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Once a sleepy farming region, Silicon Valley is now 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 this area the epicenter of this transformation? Discover the dark secrets behind the real history of Silicon Valley and the Big Tech giants in this important edition of The Corbett Report.
~~~
Once
a sleepy farming region, Silicon Valley is now 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 this area
the epicenter of this transformation? Discover the dark secrets behind
the real history of Silicon Valley and the Big Tech giants in this
important edition of The Corbett Report.
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TRANSCRIPT
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: internet activity; credit card purchase hi444444story;
airline ticket purchases; car rentals; medical records; educational
transcripts; driver’s licenses; utility bills; tax returns; and any
other available data.
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 ever wider 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 behaviours 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.
