Even Without Cambridge Analytica (Or Facebook), Was The Network E'er Meant For Surveillance?

From Scroll (India), March 31:

Yasha Levine’s ‘Surveillance Valley’ provides a frightening history of the night side of the internet. 

When it was lately revealed that Cambridge Analytica had managed to catch the Facebook data of millions of people in addition to used the information it gathered inappropriately to build psychological profiles which were utilised to influence elections, at that topographic point were a few predictable reactions. The first off was from the footing of digital media itself, similar a shot wholly beholden to the social media giant for publicity in addition to outreach.

While publishing intelligence of the leak past times Cambridge Analytica, intelligence media similar Time and The Guardian were quick to struggle that this was owing to an unethical practise they named “data harvesting”. Companies similar Cambridge Analytica, they said, had taken payoff of Facebook’s laxity to pocket the private information of users in addition to sell it to the highest bidder. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, in an interview given to CNN, in addition to inwards total page ads published inwards all major American newspapers, apologised for a “breach of trust” in addition to promised to travel along information rubber inwards the future.

In all of this at that topographic point was an emphasis on what CNN’s interviewer Laurie Segall called “bad actors”, who were exploiting Facebook’s features allowing app developers to collect users’ in addition to their friends’ information to larn every bit far every bit destabilising election processes across the world. Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 visibly nervous Zuckerberg – spooked at to the lowest degree inwards part past times abrupt drops inwards his company’s marketplace capitalisation and, past times extension, his personal wealth – promised that Facebook would double the issue of people working on review in addition to safety past times the cease of the year.

Built for surveillance?
But what remained unvoiced was a lilliputian doubt: of all the “bad actors” out there, could Facebook in addition to the other large tech companies past times the biggest, baddest actors of them all? Surveillance Valley, Yasha Levine’s novel book, posits an unsettling novel thesis: the internet, in addition to all that is inwards based on it, is non entirely a tool developed nether the aegis of the States of America military machine in addition to intelligence agencies, but is also a worldwide surveillance network that wearing clothing itself inwards the garb of private liberty in addition to apolitical technocratism.

In the pop imagination, the even out of the cyberspace is restricted to the creation of a information sharing meat at the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Networking Office past times Stephen Wolff inwards 1986. The NSF was a federal agency, in addition to Wolff’s creation of the NSFNET was a way to link the supercomputers of 5 universities to shape the first off populace network of connected computers. Within the side past times side 5 years the NSFNET backbone connected 13 regional networks in addition to 170 to a greater extent than colleges. The internet, every bit nosotros know it, was officially born amongst the privatisation of the NSFNET.

There is a undercover history of the Internet, however, which belies this heartwarming even out of academic networks going commercial. What preceded the NSFNET was, every bit Levine tells us, “...a convoluted story. Wade inwards deep plenty in addition to yous honour yourself inwards a swamp of three-letter federal agencies, network protocol acronyms, regime initiatives, in addition to congressional hearings filled amongst technical jargon in addition to mind-numbing details. But on a primal degree it was real simple: later 2 decades of lavish funding in addition to enquiry in addition to evolution within the Pentagon system, the Internet was transformed into a consumer turn a profit centre.”

That this consumer turn a profit meat is soundless massively beholden to the military-intelligence complex that engendered it is the primary thrust of Levine’s book. Cloaked in addition to swaddled inwards libertarianism in addition to radical revolutionary discourse, the cyberspace every bit nosotros know it is thoroughly co-opted past times all agencies of the state. Drawing on an immense trove of resources that larn dorsum to the 1950s, Levine has attempted to delineate this undercover history inwards a way that is both easily accessible to lay readers, piece soundless appending over 1 hundred pages of notes that advert all his sources inwards neat detail.

Starting from the secretive Project Agile of the Vietnam War, in addition to ending amongst the faux promises of cyberspace privacy in addition to liberty advanced past times companies similar Tor in addition to Signal, Levine patiently deconstructs all the major narratives that brand upward the myth of the golden digital age.

Deconstructing the beginning
Right later Soviet Russian Federation launched the first off satellite, Sputnik, into infinite inwards 1957, the American President Dwight D Eisenhower hired a novel secretarial assistant of defence, Neil McElroy, a marketing practiced in addition to president of Procter & Gamble, to prepare upward a perfect populace relations projection called ARPA or the Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA was supposed to hold out an organisation that would “cut through regime carmine record in addition to do a public-private vehicle of pure military machine scientific discipline to force the frontiers of military machine technology scientific discipline in addition to educate vast weapon systems of the future.”

What ARPA effectively created, nether the supervision of William Godel, was a vast information collection in addition to storage means that collated “interviews, polls, population counts, detailed anthropological studies of diverse tribes, maps, available weapons, migration studies, social networks, agricultural practices, dossiers…out of ARPA’s centres inwards Vietnam in addition to Thailand.” Drowning inwards this immense treasure trove of data, the administrators of ARPA realised that they had to build a scheme that was capable of treatment all the information in addition to presenting it amongst a unproblematic graphic user interface in addition to the might to interact amongst other computers inwards existent time.

The first off developers of ARPANET, JCR Licklider, got this thought of a vast information processing network that functioned merely similar whatever organic of ecological system, from his association amongst the famous thinker in addition to mathematician Norbert Wiener’s ideas on cybernetics. Wiener, who was a distinguished professor at MIT, had a revolutionary thought that the footing could hold out defined for all intents in addition to purposes every bit a giant computational auto that ran on the central of information. Wiener himself had been spurred on to educate this dependent past times his fourth dimension inwards the military, edifice anti-aircraft cannons that could predict the trajectory of a bird based on its pilot’s actions in addition to thus every bit to effectively destroy it....

...MUCH MORE