Le Show; 2019-04-28

From deep inside your audio device of choice. This is La Show and I've been reading a couple of books on the subject of this thing that permeates our lives and has for the last couple of decades called the Internet. And I'm going to have conversations with the authors of each book on this program starting today with Yasha Levine, who's the author of a book called Surveillance Valley, which kind of gives a sense of what the thrust of the book is. Levine was born in the Soviet Union and came here with his parents at the age of nine, grew up in San Francisco. He's written for a wired the nation, slate time, the New York observer and other publications. He's also written books about the Koch brothers and Malcolm Gladwell. That's some scope.

Yasha Levine, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. I didn't realize we're going to have other authors on here. I'm going to have one other, but not on this. I wouldn't have showed up if I had known. I'm just kidding. Not on this program, on another program, at another time. This is not going to be a debate. Okay. Yeah, right. Surveillance Valley, the premise of it and I'm going to boil it down and then we're going to drill into it is that the internet that we have, I'm going to use that word again, permeating our lives these days, there are various theories as to how it is developed into this data sucking surveillance monster that a lot of people decry. And there are those who say that this is a product of a certain economic imperative. There are those who have other explanations. Yours seems to rest on the premise that baked into the DNA of the internet is its roots in the United States military.

Am I stating that correctly? Oh, yeah. So let's- That's right. So, how, this starts with an agency that I think some of us have heard of but has succeeded in maintaining its error of mystery through the years, ARPA or DARPA. Tell us a little bit about how the internet grew out of ARPA or ARPA net. Sure. Yeah. So ARPA was created in response to the launch of the Sputnik in the 1950s as a way to close the sort of technology gap between American and the Soviet Union because the Sputnik was a nice little show for the entire world. You know, it was the first man made satellite shot into space. But what really put the fear of God and to American military brass was the rocket on which it was launched. So the Soviet Union demonstrated that it had the capability to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile that could be topped with a nuclear warhead.

And that warhead could come down pretty much at any place in America or around the world. And America was essentially open to attack, wide open, and President Eisenhower created ARPA as almost like a PR stunt to show that we're doing something about this. And ARPA was supposed to be a kind of a NASA agency, a military NASA. So it was going to develop missile technology to compete with the Soviet Union. But very quickly, it was sort of reorganized and a lot of its missile programs were transferred to a new civilian agency called NASA. And it was sort of remained in life support, not clear what it was doing, what it was for until John Kennedy became president and sort of reinvigorated the agency as an agency that would develop new technologies and new types of weapons that would allow America to fight a new kind of war that it was confronting around the world, particularly in Vietnam,

a kind of insurgency war. So it's not like a traditional war where you have armies facing off against each other with tanks and people in uniform, but it was a war that America was starting to wage that was essentially against an enemy that was embedded within a civilian population. And I was almost indistinguishable from a civilian population. And so ARPA became the center of counter-insurgency R&D. So you say in the book that ARPA's mission became one of building computer systems that could collect and share intelligence, study and analyze people in political movements, so as to predict and prevent social upheaval. How are they going to go about this? What were the steps that they were taking to be able to prevent the next vehicle? At that point, America had already developed an early warning radar system. This was the first sort of national spy system, spy network.

You could call it that because of these installations of radars all around the country. Surveillance. Let's be nice. Surveillance. Surveillance, it's surveilling the air for hostile aircraft. And if there's a hostile aircraft that's detected, this computer system would recognize it and would allow the Air Force to scramble jets, missiles, and to intercept this threat. And so that would have already been established. And some of the early first interactive computers with screens, and essentially these early kind of mice that you could move around and click on things on the screen, came out of this early warning radar system called Sage that ran on these giant IBM computers that were almost like an acre each. So this notion that you could develop computer technology, network it, and make it national, and use it to watch airspace, but also predict the future position of an aircraft. So that you can see the trajectory, you can see the speed, so you could intercept them in the future, right?

You can send a missile at that point in the sky and then blow them out of the air. Now the idea, you know, that couple of people that were in these rarefied militaries, or futurist circles, were thinking about why not use that model for a battlefield? Why not use that model for a human society? Why not use that radar system model for, you know, everything in the world, why limited to airspace? And so you could do the same thing with, let's say, a political movement, you could feed information about a society, what's happening in that society? Are there conflicts, is there an economic crisis? Are there ideas that are being propagated by certain people that are, you know, taken on a viral quality? If you could feed that into a computer system and create models that could, you know, crunch those numbers and come up with predictive results, you could create an early warning system for social revolutions and for insurgencies. You could also use it to potentially isolate the sort of the problem aspects of a society, like who are the radicals?

