Silicon Valley Is NOT Your Friend

Here is a must-read essay by David Swanson:

Levine’s book (Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet) describes Google and other Internet corporations as major military and spy contractors from the beginning. Google partnered with Lockheed Martin on parts of the war on Iraq and is a major partner of the military, the CIA, the NSA, etc. Surveillance Valley goes back to the post-WWII origins of today’s military madness. Military experiments as preparation for war, “field tested” in Vietnam, and supported by President Kennedy as appropriately hi-tech and modern, were actually war and developed into one of the worst wars ever seen. Vietnam was mass-surveilled  - or the attempt was made and foiled with bags of urine and other low-tech tricks.

Tools developed in Vietnam were immediately applied against U.S. citizens, especially those trying to improve the United States in any way. And the overabundance of data drove the development of computers that could handle it. Spying on everyone is not an enterprise tacked onto the computerized world; it’s why we have a computerized world. Arpanet is not a secretive predecessor of the Internet that was used by the military and became known after the Internet mushroomed. It’s a project that was publicly reported on as a major mass surveillance threat in 1975. The connecting of computers with each other was feared as a tool of tyranny. Congressional hearings were held.

By the 1990s computer wizardry, which had been seen as an arm of a threatening military-police state was romanticized as rebellious “hacking,” an image transformation the enormity of which has been overlooked because we’re in it. Nowadays the supposed inability of certain computers to be hooked up together is used as an excuse for keeping refugee kids separated from their families, and our immediate reaction is to say: Well hook those computers together, already!

The Internet was not just developed in large part by the military, but also privately for the military. It was privatized without much public debate, an enormous giveaway to which the destruction of net-neutrality is just a final scene. The search and advertising interests of companies like Google have long overlapped almost exactly the surveillance interests of the U.S. government, while so contradicting the public image desired by Google that Google has kept its basic functions tightly secret.

You can read the rest @
http://washingtonsblog.com/2018/07/silicon-valley-will-not-save-you-from-the-surveillance-state.html

So, the big lie at the heart of the Internet is finally revealed. Too bad no one gives a damn.