhinged. Here, the snake begins eating its own tail and encryption technologies such as Tor and Signal are linked not just to WikiLeaks, but also the National Security Agency as honeypots that "provide a false solution to the privacy problem, focusing people's attention on government surveillance and distracting them from the private spying carried out by the Internet companies they use every day."Levine's arguments aren't entirely persuasive, but readers will be forgiven for hereafter not wanting to entrust too much information to the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon, to say nothing of the feds.

Kirkus Reviews