If you can't, if you just be a massive people walking down, in Times Square, one person doesn't differ from another, you know, externally. But if you know about their backgrounds, if you know about who they hang out with, what they read, what are their social circles, right, then you could begin to understand who they are. And sort of, that was the idea, one of the ideas, one of the strands that was running through the military at the time in the 1960s during the Vietnam War that fed into this ARPA program that would later launch the ARPANET, which was the early version of the internet. In your book, you cite a moment in time, and I should have remembered this because I was watching TV then, but a reporter on NBC Nightly News revealed that ARPANET was being used to help the CIA, the NSA, and the Army spy on anti-war and civil rights activists. It's the Kona's Intel project, is referring to this.

Yes. Tell us about the Kona's Intel project. In 1975, there was this report by a journalist, NBC journalist named Ford Rowan. He came out with this report saying that there's this secret military network that's linking the White House, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and it's being used to spy on Americans. It's being used to move around data on Americans' reversives and radicals, and it's being used to spy millions of Americans. And it was interesting because a big part of that segment, he spent talking about the technical structure of this network, how it worked, and how there's these different routers that were connected, and what it made it very different from other technologies was that it could connect any kind of computer, that it could connect any computer sitting in any government agency. From any manufacturer. From any manufacturer, like today. Like the internet that we have today, so you can connect, the internet today doesn't

really care what kind of phone or what kind of computer you connect with. There's a standardized language, and that was a very unique thing at the time because if you probably remember in the 70s, the big thing was about the centralized government database. There's a word about the big one computer that would have everything on you, starting with your social security number, to all your phone records, to your bank information, to your military service record, to your school records, all these things. People were freaking out that this could be possible, and there were some government proposals to create such databases, these centralized massive databases and Americans. And they were shot down in Congress time and time again. But what the Arpanette showed at the time was that you didn't need a giant centralized computer, a giant centralized database, if you could connect a bunch of little databases together and share that information. So you didn't need to have a centralized database in Americans having all the information. If you could just share information on these people that the FBI has, that the NSA has,

that the CIA has, and connect that with other government agencies. So the big breakthrough in what really freaked people out on why the Arpanette, the Internet was on NBC News for three days in a row, because this was a new development, and it kind of went around the fears that people had, and it was unexpected, that you didn't need a centralized database, you could have a bunch of different databases. And what the report showed was that the US government had taken records that it was supposed to have destroyed from the late 1960s on American protesters and civil rights activists that had collected illegally in the 1960s. It was supposed to have destroyed those records. Those were from the Coentel program of the FBI among other things. In this particular case, it was an illegal US Army program. Which I mean, look, every agency had its own spy operation going on, and every agency was collecting data. But the US Army had its own program and it wasn't supposed to be spying on people on American soil, right, that's not what the US Army is meant to do, but it had created a sprawling surveillance

program that had infiltrated pretty much any protest movement, any activist organization that had more than two or three people had essentially the fourth person there was a US Army spy. That was because it was believed that America was being infiltrated by Soviet agents who were sort of feeding divisions in America, that they were feeding sort of the civil rights movement, that they were using that and funding it to basically crack America like an egg. And so these legitimate protests and legitimate civil rights groups were seen as actually sort of foreign tools to break up America. And so that's why the Army got involved is because they thought this was actually kind of a low level invasion, right, that was prepping America for a larger war, destabilizing it. And so the US Army collected millions of records on Americans, you know, US senators, church leaders, civil rights activists, you know, left wing protesters, student activists, pretty

much anybody. There was a poor people's march on Washington DC and they had infiltrated it and they were actually the instructions that the agents got from their superiors was you got to make sure that there are these mules that are sort of being, that are wheeling these wagons from the south, you know, these poverty wagons from the south, you got to check the mules for signs of abuse because then we can use that if they're abusing animals, you know, we can use that against them and we can use that to tarnish them. So yeah, the US Army recruits basically young guys, you know, growing out their hair long and joining these protests. And so when that was exposed, that program, the US Army said that, oh, yeah, we're sorry about this. Yeah, we'll destroy the records. Yeah, it's not really that legal, you're right, we'll destroy the records. And instead of destroying the records, they used the ARPAnet to digitize them and to share them among all the different intelligence agencies. That's why I was so scandalous, you know. You mentioned another computerized surveillance program that was coming out of ARPA called

Project Igloo White in Thailand. Yeah, during the Vietnam War, ARPA was involved with the Air Force to essentially bug the battlefield as they called. The problem that the American military faced in Vietnam was the jungle cover, right? The jungle cover that was screwing everything up. You couldn't see which are bombing because of the dense jungles. You couldn't see troop movements because of the dense coverage. Of course, agent, agent orange, right, was used to destroy and to denote completely, you know, huge swaths of jungle. Another program that was initiated was to develop a computerized surveillance system that would rely on these wireless sensors that would be dropped from air, from airplanes and that would embed in the ground and that would transmit data, some would transmit sound. Other would transmit vibrations in the ground, let's say if there's a truck passing nearby. Others would actually even try to detect if there's urine, human urine and if there's

a large troop movement, you know, through the jungle, people are peeing, obviously. And so the idea was that you'd sense that urine and you'd beam that information back. And so the idea was you bug the battlefield, right? You have these embedded sensors everywhere. And when North Vietnamese soldiers are moving through, there's a convoy that was moving under the cover of the jungle, these sensors would pick up that motion and would transmit that back to a, you know, through these various relay stations to a command center where there'd be an IBM computer and a couple of guys sitting there without their shirts on because it was hot. And they would say, oh, you know, sector G is lighting up. You know, we got a call in an air strike there. And so based on the data that they'd be receiving from these sensors, the US Air Force would be called in and they just, you know, completely just annihilate that section of the jungle and then go home and call the mission a success without really knowing if they actually hit anything down there. Just these networked sensors telling them what to strike and when?

Yes, exactly. And there's evidence that the Vietnamese understood what was happening and figured out ways to trick the system. So, you know, they triggered this to these sensors on purpose and basically have a false alarm and have, you know, the US concentrate all their firepower on a sector where nothing was happening. Meanwhile, they're moving in a different part of the jungle completely. And so they're actually tricking, you know, American forces of into thinking that they're succeeding and winning, right, that they're hitting these targets and annihilating them. But in reality, they're actually just playing with this computer model and it's all virtual. And so there, you know, everything, the mission is based on a virtualized picture of the battlefield and you're basing whether or not you've succeeded in your mission on the information that you're receiving from your sensors that don't necessarily correspond to reality. And the North Vietnamese were spoofing it in our modern parlance. Yeah. A person you introduce, Mr. or Dr. Lick Leiter, who seems to be a really crucial person. Tell us about him a little bit.

Yeah. Lick Leiter is an interesting character. He's an engineer and a psychologist and he had sort of cut his teeth. Working for the military building America's early warning radar system, the first early warning radar system for hostile aircraft. Now it's known as NORAD and he helped design parts of that system, specifically the parts of the system that involved human computer interaction. So things like creating a computer screen that a human being could interact with, I mean, these things were had to be invented from scratch because they didn't exist back then. You know, a kind of a mouse like gadget that you could click on menus and things like that. So a graphical user interface, he helped to design for this big computerized early warning radar system. And that experience, he was kind of radicalized and it came this early tech evangelist because he saw that you could create these systems, right? And you could build computers in a way that sort of integrated humans into them, right?

So rather than making them these kind of like big giant calculators that you had to tap away on, actually create computers and computer systems, almost to envelop people, right? So you could easily interact with them. So if you offer the system, he kind of almost predicted what the internet would look like today. He saw that, you know, you'd have these big data centers that would be connected by high speed telephone lines and to each other. And then they will also be connected to people in their homes or in their offices or in government offices or or in warships or whatever, right? By radio, by telephone link, by modem. And it would be this kind of global network and it would pool resources, it would have programs that you could run, you could read news, you could, you know, ingest data, you can crunch numbers, you could do all sorts of things on it. And he envisioned this and he kind of wrote it out in this paper that became very influential. Based on that, based on his vision of this global or at least national at the time computer

network that was easy to use, ubiquitous, he got a job at ARPA. He was designing and running the program that would spawn the ARPAnet, the first military version of the internet. You know what you describe sounds so much like what we live with today. It wasn't seen as something nefarious, right? It was seen as something useful. The idea was that you could expand human potential. And so it would be useful for people in their creativity, right? People, artists would be more creative. It would also allow the government to work more efficiently, it would allow businesses to work more efficiently. People at the time saw it as a, you know, as a useful thing, it wasn't nefarious. Even though there was a precedent you cite in your book of Nazi Germany's use of IBM technology for the study and management of large groups of people as you describe it. So there had already been an example served up by history of the way this could go wrong. You know, I think one thing that's really been bad about the.com boom and this kind

of reimagining of technology is something that is outside of the world, right? We think of the, at least we used to think of the internet as something that was almost disconnected from physical reality across borders. It wasn't in the physical space, it was almost abstracted ideas, it was this, realm of ideas, you know. So we tend to disconnect the technology from the underlying sort of political and socioeconomic reality on which it exists. And so these things are a function of society they were created by society, they were created by government and by private corporations. And they, you know, the internet kind of embodied these values and computer technology embodies these values in the way that it is designed. And so, of course, you know, when you have governments that are involved in pretty brutal military campaigns when they're involved in suppressing their own populations and jailing their populations, these computers are going to be used to do that. They're going to be used as instruments to organize those things. So at the same time, these computers are going to allow us to, you know, talk remotely

from each other, right, and connect people around the world in kind of in pleasant ways. But they are a function of society. And so the fact that you have Nazi Germany using IBM tabulators during the war to manage its large slave labor complex that was used to sort of keep armaments coming to the front lines. It's a function of these computers that can be used in different ways by, in different contexts, right? And so they have this kind of dual or multi-use. But computers are always, you know, tied to surveillance. And this is another, I think, important thing that we have to remember when we talk about computers. Computers are fundamentally machines that take information and organize it and crunch it somehow to make it more useful. They're information machines, right? And where do you get the information? The information usually comes from the outside world. So if you're dealing with the early, you know, punch card technology, you're doing railroad timetables, you're counting people for the census, right?

You're doing these things. You're taking information from the outside world and you're ingesting it into a computer. You're doing something with that information. You're getting a result way, right? But ultimately, a computer relies on gathering data from the outside world. And, you know, I like to think of it as surveillance, you know, written, writ large, you know, on a high level of that word, not just spying on people, but spying on the world or watching the world collecting data. And so it's not surprising that, you know, computers are intertwined with surveillance because that's what computers are meant to do. They're meant to process surveillance data. You, at one point, mentioned a guy whose name was almost ubiquitous in the early days of publicity about the internet in the early 1990s, of Vince Serf, who's now, I guess still has this, maybe the most amazing job title in the world, given everything we know about everything these days.

He's the chief evangelist of Google. Is he still? Yeah, I think it's called, is he chief internet evangelist? Yeah. And, you know, it's funny, because that title really is, masks his real function, which is that he's kind of a covert lobbyist, essentially, is what he is for Google, because he's just this high level guy who, you know, helped create some of the protocols that underlie the internet today. And he is so connected across industry, government, and military layers of society that he can sort of make things happen. He sort of has a very good reputation, but yeah, Vince Serf, you know, worked for ARPA and was instrumental in creating ARPA net 2.0 that later became the internet. TCP IP, which are the protocols that make computers talk to each other, right? Exactly, exactly. It's the TCP IP protocol. It governs the way that data is structured. It's this kind of the language that allows all these different computers to talk to each other separately. You know, they can be many manufacturer, but as long as they adhere to this language,

they can all talk one language. You quote him as saying that his efforts with a colleague to devise that protocol that would allow networks, not just computers to talk to each other, but different networks to interconnect was, in your words, entirely rooted in the needs of the military. Yeah, he was a military contract. He worked for ARPA. I mean, he was not even, he was a contractor at some point, and then he was a full-time employee of the Pentagon. And so, you know, when you're working for the Pentagon, chances are you're doing something that the military wants you to do. I mean, I don't know, maybe I could be proven wrong by somebody, but that's basically what you're doing. And he was trying to make the internet useful to the military. So he was going around with his team member saying, like, what can we build for you that uses the internet that makes your life easier and better? And, you know, so he would go around, you know, helping, for instance, Air Force come up with these custom programs that would run on the internet that would allow them to

load airplanes much more efficiently and allow different bases to communicate about what they need and how to better stack the payload and things like that. One of the early demonstrations of this TCP-IP internet protocol that he developed was actually a NATO tank battle, essentially, except that they had a van outfitted with the TCP-IP compliant technology going down the 101 freeway, I think, near Stanford, basically beaming up information to a satellite as if it was a tank, right, on a battlefield. That information was being then across sort of a landline to another location and then it was being backed by radio and then a landline and again, a satellite link back to the van. So it was a demonstration of that, hey, you could have a mobile unit connected to the internet by satellite and it could communicate with a Pentagon thousands of miles away. And that was very useful, obviously, technology, right?

And this was in, I believe it was in 1971 or 1972 that this was being done. And we've seen the most recent public demonstration of that kind of technology when Wiki leaks released the collateral murder video. Exactly. I just make that connection, but it seems obvious. So we've talked about how the internet is born in this military space and then the question would be, how does it then jump the gap to civilian life? And you point to an individual who, at one point, was counterculture heroes to a brand. Most people knew him from his creation of the whole earth catalog. Exactly. He was a big cultural figure in the 1970s and 1980s. Probably I'd say one of the more interesting characters in the history of the internet because he's sort of unexpected, you know, what a steward brand have to do with the internet, you know, the guy who kind of created a sales magazine, right, like an LL Bean magazine for hippies in communes.

He was part of the Mary Pranksters. He helped put on, I think, the first great full of dead show in San Francisco. He was very tight with the commune movement and launched the whole earth catalog as a magazine for the commune movement, right, as a way of, you know, how do you, how do you use small scale technologies to create a better world that's what communes were trying to do. They were trying to move out of the cities and create a new world. They were not engaging with the old world, right, they wanted to create a new utopian society. And so the magazine that he created was servicing them, right, here are the tools that you can use, here are some tips that you can use to, you know, make your organic garden and all these things. And he at the same time that he was embedded in the commune movement, he was also embedded in the world of, of ARPA and the ARPAnet. So he was in Stanford and he was very close to people at the Stanford Research Institute, a major ARPA contractor that was involved in building the ARPAnet. And so he was in the, straddling both of these two worlds and what he showed was that the

worlds of ARPA and military contracting, the Vietnam War and, and the commune movement were actually not far apart at all, but actually overlapping on multiple fronts to the point where you had Douglas Engelbart, who was famous for inventing the mouse, but who was, you know, invented the mouse as a contractor for ARPA, a part of the ARPAnet program. He was, you know, a big fan of the commune movement. He dropped acid, he gave acid to some of his engineers to see if they could be more productive. He was very friendly with Stuart Brand, and Stuart Brand even helped him run one of the first demos of, of using the ARPAnet, the internet to do live video conferencing and collaborative document editing. So stuff that you would be able to do on like Google Hangouts or Google Docs. Already in the early 1970s, that was already possible, and they're a very crude way, obviously. This is not something that you could, could have at home. But it was already demonstrated to be possible, and Stuart Brand, while sort of hanging out

with the commune, was also helping this ARPAnet contractor put on the demo of this, that was, that was kind of really a turning point for a lot of people because they, they suddenly saw that way this ARPAnet isn't just some random network, it could actually do things. You could actually build these applications on top of it that were very interesting. And so he straddled both of these worlds, and when the personal computer revolution started hitting in the 1980s, and these computers suddenly began to be cheap enough for people to buy, he sort of switched away from the commune moon, which is already at that point dead pretty much towards tech evangelism, and, and, and boosting and promoting the idea that technology, personal computer technology, and computer networks, were the new frontier of social and political liberation. These were the new digital communes, and so he staged the first hacker conference in Marin, in Marin County, that was covered by PBS, and that was, you know, introduced people

to these weird, you know, computer engineers with, with bearded kind of troll type, type characters that were, you know, creating these weird, weird programs and games and things like that. Just market them, these nerds, and these hackers, as the new commune movement, right? These were the new hippie leaders, and they were going to take this technology and create a new world with it, a better world, a more equal world. And so, you know, he was almost, you could say, that wired magazine, it kind of takes Stewart Brands a whole earth catalog with his later tech evangelism and kind of puts it into the shiny package and creates a magazine for the dot-com boom, wired magazine, so he was an inspiration for it. You quoted him in a Rolling Stone article that he wrote on the subject, as saying that ARPA was not some, quote, big bureaucratic bummer connected to America's war machine, those are your words, but instead was part of, and these are his words, an astonishingly enlightened research program that just happened to be at the Pentagon.

It's pretty interesting, yeah, this is in the pages of Rolling Stone, so at the same time that it was publishing, Hunter as Thompson, right, the Rolling Stone, it was also publishing Stewart Brand and this profile of ARPA military contractors working for a counterinsurgency project, working for a project that was building a new command and control system, communication system for the military, as totally enlightened. We're just making this military communication system, but we just happened to be at the Pentagon. It really helped to almost pivot and remarket military technology and the people who make this military technology into radicals and into these people who are going to be creating a new world, and so you can see his pivot that he did in the 1990s and the 2000s with how we saw people like Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page and people like Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs was a huge fan of the whole earth catalog and he was a huge fan of Stewart Brand, Jeff Bezos is a giant fan of Stewart Brand as well, I mean, they're

even partnering on a project together to build this forever clock in some mountain. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so they're all actually, you know, he was an inspiration to a whole several generations of Silicon Valley billionaires or people who would become billionaires. Now there is an individual you mentioned in the book who's crucial in moving the internet from government to private hands. Tell us a little bit about Stephen Wolfe. Well, Stephen Wolfe is just a kind of a faceless bureaucrat. But he had a nose and eyes, right? Yeah, he had eyes, but faceless at the same time. Exactly. Well, look, Stephen Wolfe is an interesting character because he is, was a bureaucrat who helped privatize the internet. A lot of people don't realize that the internet that we use now was actually privatized. So it was funded first by the federal government and then very, very methodically was designed

to be privatized. He was the guy who developed a program of how that would work. And so no one really knows his name. He's in an obscure, you know, sort of academic histories of the internet, but no one knows his name, he was surprised at a report even bothered looking him up when I, when I got in touch with him while writing the book. And he was at the National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation kind of took over the mantle from the Arpanet. When the Arpanet was absorbed into the military and became a functional military network, the National Science Foundation kind of took over for creating and maintaining a academic internet that could connect American universities and a set of net. So he was one of the main people who was put in charge of sort of designing how this network would look, how this academic federally funded network would look. And at the time he designed it with the express goal of privatizing it when the network

would become commercially viable. And the way that they did that was that they contracted it out to private contractors. So the main national network, the backbone of the national network was run by IBM and MCI, the old telecom company. Then there were these smaller regional networks like local ISPs that were also sort of created and funded to service local communities, universities, but also communities geographically around them. And so the US government funded it, funded it, funded it, this network. And when these companies could attract enough private customers to fund their business, they were allowed to essentially keep all the infrastructure assets they had developed with government funding and to become fully commercial companies. And these ISPs, these regional networks and the backbone provider would later become absorbed into the time-warner, Verizon, and so on.

So the US government funded this network, this national network of these different regional networks. And those regional networks were privatized and bought up by telecommunications companies and led directly to the fund monopolies that we used today. When you say, they didn't actually pay the government for these assets, right? The buying up was the small companies were bought up by the big companies, but none of that money flowed back to the feds or did it. There was no money going the other way back to the government and the government didn't retain any stake in these companies that had helped create with government funding. It was just the way that it worked and it simply is that you had private companies that existed and survived only because of federal funding. And these companies then built out the infrastructure, built out the network, connected customers. And then that infrastructure was privately owned, but it was funded completely by the government. And so when they were, they were sort of technically privatized, but they had been privatized

from the very beginning because that's the way that the network was designed. It was designed to be a private network sustained through government funding, right? And so there was nothing to pay the government back for, not in the way that it was designed. And this was done on purpose as Stephen Wolf told me, this was like the Reagan years. This is the late 80s and middle 80s and the idea that you would create a totally new national infrastructure that the government would actually own it and control it and run it. I mean, you might as well say that you're a communist, you know, if you're proposing something like that. So it wasn't even something that came into the heads of bureaucrats at the National Science Foundation because the idea was you want to use government money to stimulate private enterprise. Of course, this is a key piece of infrastructure built by the government and built to be privatized. And it was done with no public input, like no one really knew what was going on at the

time. And when the dot com boom really started taking off, of course, this infrastructure became really, really valuable. But you know, it would all flow to, of course, to the private sector and the government kind of never got anything for it. You quote a manager of an NSF net provider at the time who's told the New York Times about this quote, it's like taking a federal park and giving it to Kmart. Exactly. I mean, there was a brief scandal. But you know, what's funny about that quote is that there was a spat between different internet service providers that had been created by the government. And when this sort of privatization was taking place and when they were being allowed to sort of seek private customers and then privatize chunks of their operation, it wasn't that this early ISP was against privatizing this public park or this national park. They were upset that the biggest and juiciest pieces of this national park were being privatized to a sort of a favored company, right, that one company was getting the best stuff and

that they were getting the scraps. And so there's actually a fight for the way that that privatized infrastructure was divvied up. And so even the scandals surrounding the privatization of the National Science Foundation network, the NSF net, revolved not around whether or not we should have a public internet with us. Should the government fund it or should it be even privatized? Is that a good thing to do? The scandal and the fight around it was which company gets to take what part? And why is the government privileging some companies over others? And as you point out, the decision to do this never came to a vote in Congress. There was no public debate about what should happen to the government at that time, the federal federally founded internet. It just happened. In hindsight, it seems like a scandal. But because the public didn't really interact with the internet at the time, right, only a small, very small world was even aware of what the potential of this technology was.

I mean, the ISPs and telecommunications companies that had taken part in the National Science Foundation network in this project, they knew that this was going to blow up and that this was the investment of a lifetime. And so a small world of new, you know, a few insiders, essentially. But the larger public or even business community, academic community, and shockingly, even the politicians didn't really know what this was or why it was valuable or why it was important. So it was just done kind of right under people's noses. Is today's internet all involved with ARPA or DARPA or is it fully just commercial and interested in leveraging your data for commercial advantage? Of course, it's integrated with ARPA and DARPA. I mean, now it's called DARPA, there's a detact on to it for defense. Yes, it's very much DARPA is a large agency.

And it does all sorts of advanced weapons, research, and development, I mean, not just, you know, weapons isn't like killing people and shooting people, but information technology, medical technology, robotics, for instance, you know, a good example of it is, like, if you remember those scary Google robots, the cheetah that Google had that would run down the street, you know, that was a company that was funded in part by DARPA by DARPA money. So Google bought that company, the company was funded by DARPA and essentially seeded with DARPA money. Facebook at some point was working with DARPA to develop a use for its Oculus 3, you know, virtual reality goggles to develop this virtual reality environment in which cybersecurity experts and, you know, information warfare specialists could sort of visualize the internet and 3D and kind of fly through it and things like that. Facebook hired a former director of DARPA to head its advanced projects division.

So there's a big revolving door between personnel, between DARPA and Silicon Valley and a lot of joint projects or projects that sort of flow out of DARPA and flow into Silicon Valley in all sorts of different ways. I'd say that the internet is more integrated now with, you know, the military industrial complex or with a national security state on a larger level than it was ever before. Wow. Look, Edward Snowden's documents give a sense of that, right? I mean, it shows that the NSA is running this global surveillance program and that every major tech company in America was a part of it, part of this secret program that allowed the NSA to tap their data warehouses and allowed an analyst at the NSA to basically yet get, like, text message alerts for when their target, you know, logged onto their Gmail account or when they started moving from a certain location and things like that. So it's a very advanced program.

That program is, I think, one of the largest sources or main sources for intelligence that's used in presidential intelligence briefs. So the US government relies on data that's sort of filtered and collected by these private companies, right, for its own intelligence gathering operation. So that's what the feds are getting for their investment, his data. Yeah. Yeah. And if you look at every, if you look at any arm of the Pentagon, whether it's the Army, whether it's the Air Force, whether it's the Navy, you'll find at least several various projects that are aimed at predicting and stopping future conflict. So using the Internet as sort of input points, right, for this radar system, for an early warning radar system for human societies. And so, you know, back in the 70s, when the Internet was first being developed, it was a system that could be used to transfer data and crunch data, right, and process it and

visualize it. And the actual intelligence had to be collected external to the system, right, so someone actually had to go out into the real world and spy on people, write down things, right, and then plug it into the system. Today, the Internet, you know, is ubiquitous, everything that we do sort of is, or a lot of the things that we do is filtered through it, you know, our phones are on us all the time. So our location is tracked in real time as we go about our business, you know, all our emails, our communication to the people, what we watch, what we read, right, who we date even. I mean, you know, also everything pretty much, it gets funneled through the system. And so, the Internet has become much more powerful as it's gotten commercial, right, because suddenly it is actually that vision of the Internet that certain rare five people had in the Pentagon in the 60s is coming true. The radars are all around us, right, these radars are picking things up from our interactions,

you know, to our location, to where we are, and sort of feeding into the system. And the military agencies are tapping into that. And of course, Google and Facebook make money off of that, but the intelligence agencies that sit above them use that information if they need it. It was a few days ago, the New York Times did this story about showing how more and more police departments are relying on data that they get from Google to solve cold murder cases and things like that, because they just do this drag net where they say, okay, this person was killed in this isolated area, no one saw anything, they're no cameras, they're no witnesses. But what we do have is we can see if there was anyone, you know, with a phone in this general area at that general time. And so suddenly, oh, well, there's a 15, 20 people that we can talk to and potential suspects, right? So it's used every day of this data, you know, not just by these sort of scary intelligence agencies that we know so little about, like the NSA, but by local police departments as

well. And so, yeah, the internet has become much more useful as a surveillance tool and as a kind of a management tool for society, as it's gotten privatized and as it's gotten commercialized and ubiquitous. Do you think we were, as a country sold a bill of goods, biology, wizardry in the 90s, Arnie was doing brand and going through a wired magazine about how this was ultimately a tool for human liberation, unlike anything we've ever seen before, given where we are now. Of course, yeah, I mean, I think we all fell with suckers, you know, for a pretty transparent marketing ploy, you know, how can the internet transform anything if the general other structures, you know, like Wall Street, right, are making money off of it, right? So what kind of, what kind of liberatory technology is it when you have just Wall Street going crazy, speculating on this, on the stocks of this technology, you know, look, you know, for me, it's interesting because one of the reasons I wrote this book is, is, is because

of my past in the Soviet Union, my family came to San Francisco in 1990. We had escaped this utopia that had failed because she was collapsing behind us. We moved to America and we're in San Francisco, right as the dot combo was beginning to heat up, right as this technological revolution was heating up. And in America, as this immigrant kid, you know, all I heard was that there is this new utopia that was being built, that this computer technology that these, these networks were going to bring into being everything that the Soviet Union could not. It was a very powerful story and a mythology and everyone that I knew at the time, you know, a lot of people that I knew, not everyone, but three out of four people that I knew, let's put it that way, went into computers and became computer programmers and were part of this thing. And they were young and making money and it seemed like it was true. So for me, you know, the dot combo and the internet dominated my American experience

from almost the very first days that we arrived. And so the book, this book that I wrote is almost like a corrective, you know, for myself, but also for the world. Yeah. Yasha Levine. Thank you so much. It's a, it's a fascinating book. It's called Surveillance Valley. Is it out in paperback? No, not yet. Okay. It's out in paperback in England. All right. But let's all go to England once again, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me. And now ladies and gentlemen, the apology of the week, here's presidential now running for president, former vice president Joe Biden, on the view this week. She was not 100% happy with your discussion with her. So here's your opportunity right now to just say you apologize, you're sorry. I think we can clean this up right now. Well, by the way, I did. I understand. Look, I'm not going to judge whether or not it was appropriate, but she had the whether she thought it was sufficient.

But I said privately what I've said publicly. I'm sorry she was treated the way she was treated. I wish we could have figured out a better way to get this thing done. I did everything in my power to do what I thought was within the rules to be able to stop things. But since I had publicly apologized for the way she was treated, I had publicly said it. I publicly had given throughout credit for her, the contribution she made to change, began to change this culture in a significant way, that what I didn't want to do, and I didn't want to quote invader space. I didn't want to get in the situation where this became, and then I went when I heard all this about the, and it was legitimate, expecting to call every time the phone rang, and so I spoke to some leading women advocates in this area, someone newer, and I said, could you see whether she'd take my call?

Yeah. And I was grateful she took my call. You know, I think what she wants you to say is I'm sorry for the way I treated you, not for the way you were treated. I think that would be a closer. Well, but I'm sorry the way she got treated. In terms of, I never heard say, if you go back and look what I said and didn't say, I don't think I treated her badly, I took on her opposite, what I couldn't figure out how to do, and we still haven't figured it out. How do you stop people from asking inflammatory questions? How do you stop these character assassinations? Outside, there was a full blown attack on her in order to try to get the defense quote, unquote, for Clarence Thomas. And I am, I know woman or any victim of harassment should ever be put through that circumstance. Mm-hmm, the apology of the week, such as it is, Joe Biden apologizing kind of to Anita Hill one more time, the view.

And now it is, news of the godly. Well, New York is joining the group, you know, Pennsylvania, Texas, some other states in the United States have publicized lists of Catholic clergy who have been supposedly incredibly accused, living or dead of sexual misconduct with young, young people, parishioners sometimes. The New York Archdiocese now, one of the largest in the United States. Why isn't it the largest? What the hell is wrong with you in New York? Anyway, it has identified 120 former Roman Catholic bishops, priests and deacons accused of sexually abusing children. What do we tell the children? The Archdiocese was the latest, to publicly list the names of former clergy members accused of abuse, coordinator writers, as the church faces state and federal investigations into

its handling, a handling of decades of allegations of sexual misconduct by priests. I write to ask forgiveness again for the failings of those clergy and bishops who should have provided for the safety of our young people, but instead betrayed the trust placed in them by God and by the faithful. That's the statement from Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan. He's an Archbishop and a Cardinal. And he's a Timothy and a Dolan. The Archdiocese released the name of each accused clergy member the year he was ordained and whether he had been removed from the ministry, also listed the year that he died, if he happened to do that. Yeah. List, though, did not contain information about the accusations that the clergy member faced, because that would be, you know, an invasion of something. A review board has been created to help determine whether allegations of sexual abuse are credible and substantiated and whether accused clergy should be removed from the ministry as a result.

Well, never too late for that. Let's look into that, shall we? News of the godly. Let's copy right a feature of this broadcast, and now, ladies and gentlemen, news of America's longest war, and this, we've waited a long time for this. I think an area in which we can claim the lead in the war in Afghanistan, international forces, that is to say the United States and our NATO allies with NATO in Afghanistan really, and their Afghan government allies were responsible last year, or sorry, the first three months of this year, responsible for more civilian deaths than the Taliban. That's according to a UN report this week. The first time in recent years, civilian deaths attributed to government forces and their allies exceeded those blamed on their enemies. The statistics reflect what many say is a growing problem in the war in Afghanistan, according to courthouse news, in which civilians die not only in suicide bombings, in surge in

attacks and so forth, but also in the crossfire as Afghan forces and U.S. forces, and other NATO allies pursue militants, nearly half the civilian deaths attributed to Afghan forces and their allies occurred during air strikes. Some of the other civilians were killed during searches and raids of militant hideouts. More than 50% of the civilians killed were women and children, according to the UN. The Afghan President Ashrahani this year urged his ground forces to say greater care to protect civilian lives, one conducting search operations, and this Taliban who control, if you didn't know this, nearly half the country have asked their fighters to avoid civilian casualties in their attacks on government forces, which they conduct every day. You know, the Taliban is now conducting talks with the United States, they still refuse

to talk with the Afghan government, but hey, what are talks among friends? Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, of America's longest war. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, thank you, ladies and gentlemen, of America's longest war. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, thank you, ladies and gentlemen, of America's longest war.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, that's going to conclude this week's edition of the show. Thanks to Jason Isaac and Aaron Cohn here at WNYC in New York, Jeffrey Talbot, at audio works in New Orleans, Tommy Stang, at Dungeon Beach Studios, in Brooklyn, and Garrett Pitman, at WNON New Orleans, and only Tommy Stang doesn't have double letters in his name. That is so weird.

The program returns next week on the radio, at the same time on the same station, and on your audio device of choice, whenever you want it, whenever you say, hey Alexa, play the show. Hey Alexa, play the show, I just said it, and it would be just like not having Alexa in your house if you'd agree to join with me then, would you? All right. Thank you very much. A tip of the show, Sha'po, the San Diego Pittsburgh Chicago and Hawaii desks, thanks as always to Pam Holsted for her help with today's broadcast. And thank you to the Tribeca Film Festival for the lovely tribute they held last night here in New York City to celebrate the 35th anniversary of this is Spinal Tab. Still available on your video device of choice. The email address for this program, the playlist of the music heard here on when we play music and you're chance to get cars I talk t-shirts all at harryshare.com and I'm on Twitter at the harryshare.

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